The impetus for developing this new generation of airliners is the need to improve fuel economy so as to maintain the profitability of the passenger air transport industry. Between 1986 and 2001, the world price of crude oil remained steady at near $22 a barrel. From 2002 to 2008, the world price of crude oil rose steadily from $25 to $95 a barrel (the prices quoted are rough averages, and in 2007 dollars). Modern airliners that are lighter and stronger than their older-generation all-metal size equivalents can carry more payload with less fuel consumption, and this translates to economic sustainability.

The quest for a more efficient airliner began with the first example of the type, Igor Sikorsky’s S-22 of 1913, the Ilya Muromets, a four engine biplane with an enclosed cabin for 16 passengers. Russia’s military needs in WW1 swallowed up the commercial potential of the S-22, and the production was shifted to bombers. The post-war rebirth of commercial aviation began with the Farman twin engine biplane transport of 1919, the F-60 Goliath, seating 14 passengers. Since then the quest for “better, faster and cheaper” passenger aviation has never stopped.

In 1972, Airbus introduced its A300, the first twin turbofan widebody air transport. The Boeing Commercial Airplanes company introduced its first widebody twin turbofan airliner, the 767, in 1981. Airbus chooses to be an airplane manufacturer that leads the industry in the application of engineered materials (composites) and computer-controlled aviation. Boeing is an airplane manufacturer that seeks to maintain its reputation for robust, reliable and increasingly efficient designs, which it gained early in its history with airplanes like the revolutionary 247 of 1933, the first truly modern airliner (all-aluminum monoplane of semi-monocoque construction with cantilever wings, wing flaps, retracting landing gear, trim tabs, autopilot, and deicing boots for the wings and tailplane).

Airbus and Boeing are today’s main competitors for new airplane orders worldwide. As noted earlier, it is the cost of fuel that drives the economics of commercial air transport, and in turn the replacement of older aircraft with newer models. The competing demands of safety, reliability, strength, carrying capacity, volumetric efficiency, speed and fuel economy drive airplane designers toward a convergence of characteristics, so that today both Airbus and Boeing airliners look, sound and feel largely the same to most passengers.

Each iteration of a manufacturer’s model type will have a higher proportion of weight-saving composite material, and a more extensive array of electronic and computer systems. How and where composites and computers are used by Airbus and Boeing may be quite different between their competing models of comparable type, but inevitably both manufacturers increase their use of both composites and computers, to remain competitive. The Airbus A330 and A340 series of airplanes, introduced in 1992 and 1993, and their classmate the Boeing 777, introduced in 1995, will be replaced by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, set for introduction in 2010, and the Airbus A350, set for introduction in 2013. Both the 787 Dreamliner and the A350 are nearly all-composite airplanes. The 787 Dreamliner is 80% composite by volume, and by weight it is: 50% composite, 20% aluminum, 15% titanium, 10% steel and 5% other. By weight, the A350 is: 53% composite, 19% aluminum and aluminum-lithium, 14% titanium, 6% steel and 8% other.

The challenge facing the civil aviation industries today is to answer the questions raised by the mysterious loss of Air France Flight 447, and to convince the public that any problems that may be uncovered about the use of composites and computers in AF447 will be fully understood and solved before building and flying all-composite airliners with even more complicated computerized control systems.

So, it is no wonder that Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney defended electronic flight control technology and the Airbus A330, in an interview prior to the Paris Air Show: “The causes of the [AF447] accident are unknown, and I don’t think there is any link with a serious fault with the aircraft…the A330 is a reliable and proven aircraft.”¹

The AF447 crisis in civil aviation may be similar to that of the two de Havilland Comet crashes of 1954. The Comet, introduced in 1949, was the world’s first passenger jet transport. During both January and April of 1954, de Havilland Comet airplanes broke apart at altitude while flying in clear weather over water. After the second crash, the fleet was grounded, many pieces were recovered from the seabed to assemble partial reconstructions, and many tests were conducted on another intact airframe. The cause of spontaneous disintegration was eventually found to be metal fatigue in the aluminum alloy used for the skin, by the cumulative effect of many cycles of cabin pressurization and de-pressurization.

The changes in design, materials and manufacturing techniques needed to solve the problems of the de Havilland Comets of 1949-1954 were used to produce an improved Comet, which returned de Havilland to passenger aviation in 1958. However, those same lessons had already been divined by Boeing to produce the 707, their first commercial jet transport, which was also introduced in 1958 and immediately went on to dominate passenger air transport through the 1960s.

If the air transport industries fail to fully resolve the AF447 mystery, then a portion of the public will assign an apprehensive image to the coming generation of composite computer-controlled air transports, a psychology we could think of as “‘54 Comet dread,” as opposed to “’60s 7-0-7 optimism.”

AF447 In The Clouds

In the early pre-dawn hours (~2:15 UTC) of 1 June 2009, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris fell out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean near the equator about midway between Brazil and Senegal, with the loss of all 228 people aboard. The aircraft was one of the most modern, a dual engine Airbus A330-200.

(UTC is Coordinated Universal Time, which replaced Greenwich Mean Time in 1964 and is defined for the time zone straddling much of 0 degrees longitude. There are 24 time zones each generally of 15 degrees longitude, but there are numerous deviations of time zone boundaries.)²

The accident occurred after the airplane had flown over 90% of its planned northeast-directed transect of 227 km through the width at mid length of a mesoscale convection system (MCS), a cluster of storms 800 km long east to west, and 160 km wide north to south.³

The last radio message from the crew of AF447 was a routine notification at 1:33 UTC that the flight at 35,000 feet (10,671 m) along oceanic high altitude route UN873 had reached waypoint INTOL, near the outer boundary of airspace monitored by radar from Brazil. The pilots of AF447 expected to reach waypoint TASIL, near the edge of airspace radar-monitored from Senegal, in 50 minutes (by 2:23 UTC), a distance of 663 km between waypoints. A mid Atlantic gap of at least 500 km exists between the limits of Brazilian and Senegalese air traffic radar surveillance.⁴

Between about 1:46 UTC to 1:56 UTC, AF447 flew through the western fringe of the top of a storm that reached to between 35,000 feet (10.67 km) and 40,000 feet (12.2 km). It seems AF447 had shifted somewhat to the left, or westward, from its planned flightpath in order to avoid the brunt of this storm, and in anticipation of weaving between storm cells ahead. Thunderstorms in the tropics are usually very localized, of short duration, and produce abundant rainfall. They can develop so quickly that a Paris-bound flight 4 hours out from Rio de Janeiro might encounter an active storm cell over a patch of ocean that had been cloudless prior to takeoff. This is why airplane weather radar had been developed, to alert pilots of weather threats ahead, and to guide their weaving between active storm cells when they became unavoidably embedded in weather systems with numerous storms. After crossing about 42 km of clear airspace, AF447 entered the main MCS thunderstorm cluster, at about 1:59 UTC.

A sequence of satellite images of the MCS cluster show the large 800 km by 160 km (roughly) cloud mass with its variegated edge, drifting, evolving and fragmenting during that day. These images show the merged shape seen from above of the laterally spreading “anvil” tops of the many individual storm cells in the cluster. The updrafts in these cells had sufficient energy to push moisture up to between 40,000 feet (12.2 km) to 56,000 feet (17.1 km). Moisture that rises into the base of MCS clouds, perhaps near 3281 feet (1 km) at 20 C (68 F), can be chilled by strong updrafts to arrive at -40 C (-40 F) at the 10.67 km cruising altitude of AF447, and continue rising and chilling to as low a temperature as -80 C (-112 F) at 17 km elevation. This storm cluster was typical, not unusual, for the location and time of year.

AF447 proceeded northeast through the MCS cluster, guided by its weather (moisture, rain, hale) radar along a corridor of mild radar reflectivity (and of anticipated least relative ’storminess’), about equidistant between a strong cell to the west and the strongest cell of the moment, which was about 30 km east. About 8 minutes after entering the MCS system (2:07 UTC), AF447 began penetrating what was probably the most energetic part of the storm cluster along its flightpath.

At 2:10 UTC, the first of a series of automated signals was sent by AF447’s onboard computerized maintenance system, via satellite, to Air France computers in Paris logging maintenance information. The series of automated messages had a combined time span of 1 minute and occurred until 2:14 UTC; 5 failure reports and 19 warnings were transmitted. The earliest automated messages reported on the failure of the Pitot Tube sensors, which measure the airspeed of the airliner and provide an estimate of altitude based on the static pressure of the atmosphere. Subsequent messages in the initial burst indicated that the auto-pilot (automatic ’steering’) and auto-thrust (automatic ‘gas pedal’) systems had been disengaged, the collision avoidance system (to detect other nearby airliners) had a fault, that the flight control computers (three for redundancy) had shifted to an “alternate” mode where they made fewer automatic adjustments to the airplane’s control surfaces, and placed fewer limits on the range of manual inputs by the pilots that would be implemented as motions of the control surfaces (ailerons, rudder and the many types of flaps).⁵

From 2:11 UTC to 2:14 UTC, messages indicated the failure of the gyroscopes (air data inertial reference system, ADIRU, used to provide the artificial horizon orienting the sense of ‘up,’ ‘down,’ and ‘level,’ essential during nighttime) and resulting faults in the instrument panel displays (screens and electronic images instead of mechanical dial gauges); there was disagreement between systems that interpreted air data (such as for airspeed and angle of attack of the wings into the airflow); that a fault had occurred in the flight control computer system (that transmits commands to the hydraulic actuators that physically move control surfaces); that a fault had occurred in the computer system that captures and processes pressure and electrical outputs from air and motion sensors that supply data; and finally, a “cabin vertical speed warning” indicating a rapid loss of cabin air pressure, due to either a rapid descent or a breaching of the cabin shell.

AF447 may have entered its period of most severe jolting, buffeting and external cooling near 2:07 UTC, when it began crossing the core of the MCS cluster between its most active cells. Some as yet unknown excessive structural strain — perhaps exacerbated by material embrittlement or loss of plasticity and cohesion due to excessive cooling, such as by micro-strains induced by the expansion of trapped moisture freezing inside composite materials — may have been delivered by turbulence and initiated the subsequent fragmentation of the aircraft.

Pressure sensor icing sustained during at least the three minutes prior to 2:10 UTC seems to have initiated the cascade of air data (speed, pressure, altitude and attitude) processing and instrumentation failures, and contributed to the growing uncertainty of the decision-making electronic processing for the navigation and flight control systems.

Pilots rank their priorities during flight, especially in emergencies, as: “aviate, navigate, communicate.” The pilots of AF447 would be working first to keep their airplane at a proper speed: fast enough to stay aloft at the given elevation and weight of the airplane, and not too fast to damage the structure because of excessive pressure differences produced by airflows near the speed of sound, and by excessive structural stresses induced by the alternating jolts of updrafts and downdrafts in turbulent air spaces. Given that the aircraft remains aloft and is not being rattled to pieces, the next priority is to point it in a safe direction, for example away from active thunderstorm cells, and along the best route to a safe landing. The third priority is to communicate the status of the flight to air traffic controllers, a useful task as long as it is not a distraction from essential aviating.

Troubleshooting a torrent of error messages from a computerized flight control system to then compose a radio report for air traffic controllers is not a sensible allocation of attention during an emergency to control an airliner in a storm. We can understand why the crew of AF447 might not send any radio messages during their 3 minutes (and possibly as much as 11 minutes) of weaving between the storm cells and riding the waves of turbulence, before the first automated alarm of trouble was transmitted at 2:10 UTC. At this point, AF447 had crossed 154 km of the MCS cluster, the last 42 km of which were probably the roughest. During the next 4 minutes, when the automated messages were sent, the flight probably travelled 56 km. At 2:14 UTC, AF447 was about 2 to 3 minutes (28 km to 42 km, at 14 km/minute) from exiting the northern edge of the MCS cloud system, and it sent its last transmission.

AF447 Into The Sea

The search for AF447 began at 2:23 UTC. Brazilian air traffic controllers called their Senegalese counterparts when they failed to receive the expected confirmation that AF447 had announced itself to Senegal by radio, as required upon entry to a new airspace. The Brazilian Air Force dispatched search planes, a Spanish maritime patrol plane searched southwest from the Cape Verde Islands, and the search effort quickly expanded in the following days to include Brazilian naval vessels, cargo ships within the search area, French military planes and ships, and satellites.⁶

Fernando de Noronha is an archipelago of 21 islands 354 km (220 miles) northeast from the eastern tip of Brazil. AF447 flew past (~1:18 UTC) and to the west of Fernando de Noronha on route to waypoint INTOL at 565 km (351 miles) from the coast. At about 2:44 UTC, the pilots of a TAM Airlines flight from Europe to Brazil reported observing “orange dots” on the surface of the ocean — burning wreckage? — when they were approximately 1300 km (808 miles) from Fernando de Noronha. This would put them about 515 km (320 miles) northeast of the last known position of AF447, 30 minutes after its last transmission.

If AF447 broke apart at 2:14 UTC, some wreckage might fall as far as 130 km from this location (an estimate based on the debris scatter from China Airlines Flight 611, a Boeing 747 that broke apart at 35,000 feet in 2002). Powered flight by AF447 beyond 2:14 UTC was unlikely since there were no subsequent automated messages (presumably, all power generation, controlled motion and thrust had ceased). If the “orange dots” were burning AF447 wreckage, then the TAM pilots had the ability to see glows no less than 380 km ahead of them. So, the “orange dots” sighting is probably unrelated.

The Brazilian Air Force spotted floating debris 650 km (404 miles) northeast of Fernando de Noronha on 2 June, the next day a Brazilian Navy patrol boat arrived in the area. On 6 June, bodies and debris from AF447 were recovered. On 8 June, the vertical stabilizer and rudder of the Airbus A330-200 was found and recovered.⁷

By 26 June, when the search for human remains ended, 51 bodies and 600 pieces of debris had been recovered from two debris fields about 80 km (50 miles) apart on the surface of the ocean. The finds were concentrated along a 150 km track almost due north from the last known position of AF447; debris (but apparently not bodies) was scattered as far as 50 km east and west of this track. The tendency of flat pieces of debris to glide haphazardly as uncontrolled airfoils would scatter them much further from the last heading of the airplane than more compact objects, which developed no aerodynamic lift.⁸

Autopsies revealed the victims to have fractured limbs and hips, no seawater in their lungs, no signs of burning or charring, and some had little or no clothing. The presumptions are that AF447 broke up at altitude without a fuel explosion causing a cabin fire, that the victims were ejected from the wreckage at high altitude, which sucked out their breath and quickly made them unconscious, that the high speed air blast tore off their clothing, and that their bodies were not fragmented on hitting the sea because they fell more slowly individually than if they had been attached to a much heavier mass like a wrecked fuselage.

An explosion and fire in the lower fuselage (below the floor of the passenger cabin, in the center fuel tank or the cargo holds) cannot be ruled out because the passengers would be shielded from such a blast and fire, and the airplane still disintegrate in flight. Recovery of a sufficient number of parts from the lower fuselage will resolve the question of fire (no evidence yet). The recovery of parts has so far been restricted to those that float, so a great deal of plastic and composite material, and not so much metal.⁹

The official investigators are anxious to find the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder (the “black boxes” which are actually orange), which lie somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. To help locate them, each is equipped with a sonic emitter (”pinger”) with a range of 2 km. The sea floor is between 2.5 km and 4 km deep below the suspected crash site, and is quite mountainous since it is close to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (the boundary from which tectonic plates originate and spread eastward and westward). The recorder cases can withstand pressure down to a depth of 6 km, and the pingers are designed to operate for at least 30 days, after which their signals fade.

Questions And Speculations

The sequence of known events for AF447 has been laid out in the sections above. The distances and UTC times quoted are either from news accounts or my simple calculations, which do not account for factors such as the curvature of the Earth and headwinds, which pilots, navigators and meteorologists use to arrive at precise numbers. Unless Airbus can make a more detailed analysis of AF447’s automated messages, and until more parts of the airplane are recovered and analyzed, especially the voice and data recorders, we are left without more facts. So, now we ask 5 questions and speculate.

Question 1. AF447 flew into a line of thunderstorms and was destroyed. Is this a case of pilot error?

The ranking for safety of nine modes of transportation on the basis of deaths per billion journeys (the basis of insurance rates) is: bus (4.3), rail (20), van (20), car (40), foot (40), water (90), air (117), bicycle (170), motorcycle (1640).¹⁰

The primary causes for the complete loss of commercial jet aircraft in accidents during 1996 through 2005 were found to be the: flight crew (55%), airplane (17%), weather (13%), miscellaneous other (7%), air traffic control (5%), maintenance (3%).¹¹

Airline travelers demand rapid transit across vast distances with the punctuality of well-run train services. They also crave comfort, meal services and entertainment during their trips. Personal safety and incident-free travel are usually taken for granted, but highly prized when thought about. And, passengers want it all cheap. Everything about passenger airplane design and airline operations is focused on producing this type of experience for the flying public. An accident like that of AF447 is simply an unpleasant reminder that nature may not always be as conveniently benign as we had assumed and planned for in the design of our passenger airplanes and the operations of our air travel industry. Our margins may be too thin because we are in too much of a hurry, and too cheap.

