SCIENCE OF CATASTROPHE

SUMMARY: Coming up on Radio Ecoshock two heavy hitters. We have the expert on past mass extinctions, and maybe the present one, scientist Peter Ward. Then climate scientist Paul Beckwith joins me. There is serious news about plankton, the tiny ocean plants that feed the seas, and provide most of the oxygen you are breathing right now. I'm Alex Smith. Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.

Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.



A NEW WEB SITE, BLOG AND PODCAST FEED FOR RADIO ECOSHOCK

The long-standing (since 2006) Radio Ecoshock podcast on Itunes has died. That is because this blog has become too complex for the Itunes system. I have to break apart the podcast feed and the blog. Plus, the web site is rather boring. It just doesn't reflect the excitement of our guests and the danger of these times.

I have a new site designer working on this. He's a long-time fan, in the online business, who is giving Radio Ecoshock a great low rate. Carl's been running the Radio Ecoshock web site for years, flawlessly. He's a big reason you can get Radio Ecoshock online. Plus, Russ, the original Ecoshock graphics designer, is coming back with a new logo and some screen graphics.

As you know I've been fundraising last fall and continuing. That's partly to save up for the cost of a new web site, blog - everything really. If you can add to that fund, we'll get even more online, helping more people find out about climate change and other serious problems facing this civilization. If you can help, use this page to see donation options.

A CALL FOR GRAPHICS OR PHOTOS

Do you have photos or other graphics or images you can contribute to our new web site and blog?

Photos of nature, or the wreckage of nature would be welcome for the new site and on-going use (like on Soundcloud). Or you may have drawing, art, or images suitable for Radio Ecoshock (burning Earth, fallen forests, nuclear stuff, you know what we cover).

You must own the rights to material you submit. If it is public domain, you must send proof (say a link) that shows it is public domain.

Send your submission, or a link to where I can get it, to: radio //at// ecoshock dot org. Thanks for helping out if you can! Let's get this science and news out further to more people.

DR. PETER WARD: PAST EXTINCTION, PRESENT DIRECTIONS

Is Earth designed by life for life? Or is this a casino of chance, where catastrophe decides the survivors? Those questions, and more this week with Dr. Peter Ward on Radio Ecoshock. I can tell you Peter is a Professor at the University of Washington, and a paleontologist. He's a specialist in the long history of Earth, it's climate, and its periods of mass extinction.

In my opinion, Peter is also one of the most under-estimated minds in American science. His 11th book shook me. It's called "Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future." That books presents the best theory we have on the mechanism of great mass extinction. That was in 2007. Two years later he surprised us again with the Medea Hypothesis (Princeton University Press) which we'll touch on. His 2010 book "The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps." stands near my desk, as a standard for the public. In 2015, he published "A New History of Life: The radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on Earth" with Joe Kirschvink. It is radical science. We'll find out why.

It's my pleasure to welcome Peter Ward back to Radio Ecoshock.

Dr. Peter D. Ward

I saved up some serious questions for Peter, which touch on his string of books. We start by revisiting his now ten-year-old theory of how a massive extinction of land and sea creatures happened. That's in the classic book (read it!) "Under A Green Sky". I ask Peter to describe the organisms that created a poisonous atmosphere for a time on Earth.

These are bacteria that have a different metabolism than most life we know. They do not depend on oxygen, and breath out sulphur dioxide. That's the "rotten egg" chemical you may have smelled in a high school chemistry class. We instinctively run away from that smell, because it is poisonous to our lungs.

Ward theorizes that when oxygen ran to lower levels in great warming of the oceans in the distant past, these sulphur producing bacteria took over from oxygen producing plankton. Waves of poisonous gas would have washed over land, killing off most life forms there. Thus we have a period of ten million years (among several such times) where there is no record, or very little sign, of life in the fossil record of rocks.