Passenger airplanes are designed to withstand forces comparable to about 2 to 2.5 times their maximum loaded weight (2 to 2.5 times their total mass times the constant of gravitational acceleration, g = 9.81 meters per second-squared). We could design passenger airplanes that are essentially unbreakable, like the F-35 fighter now under development, which can be stressed to 8 or 9 g, and uses composite materials for its wing and nacelle skins. However, ‘unbreakable’ passenger airplanes would be much smaller and slower than the 200-500 seat turbofan-propelled transports we are used to. They would be more like the Lockheed P-3 Orion that has been used as a “hurricane hunter,” flying through violent storms to gather meteorological data. The P-3 Orion (1962-1990) is a maritime patrol plane developed from the Lockheed Electra passenger airplane (1957-1961), which could carry about 120 people. The four engine turboprop P-3 Orion has an operational limit of 3 g, but the plane was shown to survive a 7 g stall recovery in 2008; see the photo of the wing.¹²

Compare the photo of the overstressed P-3 Orion wing to photos of a recovered spoiler (wing flap) from the AF447 airplane.¹³

We could restrict air travel to times and routes of guaranteed clear weather, but then direct flights between Brazil and Europe would be impossible because planes would be barred from crossing the approximately 700 km wide Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a permanent band of thunderstorms that circles the globe near the equator. Flights are often grounded or diverted to alternate destinations when dangerous weather develops, but neither the flying public nor the airline operators are eager to expand this practice to the point of avoiding any possibility of contact with rain, snow, ice, lightning, turbulent air and birds.

So, on the basis of accepted practice, the Captain of AF447, Marc Dubois, did not make an error to set off on his fateful flight. It remains to be determined if he and his two assisting pilots made the right decisions in maneuvering the airplane through the atmospheric conditions they encountered, and in responding to the technical problems that erupted.

There are three possibilities of root causes here: human error, systemic error, or natural catastrophe. If the pilots made mistakes, then the information on the voice cockpit recorder and the flight data recorder will probably reveal them (if the recorders can be found). If the piloting was flawless, then the accident could be a systemic failure, a result of inadequacies in: airplane performance, design, maintenance, certification (the performance and safety standards we choose to adhere to, through government regulation), and the operational practices of the air travel industry.

The third possibility, that an unusual and rogue natural force overwhelmed AF447 and could not have been anticipated, lets humanity off the hook. The current best guess for an AF447 natural catastrophe is wind shear, a large and abrupt change in wind velocity experienced in crossing an invisible plane through the atmosphere. But this excuse is weak. Wind shear produced by the updrafts and downdrafts in thunderstorms is now monitored by onboard Pulse-Doppler weather radar. Clear air turbulence (CAT) is a form of cloudless wind shear that is difficult to avoid because it cannot be detected visually nor with radar (a laser range-finding and reflectivity-measuring system called Doppler LIDAR is needed). CAT is created near the four high-altitude jet streams that ring the earth, in the wind shadows of mountain peaks, and as the wake turbulence of large airplanes. AF447 was far from all of these.

The Captain of AF447 was 58 and had 21 years of piloting for Air France. He had undoubtedly flown Airbus planes between Rio de Janeiro and Paris many times. On the 31st of May, he probably saw nothing unusual in the weather predicted along his route (see Figure 4 in Reference 3, and the associated maps of higher elevation winds). He expected the usual thunderstorms near the equator and would be sure to monitor his weather radar during flight, to adjust his course as needed to evade active storm cells that might develop along his intended track.

The northern hemisphere’s trade winds move southwest, and the southern hemisphere’s trade winds move northwest; they converge in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The converged masses of heavily laden moist air then rise to great height (17 km) before diverging into a northward flow north of the equator, and southward flow south of the equator. These high-altitude flows toward higher latitudes sink to low elevation at 30 degrees north and south latitude, and then skim along the surface of the Earth westward and toward the equator, as the trade winds. These toroidal patterns of atmospheric circulation are called Hadley Cells. The ocean regions of the ITCZ were called “the doldrums” by early European mariners because of the typical absence of surface winds. The tropical heat and vertical trend of atmospheric circulation within the ITCZ continuously spawns thunderstorms, and these can group into squall lines or clusters now called mesoscale convection systems (MCS). The updrafts in these storms can reach 17 km, well past the usual 10-11 km cruising altitude of airliners. Pilots experienced at transoceanic flight, like those of AF447, would understand the nature of the air spaces they intended to cross, and plan accordingly.

At least 12 other airplanes passed through the area of AF447’s disappearance during the period from 3 hours before, to perhaps 1 hour after 2:15 UTC. It is likely most were Airbus airplanes since the carriers were Air France (four, besides AF447), Air TAM (three), Air Iberia (two), Lufthansa (two) and British Airways (one). One Air France plane left São Paulo bound for Paris on 31 May 2009 at 22:10 UTC after AF447 left Rio de Janeiro at 22:03 UTC that same day, so they must have been as close to each other on the same route as allowed by regulations for safe separation. Several of the other planes passed AF447’s last known position within 30 minutes of the disappearance. None reported anything unusual (one passenger on a flight 40 minutes behind AF447 recalled a half hour of turbulence near the equator).

The effects causing AF447 to fall from flight were extremely localized and short-lived.

Question 2. Pitot Tubes measure airspeed, but on AF447 they failed due to icing. Did a loss of speed data cause the flight control computers to issue bad commands, which led to a loss of control in bad weather?

A Pitot probe is a small tube facing into the airflow from the nose of an airplane; it’s purpose is to sense ram pressure, which is interpreted for speed. Obviously, the speed sensor fails if the tube becomes plugged. It has to be maintained and cleared of insect nests, insects impacted during flight through swarms, and dirt; it has to drain off rainwater without distorting the pressure reading; and it has to be equipped with a heater to melt impacted ice.

A number of Airbus planes have had problems with Pitot probes that failed due to icing, and the entire A330 and A340 series have been undergoing retrofits. The AF447 Airbus A330-200 did not yet have the improved Pitot tubes, but since its loss Air France has speeded the retrofitting of its Airbus fleet, and all carriers are now quite focused to complete this task. There have been many recent articles in the news and in pilot forums like airliners.net, about the Pitot tube problems on Airbus planes.

The Airbus A330 uses three Pitot tubes, and its air data computers select the reading from any two that agree. None agreed on AF447 (at 2:10 UTC) so the flight control system informed the pilots that speed data was unreliable — absent — and it shifted flight control from the fully automatic mode to an alternate mode, which is comparable to the amount of computerized flight control on a Boeing 777.

Airbus pilots have a back-up procedure for estimating speed on the basis of other instruments (angle of attack and engine power) in case their airspeed indicators fail. This procedure is simplified to about three simple control settings (for thrust), for low, medium and high altitude; and which are to be committed to memory for use in emergencies.¹⁴

The computerized flight control system does not blindly use inconsistent data to compute bad commands to control surface actuators. Instead, it flags the discrepancy and turns control over to the pilots, and the pilots have their back-up procedure for flight with unreliable speed data. The loss of speed data alone is not sufficient to cause the loss of flight control.

Question 3. Did a loss of speed data cause the AF447 pilots to overspeed the airplane to the point of structural damage, because they believed they were preventing a stall?

An airplane must move fast enough to generate the aerodynamic lift force that holds its weight aloft. The stall speed is the minimum for flight. Stall speed increases with altitude because the atmosphere becomes thinner. The stall speed for the AF447 Airbus A330-200 at 35,000 feet was 759 kph (472 mph).

Airliners are designed to fly at high subsonic speeds because supersonic travel requires much higher fuel consumption. They have swept wings that remain behind the curved pressure wave the airliner’s nose plows before it, and which becomes a shock wave when the airplane moves at or above the speed of sound.

Consider a straight-wing airplane moving at sonic to low supersonic speed. The outer parts of the wings will extend ahead of the curved bow wave, and produce additional shock waves. Because neither flight speed nor incoming air density and temperature are perfectly uniform, shock waves will oscillate about some mean position relative to the airplane, causing fluctuations in the distribution of pressure force on the aircraft surface. Also, shock waves that cross the surfaces of wings will cause the flow to separate, destroying the lift. Shock waves create drag, and more shock waves create more drag. Maintaining high speed against high drag requires large engines with high fuel consumption. Supersonic airplanes are equipped with very powerful engines to accelerate them quickly from the subsonic to supersonic regime.

The maximum speed for a subsonic airliner is set by the criterion of ensuring no localized sonic flows nor shocks. For example, flow scooting around the joint of a wing and the fuselage, or some bulge on the skin, might be locally faster than the average aircraft speed. That average must be kept below the point where the fastest localized flows are sonic. Besides ensuring a smooth attached flow over the skin of the airplane, the absence of shock waves ensures there are no abrupt changes in pressure from point to point along the airframe. Such jagged and fluctuating distributions of aerodynamic force would produce large stresses and torques on airframes, and require they be much more robust. Robust equals heavier equals smaller equals less payload equals more fuel consumption equals unprofitable civil air transport like the now-retired Concorde. The upper speed limit for AF447, at 35,000 feet in clear weather, was 913 kph (567 mph).

The speed of sound depends entirely on the temperature of the air, and as this cools with elevation (below the stratosphere where most civil aviation occurs), the speed of Mach 1 decreases with height. Since stall speed increases with height, an altitude is reached beyond which a given airplane cannot fly. This is called the “coffin corner.” A pilot cruising near this altitude has only a narrow window of safe speed. This pilot must be alert to stay ahead of a stall while not speeding too quickly and subjecting the airplane to large fluctuating forces pounding and ultimately breaking it. AF447’s speed window at 10.67 km altitude was 759-913 kph (472-567 mph, Mach 0.72-0.86).

AF447’s nominal cruising speed of 871 kph (Mach 0.82) was relative to headwinds of about 28 kph, so its speed relative to the earth (ground speed) was 843 kph (524 mph).

If AF447 had only lost its speed data the pilots would used their back-up speed scale (BUSS), described earlier, and the flight would have continued. There had to be additional problems to rob the pilots of the readings on which the BUSS relied, or to distract them from aviating. Additional problems could be natural: the ‘act of god’ catastrophic updraft or turbulence that went undetected by all and disappeared with AF447; the problems could be multiple and simultaneous aircraft systems failures; and the additional problem could be the pilots’ own mistake in becoming absorbed in trying to interpret the cascade of error messages and to reboot their computer systems, and so lose sight of their drifting airspeed until it was too late.

The mystery at this point is that nature does not seem to have been unusually unkind at that time and place, it is hard to believe the airplane would have multiple systems failures and suffer a catastrophic disintegration without some overwhelming external force being applied, and it is hard to believe the flight crew was anything other than highly competent, experienced, prepared and alert.

Question 4. Can lightning more easily penetrate the composite panels of the Airbus A330-200, and this effect initiate the problems of AF447: by causing an electrical fault disrupting computer systems, or sparking a fire or fuel explosion?

The first 20 years of aviation were dominated by composite airplanes, which were made of resin-painted canvas-covered wood frames, a construction method used earlier for canvas-covered canoes. Metal airplanes were built to meet the demands of higher speeds, larger load capacity and greater reliability. Aside from its aerodynamic and mechanical functions of producing lift, reducing drag, and containing cabin pressure, the surface of a metal airplane has the electromagnetic function of acting as a Faraday Cage, shielding the interior (passengers and crew, cargo, fuel system, electronics and control systems) from any external electromagnetic threats, such as lightning.

Electromagnet waves and arcs (like lightning) will easily penetrate composite panels unless they contain layers of metal foil or metallic fibers, which are connected to grounding points so as to short-circuit and bleed away incident electric currents. Composite panels designed for airplane skins must incorporate such metallic lamina to shield the aircraft from lightning, and to ensure that no external electromagnetic emissions can penetrate to sensitive electronic systems within the airplane and interfere with their operation (electrical noise shielding). Engineers are aware of these requirements and have standards (and regulations) to guide their design efforts.

The electronics and computer systems in airliners today are so complex and sensitive that the electromagnetic shielding has to be a critical part of the design of the airframe. Ideally, a new design is tested against real electromagnetic waves and electric arcs, and not just “virtually” with computer simulations, to verify the Faraday Cage performance of the structure. Since the average airliner experiences about one lightning strike a year, reality eventually weeds out the bad designs.

The fact of the automatic messages from AF447 shows that electrical power was available until at least 2:14 UTC that day, there were no indications of interruptions or surges.

Also, there was no indication that lightning occurred near AF447’s last known position during the time of its disappearance (based on NASA surveillance). Storms in equatorial oceanic regions exhibit an unusual lack of lightning, a fact motivating current meteorological research. See (3) for sources on this topic.

So, it seems lightning is a very unlikely contributing factor to the disappearance of AF447.

Question 5. Do composites degrade more easily and quickly than aluminum and steel, and are composite airplanes more fragile that all-metal airplanes?

The contemporary use of composite materials for aircraft structures is very new, and there is less than twenty years experience with them in the field. From the very studies that were used to devise these engineered materials, scientists learned about their weaknesses as well. Composites are fibrous or mesh layers (lamina) bonded together by a resin or cement matrix. Shock and cyclic stresses can lead to failure of the material by separation of layers — delamination.

Cyclic stresses can be from pressurization and de-pressurization, or cycles of temperature extremes that cause stresses by thermal expansion and contraction, or severe vibration and repetitive torquing. A composite panel may develop an interior separation that remains unnoticed for some time before the complete failure of the panel. The integrity of composite airliner panels must to be checked periodically, by visual inspection and acoustic probing (which might be tapping to hear a ‘funny’ sound).

In 2002, airplane mechanics working for the Federal Express delivery service discovered that the hydraulic fluid used in the actuators of an Airbus plane had dissolved some of the composite material of the rudder, causing a separation from control rods, and difficulties during flight. In 2005, a rudder removed for inspection revealed extensive delamination between its outer layer and its inner core; traces of hydraulic fluid were found between these layers in the area of separation.

These and other incidents of composite material-related rudder malfunctions on Airbus planes cast doubt on the ascription of pilot error as the cause of the American Airlines Flight 587 accident of 12 November 2001. An Airbus A300-600 just airborne and climbing crossed into the wake turbulence of a nearby Boeing 747; the first officer made aggressive rudder motions to keep the Airbus plane upright, and the rudder snapped off followed by the vertical fin, leading to a horrific crash into a residential neighborhood of Queens, New York City. What if the strength of the rudder and its joints to its actuators and axle had been seriously degraded earlier?

William John Cox has reviewed many incidents and accidents with Airbus planes in which the composite-material vertical stabilizer and rudder was a key factor. The strength of his doubts about composite rudders is reflected by the title of his article, “Should the Airbus Be Grounded?”¹⁵

The overall technical question that has to be answered about composite materials used in aviation is: what causes them to degrade during their service life, and how long is that service life? We can break down the overall question to types of sources of both sporadic and cyclic stress: aerodynamic (pressure), mechanical (vibration, torque, impact, shock), thermal (heated expansion and cooled contraction), chemical (surface reactions with gases and liquids found in aviation, the effect on bulk integrity by the absorption of moisture, gases, volatile organic compounds), electrical (corona and arc discharge effects on surface integrity) and radiative (ultraviolet light embrittlement).

There is no technical reason why composite-material aviation structures should be less safe than their metal counterparts. But, it may be that an equivalent degree of safety would require that composite panels, shells and structures be replaced more often than metal pieces, because the composites may degrade more quickly under the combined actions of the pressurization and deep cooling cycles of flight, the corrosive and embrittling effects of ozone and ultraviolet light, the dissolving and delaminating effects of hydraulic fluids and volatile organic compounds (fuel and solvent vapors), and the fracturing by impact with hail and other hard airborne grit.

The loss of AF447 underscores the need to answer these questions.

An Imagined Final Sequence

Assume AF447 flies into a patch of especially dense and especially cold fog whose supercooled droplets freeze on contact to rime ice, which clings tenaciously; 12 other flights miss as intense a fog freeze. Supercooled fog droplets are small and have low reflectivity to radar, pilots have to tilt their radar antennas down and turn up the gain to see the rain and hail at lower elevations ahead to infer a high concentration of ice crystals and supercooled fog above, assuming there is little horizontal wind shear so the high ice and fog have not moved laterally from their formative updraft and rainout downdraft. But, this can happen as the cloud’s anvil, so perhaps fog freeze is unavoidable if the flight is weaving between storm cells. Rime ice sticks on contact, accumulating into a solid mass with many air pockets. Twenty four steps of an imaginative sequence follow.

1. Gradual icing reduces the inlet areas of all 3 Pitot probes, uniformly. The angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor is a weathervane attached to a horizontal shaft at the side of the aircraft near its nose. The AOA measures the angle between the airflow and the longitudinal axis of the airplane. Assume the AOA vane also ices, swiveling gradually to higher angle. Both effects cause a gradual speed-up on auto-thrust (the airplane version of cruise control).

2. Pitot icing blockage becomes severe and non-uniform; a 50 kph discrepancy between probes is recorded.

3. The Pitot system fails at 2:10 UTC, auto-pilot and auto-thrust go to the “alternate” mode, which is comparable to the combination of automatic and manual control used on the Boeing 777. The rudder is no longer limited to only 5 degrees of deflection because the flight control programming presumes the pilots would need the freedom of greater motion to perform recovery maneuvers. The shift to alternate mode is not a failure of the automated system, but the response programmed for the situation.

4. The speed window (”coffin corner”) at 35,000 feet is 757-913 kph (Mach 0.72-0.86). The pilots had set auto-thrust to maintain a speed near 881 kph (Mach 0.83). They are fooled into thinking their present speed is about 834-850 kph because of the last presumably good speed readings they observed prior to the warnings of 2:10 UTC. They assume the current power settings are for this speed, when actually the speed has crept up to 913-929 kph without notice.

5. Arriving at excessive speed causes 1.3 g shaking, which is self-induced but they interpret as atmospheric turbulence. If they were really cruising at 881 kph (Mach 0.83) and had encountered turbulence, then they should have reduced their speed to 819 kph (Mach 0.77). Assuming this is their situation, they try reducing speed by using the ‘no airspeed data’ flying procedure. They throttle back a bit, guessing at a 16-32 kph reduction based on the combination of the AOA sensor (which is iced and showing too high an angle) and the power setting. They assume the power setting accounts for a higher headwind than is the case (because it seems high), and they want to be assured of avoiding a stall, so they actually only reduce power to slow down by 16 kph to 897-913 kph (a good thing, too!), imagining they are now flying at 819-834 kph.

6. The AOA system fails at 2:11 UTC. Either the vane stalk is frozen into position, or the 1.3+ g shaking from excessive speed has caused too many erratic and wide swings of the vane, and it has faced broadside into the flow and become heavily balled up in ice. So, speed guessing is now nearing impossible. They are at about 897-913 kph when they should be 819 kph, assuming turbulence; and there may actually be some real turbulence as well. The majority of the “turbulence” they are experiencing is really the buffeting effect of excessive speed caused by the erratic shock and pressure jumps along the fuselage, wings, tailplanes, vertical stabilizer and rudder during transonic cruise. At 2:12 UTC, air data discrepancies are flagged; perhaps icing and transonic flow (shock wave effects) prevent other measurements such as of total air temperature.

7. Swept-wing transports have a tendency to swing back and forth in a lateral rolling motion called a Dutch Roll. A combined yaw and roll make the nose point left and the right wing dip (or go into the opposite combination), which is countered by the ailerons to level the wings, and the rudder to steer back on track. But, the lag in response swings the plane past straight and level into a nose pointing right and the left wing down attitude. The Dutch Roll is an oscillation between control inputs and lateral swings. Part of the automatic flight control system is a yaw damper, a slight shifting of the rudder back and forth as needed to keep the airplane straight and level.

At 2:13 UTC, AF447 was flying at excessive speed, the surrounding atmosphere may have exacerbated flight instability by being turbulent, and the flight control system no longer limited rudder deflection to 5 degrees. Yaw damping became ineffective. Because of the 1.3+ g shaking and the shock-induced flow disruptions of transonic cruise, the responses to the deflections of the ailerons and rudder became erratic, and an amplifying Dutch Roll oscillation sets in.

8. A big tail swing right is countered by a rightward rudder deflection of greater then 5 degrees, and the combined moment (torque) to the right and the air resistance against the vertical fin (to the left) puts a greater then 2.5 g load on the vertical stabilizer, and snaps the entire fin-plus-rudder assembly off to the left.

9. The loss of the vertical stabilizer releases resistance to the rightward moment, and an instant angular acceleration of 3.5 to 5 g, or more, swings the tail rightward.

10. The rear pressure bulkhead in the fuselage has a pressure force directed rearward, from the pressurized cabin and cargo hold toward the unpressurized tailcone. During a rightward tail swing, this force points to the back and rightward. At the same time, the rightward moment acting on the tailcone puts a lateral force on it, which is to the left and increasingly back during the rightward swing. With the tail wagged right, the rear bulkhead is tilted forward on right side, backward on left side, and the resultant force on it is more or less straight back. This causes a rotation of the bulkhead so as to open its seam on the right side of the fuselage, breaching the pressure seal and allowing the cabin to de-pressurizes rapidly.

11. An automatic signal sent at 2:14 UTC announces cabin de-pressurization.

12. The unimpeded rightward tail swing sweeps the right wing square into the airstream while the airplane is near its maximum speed, about 881-913 kph (Mach 0.83-0.86). This swings the right wing leading edge forward at a higher relative speed than Mach 1, so it moves forward of the leading shock.

13. The shock extends along the middle chord of right wing, now angled more squarely into the flow, and causes flow separation behind it, with a complete loss of lift; shock stall.

14. The plane’s nose is yawed left in a rightward tail swing, the right side losses lift force while left keeps it, and the result is a sudden strong moment causing a rotation (perhaps 5 g) about the plane’s longitudinal axis: left side/wing up, right side/wing down.

15. The excessive right twist of the fuselage causes engine pylons to fail. Engine number 1 (left side) breaks off — cutting electrical power — rotating in an upward swing right, smashing into the bottom of the left wing near the wing root and trailing edge, and then smashing into and through the left side of the fuselage just past the left wing root.

16. Engine number 2 (right side) swings up and right to twist bottom-up through the right wing leading edge, outboard of the engine location, and the outer wing then snaps off by rotating about the rip, with a tip upward motion. Air blast through its underside blows off upper surface spoilers like the one recovered by the Brazilian Navy.

17. The tailplanes probably snap off at the same time as the engines.

18. The reduction in mass on the right side, relative to the left, gives a boost (less inertia and drag) to the rightward roll underway.

19. The rear section of fuselage twists off from its remaining right side connection with a leftward swing, and the tailcone section separates from it, tearing off from the right to left side of its pressure bulkhead seam.

20. The interior of the fuselage originally behind the wings experiences an air blast through its forward open section toward the tail end; many panels and weakly attached objects are blown out.

21. The still intact assembly of forward fuselage plus right wing stub plus left wing continues to roll completely over while also yawing back and forth, for several cycles. The wing experiences lift forces that make the entire body spin, like a maple seed pod, whose single airfoil causes it to gyrate during a swinging descent.

22. The angular force at the left wingtip and at the cockpit end of the fuselage are greatest, so the fuselage snaps apart aft of the cockpit and also ahead of the left wing root, while an outboard length of left wing also snaps off.

23. The sections of the airplane that fall are: the vertical stabilizer with its rudder (recovered by the Brazilian Navy), the tailcone (with or without tailplanes), the rear cabin section (probably further ruptured during descent by air blast), the engines, the right wing outboard of the number 2 engine location; then after a bit of ‘maple seed’ auto-rotating helicopter flight as a unit: the cockpit section of the forward fuselage, another length of the forward fuselage, an outer length of left wing and the wing root section of the fuselage with the remaining wing stubs.

24. The four sections of the cabin (the tailcone is a fifth fuselage section) guessed here might experience further air blast rupture and content ejection as they descend; and the large structural remnants hitting the water would then suffer collision fragmentation.

What’s Next?

Perhaps some day we will know the real sequence of events and apply its lessons to improve our aircraft, or modify our air transport habits.

To move beyond imagination we need more facts. If the voice and flight data recorders are ever recovered (lost under the ocean over a month at this point), then investigators will learn much more. The public may learn more soon because the French Investigation and Analysis Bureau (BEA) is set to issue an initial technical report on the 2nd of July.

1. Boeing Backs Airbus on AF447.
2. Map of Time Zones.
3. Tim Vasquez, “Air France Flight 447, A Detailed Meteorological Analysis.”
4. Map, From INTOL To TASIL.
5. Air France Flight 447, Wikipedia.
6. Simon Hradecky, “Crash: Air France A332 over Atlantic on Jun 1st 2009, aircraft impacted ocean,” The Aviation Herald.
7. AF447 Airbus A330-200 Vertical Stabilizer And Rudder, Wikipedia.
8. BEA’s AF447 “Sea Search Operations,” (link “sea search operations” produces PDF file with maps).
9. Brazilian Air Force, Information On AF447, see “fotos.”
10. Air Safety, Wikipedia.
11. Aviation accidents and incidents, Wikipedia.
12. P-3 Orion At 7 g.
13. AF A332 Crash (F-GZCP) Part 16, ‘Recovered Spoiler‘:

    Reply 204, Pihero,
    Reply 205, KingFriday013,
    Reply 242, Guillermo.

14. Joelle Barthe, procedure for Airbus flight without airspeed data.
15. William John Cox, “Should the Airbus Be Grounded?“

Determining what actually happened will require recovering and examining the remnants of the airplane, in particular the major fragments of the airframe, the engines, and most importantly the flight recorders (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder). Without the benefit of a pilot’s radio report, investigators would only have the flight histories of the selected components and parameters that are monitored by the flight recorders. One worry is that the flight recorders are submerged at between 9,000 ft (2744 m) and 14,000 ft (4268 m) and may be difficult to find; their casings are designed to withstand the pressure of 6000 m (19,680 ft) depth for up to 30 days.

Speculation about what may have happened centers on lightning causing a massive electrical surge that caused the failure of (fused, short-circuited, overloaded) the fly-by-wire flight controls; and severe buffeting in a thunderstorm, which disrupted the flight-path.

Pilots of fly-by-wire airplanes do not normally use muscles or hydraulics to move the many flaps and the rudder; electric motors controlled by computers do this to an extent set by the pilots’ manipulation of their control levers, pedals and wheels. The lightning-blackout scenario is unlikely because lightning strikes happen regularly in commercial and military aviation, and airplanes are designed to withstand them (by keeping the electrical charges outside the plane’s interior, because of the all-metal hull and wing surfaces). Also, pilots are trained (in simulators) to compensate for loss of the fly-by-wire system by using the mechanical control system of the trim tabs to push the bigger flaps and the rudder into place. Trim tabs the smallest of the many types of movable flaps, which act like the tails of weathervanes, pushing the larger flaps or rudders they are embedded in into new angles; in normal operation the trim tabs are an assist and a fine adjustment.

The lack of a distress call from the pilots suggests two possibilities: their radios were inoperative or had lost power (which would be odd since the automated data transmission system was functioning), or a very sudden breakup of the airframe in flight. Airframes of modern commercial airliners like the Airbus A330-200 are designed to withstand the buffeting of air turbulence and the stresses of the severe turns and dives that may occur in emergencies. If the airframe broke up prior to impact with the water, what was its cause? Obvious guesses are: missile, bomb and fuel tank explosion.

There is no evidence of a missile attack, so we eliminate that guess. Sabotage by bomb is also discounted, because that guess requires too many elaborate assumptions. Actually, any speculation is entirely unjustified at this point, since recovering evidence and systematic analysis have yet to begin. However, events like this inspire fear and cause minds to race, speculating on causes and meanings.

So, we are led to the question of a fuel tank explosion, could it have happened in AF 447 as either a natural event (electrostatic discharge into fuel-air vapors above liquid fuel in an agitated tank) or an unintended electro-mechanical failure (spark from wire exposed by damaged insulation, into fuel-air vapors) as in the TWA Flight 800 disaster of 1996.

The fuel tanks of airliners are fitted into the wings and the section of the hull below the passenger deck and along the length of the wing roots. The central fuel tank between the wings is usually the single largest volume fuel container. As a plane climbs to higher elevation, the atmospheric pressure drops and so the air originally contained in a fuel tank at the airport seeks to expand; if the tank were sealed this would cause the internal pressure to increasing exceed the external pressure and put great stress on the tank walls. Similarly, as fuel is pumped out of a tank to the engines, the space evacuated must be filled with ambient air to avoid creating a vacuum that would resist subsequent pumping. So, fuel tanks are designed with vents that allow air to flow in, and fuel-air vapors to flow out as needed to equalize pressures at any altitude. The vents are in the form of pipes that run from the central fuel tank through the wing tanks and out to the wing tips where an orifice, at each wing tip, allows for the exchange of air.

Because hydrocarbon liquids and vapors are very insulating electrically, and metals are excellent conductors, there is always a build-up of electrostatic charge between fuel flows and metal containers. This is why sparks can be generated when fuels are pumped into rapid flows or sprays near metal surfaces. There have been many accidents caused by electrostatic discharges into fuel-air mixtures, which were initiated by improperly grounded or excessively turbulent pumping procedures. The petroleum industry has long known about this phenomenon, and developed many standards for the design and operation of fuel pumping and storage equipment. Also, many fuels have chemical additives that enhance their electrical conductivity, to significantly reduce their ability to hold electrostatic charges (reducing the electrostatic build-up relative to the metal piping and containers during pumping and/or sloshing).

The fuel vent pipes of airliners are one type of fuel pumping system. These must be designed to minimize the electrostatic build-up between the flowing fuel-air mixture and the pipe walls. Larger diameter vent pipes will keep flow velocities low (electrostatic build-up and the possibility of sparking increase with flow velocity). Plenum chambers and baffles along the flow path can help prevent bursts of rapid flow in reaction to some mechanical jolt to the wing structure or some sudden drop in external air pressure (which would impulsively draw out fuel-air vapors). Using additives to significantly increase the fuel’s conductivity is also extremely helpful.

Because the airplane manufacturing, airline transport and fuel industries routinely do a good job of managing the fuel and fueling risks, it is rare that we hear about fuel fires and explosions on the tarmac or in flight. However, fuel vapor explosion accidents still do happen; a Boeing 737-400 parked at the gate in 2001 had its center tank explode, killing one person.

Despite the many airliners that experience lightning strikes without harm, it may be that the destruction of AF 447 was the rare instance of lightning igniting the fuel-air vent flow, which subsequently caused a major fuel tank explosion.

Whatever the cause of the loss of AF 447, the loss of 228 lives demands that it be found, and the lesson applied to improve air transport safety.

The last paragraph summarizes the publicly available facts about the DPRK’s nuclear test #2 (see notes here and here for news accounts). Commentary on the meaning of this test was actually written three years ago, on the occasion of the DPRK’s nuclear test #1 of 9 October 2006 (see here and here).

My commentary of 2006 still applies because neither the policy goals of the United States and Security Council Nuclear Powers, nor the fears of the DPRK leadership have changed since 2006. In the simplest terms, world capitalism under the direction of the United States wants the North Koreans to dismantle their DPRK state and to integrate their economy and workforce into that of an expanded Republic of Korea (South Korea) in a manner similar to the dissolution of the East German communist state (Democratic Republic of Germany, 7 October 1949 to 3 October 1990). The foreign policy of the DPRK, of which its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs are a part, is aimed at combatting the existential threat to the DPRK governing elite.

First, let us consider some of the physical aspects of DPRK test #2.

A yield up to 20 kT is clearly a “success” and indicates the verification of one design of an implosion system (discounting the possibility of a gun-type assembly as in the Hiroshima bomb). I presume, but do not know, that this bomb is an experimental device that is neither compact and light-weight enough, nor ruggedized enough to fit within the payload mass and space limitations of a slim missile body, and to withstand the forces of acceleration required of a ballistic missile nuclear warhead. Any program aimed at that goal will require another test (in perhaps three years?) of a militarized packaging of the “pit” (nuclear core and its surrounding blanket of high explosives) tested today.

The amazingly deep burial at 10 km will probably assure full containment of radioactivity from the DPRK test. US underground tests were often 0.3 km to 0.5 km down. Because of the rapid attenuation of the high frequency parts of an electrical signal with its travel distance along a cable, the US nuclear program engineered its underground tests with the minimum burial depth necessary to assure containment, so as to have the highest fidelity possible for the detection and recording systems relaying and storing experimental data from sensors near the device. Optimizing the burial depth for signal fidelity required a sophisticated arrangement of plugs and backfill to seal the emplacement shaft or tunnel. I wonder if the DPRK test program is satisfied with simple low-fidelity data (the simplest being the sensation of an artificial earthquake), or if they have an underground alcove with high-fidelity recording equipment in a cavern near the detonation point. It may be that the DPRK wished to avoid snooping by US intelligence satellites, so it buried the entire test operation. It is also possible to partially decouple the force of a buried explosion from the surrounding earth by placing the bomb in the center of a larger cavity; this will transmit a weaker seismic signal, and could spoof seismic measurements of yield by foreign powers.

Clearly, the DPRK nuclear program scientists evaluated the data from their test of October 2006, made new calculations, undoubtedly built new assemblies for hydrodynamic testing (perfecting the dynamics of the heavy-metal implosion driven by chemical high explosives), and settled on a design that produced sizable yield. It is equally clear that their nuclear materials program was able to produce sufficient weapons-grade fissile material for at least one new device since 2006 (perhaps 10 kg), and probably several times that amount.