These sulfur bacteria are very ancient. They were on Earth at least 3 billion years ago, and remain with us still. You can find them in the bad-smelling oxygen-deprived parts under a beach, if you dig down. If oxygen in the oceans become depleted beyond a certain point, these sulfur breathers will come roaring back!

All this relates to the possible collapse of oxygen-producing plankton, which I cover with Paul Beckwith in the second part of this program.

A few weeks ago I interviewed the Russian scientist Sergei Petrovskii, now working in the UK. His work suggests that phytoplankton, which produce the majority of the world's oxygen, could thrive as warming progresses, up to a point where many species go into extinction. The paper is called "Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics Under the Climate Change".

The full paper is here.

Or you can listen to my interview with Petrovskii here.

Sergei Petrovksii told us he had not yet checked his model against the record of the ancient past. So I ask Peter Ward, who know about such things, if there have been cases of a dip in world oxygen levels in the paleoclimatic record, since the Great Oxygenation Event, about 2.3 billion years ago?

His answer is "yes" many of them. Ward tells us that each of the mass extinction events in the past 500 million years were accompanied by a reduction of oxygen. Listen to the interview for the full details, but this appears to further the concerns raised by Petrovskii - that extreme warming could lead to a plankton die-off and consequent loss of oxygen.

Download or listen to this 30 minute interview with Peter Ward in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

ARE SEA LEVELS RISING FASTER?

My next problem touches on Ward's book "The Flooded Earth". In Robert Scribbler's blog, Robert Marston Fanney says sea level rise has accelerated. He writes: "From 2009 Through October 2015, Global Oceans Have Risen by 5 Millimeters Per Year". He cites data and a graph from AVISO, the satellite altimetry data site.

On the other hand, very new science has come out suggesting a drier state of land is soaking up more moisture than before, limiting sea level rise. That comes from work led by J.T. Reager, a researcher with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

What does Ward see happening in this matter of short-term sea level rise? Actually, he prefers not to talk about short-term sea level at all. There isn't a consensus yet about it, as new science comes out. What we do know is that sea levels WILL rise, and Ward documents the impacts of that in his book "The Flooded Earth".

ON QUESTION OF SEA LEVEL RISE: BREAKING SCIENCE

Here is a quote from a press release February 22, 2016 from the Potsdam Institute:

"Sea-level rise past and future: Robust estimates for coastal planners

POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH (PIK)

"Sea-levels worldwide will likely rise by 50 to 130 centimeters by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced rapidly. This is shown in a new study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research that, for the first time, combines the two most important estimation methods for future sea-level rise and yields a more robust risk range. A second study, like the first one to be published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides the first global analysis of sea-level data for the past 3000 years. It confirms that during the past millennia sea-level has never risen nearly as fast as during the last century."

And here is a news story about that second breaking science story - that sea levels are now rising faster than they have in the past 2800 years.

CATASTROPHISM

Starting in the 1700's, scientists, especially geologists, described the world a gradual continuum, where "the present is the key to the past". The opposite theory, called catastrophism, was left for fringe writers like Immanuel Velikovksy.

Peter's newest book re-writes the history of life on Earth, not from the viewpoint of gradual evolution, but from the many catastrophes that have occurred on this planet. That's not just the impact of asteroids hitting, but gigantic and long-lasting eruption of volcanoes, the almost frozen times known as "snowball Earth", and of course the many periods of serious global heating.

This new book also originates from Ward's important earlier book the "Medea Hypothesis". That is an answer to James Lovelock's and the Gaia hypothesis. Instead of life arranging the best circumstances for its continued survival, Ward finds in the geologic record that life forms have often been suicidal, destroying the conditions required for survival. Does that sound familiar?

The new book is: "A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth" by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink.

If life bumbles along through long periods between catastrophes, often of it's own making, where do you think we are now? Are we on the edge of the next mass extinction, or could that be thousands of years from now?

GET THE RIGHT PETER WARD!