All in all, it is evident they are now a full-fledged member of the nuclear weapons club. The most honest reaction the Security Council of the UN, and the leading world powers could offer would be: “congratulations!”

Now, let us speculate on the political fallout.

The DPRK has made the clearest possible statement that the best defense against domination by superior powers is nuclear weaponry. The greater care with which the U.S. and Security Council Nuclear Powers approach the DPRK confirms this argument. When observing the situations of Palestine, Iraq and Iran, most of the rest of the world would concede the validity of the argument.

The policy of the U.S. is to encourage other nations to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — and renounce nuclear weapons — while exempting itself from it; essentially “disarm that we may more easily rule.” The DPRK posture is a rejection of the US policy, and a pointed example of rebellion calling out to the rest of the world.

Another aspect of the DPRK’s nuclear weapons politics is to put its near neighbors on notice not to think of colonizing it. This message is particularly aimed at South Korea, seen as an extension of US capitalism, and to Japan. There are still Koreans living who remember being brutally enslaved by Imperial Japan, which forcibly annexed Korea during 1910 to 1945. Even more Koreans remember the 1950-1953 war between China and the U.S., on their peninsula. The casualties of that war, for the US-led anti-communist forces, were 474,000; the combined casualties for the communist Chinese and North Korean forces were between 1.19 million and 1.58 million; and the total number of Korean civilians killed or wounded is estimated at 2 million.

Today, Japan fustigates that it may have to build its own nuclear weapons (within one year!) to counter those of the DPRK, and South Korea issued similar statements to assuage domestic concerns about the nuclear developments in the North. There is little reason to fear aggression by the DPRK. While it may soon be true that it could launch a few nuclear warheads into South Korea, Japan and toward US bases and fleets in the Pacific, such attacks would ensure the swift destruction of the DPRK elite by retaliatory actions of the most modern military forces on this planet. Nuclear weapons would not be needed for this; waves of GPS-guided missile strikes with conventional high explosive warheads, followed by similarly guided airborne bombing would eradicate the DPRK nomenklatura and its entire military infrastructure. Also, it is very likely that missiles launched by North Korea would be immediately detected by US and allied nations’ radars and satellites, and countered by anti-missile missiles (today’s equivalent to the flak thrown up in WW2). Such defenses are more likely to be effective against long-range missiles since there is more time to react. The DPRK leadership knows from its own history that US-led military action has no regard for Korean loss-of-life, so they are fully aware that their nuclear arsenal is only a stratagem strictly limited to diplomatic gamesmanship short of actual war.

So, what does the DPRK leadership hope to gain by brandishing nuclear arms? The DPRK leadership’s deepest desire is that of all elites everywhere: a long-term guarantee of its privileged position within the undisturbed extent of its domain. The DPRK wants to interact with the rest of the world in a way that sustains the physical and economic existence of their state but without introducing any ideas or social forces that weaken the control of the DPRK leadership, and the fealty of the population to that leadership. Clearly, the present DPRK regime is skeptical it can follow the Chinese example of introducing a state-directed form of capitalism while maintaining ideological control and sufficient popular obedience, so it is resistant to allowing the population wider exposure to foreign influences. The DPRK nuclear arsenal is the equivalent of a 10 foot (3.3 m) high wall topped with glass shards surrounding an estate with Pit Bulls and Doberman Pinschers running loose. It is a shield built with pride and motivated by fear.

Unfortunately, urging the DPRK leadership to engage in nuclear disarmament is equivalent to urging it to dissolve; the nature of their brittle power structure could not withstand the corrosive effects of the psychological, cultural and economic forces within world capitalism. They know this, hence the obsessive defensiveness. The most humane policy toward the DPRK would be to leave it alone. Over the long term, if it is neither harassed nor provoked, it will slowly relax many of its fears. Once the apprehensions of the DPRK are reasonably lowered because it is no longer being pressured and hurried to fit into a foreign capitalist agenda, then it is likely the society of the DPRK will evolve into greater harmony with the world consensus on many issues. Such a policy would be one of respecting the integrity of another society, and of non-interference. It is definitely not the policy with the highest expected return on investment (ROI), nor the earliest expected payoff, but it is the policy with the least likelihood of harming the Korean people and their neighbors. One has to imagine the possibility of arriving at nuclear disarmament as the inevitable consequence of the disuse of nuclear weapons: they are no longer maintained and rust away because their owners have moved on to other activities.

Internationally, patient respect will ultimately soften the fearful pride of an otherwise unaggressive state. The real solution to nuclear proliferation is the expansion of social and economic justice within our own nations, because nuclear arms are primarily a symptom of economic class warfare coupled with racism. Let the people of North Korea deal with their economic elite, and let us reform ours; and in that way we can eliminate the nuclear weapons squeezed out of the world’s popular collective labor by our various ambitious and parasitic ruling classes.

The impetus for this interview (Sobre poder atómico, cambio climático, energías limpias y formas de organanización ciudadanas) was the publication of a Spanish translation of Garcia’s CounterPunch article “To Power A Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?”

Salvador López Arnal: Let us start with a few basic notions. When we talk about nuclear fusion, what do we really mean?

Manuel García, Jr.: Nuclear fusion is the application of energy to a pair of atomic nuclei so as to force them into each other despite the electric and nuclear forces of repulsion that normally keep nuclei separate and distinct, so that some of the combined nuclear mass is transformed into energy by Einstein’s formula E = m c-squared, and is emitted as nuclear radiation; and the remaining combined mass is reformed into an new single nucleus of a different chemical element.

SLA: This new source of energy is sometimes associated with a defeat of climatic change. Why? Do you think this is a fantasy of self-interest by governments, military powers and large corporations?

MG,Jr.: The consensus of modern science is that the carbon dioxide (CO2) gas emitted by the many, many sources of combustion of hydrocarbons (petroleum and many forms of natural and processed organic matter) inherent in human activity has made the Earth’s atmosphere warmer and more insulating (it traps more infrared radiation, which is heat) than it was before the industrial exploitation of petroleum. So, human activity in combination with natural cycles of climate are producing an effect that is called global warming (”Climate and Carbon, Consensus and Contention“).

By comparing the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere today with conditions and climates of the distant past, so far as science can detect them; and by running computer simulations of Earth’s climate into the far future, scientists can arrive at a wide variety of possibilities of what our climate might evolve to during this century. Many of these predictions are unpleasant, some generally, and others for particular regions and portions of humanity. For example, some island nations may disappear because of the rise of the ocean level due to the melting of the ice caps.

The difficulty faced by modern society is that the great work-saving technologies, comforts and advances much of the developed world enjoys are possible because of abundant energy, which we generate by the combustion of coal (for electricity and industrial process heat) and petroleum (for transportation technology and military mobility), and this combustion is the source of the CO2 that might trigger a major change in Earth’s climate to much less hospitable conditions. Do we forsake today’s comforts and conveniences for decades, even longer, solely based on fears arising out of computer simulations, and which may not come to pass? Or, do we proceed emitting enormous quantities of waste heat (CO2 and entropy) to continue our capitalist mode of industrialized resource exploitation, and wealth accumulation for a select few, even if it triggers a catastrophic shift in climate and a drastic reduction of food production?

How to respond to the uncertainties and challenges of global warming, by finding the right balance between our old technologies of energy production, new ones that emit less CO2 but may need development and investment before achieving their full potential, and imposing stricter measures of energy conservation and accepting greater inconveniences (like the reuse and recycling of current items) is a subject of major contention today. Nobody wants to give up their particular way of making a profit just because it may contribute to global warming, and also many would like to find profitable business ventures that exploit the concerns over global warming. So what begins as a discussion of geophysics and its impact on society degenerates into many arguments about making money, and politics: who is going to “win” and who is going to “lose?”

Clearly, if we can find new ways of generating abundant energy without also emitting CO2, then the comforts of the First World can be continued, and the necessary improvements for the Third World can be made without causing a change of the world’s climate. So, many suggest that their favorite technology or hoped-for future profit-making scheme will provide energy without CO2 emission. Some of these claims have more merit than others, and many groups that make such claims are seeking government subsidies (research money or tax breaks).

The nuclear power industry is advertising itself as a “green” technology, one that does not emit CO2. This is blatantly false as all the mining, fuel processing, transportation, construction and waste disposal activities associated with nuclear power create CO2 emissions. Wind and solar energy are the most efficient as regards energy produced per mass of CO2 emitted. The deficiencies of wind and solar in terms of their convenience are that they are energy sources of low concentration (they may require a large area for collection) and low power (low to moderate temperature or limited electrical power from any single generator). Conservation is the most cost-effective “green” technology today, it simply means reducing the waste associated with whatever energy generation methods are already in use.

SLA: So, at this point fusion is promoted as the solution?

MG,Jr.: One dream that grew out of nuclear physics is the vision of devising fusion reactors to power society. We are familiar with the enormous output of energy from nuclear fission (the splitting apart of a nucleus) whether slowly in nuclear reactors or suddenly as in explosions of nuclear bombs. But, there is a much larger yield of energy from nuclear fusion; and an essentially unlimited supply of fusion fuel. The fusion of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, powers our Sun (the Sun’s own gravity from its huge mass squeezing the nuclei together at its core). Here on Earth, deuterium and tritium occur naturally in trace quantities in the oceans; and they are readily made from ordinary water irradiated with neutrons in nuclear reactors. The fusion dream is to use deuterium and tritium to make power reactors of much greater yield than nuclear fission reactors, and which do not use radioactive metals for fuel, nor generate the same quantities of radioactive waste.

The leading idea in the quest for technological fusion energy has been the magnetic compression of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) plasma (a highly electrified gaseous form of matter) in devices called tokamaks (magnetic fusion energy has nearly 60 years of research). A more recent idea (over 35 years) is laser-fusion (called inertial confinement fusion). The NIF facility I discussed in my recent article is a laser-fusion facility (”¿Bombas nucleares o luz solar?“).

Fusion works marvelously in stars because they are so massive. Their huge gravity forces nuclei into fusion at the star’s core, and the huge bulk of the star is of sufficient depth and density to easily capture and contain the nuclear energy released by fusion reactions. Fusion is a process of energy generation that is mismatched to the much smaller scale of our Earth. The Sun extends 109 times further from its center than the Earth, and it is 333,000 times more massive. Science has yet to devise an artificial star, a steady fusion reactor; but it has devised impulsive ones, which are nuclear (hydrogen) bombs. My article described how NIF (National Ignition Facility) and facilities like it assist in the design of nuclear weapons.

SLA: What are your criticisms of nuclear energy, generally?

MG,Jr.: My criticism of nuclear power in all the forms described, for the purpose of providing a steady supply of electricity to a nation, is twofold:

1, the technology is not well matched to the end-use, there are many complexities, dangers, and inefficiencies between the fuel source and the electrical output, the entire cycle from fuel production to waste management is excessively costly (per kWh of electricity produced) fiscally, environmentally and politically;

2, the nature of the technology makes for highly centralized generator sites (which must also be high security zones, and are very expensive), requiring an extensive distribution network (which will have transmission losses).

Highly centralized power generation serves the needs of highly centralized economics: exclusive capital accumulation at extensive social cost. Distributed power generation serves the needs of a distributed population: communal technical networks provide local control and personal economic independence.

Solar and wind technologies can generate electricity locally and practically over much of the Earth’s surface, whether land or sea. There are far fewer conversions of energy forms from the sources to the electrical output, so there are fewer types of inefficiencies; and there are never the types of hazards associated with radioactive materials and nuclear technology. Because the energy generation processes are natural to the Earth’s environment (solar-electric, solar-thermal, wind-torque-electrical, hydro-torque-electrical), the entire process cycle: from source to generation to recycling of used equipment and material, is much simpler and cheaper (by fiscal measures that are socially complete in that they account for environmental and political liabilities). Solar, wind and hydro technologies are “natural’ to the Earth, and well-matched to the end-use of residential electricity, and many industrial applications.

The dispersed nature of “the source” of solar energy (wind and hydro too, but they are more localized) means that generators and users are closer to each other (even coincident), so distribution networks will be smaller and more efficient. This means proximate local networks can have overlap, providing redundancy and thus a greater degree of overall reliability over regional and national scales. It also means the local “owners” of the generators are much more likely to be among the users of the electrical output, so the entire economics of the system becomes as distributed and decentralized as the energy source. Micro-networked solar energy is intrinsically communal. An energy system that offers a family the possibility of gaining its energy independence by harvesting the sunlight that falls, and catching the wind that whisks through the space they occupy to live, would be a wonderful thing.

However, if you are part of a group — we could call them capitalists, or industrialists, or pirates, it’s all the same — who wish to control a large source of energy, which they meter out to many individuals at a distance for a profit, then you would prefer a highly centralized energy generation technology. This is why I wrote that nuclear power is prized by the mentality that sees the taxi meter and the cash register as the purpose of organizing society. The hazards, complexities and inefficiencies that make it necessary to isolate and make large nuclear power generation sites, also fits them to the needs of monopoly control, and leaves the nation vulnerable to societal blackmail through the energy dependency of its people.

SLA: In a recent article published in CounterPunch — “To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?” — you mention that Hugh Gusterson wrote, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that the recently inaugurated National Ignition Facility (NIF), near San Francisco, was in its entirety a program of nuclear weapons development. Do you agree with that opinion? How does NIF support nuclear weapons development?

MG,Jr.: My article covered that point. NIF is funded to provide data on fusion phenomena that are created on a microscopic scale, with extremely intense pulses of laser light bombarding micro-balloons filled with deuterium and tritium. NIF will also be used to provide data on the properties of uranium and plutonium when they experience extreme pressure; microscopic samples will be compressed by laser bombardment, and fission reactions initiated. This data from experiments is then used to refine and correct computer codes that simulate the intricate physics. These codes can then be used to help design full-scale nuclear bombs. NIF is intended to fill the gap left by the cessation of full-scale nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. There has never been any secret about any of this, but Thomas Friedman did not mention it in his paen to NIF as a prototype fusion energy system, published recently in the New York Times. That was Gusterson’s point.

SLA: As you say, NIF belongs to the mentality that “sees the taxi meter and the cash register… as the purpose of social organization.” But, you add, “this flow of energy in unlikely to be as safe, reliable, freely available, poverty alleviating and socially uplifting as could very easily be the case today.” What sense does it make then to choose a road of so limited value? What is hidden behind that decision?

MG,Jr.: This is because public resources are being invested for the benefit of a profiteering capitalist elite, and all risks and liabilities are being socialized. Don’t ever think that socialism is disliked in the United States. On the contrary, it is highly prized by the apex class of our economic pyramid as the best way of eliminating its wastes, expenses and responsibilities. Centralized energy technology is preferred by monopolists, and their sole focus is exclusive capital accumulation. Decentralized power generation puts more control into the hands of local communities and individuals. This method of powering the nation is clearly of superior social value (and an essential necessity in the rural Third World, with solar electricity generators of the simplest type), but it is not championed by the US government for the same reason national health care is not championed by the US government: it has been bought off by corporate money. The key political point here is that the US government does not work primarily in the interests of the public, it is an agent of corporate interests, protecting them FROM popular democratic action. By far the most devastating deficit in the U.S. today is the democratic deficit; the fiscal ones are trifles in comparison, they only entail money.

SLA: You also mention that nuclear weapons only have a functional value if their design is proved by tests and that this requirement was the reason for the many nuclear tests carried out by many countries since 1945. How many tests have been carried out to date by all nuclear nations, including Pakistan and Israel? Where are they carried out?

MG,Jr.: Since 1945 over 2000 nuclear tests have been carried out, about half were conducted by the U.S. (1054); Russia did 715, France 210, the U.K. 45, China 45, India 6 and Pakistan 6 (this total is 2081). Not all tests have been acknowledged or verified, so there are some uncertainties as to the exact number. South Africa, under the apartheid regime, and Israel may have conducted a joint test in the South Atlantic, but South Africa claims never to have tested and has since dismantled its stockpile; Israel says nothing and is not known to have conducted a nuclear test. Tests have been carried out in many places. Most US tests were in the Pacific southeast of Hawaii, and at the Nevada Test Site. Both Russia and China conducted their tests at remote sites within their territories. France conducted tests in the South Pacific, and the U.K. conducted nearly half its tests in Australia or territory controlled by it, and the rest at the Nevada Test Site. India and Pakistan used remote and desert locations for their underground tests. The test by North Korea in 2006 was of such low yield that many believe it was really a failure.

SLA: What are the difficulties and risks of working with large quantities of materials with high levels of radioactivity?

MG,Jr.: The risks are of (1) radiation exposure to people, causing illness or disability or death; (2) the possibility of grouping too much radioactive material together and initiating a chain reaction (a critical mass that proceeds to “melt down”); (3) theft of nuclear material, and its malicious misuse; (4) accidental release into the environment, introducing a pollutant with heavy metal toxicity as well as radioactivity; (5) producing a large amount of radioactive waste: the machines, materials and containers used to shield workers from radioactivity, which must be stored and kept secure for a long time; (6) incurring large and continuing expenses to pay for all the activities required by the possession of a nuclear materials industry and its legacy.

SLA: Is there any link between the use of nuclear energy and the possession of nuclear weapons?

MG,Jr.: Yes. The material for bombs is usually produced in reactors built for that purpose, but it can also be harvested from the fuel rods of civilian power reactors. All uranium nuclear reactors produce a build-up of plutonium. This is why the U.S., Russia and the major atomic powers wish to control the fuel cycle of reactors in client states that have “peaceful’ atomic power, like South Korea. The fuel cycle is the production of fuel rods for civilian reactors, and their eventual removal and “reprocessing” to remove the plutonium build-up, and recycle the remaining uranium-235, or package the rod for “disposal.” The situation of Iran’s nuclear program illustrates the intrinsic connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons (”Iran’s Uranium“).

SLA: What do you think of the pressures by the US and Israel to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear energy?

MG,Jr.: Both Israel and the U.S. want to prevent the rise of any competitive regional power in the Middle East and Central Asia. This is because the U.S. seeks to control the sources and economics of petroleum, and Israel seeks to undercut the source of economic sustenance to the resistance movements in the territories it invades and occupies (and its vision is large in this regard). I have elaborated on these themes elsewhere (”Iran’s Uranium“).

SLA: Please give us five reasons against the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

MG,Jr.: Nuclear power is:

(1) inefficient: it is likely that more energy will have been used to build, maintain and secure nuclear power sites, and to manage the waste legacy of the nuclear power industry than it will ever supply as electricity;

(2) insecure: nuclear reactors require massive amounts of cooling water, those located along rivers have had to be shut down in times of drought (in recent years in Europe) creating shortages of supply; because nuclear power is so centralized, any reactor site that is incapacitated for any reason will cause a deficit in its network, and this will require purchasing fossil-fuel energy on short notice, or doing without;

(3) slow: it takes so long to build a nuclear power station that this technology cannot really be mounted, nor easily disassembled as the case might be, to respond to changes in the volume and geographical distribution of energy demand;

(4) dangerous: it uses the most physically hazardous substances we know of, though I suppose they do kill germs, and this extreme hazard creates monumental problems of risk management and security; also, the possibility of nuclear weapons proliferation is all too real;

(5) expensive: the features noted each add to the expense of the technology, and this cost is considerable in each of the fiscal, political and environmental dimensions; expense is always a relative measure, and my view is that if solar (and related generation and storage) and micro-networks were given the same quantity of government subsidy, and not even for as many decades as nuclear power has enjoyed, we would have a much better system of national electrical power by every criterion imaginable, except that of monopoly control of a societal dependency.

SLA: You mentioned that NIF is presented as the positive answer, in the U.S., to the question many nuclear weapons states are now asking: “can we keep a nuclear weapons arsenal at reduced cost and also bypass the ‘danger’ and ‘political’ disincentives of having them, by eliminating most of the weapons testing infrastructure and workforce, and instead relying on the virtual reality of computer simulations.” Why do you think that those simulations will never be able to replace tests of real life-sized weapons?

MG,Jr.: By definition a simulation is incomplete, it relies on projections and approximations to some of the details that make up a real item and a real phenomenon. The details of the dynamics of ultra-rapid (billions of a second) compression and nuclear fusion of millimeter-scale capsules will have unavoidable differences to the much slower (microseconds) implosion of full-scale nuclear devices. The characteristic length scale of the phenomenon plays a role in determining how the dynamics of the imploding fluid mass will evolve.

Let me give an analogy. The distance over which molecules of air interact by collision (at sea level) is about 60 billionths of a meter, call it lambda. The air friction resisting the motion of an object through the atmosphere is the accumulated effect of molecular collisions: air pushed away by the object in turn collides into surrounding air molecules, and some of these rebound back into the object. The net effect is “drag” caused by the viscosity of air. The effect of this viscosity is most pronounced against the surface of the object, but soon fades away with distance from it (say within thousands of lambdas). In the case of a typical airplane wing, the fluid disturbed by viscous interaction with the wing surface is confined to a relatively thin layer called a boundary layer (which might build up to a few percent of the wing thickness). For many calculations of aeronautical engineering, a slight increase to the thickness of the wing is used to account for the boundary layer of fluid that tends to move with, or ’stick,’ to the wing, and then the overall lift of the wing is calculated as if this modified shape were moving through a frictionless atmosphere. This method is quite good when the length scale that characterizes the size of the wing is large in comparison to the thickness of the boundary layer. This is easily the case with large wings at high speed, as with our airplanes. However, this method fails when trying to understand the workings of the wings of small insects. Gnats that may be of millimeter scale will be swimming in a viscous soup of an atmosphere, since their wings and bodies are easily within the length over which air viscosity acts.

Because not every force and physical interaction changes its characteristic length scale as the length scale of the object in question is changed, there are inevitable differences in the dynamics of fluid motion, between situations of different size. Another example is the dynamics of planetary atmospheres, like our weather, which is highly influenced by gravity because of the size and mass of the Earth. Yet, gravity has essentially no influence on the dynamics of gnat flight; gnats are nearly suspended in weightlessness, paddling through a three dimensional syrup of atmosphere.

So, micro experiments in fusion will certainly help to refine codes simulating intricate physics, which can be used to help design full-scale nuclear bombs, but neither these experiments nor the codes will ever fully account for all the details of the full-scale dynamics. Of course, all that is needed, for the purposes of engineering warheads, is that they be good enough, and that is ultimately determined by the complexity of the warhead designs and the accumulated experience of the weapons designers.

SLA:You mentioned that, in any case, the crucial point is that nuclear weapons are unnecessary for a reasonable national defense. How do you justify that statement? Because of the monstrous effects of their actual use?

MG,Jr.: Let me point you to an article (”Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence“). My basic points: (1) the globalization of world economies makes any nuclear war a permanent loss of wealth to the investor population of world capitalism, so nuclear weapons have lost their strategic value, and (2) the improvements in shooting and bombing accuracy given by the integration of computer, electronics and GPS space technologies makes it unnecessary for advanced military powers to use the massively powerful blasts from nuclear explosions in order to achieve tactical objectives in their colonial wars or wars for dominance against rivals.

SLA: You ask yourself: “Is the investment in NIF as an ICF (Inertial Confinement Fusion) system prototype a wise public policy, regardless of NIF’s role for nuclear weapons?” You answer by saying that “it depends on the type of society you want to power and when you expect to start doing so.” Why? How do you justify that relation?

MG,Jr.: I can only repeat what I said in the article (”To Power A Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?“). Highly concentrated power generation systems serve the needs of narrowly focused capital accumulation at great social expense. Fusion energy systems fit that type, but they will take a very long time and a lot of money to develop.

SLA: You also mention that you prefer to organize society “in a socialist or classless manner, or at least more egalitarian and certainly not corporate-controlled,” and that you would prefer a decentralized national energy supply system, where “the generation, control of, storage and use of energy were all local.” What type of systems would these be? What sources of energy are you thinking about?

MG,Jr.: A solar collector unit, perhaps the size of a large refrigerator, that can generate enough heat to power a small Stirling engine that then cranks a generator, and produces as much electricity as a typical wall outlet (115 VAC, 15 A) during four hours a day, and which could be built locally with generic components, could transform the lives of people in Third World villages and rural areas. Imagine having the energy to pump water, refrigerate essential food stores, recharge batteries that provide lighting for nighttime study, run power tools, provide electric heat for cooking, boil and purify water. Such simple and small systems of “gridless green energy” could have a major impact on the conditions of most of humanity, including the people at the bottom of the economic ladders in our First World nations. Fancier versions of such systems (e.g., using the batteries of electric vehicles as storage units of household electricity generated by a solar-photovoltaic system), and micro-networks of generation and storage as mentioned several times, could maintain the level of comfort we have grown accustomed to in the First World, and do so with much less danger and in a much more egalitarian and economically liberating way. There are no physical laws barring such a vision, only the small-mindedness of our greed as institutionalized in our politics.

SLA: You state that we already have all the technical means to implement such a system, a national network of micro-networks or local networks. “Solar energy focused as heat onto pipes carrying oil along the focal axes of parabolic trough collectors, and the oil transferring its heat through a heat exchanger to water, generating steam, which in turn drives a turbine that turns an electric generator, can produce electricity from sunlight with from 1% to 5% efficiency, steadily during the day.” Are you thinking basically of the U.S.? Would it really be posible in other tecnologically less developed societies? Wouldn’t it be necessary to have technological or even geographical conditions that are within reach of very few states?

MG,Jr.: Clearly, the more elaborate and technically refined the nature of solar, wind or hydro systems and the networks connecting generators with storage units and users, the less likely they will be first used in the Third World. But, the general type of thinking behind such systems can be used to build simple examples that are within the reach of less developed societies.

Face it, there isn’t a corner of this globe that is so remote that it hasn’t been reached by the gun trade. Well, why not the solar energy movement? We can assume that there is enough of a population of artisans anywhere, with sufficient hand tools and knowledge that they could fabricate the simplest of solar collectors, ovens and windmills, Stirling motors and even electric generators if they have access to basic materials, and clearly drawn plans or sample units. Anywhere such a local system of energy-from-the-sun is built will become a focal point of new construction of newer and better systems, and these will spread to other sites and other groups of people. Yes, I admit this is a step up from giving a completely helpless and ignorant person in the wilderness a shovel and a cow; but it is not that big of a larger step. And, like the shovel and cow, giving such a person both the knowledge and the essential materials to produce a system that provides a greater quantity of clean energy right at his location is an investment in humanity that can only grow to everyone’s benefit. Read the reports on the energy needs of the Third World written by the United Nations Development Programme (my article on the subject can be read here).

As to geography, most of the Third World is in equatorial latitudes, sunshine may be one of the few things they have in abundance.

SLA: Wind-power, you say, “is the most abundant source of non-fossil non-nuclear energy today.” Do you see any inconvenience in the widespread use of this type of energy?

MG,Jr.: Large wind power arrays are best isolated to sites with little nearby population and frequent winds. An obvious location is away from the shore, for example instead of oil derricks at sea. Small wind-energy modules are already being built, which can be mounted on rooftops and add to the household electrical supply. “Inconveniences” are really just problems of design and engineering, and ultimately a source of satisfaction to the innovators of the technology, who overcome them.

A national system of electrical energy supply will be the integration of solar, wind and hydro generators of micro or residential scale, which are coupled with storage units and use sites by a micro-network, and the micro-networks are then coupled by the types of regional networks we are accustomed to now, which also connect to industrial-scale generator sites (e.g., “solar farms,” “wind farms,” large hydroelectric facilities), in order to create a quilt of overlapping local networks which in total is then a robust, reliable and multiply redundant system of national electrical energy supply.

SLA: From your point of view, the hurdles for change are only political. Is it so? What political hurdles are you thinking about?

MG,Jr.: The hurdles are: (1) public awareness of what is truly physically possible — this is the target of my writing, (2) the fear of change and loss of continuity of service (continuity of mindless comfort, as long as one can afford to pay for it), (3) the opposition of powerful capitalist “energy industry” interests, who do not want any change in their profitable modus operandi, and (4) the democratic deficit of the U.S. government (and others), which is held hostage by corporate money and is unresponsive to the public will.

SLA: Please let me ask two final questions. Why do you think Einstein supported the research on atomic energy during the Manhattan Project?

MG,Jr.: He was influenced by people he knew and trusted (Leo Szilard, like Einstein, a Jew), and were afraid the world might indeed succumb to the domination of Hitler and the Nazis. One has to remember how formidable the Third Reich was at its peak in 1939. Europe had essentially capitulated to it: France would fall in 1940, England would be isolated and on the defensive, and Stalinist Russia was formally in compliance with its non-aggression treaty with the Third Reich. The very idea of democracy and free society seem threatened. The thought of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Militarist Japan (in China since 1937) dominating and having their types of mass oppression spread over the globe was inducement enough for Einstein to urge the one major power left, the United States, to invest in the physics that could turn the tide of the world war: the atom bomb. Great fears give rise to great weapons.

SLA: Could you imagine a world without nuclear weapons? What realistic steps could be undertaken to bring us nearer to that ideal?

MG,Jr.: Yes, I can imagine a world free of nuclear weapons. The more people become self-confident in their own lives, and free themselves from their personal fears, the less likely they will be fooled by fear-inducing propaganda, which is the main tool of social control. People who have liberated their minds in this way are best able to become aware of the realities of their national societies, and to become advocates for the egalitarian betterment of their societies. Part of this betterment will include alterations to personal lifestyle, undertaken freely so as to remove oneself (as well as one can) from the support of imperialism and anti-environmental and exploitative capitalism. One then is able to drop prejudices and broaden one’s sympathy to include all who suffer in the world. At this point, your actions in the cause of creating a just and authentically peaceful world are a matter of taking advantage of whatever opportunities the accidents of birth and the vagaries of fate make available to you. Others will be influenced by your example, and in this way the effectiveness of the cause spreads.

A political movement to bring a nation to implement nuclear disarmament, and to then urge other nations to do likewise, must be populated by individuals who have gone some way along the process I described, above. The generosity of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, they being replaced by compassion and respect as the basis of international relations, can only arise from a political movement that reflects these ideals as the general sense of the personal values of its people. A people obsessed with their own gain and their entertainment, and living in fantasy worlds of parallel isolation enveloping them from their laptop screens, is a mass of atomized disengagement, a sea in which the managers of the corporatocracy wash away their cares and sink their wreckage.

I could recommend the philosophy of Epicurus, or Zen. Most basically, I would ask anyone to realize that we are living in a world that would be paradise if we cooperatively chose to make it so. Learn what you fear, and overcome it; then be grateful for life and express it. The rest will come naturally.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joints chiefs of staff of the US armed forces opined publicly that this was a sufficient mass from which to extract the fissile portion to build one atomic bomb, and that a nuclear-(one) armed Iran would be a “very, very bad outcome.” Robert Gates, the US Secretary of Defense, viewed the situation as less alarming, stating that Iran was “not close” to fabricating a weapon.

It requires little imagination to anticipate the obvious lobbying stratagems of the many Treasury Department parasites who cast the Persian uranium horde as a dire threat that can only be allayed by offering the nation’s financial jugular to deep penetration by their zealous fangs, and perhaps to also loose some cathartic aerial bombardments upon the Iranians, that like Zeus’s thunderbolts will dissipate an Olympian distemper. Nuclear weapons contractors, Zionists and American militarists are the ultimate automatons of reductio ad absurdum, regardless of the information thrown into them, their concluding outputs are invariably the same: give us more.

So, for now we bypass the mirage of policy discussion regarding today’s Iranian uranium horde, and instead describe some physical facts about Iran’s bomb-making potential.

Uranium is a slightly radioactive, silver-grey metal 70% denser than lead, which appears naturally as oxides in mineral ores. As with a number of other elements, there are several forms of uranium atoms, which are called isotopes. All uranium atoms have 92 electrons (particles with 1 unit of electrical charge, and with negative polarity) and 92 protons (particles with 1 unit of electrical charge, and with positive polarity). Each isotope of uranium has a different number of neutrons (electrically neutral particles) in its nucleus, and this number ranges from 141 to 146.

It happens that the mass of an electron is slight compared to that of a proton or neutron, and the masses of these latter two types of particles is quite close. So, one can characterize the weight of an isotope by the combination of its total proton mass and total neutron mass (this is slightly inexact, but good enough for a general understanding). The number of protons is called the “atomic number,” and the combined number of protons and neutrons is called the “atomic weight.” So, uranium has an atomic number of 92, and an atomic weight, depending on isotope, of between 233 and 238. (See the End Notes for superfluous details).

The natural isotopic distribution of uranium is: U238 at 99.284%, U235 at 0.711% and U234 at 0.0058% (the sum is slightly off 100% due to rounding).

The nucleus of any atom can be ruptured when impacted by a sufficiently energetic sub-atomic particle or quanta of electromagnetic radiation (high energy gamma rays, cosmic rays). This is nuclear fission. Nuclei heavier than an iron nucleus are less tightly bound as they are increasingly massive. It is easier for them to undergo fission.

Because the neutron is electrically neutral, it will not be deflected by an atom’s protons and electrons, so it is a very effective projectile for initiating nuclear fission. While any atomic nucleus can be made to fission by some form of high energy impact, the term “fissionable” is generally used in an engineering sense for those elements that undergo fission when struck by neutrons.

It is interesting that for all naturally occurring isotopes except one, the neutrons initiating fission must have high energy (e.g., 14 MeV). The exceptional isotope is U235, it will undergo fission when impacted by neutrons of low energy (e.g., 1 MeV). Fissioning nuclei can fragment into multiple parts, and emit neutrons of low energy. This is why a mass of U235 can sustain fission chain reactions, while masses of no other natural isotope can.