It's really strange. Peter when I talk with some of the world's top scientists, it's common for them to mention Peter's theories. Radio Ecoshock listeners ask about him. He's been on PBS, Coast to Coast AM, and helped Animal Planet. Yet if I Google Peter Ward and climate, the top couple of pages refer to a man who really is on the fringe of climate science.

Yes, Dr. Peter Langdon Ward is a vulcanologist with unorthodox views on the causes of climate change. Rather than fossil fuels, the other Peter Ward claims volcanic eruptions and depletion of ozone from chlorinated substances cause global warming. It's a different kind of denial, and yet the American Geophysical Union (AGU) continues to give this other Peter Ward top billing. Shame on them. The fossil fuel companies must love it - "we're not responsible, it's the volcanoes or something...." Yeah right.

Here are some links to the real Peter Ward - Peter D. Ward, from the University of Washington.

His academic bio, on the University of Washington site. The Peter Ward Paleontologist page in Wikipedia.

Here is Part 1 of my video interview with Peter Ward five years ago, but still valid.



Part 2 is here. Part 3 here.

Peter Ward on Earth's Mass Extinction, TED-Ed talk 3 years ago. Peter Ward You tube video "Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps".

PAUL BECKWITH ON THE PLANKTON THREAT

The world economy is teetering. The weather is nuts and dangerous. So let's talk about plankton! Those little critters in the ocean we never see, produce most of the oxygen you are breathing right now. They are the bottom of the food chain for ocean life. And they are in trouble.

Here to chat about all this is a regular Radio Ecoshock correspondent, climate scientist Paul Beckwith. By the way, there's a humorous album of photo-shopped Paul Beckwith here on Facebook.

Paul has two Masters Degrees, and is now working on his Ph.D. in climate science at the University of Ottawa. He's a prolific communicator on climate, with emphasis on his research into abrupt climate shifts.

Paul says we are entering an abrupt shift of climate now, and we will have to do some kind of geoengineering to save a livable climate. That might include feeding nutrients to plankton, whether by dumping iron into the sea, and the non-scientist Russ George tried, or even by placing tubes into the sea, to use wave power to bring up nutrients from the depths for plankton to feed on.

The latest studies found a very disturbing trend. Apparently we've lost almost 40% of plankton in world oceans already, at least according to a 2010 paper. Paul Beckwith, tells us about that study in his new video about plankton posted on You tube two weeks ago.





Then a newsletter from Jim Thomas of the ETC Group said the loss was not as great as thought. The disappearance of plankton may be partly due to satellite misreading. Jim cited the paper “Revaluating ocean warming impacts on global phytoplankton”, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on October 26, 2015.

Paul says this new study implies a loss of plankton at about 8%, instead of 40% since 1950. If true that would be good news. But there is more research needed. At the very least, this new paper in Nature Climate Change tells us more about plankton's response to warming oceans. Paul's comments are excellent, listen in.

Download or listen to this 29 minute interview with Paul Beckwith in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Paul and I talk about many things, like the impact on fisheries and world food, declining Plankton in the Indian Ocean, super warming in the Arctic and what that means for plankton, and whether he thinks the die-off of mammals and sea birds on the West Coast is caused by Fukushima radiation (he doesn't).

Get all the latest from Paul Beckwith on his web site here. I also get a lot of good tips from Paul's Facebook page.

NEXT UP: FOOD SHOCK

Next week, Radio Ecoshock covers the coming phenomenon of food shock. This isn't about doomer fantasies. The warning comes from government-funded institutions and serious scientists. Be sure to tune in for our food shock show next week.

Sorry to nag about money, but if you can spare some, I'll need it for the new web page, blog, graphics and all that. The page to find out how is here.

We are out of time. I'm Alex. Thank you for listening again this week, and for caring about our world.

DANGER DEEP IN THE GULF

GO straight to the Full Transcript with links now.

Coast to Coast AM covers the Gulf:

RICHARD C. HOAGLAND: "Gas explosion, 50 miles off Louisiana, that you can imagine. Think Mount St. Helens, underwater. What that would do is create a cloud of incredible toxic material, which would then drift with the winds over the shore, where there are millions of people..."

GEORGE NOORY: "What about a tsunami?"

R. Hoagland: "The next step is you would get a tsunami."

Oh please. And some of this garbage went out over hundreds of stations on Coast to Coast AM. Other radio programs promised millions will die, when "the Gulf volcano" blows up.

It gets worse. I expect this to triumph on You tube. But the whole story, based on un-named geologists, inside government sources, and, wait for it, aliens, was reworked by DK Matai - and reposted on sites that should know better, like the Huffington Post.

Really. Listen to the Hoagland interview, and then read Matai - it looks like a paraphrase to me - and neither cites any sources we can check.

As far as I can tell, the original source for these Gulf terror stories is Richard C. Hoagland, who explained it all on the George Noory Show. The same theory was remade by Dr. Bill Deagle, on Bill Ryan's Project Avalon show. And what do all these people have in common?

DR. BILL DEAGLE: "This is being driven by trans-dimensional super-beings, the Gods of the ancient world, the same ones like Apollo, Appoleon - there's a whole list of the names. And I can actually give you the names. If people want to know they can go back to James Wier's Book of Demonology, 1535. They are sequestered in the Vatican Library if people are listening that know about this..."

- Dr. Bill Deagle, talking to Bill Ryan on the Project Avalon podcast June 16, 2010.

Deagle's explanation of the coming Gulf explosion and tsunami are so close to that given first by Richard Hoagland, that host Bill Ryan remarks on it. Deagle says he got it all from his own sources. The theory all sounds sort of possible, with lots of faux geology thrown in, but really, all of the above people, Hoagland, Deagle and Ryan, believe aliens run the show here on Earth, and probably caused this spill, for their own nefarious purposes.

Meanwhile, as we'll hear from Stephanie Mencimer, an investigative reporter for Mother Jones magazine - the far-right and some Tea Party movement agree the Gulf spill is a plot to move Dixie into horrible FEMA camps - while Obama kills off America with the dreaded carbon tax.

Have we lost our collective minds? Why do Americans love to terrorize themselves?

I'm going to make a bold prediction. The BP well is not going to cause the Gulf of Mexico to erupt into a world-ending volcano. Millions of people will not die because of this. There will be no tsunami.

Any of these so-called experts could find that out by simply asking a few sane scientists. That's what I did for this week's show.

We'll ask Dr. Samantha Joye, an expert on both oil and the deepwater Gulf about these viral fears. More important, Dr. Joye is just back from a research mission in the Gulf, to measure those underwater plumes of oil and gas. You'll get the latest.

Then we go to the Chief Scientist of the big conservation group Oceana, Dr. Michael Hirshfield, to investigate a REAL threat to the Gulf: masses of methane are accumulating under the sea - and leaking out into the atmosphere as potent climate changing gases. What does that mean for sea life, and for the oil industry?

I guess the point is: the Gulf gusher is so horrible, with so many real unknown consequences - we don't need crank radio to muddy the waters, and frighten people with goblins and ghouls.

Three interviews, and then I return to our deepest fears, looking at the cranksters who love to wind us up, with bed time stories. And I finish with one more rumor about geopolitics - why America needs BP to feed the war machine.

READ MORE with all the supporting links.

BANKRUPTCY OF THE ATMOSPHERE

[opening Quote from John Kerry on the looming catastrophe in climate change]

That is Senator John Kerry, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This is Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith, and you are about to get 20 minutes of the latest from Al Gore. In our second half hour, I'll interview Pieter Tans, one of the top scientists measuring greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. In fact, he is Chief Scientist at the Earth Research Lab, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as NOAA. I'll ask him about the state of the atmosphere, and who's watching the store.

Surely this is the worst time to talk about climate change. According to the IMF, the international banking system is teetering on the brink of disaster. Really, we're just propping up the illusion. 65 thousand Americans laid off in one day. Now, predictions that 50 million humans will lose their jobs in 2009. Where I live, construction crews have walked away from unfinished buildings. The government is rushing in to operate a bankrupt pulp mill, with no visible owner, before the chlorine blows up. The Jack Nicholson golf course and condos will never open.