The term “fissile” is used to designate materials that can sustain fission chain reactions — materials that fission when impacted by low-energy neutrons emitted from prior fission reactions. Aside from the naturally occurring U235, fissile materials are artificially “bred” in nuclear reactors, the main ones being: Plutonium-239 (Pu239), Pu241 and U233. Pu239 is bred when U238 captures a neutron (and rearranges its now heavier nucleus). This same process sequentially produces Pu240 and Pu241. U233 is bred from Thorium-232. There are fifteen actinoid (rare earth) elements from which fissile isotopes can be produced; uranium and thorium are the only naturally occurring actinoids. Fissile uranium and plutonium are the most convenient materials for use as nuclear reactor fuel and in nuclear explosives.

Refining nuclear fuel begins with the extraction of elemental uranium from mineral ores. Since the elemental mass is less than 1% U235, it is put through an enrichment process, which exploits the mass difference between U238 and U235. The enriched portion is reactor fuel with about 3% to 4% U235, while the remainder is slightly more concentrated U238 called depleted uranium (DU). It is important to note that a major investment in both energy and infrastructure is required to be able to produce reactor fuel, a point about massive CO2 emissions that is glossed over by proponents of nuclear power as a “green” technology.

We can see that if Iran now has 1,010 kilograms of reactor fuel, then this mass will contain a portion of U235 equivalent to between 30 kg to 40 kg. If one had this quantity of U235 as a contiguous mass rather than distributed throughout 1,010 kilos (over a ton) of uranium metal, then one could cut and machine the U235 to shape parts (”the pit”) for a fission bomb. Nuclear weapons-grade fuel may be more then 90% U235, and refining reactor fuel to this extent is a lengthy and extraordinarily expensive continuation of the enrichment process that yielded reactor-grade fuel with 3% to 4% U235. So, Robert Gates is quite correct to say Iran is “not close” to having a nuclear explosive (what we normally think of with the phrase “nuclear weapon”).

A state-of-the-art bomb production industry can make an atomic bomb from 10 kg of weapons-grade U235. As the engineering refinement of and control over the implosion and criticality dynamics of the bomb decrease, the quantity of fissile material needed increases. So, an inexperienced weapons design team might have to use 20 kg to 30 kg of weapons-grade U235 to ensure their device would produce “nuclear yield.” The incredibly inefficient Little Boy gun-type uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima had 64 kg of U235, of which 0.7 kg underwent fission, and only 0.6 grams were transformed into energy (by E = m C-squared). The blast yield of Little Boy was equivalent to that of between 13 to 18 kilotons of TNT. The Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb dropped on Nagasaki had 6.2 kg of Pu239, of which 1.2 kg underwent fission, and under one gram was transformed into energy. Fat Man’s explosive yield was 21 kT. If Iran’s U235 were to be concentrated to weapons-grade material, they would have enough for at least one bomb.

Electricity can be generated from a power reactor that “burns” nuclear fuel. The fission energy released as the motion of fission fragments is captured by the mass of the reactor core, which heats up, and in turn boils water to drive steam turbines that turn electric generators (there are also other types of reactors that exploit the heating of the core). As the mass of reactor fuel burns, it accumulates substances transmuted by nuclear reactions, such as Pu239, Pu241 and other radioactive isotopes. Some of these new substances poison the process of fission chain reactions, because they absorb neutrons. It is this effect, rather than a complete depletion of U235, which limits the utility of a fuel mass. Spent fuel may still be 0.5% U235.

Fissile material bred from uranium fuel in reactors can be harvested (”reprocessed”). An advanced fission weapons program will breed plutonium from uranium, and then enrich the plutonium to a weapons-grade purity of Pu239 or Pu241. This is the kind of program carried on by the major nuclear powers. Iran is nowhere near this. But, it is possible it has done “test tube sized” experiments that attempt to breed and extract trace amounts of plutonium from uranium reactor fuel. Any scientific establishment working to learn how to reprocess spent fuel so as to ameliorate the problems of long-term storage and disposal (and/or to design breeder cycles) will of necessity be working on methods for extracting plutonium.

The practical energy yield or “burn up” from a mass of reactor fuel is characterized by the number of 24 hour days at 1 megawatt output of thermal power per metric ton of uranium metal. Typical numbers for existing reactors are 30,000 to 40,000 MW days per metric ton of fuel mass. Let us say the Iranians acquire or build a reactor with 36,500 MW-day/tonne. This is equivalent to 100 MW-year/tonne (ignoring leap year corrections). Given their 1.01 tonne horde, they could expect an energy yield of 101 MW-year. Now, a megawatt of power is equal to 1,341 horsepower, the power of a moderate train locomotive, an early WW2 airplane engine, a good sized charter fishing boat, and a standby emergency power unit for a campus or moderate industrial site. Nuclear power for supplying electricity to the electrical power grid of a small nation or a national region would more likely flow at a rate of 100 MW to 1 GW (gigawatt, equal to 1000 MW). Our hypothetical 100 MW-year/tonne system would use up the 1.01 tonne fuel supply in 1 year and 3.7 days of continuous 100 MW operation, or in 37 days of continuous 1 GW operation. It is evident that the Iranian uranium fuel supply is only a token of what would be needed to operate a useful civilian power system. The most likely application of the present Iranian uranium reactor fuel supply is in powering a small research reactor that is used to enable experimentation in all aspects of nuclear power technology and reactor fuel management and reprocessing.

Are the Iranians trying to produce an atomic bomb? They should be, given their history of experiencing invasions and warfare (Alexander the Great, Mark Antony, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Imperial Russia, the British Empire, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Saddam Hussein); their ballistic missile proximity to the Eurasian nuclear powers of Russia, China, India and Pakistan; and to that nuclear-armed Middle East enclave of furious exceptionalism — Israel; their enviable quantities of petroleum and natural gas; and the entrenched hostility of the United States imperialists, miffed at the Iranian refusal to submit to its possessive control and to a cultural deflowering.

The Iranians say they are not building a nuclear weapon, and you cannot disprove their claim on the basis of physical evidence or physics estimates. It does make business sense for Iran to save its petroleum resources for the export market, and to increase that profitability by powering its domestic economy with its own independent system of nuclear power. Also, given the world thirst for oil, it does make sense to develop an alternative now for powering a post-fossil fuel economy. Disbelief of the Iranian characterization of their nuclear energy work is based on political agendas (e.g., Zionism), and simple prejudice aping principled mistrust (e.g., neo-con imperialism). It IS possible the Iranians have not been truthful about their intent, but it is not possible to discern this from physical considerations. And, we must be clear that the Iranians are completely within their rights (by treaties signed) to pursue their nuclear energy work for the purposes they have stated: civilian electrical power.

What is clear is that the physics of bomb-making and the physics of civilian nuclear power are inextricably entwined beyond any possibility of chaste separation that would fully satisfy the political desires of competing states. It is also clear that any nation’s investment in an independent nuclear power system is a de facto national defense program, because the threat of it acquiring nuclear weapons is implicit and physically embedded in the development work for the technology.

What must also become clear is that investment in nuclear energy technology, especially if carried forward to weapons development, is a detriment to the social good because it drains enormous resources that could be used to improve the health and well-being of the public. Some of this public detriment will be due to the ambitions of a national leadership whose machinations for greater power lead to the diversion of national wealth into military programs — and nuclear power is intrinsically a central government and a military program. By the very nature of nuclear material, nuclear fuel and nuclear fuel reprocessing, the central government must control the technology for the sake of security. Civilian nuclear power is at best an attempt by the government to spread the costs of maintaining the nuclear fuel — and nuclear bomb — infrastructure (e.g., a ‘non-bomb’ military application is nuclear-powered warships). This is why the U.S. and Russia have sought, and still seek, client states whose civilian nuclear power systems they would fuel and reprocess (e.g., South Korea).

That Iran does not wish to be such a client state is interpreted by the Washington imperialists as an act of defiance, a declaration of nuclear armament building. This independence on nuclear matters is entirely within Iran’s rights as spelled out in the test ban and non-proliferation treaties. This act of independence may also be an Iranian virtual nuclear weapons program that is a purely psychological illusion, and would be judged successful if the degree of caution and hesitation it introduces into the US approach to Iran outweighs the inevitable increase in US irritation with Iran.

The hostility of large powerful states toward smaller, weaker ones may justifiably motivate some of those lesser states to explore the deterrent potential of nuclear arms. Like the spines of a sea urchin, or the noxious taste of a milkweed (Monarch) butterfly, a small credible capability in nuclear arms may offer significant protection against large unrelenting predators. The entire world can see how gingerly the U.S. treats North Korea, with its puny near-dud atomic bomb (assuming it has another) as compared to, say, Venezuela or Syria or Cuba, which evidently lack nuclear arms.

What is so stupid about US policy regarding nuclear developments in other states is that its ham-fisted belligerence reinforces the fears of small nations that decide to divert resources from economic development to the sprouting of nuclear-armed political spines; and what is so sad is that the objectification of that U.S. hostility and that subject nation’s fear into those armament spines is a heartless tax sapping national wealth that is sorely needed to meet basic human needs. The I Ching might have put it this way: the hostility of the great is the impoverishment of the weak.

END NOTES

The actual physical mass of an atom is the product of its atomic weight — which recall is simply the number of its combined protons and neutrons — multiplied by an “atomic mass unit,” (abbreviated as AMU), which is a precisely defined quantity that we will round for convenience to 1.66/(10 to the 24th power) grams. So, an atom of U238 has a mass of 3.95/(10 to the 22nd power) grams, an exceedingly small mass.

A macroscopic quantity of 238 grams (about half a pound) of pure U238 will contain 6.022 x (10 to the 23rd power) atoms. This last number is called Avogadro’s Number. It is an interesting fact that any pure isotopic mass whose quantity in grams is numerically equal to its atomic weight (the number of combined protons and neutrons in one atom) will contain Avogadro’s Number of atoms.

The numerical value of the AMU is the inverse of the numerical value of Avogadro’s Number.

However, it is often the case that governments see the personal freedoms of their citizens as impediments, liabilities, and threats to its power. This thrust is usually labeled “maintaining order.” To this end, governments will organize specialized units of labor called police into enforcement agencies, equip them with instruments of coercion, and shield them with legal protections. Admittedly, the realities of human nature, and the wide spectrum of observed human behavior justifies some of this effort.

In our capitalist societies, the maintenance of social order has become both an industry and an infrastructure. When these operate to protect and even advance individual freedoms, human rights and personal safety, then they justify their methods and their existences. This is not uniformly the case, as is too painfully obvious to many who have witnessed or endured the abuses of police and prosecutorial powers by careerists advancing their personal agendas. For this reason, society justly demands that there be a rather intrusive oversight of police, judicial and prosecutorial professionals, and many restrictions on the technologies and methods they are allowed to use. The purpose of a justice system of authentic social value is to achieve 100% success at safeguarding the rights of the innocent; it is not to achieve 100% success at ensuring the punishment of the guilty. The latter goal demands a continuous and significant sacrifice of innocent people. Such sacrifice is unconscionable in any justice system that includes capital punishment.

Just where is the boundary between lawful freedom of assembly and the unlawful “right to riot?” (As an aside, we must allow for the logical possibility — even the social necessity in extreme cases like the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza Strip — of a lawful right to riot). The traditional police technologies for containing unruly assemblies, lawful and unlawful, include: megaphones (public address systems), truncheons (sticks), plastic shields and body armor, deployment on horseback, high pressure jets of water, tear-gas and small arms fire. In more recent times, lightly armored assault vehicles (police tanks) have also been deployed.

Over the years, police responses to public assemblies have caused fatalities of innocents, spurring research to arm police with minimally-lethal technology that is effective at social control. From such efforts came the mechanical technologies of water jets (fire hoses), tear-gas bombs and sprays, rubberized truncheons, and most recently rubber bullets. Also, electrostatics was exploited to devise the Tasers in use today. Viewed from an authoritarian perspective, these are certainly improvements over straightforward military firepower, but still, people have been badly injured and killed by these “softer” forms of coercion.

The conundrum of finding gentle coercive force technologies against public assemblies is now seeking its answer through electronic technologies, specifically microwave and laser broadcast power. The National Institute for Justice, the research arm (or “Q Branch,” in James Bond parlance) of the US Department of Justice, is now testing candidate systems of assembly dispersal and control. Police forces will eventually be equipped with centimeter-wave microwave beam broadcast systems, similar to one devised by the US Army, to heat skin at a distance and elicit a flight reaction.

A second, and better developed device of remote control torture is a bulky “rifle” that combines visible light and infrared lasers to incapacitate people by blinding them for a period of time (”dazzlers“), as well as being able to heat skin uncomfortably.

Obviously, any non-lethal form of coercion is more easily used as an instrument of torture, for example during arrests, interrogations, and in prisons. The surreptitious and deniable misuse of such weapons by rogue law enforcement individuals would be harder to detect because of the minimal aftereffects.

Both the convenience of remote control torture and the absence of lasting physical evidence of its occurrence make these insidious weapons of authoritarian control over personal freedom as envisioned by the contemporaries of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

The best protection against such weapons would be the elevation of the social consciousness and political maturity of the citizens, generally, to achieve a greater sense of community, to both: ensure popular political power over the control and enforcement agencies of government, and to populate those agencies with individuals whose first allegiance is the protection of people’s freedoms rather than the protection of government power and its careerists.

Otherwise, we are burning away the actuality of the First Amendment. We are trimming our right of assembly to self-contained gatherings that cause no political disturbance, to virtual assemblies on the internet that create little notice, that cannot offer the challenge to entrenched power that is carried by the actual massed presence of our physical selves, united.

Student #1:

I am twenty years old and go to the University of C, studying for a degree in business and technology. With all that is happening around me, I am no longer sure what I aspire to be. I wish to help bring the change to this world that will lead to [the social and political policies this publication advocates]. I was considering trying to become a technician in some field, but am unsure of what. I know that most politicians cannot get things done simply because they are not trained to do so; and am asking for your guidance as to where I should point myself. I’m a bilingual college student who works as a bank teller, and quite frankly, the more I learn about banking the less I want to work in it; the more I learn about the monetarism we are a part of, the more I want to change it. It’s terrifying, when I ask some of my peers what they know of our government, or how our money system works, or about world affairs. I usually find an overwhelming ignorance, or just lack of interest because they don’t think they are part of the global community. In fact most people my age could care less about what goes on outside this country or how this government handles public affairs. They are usually just interested in pop culture, or where the next party will be, or who has the most impressive weed. I am disdainful of most of the people in my generation, who are absolutely clueless of what the world is really like. I have a different perspective since I come from a different country and I have traveled quite a bit. But, I do not know what I should do. I am lost and in need of guidance, or another person’s perspective. Would you reply in a sincere and honest way to this question? Is there any hope for change and what can I do to be a part of it?

Response #1:

The best thing you can do for society is to become good at what you love doing most. Naturally, I am thinking about legal and humane applications of your developed skills. Each of us has some activity that we are naturally drawn to, that excites us, that we can feel passionate about, and that would give our lives meaning even if we had to live in poverty and obscurity to engage in it. For some, it is music, perhaps singing or composing — think of Mozart and Maria Callas. For others it can be mathematics or scientific or nature studies — think of Charles Darwin or Einstein. For others it can be craftsmanship by hand, like potters and calligraphers honored by Chinese and Japanese tradition. For others it might be writing, of many varieties. The point is that you must first determine what it is that you REALLY want to do with your mind and hands, in the day-to-day, regardless of whatever circumstances might exist in the world outside. Find your avocation.

The next step is to decide what type and quantity of education you need — and are willing to put up with — in order to develop your avocation. Simply put, if you love doing it, you will be willing to put up with the work needed to learn how to do it well. This is the “monastery” and “apprenticeship” stage of a consciously self-directed life. This is the period where artists and musicians wait on tables to earn the money needed to pay those exacting and expensive teachers, and for the art supplies and/or gigs they need to hone their art. This could be on-the-job training, and it could be graduate school in the Ivy League. The point is, get the education you need to hone the skills for practicing the mechanics of YOUR passion.

Eventually you “finish school” and have to make it on your own, hopefully on the basis of being paid for practicing your craft. Perhaps your passion is writing, specifically in the field of history, but you find yourself employed in a bank or insurance office because you have to support a family and because the employer finds your ability to write sufficiently applicable to preparing financial reports and business documents. You would much rather be a columnist at a big city newspaper, but you just can’t write as fast and as good — within the confines of the paper’s orthodoxy — as the people they already have. Your challenge is twofold:

1, how to ensure the support of the family (which might be minimally yourself), and

2, how to apply the skills of your passion (your avocation) to the betterment of society?

This is such a grand challenge, that most people can’t do it.

First step, be forgiving of yourself. It is not possible for one individual to take on the problems of the world, to feel responsibility for all the ills and misery around you. This is too much, it crushes the individual. Second step is to not give up, to develop your understanding of the world and society around you, so you can perhaps come to see opportunities where you could contribute your skills (your passions) and they would find a welcome, and possibly even reward you monetarily, so as to help with part 1 of your career challenge.

Beyond this point, it is simply effort and refinement.