Britain is going bankrupt. Who can compete with a headline like that?

Top world scientists now tell us the natural world is dying. In just one example, trees in the Western United States are dying from climate change. In fact, the whole West is heading into a drought that may last hundreds of years. Cows are falling over dead in Texas, finding nothing in the dried up vegetation. Bush's home state is headed into climate disaster.

The Obama administration is rushing to undo the damage of eight years of denying science. Of muzzling, firing top scientists. Of wantonly lying to the public, about the bankruptcy of our atmosphere. In a flurry of appointments, the deniers have been cast out, and actual scientists and experts appointed to a wide range of posts all pointing to climate action. Even foreign affairs, as we'll now hear from John Kerry, depends upon saving the climate.

[Kerry explains military experts say that climate disruption will lead to disturbances, failed states, wars and terrorism.]

That is why the Senate Foreign Relations Committee invited former Vice-President Al Gore to testify on January 28th, 2009. He spoke for 27 minutes, and then answered questions for another two hours. We'll just hit the highlights. You can download the testimony, and the Q and A, as free mp3 files, from our web site, ecoshock.org. I'll give you the links in just a moment.

After Kerry's introduction, Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana spoke. Now that the public knows climate change is real, Lugar can't trot out a denial. Instead, he promoted big bucks for biotech. Lugar said Africans will starve without biotechnology. He wants America to pressure Europe, forcing open their markets to lab-made food. Just a lobby announcement.

Let's clear our palates, with a taste of Al Gore.

[listen to a digest of Al Gore's key testimony, and answer to questions, in this week's Radio Ecoshock Show]

Remember, I'm just playing you selected clips from 2 and a half hour of testimony. Get the real thing from our web site. Here is the testimony link (6 MB, 27 min), the first hour and 24 minutes of Q and A with Gore and the Foreign Relations Committee (20 MB) and the last 37 minutes of Q and A. A lot of questions you would ask, along with political considerations, i.e. how can this transition to green energy happen in the real world.

Mr. Gore goes on to explain that the Arctic Ice remains at the lowest levels ever seen since the last great ice age. West Antarctica is also warming up. As it melts, along with Greenland, each 1 meter rise of sea level means another 100 million climate refugees. He showed new maps of huge horrible dead zones developing in our oceans.

But you know that. You know.

Naturally, the Committee wanted to know what we can do. Al Gore did offer a range of solutions. He said solar thermal energy alone could meet the electricity needs of America, with just a hundred square miles of desert.

But we're going to focus on the step he thinks need to happen first: the construction of a unified national smart grid to distribute the power of renewable energies. Here is John Kerry in dialog with Al Gore.

[in the Radio Ecoshock Show]

CAP AND TRADE OR CARBON TAX?

Although he has supported a revenue neutral carbon tax in the past, Mr. Gore testified he thought the cap and trade system was the most viable option now. Some European countries, and two Canadian provinces have already brought in a carbon tax. The revenue is not kept by the government, but returned to taxpayers. Some Americans are not ready for that, or don't trust the government.

We also need to realize that Al Gore, in addition to his famous role as climate educator, is now a multimillionaire successful businessman in the green energy field. The industry alliance he represents wants cap and trade - they think they can make money in a pollution market. Given the collapse of self-regulated capitalism, many environmentalists don't trust cap and trade either.

A DEAL WITH CHINA?

Part of the focus of this testimony is preparation for the climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009. That will be the first international opportunity for the new Obama administration to work for a climate solution. However, Al Gore suggested that the U.S. should be negotiating an agreement with China, even before Copenhagen. If the two biggest polluters can really reduce carbon, the worst of climate disruption might be avoided. And Gore says China has seen the green light, and is willing to reign in their greenhouse gas emissions. We shall see.