So, can you solve world hunger by becoming an ace potter in some country hamlet? No, but you might develop into a good teacher of young children working with clay, of adults regaining use of hands and minds after strokes, or you might devise some cost-effective containment devices or strategies for people in poor rural communities who have to make their own items — and clay is a natural. My point is that if you actively think about what human needs exist and how you could apply what you know to them — at some level even a very local and personal one — that you will increase the portion of your working energy that goes into bettering society, instead of just being a mindless “consumer” whose total working life is gobbled up to keep running some capitalist, socially-parasitic system.

The better you are at what you do, the more likely you will be able to apply your skills at a higher level, and to affect more people.

So much for generalities.

It sounds as if you have some economics knowledge. If so, and it interests you, there is always a need for “experts” in development who work to devise methods for poor and peasant communities to improve their economies in sustainable ways, and to keep their independence from foreign multi-nationals (you know, “globalization”). This is not easy at all, and the need is great. Naturally, well-trained economists usually prefer getting the big bucks working for banks and big financial firms, which aim to exploit those peasants (along with everybody else). If one could work in such a setting and make big bucks by funneling investors into ethical portfolios, and then also use your own fat commissions ethically, and/or to fund social improvement projects of your own, then you would be applying MBA skills in a very worthy way.

Look into the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UNICEF for descriptions of economics applied to improve rural/poor/3rd world societies. I have read reports about the energy needs of the world’s poor, a significant problem that cries out for economists with talent, and an interest in simple energy technology (for more, http://www.idiom.com/~garcia/EFHD_01.htm).

If you add a facility with languages (being multi-lingual) to any set of skills, then you become much more effective.

Given the economic circumstances today (impending depression) you can easily see that teachers, advisors and advocates who show people how to get out of debt, stay out of debt, and ultimately produce and trade for what they need without having to go through corporations at all — for food, water, energy, light, heat, furnishings — would be a boon to poor people, which is to say most people. Could you devise such schemes of personal financial independence for the non-rich?

I’m working on ideas for generating electricity directly from sunlight, using a “small” machine, so individuals could reduce or even eliminate their dependence on utility companies (perhaps foreign, and perhaps exploitative) and power lines (so, for remote villages), if they could also simplify their lives sufficiently to conserve a good amount of power. Physically, it is possible. Practical?, convenient?, reliable?, still working on it. Maybe I’ll arrive at a breakthrough someday, and maybe nothing will ever come of it, but I’m trying, and I’m using my passion for math and physics. How successful am I at changing the world? I’m forgiving on myself on that point, but I’m trying, and I’m using my passions (which include writing) for much of my time.

Read the book Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl (easily found). It is short, and shows how we humans need meaning in our lives. When we are engaged in what gives us meaning, we can literally live through anything. The philosopher-folklorist Joseph Campbell (book: The Hero With A Thousand Faces) also talks on this theme.

I can’t tell you what to do or study until you identify what gives your life meaning. What is it you feel you are driven to do. Once you know that, nurture it, develop it. And then try, ethically, to apply it in the world. Measure success by the level of satisfaction in your life, NOT by externalities like money, titles, attention and status. Develop a sense of self-respect that can’t be bought (and beware, because it will “cost” you in those externalities). The only success is to lead a life of meaning, even if invisible to others; the only failure is to never experience the thrill of what you were meant to do.

Student #2:

Hello! My name is M. Right now, I’m an undergraduate physics student at O University. I’m finishing up my senior year and I’m getting very excited about continuing my education in graduate school and eventually getting my Ph.D. The plan is to pursue my research in plasma physics. However, I’m always finding conflicts with these ambitions. I chose this path because I really do love physics and math and wanted to do something with my life that was beneficial to the earth. I chose plasma physics as a way to research fusion energy, thinking that this would be the cleanest possible goal for the planet. But whenever I speak about this to other “radical” friends, they kind of look down on me. I’ve gotten a lot of criticism from friends and acquaintances. I read [this publication and MG, Jr. articles], and love seeing a physicist that shares all of my political ideas and feelings about the world. So as a physicist and thinker, is the path I’ve chosen a bad one? I know that you may not be able to make that call for me, nor am I expecting you to plan my life. I just wanted to ask for your opinion.

Response #2:

You put your question very clearly and succinctly. Unfortunately, I do not see how to give as clear or concise an answer.

It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1868)

On April 22, 1970, I attended a lecture in my undergraduate physics class, on nuclear fission and fusion. Professor Walter Whales became quite engrossed in his presentation, which became an hour-long tutorial on the design of a fission bomb. It was fascinating. To see how all the individual textbook phenomena fit together in an intricate, interrelated fashion to produce one awesome effect was just marvelous, a private viewing behind nature’s curtains at a vast panorama of hidden depth, an initiation. At the end of his lecture, Professor Whales was struck by an amusing realization and, with a smile and all his chalk-board spherical shell diagrams behind him, said “What a thing to be talking about on Earth Day!” I left the lecture hall that day, walking onto the sunny spring-day college green, crowded with students, mini-skirts, Beatles music, and the celebratory atmosphere of the first Earth Day, and realized my course in life: to study plasma physics to prepare myself to be in the first generation of chief-engineers of the fusion energy plants that would just begin coming into service within 15 years, by 1985. Energy for the people, a revolution in freedom for the world, perhaps even the beginning of the end of world poverty, hunger, even war. This was one of the most ecstatic days in my life, even my girlfriend was sweet to me. Joseph Campbell called such times “peak experiences,” when you are at your best, and the world smiles on you.

Thirty-eight years later, I am the same person with the same basic dreams, only by now all the hidden assumptions I had as a 20-year-old have been uncovered, and most of them discarded as erroneous. Today, my belief is that simple solar technology, which can be fabricated locally in the 3rd World without anything “special,” except for a little knowledge encapsulated in a simple blueprint or a working model as guides, is how the greatest degree of energy independence is to be provided. I hope to put more time and energy into this project this new year, because it moves me. What I have learned from physics is how to marvel more deeply at the wonder of nature, at the genius of the evolved interrelatedness we are enmeshed in. Still, if some university or college, or even an eccentric millionaire were to pay me to work at solving physics problems involving fluids, electromagnetic effects and plasmas, and just for the sake of the art, I would jump at the chance. I was lucky enough to spend years of my time engrossed in such study — and meditation — and earn my daily bread doing so: ivory tower, rent-free. But, I’m considered a has-been now, my methods and my focus seen as passé.

And, I am passé because I rebel at the likely purposes to which my thoughts of plasma physics would be put to, were I paid to generate such thoughts; I rebel at any suggestion I channel my thinking to the projects most employers of physicists would have; and I rebel against the popular methods of career advancement tolerated among professionals of all types. Finally, I rebel against the realization that I can never be a teacher, because I cannot cater to an audience impatient to have their tickets punched so they can move on in their career trips, and impatient if I do not supply classroom entertainment to relieve their instantly available boredom. I’m a grumpy old man before my time. What I do have, in exchange for being cast off from my former professional associations and their rich resources, is the freedom to pursue my interests without the restraint of fearing to appear foolish, or worrying about getting published — accepted, included. Even if they never reach anyone else, my ideas can fill me with excitement, insight and wonder. THIS is what you want to ensure you experience, at least a few times, when you choose to immerse yourself in a science life. Remember this for those times your career is in a slump; because there are many careerists in science but far fewer real intellectual successes.

It is impossible for any single human being to resolve the conflicts of the world within the limited scope of their personal life. If you try to arrange your activity to have a “zero carbon footprint,” to be “socially responsible,” even 100% certified organic ahimsa harmless pure-loving good, you will go insane. If you are a born American citizen, you are de facto already guilty of the original sin of being a biological unit in the Earth-chewing genocidal fascism of American capitalism. It is unreasonable to expect any rational human being to assume such guilt and forsake all to become a naked sadhu in India. The rational course is to recognize advantages the luck of birth has bestowed on you and to use them to help you develop yourself to some personally rewarding and socially useful purpose. Consider the Parable of the Talents (if you have read New Testament stories). The mere fact of your birth bestows on you the right to seek personal fulfillment, and the right to be creative. If you excel in the pursuit of your deepest intellectual interests, your quest for beauty, and in the understanding of nature, you will have made the best use of your life-energy that world society could ask for. If pondering physics problems is where your heart lies, and you would be willing to wash up as a middle-aged derelict with a sufficient income for simple survival till bucket-kicking, so you can ponder these wonders for several decades during a professional career, then why ask what else? You can easily choose a “safe” course, or something that is more easily bullshitted as “goody-two-shoes” to all those unimportant people you feel necessary to keep up appearances for, and have a boring life and even still end up a professional derelict. Don’t compromise on what gives you fulfillment. If you know what it is do it, if you are uncertain what it is, find it and then stick with it. Life is short, and we all die, the only victory over death is to reach it having experienced what you were uniquely meant to do and enjoy. “Work out your salvation with diligence,” as Buddha said with his dying breath.

With your physics passion aflame, you go out with a freshly minted Ph.D. (assuming all the politics and bullshit of grad school didn’t kill your resolve with disgust), and what do you find? The people who pay for physics want bombs, guns, and money (these latter are usually advertised as educational institutions). There may be a few other outlets for physics talent, but by and large they all connect back to US government funding, and this is not charitable — whatever they say (even “pure physics” and “educational” funding is for maintaining a “pipeline” of new-young physics talent for the many military-oriented jobs). Physicists are paid to codify natural phenomena to the benefit of control-oriented agencies. Today, this means the product is some computer code that simulates physical effects or controls technological mechanisms that interact with the natural world, or other technological systems, for the purposes of monitoring and control. The actual physics minutia you would have to ponder may be very interesting, like gun barrel erosion, or shock wave propagation through varied media, or the hypervelocity dynamics of shaped charges, but the ultimate purposes of the exploration can be very inhumane. You become (or remain) a human being, instead of being just a physics expert automaton, when you take some responsibility for the purposes of the work. This is the hardest part of sustaining a career. If you ignore your portion of responsibility — and this is the overwhelmingly popular choice among professional scientists — then you reduce yourself to a tool and a hypocrite. A tool being a hypocrite is only possible because in being an employed Ph.D., a professional scientist, the tool has proved it has the cranial capacity to know that such a demand of social responsibility exists for it. I dwell on this point because most physicists I knew were in denial about their hypocrisy.

Pretty grim choice, huh? On the one hand seek your bliss in a physics career, and on the other the inescapability of being an agent of the Empire. The only out I know is what the ancient Chinese called “human heartedness,” a recognition of the realities of daily life and the limits of any human’s powers. You have a right to make a decent living, to be able to support a family, to participate in the society of your times. It is not possible to reconcile all the contradictions (between personal life and world politics) crossing through your life, with the exception of a few charmed individuals (and it is best to assume you are not one of them). Of necessity, the feeding of your family and the maintenance of your sanity cannot be done to the satisfaction of everybody. You follow the most honorable course when you recognize these unavoidable disparities, and you conduct yourself mindful of the ideals, compassionate to the people you know (like your family, who will be directly affected by your actions), and honest about your stances. So, you balance your personal “take” from the world and your “give” to the world, in managing your career and in supporting whatever it is you choose to support with it. Who can really judge you but yourself? As long as you are honest with yourself, you will know if you have been a Machiavellian careerist bullshitter, or a person doing their best to honor their creativity while striking an ethical and compassionate balance in an amoral world, dominated by cruel and selfish attitudes.

I cannot know what the specifics of your career should be. Perhaps you’ll be the next Einstein, and we would be grateful that US military money sustained you, so we could receive your wisdom and value it down the ages. Perhaps, you’ll be a physics teacher, cranking out generations of recruits for the imperial forces, and having a brief period of time to influence each student, perhaps to become more intellectually honest, perhaps to become more rational, perhaps to just get homework done on time, and this can add to the overall good to society. And, perhaps you’ll just be another troglodyte in the imperial armaments industries, and the most social good anyone will see from you will be that you kept yourself off the streets, supported a family even if only a bunch of strays saved from the city pound, and lent your company to some well-intentioned groups and artistic circles. If you live mindfully (a concept written about by Thich Nhat Hanh), then it is inevitable that your big physicist brain will question the ongoing phenomena of your life and times, and you can devise many opportunities for you to “do better” in terms of your own character, and as karma-trailing actions for our world.

The bottom line: it is your life to live, and your life to choose how to live. Honor your creativity and do what brings ecstasy and peace to your consciousness. Do this with enthusiasm, and mindfully. Be aware of your karma, the impact of your actions on others, and be honest about taking justifiable responsibility. Be good to yourself, remember you are only human, not Prometheus, so don’t shoulder all the problems of the world. We humans are never perfect, we are just monkeys with bigger brains. So monkey around, do your best, and after all is said and done the best judgment you can possibly get is: you were never perfect, just a monkey with a bigger brain, monkeying around most happily.

Give my regards to the future.

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1946): “I have no doubt, that unless big nations shed their desire of exploitation and the spirit of violence of which war is the natural expression and the atom bomb the inevitable consequence, there is no hope for peace in the world”,

Bertrand Russell (1955): “In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them”, (from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto),

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967): “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations.”

The policy-makers of the major atomic powers (the permanent members of the UN Security Council) viewed any “ban the bomb” unilateral nuclear disarmament sentimentality as foolishly naïve. However, after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, they recognized the value of regulating their nuclear-armed Cold War and improving emergency communications between heads-of-state, to help prevent an accidental nuclear war. These “rules of the game” have been elaborated in three significant treaties.

The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned above-ground nuclear explosions — atmospheric weapons tests — by the signatories. Most countries have signed and ratified this treaty; notable exceptions are the People’s Republic of China, France and North Korea.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 binds its nuclear-armed parties to refrain from transferring nuclear weapons technology to non-nuclear states; its non-nuclear parties agree not to acquire nuclear weapons; the right to develop civilian nuclear power is affirmed; and a vague commitment to eventual nuclear disarmament is also promised. All nations except four are parties to this treaty (189 parties), the exceptions being India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996 bans all nuclear explosions, whether undersea, underground, above-ground, atmospheric or in space. There are 180 signatories to the CTBT (nuclear and non-nuclear states). This treaty will go into effect after nine more of 44 specifically named nuclear-capable states sign and ratify; the nine hold-outs include the United States, the People’s Republic of China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

Within the last two years a new chorus has added their voices to the call for “a world free of nuclear weapons”:

Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage — to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world… We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal…¹

Progress must be facilitated by a clear statement of our ultimate goal. Indeed, this is the only way to build the kind of international trust and broad cooperation that will be required to effectively address today’s threats. Without the vision of moving toward zero, we will not find the essential cooperation required to stop our downward spiral… The U.S. and Russia, which possess close to 95% of the world’s nuclear warheads, have a special responsibility, obligation and experience to demonstrate leadership, but other nations must join.²

These new converts to “nuclear weapons-zero” may surprise you: George P. Shultz (Reagan Administration secretary of state from 1982 to 1989), William J. Perry (Clinton Administration secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997), Henry A. Kissinger (Nixon Administration national security advisor and secretary of state from 1969 to 1973, then Ford Administration secretary of state from 1973 to 1977) and Sam Nunn (chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1987 to 1995). Their two op-eds have many endorsements from former officials of the military-industrial-congressional complex, and even foreign ex-government officials.

Why are these elite former Cold Warriors now ready to ban the bomb? We can discount the possibility they’ve all experienced a “satori” for peace, or a sudden anti-imperial moral transformation like Saint Paul (more on this later). The new enthusiasm for nuclear weapons-zero must spring from two sources: the nature of reality and the nature of ego. First, consider reality.

The major nuclear powers could never use nuclear weapons in disputes among themselves. However you imagine such a scenario playing out, the “winner” would emerge with devastating damage, and very likely a permanent loss of political power and economic capability. The nuclear war would be an abrupt transition from a former level of “greatness” to a subsequent lesser state; an advantage to non-combatant rivals. Similarly, a war between major economic powers, one armed with nuclear weapons and the other conventionally, would still diminish the economic viability of the nuclear-armed victor because today’s advanced economies are highly interdependent. Any nuclear war between advanced capitalist nations would damage capitalism generally — that is, reduce wealth — regardless of how it altered the relative balance of advantage between the combatants. In all these cases, non-combatant nations might shun nuclear armed combatants after the war, adding to the political and economic costs of causing a nuclear war.

No advanced nuclear power has any need to use its nuclear arms against a weak non-nuclear state that opposes its authority. The conventional military forces of the advanced nations are more than sufficient to overpower small, weak and poor states — and such wars of the strong against the weak occur often enough without significant opprobrium. Using nuclear weapons in such wars would cause unnecessary fright to the “world community”, and this global disapproval would unquestionably lead to a collective punitive response by economic and political measures.