WORKING WITH THE NATURAL WORLD

While Gore brought out a lot of technical solutions, he made surprising emphasis on the role of protecting the last great forests of Earth. Deforestation causes 20 percent of our emissions. Gore also wants to see a program where the world's farmers can get credit if they capture more carbon in the soil. There is four times more carbon in the soil, than in all the trees.

THE LAST CHANCE

Al Gore told the Senate that top scientists are screaming from the roof tops: this is our last chance for action to stop a massive heat shift on planet Earth.

Dr. James Hansen of NASA wrote to President Obama, saying the climate will be saved, or lost, in the first four years of this administration. Other scientists from Germany, Australia - many parts of the world, have the same angst, the same conclusion of deadline, the need for swift action.

The most dire comes from one of the oldest voices: Sir James Lovelock. The inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, that living things regulate their own climate, told New Scientist magazine that we have, quote, "one last chance."

In fact, Lovelock worries it is already too late for emissions reductions. He doesn't trust carbon trading at all, and has even given up his love for nuclear power. The only hope he sees is a giant program to bury charcoal in the Earth, agrichar. But Lovelock doesn't think that will happen either. He expects a cull of human population, dropping down to perhaps a billion or less surviving.

Lovelock told Gaia Vince of the New Scientist, quote:

"We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO2 was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive. When the planet cooled they moved back again. So there doesn't have to be a massive extinction. It's already moving: if you live in the countryside as I do you can see the changes, even in the UK."

I'm Alex Smith, and this is Radio Ecoshock. Did you want me to lie to you? To sugar coat the facts?

The climate situation is far more serious than any banking scandal. That is why Al Gore went to Washington.

WHY ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD CAN'T MAKE US RENEWABLE...

At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, you heard Senator John Kerry ask Al Gore the perennial question: why hasn't safe renewable energy taken off? The obvious reason is opposition from an entrenched oil and coal oligarchy. But is that really all? Are we innocent?

Here is a quick quote from next week's Radio Ecoshock Show. The speaker is Martin Burger, CEO of Blue Energy, and a campaigner for tidal energy. We'll examine power from the tides, but Burger raises a deep and difficult point. Just how does a society transform itself? Can any amount of money from the Federal Government, or even mega-corporations, really change things? Or does it take a tidal wave of consciousness in humanity?

Let's listen to Martin Burger for two minutes.

"And this is a long talk, in of itself. And we are in the infancy of our consciousness evolution as individuals, but in this collective mind field.

Our Western perspective has not, or has failed to integrate the quantum perspective, and field effect. There is a fundamental truth, in physics and in reality, to what Chief Seattle said, when he talked about the web of life, that how all the animal kingdom - the birds, the forests, the beasts, and all of us - are all connected at some dimensional root level.

And out of that arises a signal that generates and manifests our shared experience called our future.

If we haven't contemplated the possibility of a low-cost clean sustainable energy future, that signal is presently weak. And that signal is displaced and dominated by those with an agenda that serves a narrow element and segment, rather than the broader segment of society.

So consciousness is really more important in creating this future, and in realizing the opportunities of significant efforts that have come long before this one [referring to tidal power]. But this one is still under the same limits of a feeble signal to the future.

Meetings like this, your book, your effort, the New Energy Movement, creates that monkey [the "hundredth monkey"] that has to ride that what-could-be train. And every one of the efforts needs that hundredth monkey.

So they [the public] will behave quantumly until that quantum mass is achieved in attention and consciousness. But then there's a tipping point where they can't be stopped.

Money won't do it. Money will take - and you can put something into a technology, and have a great flurry go on, but if it's going to change the world it has to occur with consciousness, before the money will make it stick.

So there are other technologies out there, raising more money. But when you look at it from a vision, versus a good idea, most of them are just good ideas. They're not going to change the future. They don't have a future."

What is he talking about? Einstein conceived the field theory of physics around 1905. You could say that each of us is less a distinct body, and more a collection of atoms held together by a field. These fields interact, forming larger fields.

Biologists such as Rupert Sheldrake opened the idea that animals really operate as large groups. You've seen large flocks of birds wheel in the sky as one, like schools of fish in the sea. Next week we'll hear about the hundredth monkey theory - that groups of animals reach a critical mass, where change occurs.

99 monkeys may not bring alternative energy to our lives, but the hundredth adopter might be the tipping point where suddenly everyone realizes the route to sustainable power.

Money can't do it. A change in mass consciousness needs to happen.

We'll explore all that next week on Radio Ecoshock, along with Burger's inside look at the state of tidal power around the world. Yes we could power everything using the gravity of the moon and stars, as they pull the ocean surface.

Oh yeah, we'll also take a trip into other engines and technologies waiting in the wings.

Don't miss the interview with top Earth Research Lab scientist Peter Tans in the audio of this week's Radio Ecoshock Show. We start with his ability to really speak the truth, without government interference. I ask how we know humans are altering the atmosphere, for sure. It turns out there are several ways to prove that, including a different form of carbon that humans emit when they burn fossil fuels.

Near the end of the interview, Tans worries that there is a chance, perhaps even a one in six chance, that the average temperature over land could increase by as much as 10 degrees Celsius (!!!!) due to feedback effects which we are only beginning to realize.

That is what we are trying to stop now, as each of us rises to consciousness about the danger, and the solutions just waiting for our eyes to see.

Listener tips make this almost a group project. This week "jon q public" tipped me to the Laurie Anderson live performance on You tube. The song "Only and Expert (Can Deal With a Problem)" contains a great verse about experts denying climate change. Sadly, due to time limitations, I had to cut another powerful verse about countries that bomb other countries. Listen and watch the whole song here.

Our background music at the half time break is "Clubbed to Death" by Rob Dougan.

A half hour cut-down version of Radio Ecoshock plays every Saturday morning at 11:30 on Green 960 Radio in San Francisco. In America only, you can hear it live on the Net.

I'm Alex Smith. Write me any time. The address is radio [youknowwhatgoeshere] ecoshock.org

A WARNING FROM THE PAST

This week's Radio Ecoshock broadcast is about past greenhouse worlds, quick climate shifts, and mass extinctions caused by changes to the atmosphere.

Dr. Andrew Glikson studies comet/asteroid impacts, volcanoes, and past climates. He's been doing it for 40 years.

While studying the oldest record of life on Earth, in the Australian outback, Glikson found a relationship between comet or asteroid impacts and the generation of living things. We do not yet know whether life forms (such as bacteria) actually arrived from outer space - or whether the impact generated energy and unique chemical conditions that caused certain natural reactions to duplicate themselves.

All that is a side issue to this speech, which is an education on the dominating role of the atmosphere in determining the state of life on Earth. Whether caused by impacts or volcanoes, or even gradual tilts in the Earth axis, a changing atmosphere can make life luxurious - or kill off up to 90% of all species.

The science explained by Andrew Glikson in this speech find a parallel in the book "Under A Green Sky" by Peter Ward, a scientist in Washington State. We are talking, for example, about the Permian mass extinction, about 200 million years ago. The ocean lost it's oxygen, and life surived in only a few pockets of the ocean. Most land species were exterminated.

Of the five past great extinctions (we are apparently living in the 6th extinction now) - FOUR WERE CAUSE BY CLIMATE CHANGE. Not hits from outer space. For the survival of our species, we need to know what happened - and few people alive know more than Andrew Glikson, as he summarizes not only his own research, but the general science now developing in the field.

This speech from Australia National University explains our current shift toward a hot-state planet - much faster than ever before. It has been slightly modified for radio, (to fit in an hour) with the permission of Dr. Glikson.

Learn about your planet (or die?)

The Radio Ecoshock Show 080704 1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB

Production Notes: 30 second music bed at 30:44, followed by reintroduction (to allow station ID if you want).