In short, nuclear weapons are entirely obsolete as instruments of foreign policy by the advanced nations. The integration of world economies makes the use of nuclear weapons anywhere a net loss of power and wealth for world capitalism generally. Also, the combination of electronics, computer and space technologies has so improved the target detection and shooting accuracy of conventional military systems that large-area blasts are no longer needed; and modern conventional forces are more than adequate to exert authority over weak opponents, without the inconvenience of radioactive fallout. This is the significant news in the enthusiasm for nuclear weapons-zero by the Hoover Institute elders noted earlier.

People who are marginalized and exploited by world capitalism, and who despair over improving the lot of their communities, can see acquiring nuclear weapons as a useful means to revolution, for the exact same reasons the Hoover Institute elders see them as such a threat to the American Empire: sub-state insurgents — “terrorists” — with nuclear weapons could poke painful, bloody holes through the fabric of world capitalism, and exponentially enhance their own political power. Because this threat is so serious, and nuclear weapons are now obsolete for imperial control, the Hoover Institute elders urge a rapid convergence to nuclear weapons-zero.

To underscore the credibility of the threat (or, opportunity, depending on viewpoint), let me cite one observation. A recent study I read on the probability of smuggling nuclear material and components for a crude radioactive explosive device (or anything) across the coastline into the United States concluded that there was only a 4 percent chance the Coast Guard would intercept any single shipment when carried by small craft (a boat). To minimize the loss from any single “pinch”, the smugglers might plan to convey the consignment over several shipments. The odds of success for radioactive rum running are high. What has prevented the introduction of a terrorist nuclear device into the U.S. is the control over the radioactive source material here and abroad, not the security of the coastlines and land borders.

Taking nuclear weapons systems out of active deployment; removing nuclear warheads from missile bodies and munitions depots; disassembling warheads to store the nuclear material (e.g., uranium, plutonium) at remote high-security sites, destroying the warhead shell; and breaking fissile bomb parts into granular material for mixing into lower grade nuclear fuel, which would be “burned” in civilian nuclear power reactors to recover some of the costs sunk into the original weapons, is how nuclear weapons would physically be taken toward zero. Yes, there will still be the usual problem of reactor waste, but this has to be seen as a reasonable alternative to having finished warheads and even machined bomb parts of highly refined plutonium in circulation around the world. Reactor waste may be radioactive, thermally hot and toxic, but it cannot be compressed to criticality to produce nuclear yield — no bomb.

So much for the realities, now for the psychology of nuclear weapons-zero’s elite evangelists. Scanning the names of people endorsing the Hoover Institute elders’ nuclear weapons-zero stance, I was struck by the many former government (or, military-industrial-congressional complex) officials I recall being on active duty before and during my career in one of the US nuclear weapons labs. Two of these individuals are former high-ranking nuclear weapons lab managers (Ray Juzaitis, whose career climb to a lab directorship was rumored to have collapsed before whispers of “is he safe?” by rival upper level back-stabbers, because Juzaitis had been the manager over Wen Ho Lee in 1999,³; and Siegfried Hecker, director of the Los Alamos lab from 1986 to 1997, who was replaced after a series of safety and security lapses,⁴⁵

While these former movers and shakers now enjoy lucrative sinecures, they can hardly find these activities sufficient, because they all have big egos and aggressive career drives. How else would they have risen as far as they did? Can they really be satisfied teaching BS courses on “policy” to spoiled, young patricians being trained for the imperial bureaucracy? Can they really retain their enthusiasm attending another droning symposium on knotty and speculative analyses of imperial fortunes? Can they really look forward to displaying themselves at another reception for the rich dull “donors”, who want same face-time and flesh-press value for their impressive tax-deductable foundation donation, along with a trophy snapshot alongside the honored has-been? What these elite retirees really want is to be players again, authoring (usually plagiarizing) the compelling policy ideas of the day, directing the key actions that set the karmic wheels of nations a-spinning, focusing the attention of their peers and the wider public onto their renewed glory. It chafes to “sit on the bench”, to be “passed over”; and it stings to watch the next generation — the Obama generation — briskly undo or recycle, as suits them, the elders’ political legacies without acknowledgment. It is hard to accept that one is “finished”. So, one finds a cause, something big, something that has the potential of erasing the often distasteful memory of an elder’s past exploits, by bathing them in a new and holy aura they hope will elevate their pedestals in the necropolis of the nation’s history. Other well-known examples of this psychology are: Jimmy Carter and Palestine, and Al Gore and climate change.

Like many former “spear carriers for empire” (to use Chalmers Johnson’s phrase) I, too, might be a minor example of the psychology of post-career redemption. This prompts me keep an open mind and allow for the possibility that some of the former military-industrial-congressional complex leaders now committed to nuclear weapons-zero might really have matured to a new more humane identification with the rest of humanity. This is always something to welcome. Our lives, after all, can only be fashioned in the present; our past is set and our future is out of reach. We can express a new character or a new understanding of the world from any present moment. Reforming, becoming a “better person”, “changing our ways” can be initiated at any instant, once we acquire the conception to do so. There may be some admixture of genuine feelings for peace and compassion in the participation of former government leaders who champion the elimination of nuclear weapons. Having extended this olive branch, let me confess that I do not believe this factor is significant among the retired military-industrial-congressional elite. So much for the psychology of the new nuclear weapons-zero evangelists.

The humanist “ban the bomb” sentiment is intrinsically anti-imperial and was summed up in the Russell-Einstein manifesto as: “We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” Nuclear weapons would be eliminated by meeting human needs globally — sharing (organized as an equitable U.N.) — so strong and wealthy nations would refrain from using their power to exploit the weak; and poor, disadvantaged and under-developed populations would not seek nuclear weapons, nor resort to “terror” tactics, because they would have effective and non-violent avenues to advance their societies. The new Hoover Institute-incubated nuclear weapons-zero evangelism is a pragmatic formulation aimed at preserving the American Empire by reducing one potential threat against it, which could be formed by combining the unrelieved resentments of the “service” and “waste” populations of world capitalism, and the terror potential of nuclear weapons and nuclear material.

Previously, the American situation was seen as a choice between: the absence of empire and nuclear weapons versus empire with nuclear weapons. Obviously, the first choice was forbidden. The new view states the alternatives as: empire with nuclear weapons versus empire without nuclear weapons. Note that absence of empire is not accepted as an option. The positive aspect here is that empire and capitalism without nuclear weapons, though far from our ideal, is still better than what we have today. If the Hoover Institute nuclear weapons-zero evangelism goes beyond the post-career narcissism of its clergy and actually accelerates nuclear disarmament, then it will have some value.

1. full text of January 4, 2007 op-ed.
2. WSJ op-ed, full text of January 15, 2008.
3. NYT on WHL in 2001.
4. Hecker’s 1997 testimony to congress:
   “Although the [Los Alamos] Laboratory’s long-term record for safety is impressive, in the last two years we have experienced a series of serious accidents, seemingly unrelated but suggesting weakness in the systems and structures that provide a safe working environment. On December 20, 1994, an employee of our contractor security force was killed during a training exercise when live ammunition was accidentally loaded into a weapon. On November 22, 1995, an employee lost control of a forklift and was severely injured when it rolled over. He subsequently recovered. On January 17, 1996, a contractor laborer received a severe shock when he jackhammered into a 13.5-kilovolt power line during an excavation project. He remains in a coma. On July 11, 1996, a graduate student working on energized, high-voltage equipment received a severe shock. He has recovered. As a result of these accidents, we have been subjected to intense scrutiny by DOE and the University of California.”
5. NYT on Hecker/WHL:
   ‘Mr. Hecker was cited for failing to follow through on ”an express request by senior management to develop a plan for limiting the suspect’s access, for failing to inform department’s management that the plan had failed, and for failing to take alternative actions,” according to a statement by Mr. Richardson. Though he did not name Mr. Hecker, other officials said his reference was to Mr. Hecker.’

   and

   SF Chronicle on Hecker/WHL.

My negative expectations were confirmed with the news that Obama has ruled out any prosecution of Bush Administration officials for violations of federal and international laws, that is to say for war crimes. This is a matter of policy, which extends far beyond government, and can be called “management insurance.”

Managers insure each other of immunity from responsibility, and safeguard their futures to act with impunity, by never acting in any way to bring another manager to accounts for violations committed against their employees and the general population. A manager only contributes to the prosecution of another manager when it is a matter of personal career survival, or revenge promising career advancement. (For you lawyer-types, I mean “prosecute” in the general sense of both legal and administrative proceedings, and “violations” as both statutory and policy violations).

A particularly egregious example of management insurance is described in a riveting article in the Nation magazine by Nick Turse, A My Lai A Month. Turse describes the case of Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, commander of the US Army’s Ninth Infantry Division in Vietnam (from February 1968 to April 1969) and his deputy, Col. Ira “Jim” Hunt, who served as a brigade commander and as Ewell’s chief of staff. These officers implemented Operation Speedy Express in the Mekong Delta, whose purpose was

to pacify huge swaths of the Delta and bring the population under the control of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon. To this end, from December 1968 through May 1969, a large-scale operation was carried out by the Ninth Infantry Division, with support from nondivision assets ranging from helicopter gunships to B-52 bombers. The offensive…claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at a cost of only 267 American lives. Although guerrillas were known to be well armed, the division captured only 748 weapons.

This was equivalent to a My Lai massacre a month for over a year.

Ewell and Hunt were obsessive about achieving high “body counts,” and directed their troops to essentially kill any living being, human or animal, that could be detected; and every such kill, including babies and water buffalos, was logged as a “Vietcong”. These officers saw high body counts as their avenue to promotions. The sheer horror of this policy and its careerist motivation was noted and even opposed by others in the Army, but none of these critics went outside of their management structure with their concerns, as a matter of career survival.

The results:

– The Army quashed its own investigation, burying the story from public and even Congressional view;

– a 1970 Newsweek magazine exposé was gutted to insignificance: “Buckley and Shimkin’s nearly 5,000-word investigation, including a compelling sidebar of eyewitness testimony from Vietnamese survivors, was nixed by Newsweek’s top editors, who expressed concern that such a piece would constitute a ‘gratuitous’ attack on the Nixon administration”; and

– “Ewell retired from the Army in 1973 as a lieutenant general…Ira Hunt retired from active duty in 1978 as a major general…Army records indicate that no Ninth Infantry Division troops, let alone commanders, were ever court-martialed for killing civilians during the operation.”

Pretty nice insurance for mere army generals; and some of you actually believed a new US president would support war crimes trials of a previous US president and his cabinet?! War crimes tribunals are always victor’s justice, they are imposed by the superior force of a successful invader or a successful revolution. It requires a “hostile takeover” to dump the previous management. US elections are not hostile takeovers.

Why was My Lai exposed and some limited justice dispensed? Because Ron Ridenhour (1946-1998), a soldier on active duty in Vietnam, heard about the massacre and gathered eyewitness information, and on returning to the United States sent thirty letters detailing his investigation to members of Congress and to Pentagon officials. This drew Seymour Hersh to investigate. Ridenhour had ensured the My Lai story was public, his great contribution. Operation Speedy Express had no Ron Ridenhour.

Needless to say, Ridenhour did not have a long Army career, nor achieve high rank nor gain a rich pension. But, was not his national service of far greater value? Yes, but he had punctured rather than maintained the US military’s and the Nixon Administration’s management insurance. Such maintenance is what high pay is awarded for.

You may think management insurance is corruption, and ask “why is our political class corrupt?” Why aren’t people like Ridenhour the rule rather than the exception? I think George Carlin gave the clearest (and most unsparing) answer, in 1996:

If you have selfish ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish ignorant leaders…Maybe it’s not the politicians who suck, maybe something else sucks around here, like the public…There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: The public sucks, fuck hope.

Carlin was a comic genius, but let me state his conclusion in a different way.

In 1846 a wagon train of emigrants from the Eastern U.S., the Donner Party, traveled to California but became trapped high in the Sierra Nevada mountains by deep snows (22 ft, 6.7 m) for four months, and suffered heavy losses due to starvation despite resorting to cannibalism. The members of the Donner Party were “pioneers”, “rugged individuals” intent to make their fortunes, whose only social tie was family, and for whom American Indians were obstacles (shooting Indians was not murder), and nature was for exploitation. The sad accounts of their family feuds, bickering, abandonments, thefts and murders could be taken as extreme examples of similar behaviors, and certainly similar anti-socialist attitudes we might witness among Americans in coming years as we descend deeper and deeper in the possible (probable?, inevitable?) economic depression awaiting us.

I just don’t see Americans pulling together indiscriminately during a real crisis of survival. Again, maybe I’m off, but I think our basic problem is a profound lack of character, which our political class honestly reflects; rather than that we are generally a virtuous population betrayed by a corrupt political class. It’s not “them”, it’s “us.”

The “people are good” viewpoint is orthodox leftism, as I was scolded once by an orthodox leftist who said the “people are bad” bias was a fascist tendency (the hint was clear). Obviously, from the point of view of organizing (e.g., a union) it is much easier to sell the idea and also be motivated by it, if your bias is that most people are “good”. My attitude reflects what I’ve learned from Buddhism, which is that most people are “unenlightened”, simply ignorant. Buddhism counsels compassion. It is the insistence on staying ignorant that I lose all patience with.

So, yes, it is maddening that Bush et al. will never get impeached (there is still time), tried by the Senate, or prosecuted for war crimes by the Obama Administration, or before any international tribunal. But, is this primarily a failure of Obama’s, or ours? Who elects these criminals and allows them to smirk their way through years of carnage and to reap very rich rewards? Who pays their management insurance policy? We have no innocence, and our stubborn ignorance is a worthless substitute for it. The rot comes straight out of us. Gandhi had a compassionate way of phrasing this: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

The leftist hope, and one I share illogically, is that it is physically possible for most people to become that desirable change — and call it what it is, socialism. Amazingly, it only requires a change of mind.

To accomplish more and enhance personal security, individual humans in a state of nature (i.e., alone in the wild) choose to enter into social contracts for mutual benefit; increased safety is achieved by diminishing personal freedom. This exchange is considered fair when the diminution of personal freedom is equitable and not so extreme as to enslave anyone. The social contract includes economic aspects, for the division of labor, self-defense, trade, property and marital rights, and for the general well-being and continuity of the society.

The only legitimate power, or “sovereign”, over such a society is the “general will” of its people. How the general will (the consensus) of the society is determined is a matter of detail, which depends on the: size, historical placement, geophysical setting and culture of the population in question. The general will is a legislating power that devises the laws — the “rules of the game.”

Government is the application of the laws, to regulate the interactions among the individuals of the society. Government derives its authority from the sovereign, which is the general will of the people; and “government” is objectified by the physical and bureaucratic structures constructed to enact the laws.

Note the flow of Rousseau’s logic: population choosing to socialize -> “general will” or equivalently popular consensus -> power legitimizing government -> sovereign of society -> legislating function -> laws -> government is structure constructed to enact the laws -> the individual’s compliance with laws is simultaneously an assertion of participation in sovereignty.

“The heart of the idea of the social contract may be stated simply: Each of us places his person and authority under the supreme direction of the general will, and the group receives each individual as an indivisible part of the whole.”

Rousseau’s book inspired revolutionaries and political reformers widely. Its influence can be seen in the Declaration Of Independence (1776), the Constitution Of The United States Of America (1787), the Bill Of Rights (1789), the Declaration Of The Rights Of Man And Of The Citizen (1789), the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights (1948), and in the political awareness of participants in revolutions since those of North America and France in the 18th century.

* * * *

Today, in popular consciousness, the social contract is assumed to be the obligation of government to protect its subject population physically and economically, and to mount rescue and recovery actions in response to emergencies, in exchange for popular support of government through taxation and compliance to the laws.

Most people are workers; to them an important part of their social contract is the presumed agreement with their employers that an equitable exchange of work and money will be assured by compliance with labor law, and monitoring by government regulators. Employers look to government enforcement of regulations against labor actions that are deemed fatal to the conduct of business. This is a matter of judgment, which has been badly skewed by money-power against labor in the United States.

Workers look to government enforcement of regulations against exploitation by excessive hours, under-paid and unpaid work, arbitrary and retaliatory dismissals, harassment, unsafe working conditions; and fiscal mismanagement, irresponsibility and malfeasance — by employers and financial institutions — regarding the employee’s paycheck: pay, taxes, savings, pensions and health insurance.

The social contract between a people and their government always included some regulation of labor-capital relations, for non-communist countries, but this aspect expanded significantly in response to the Great Depression (1929-1953) and in the rebuilding of Europe and Japan after World War II (>1945). Of course, labor-capital relations became a matter of government planning in countries transformed by communist revolutions after 1917.

In the United States, the expansion of the labor-capital regulatory function of the social contract is remembered as the New Deal introduced by the Roosevelt Administration (1933-1945). Its initial phase (1933-1938) was Keynesian economics applied to the expansion of civil infrastructure, and its second phase (1939-1945) was Keynesian economics applied to the expansion of military power. During the Truman Administration (1945-1952) the second phase of the New Deal was adopted as the permanent war economy of the “national security state,” which the United States has become.

In 1953, the US economy returned to its 1929 pre-crash level and the Republicans returned to power as the Eisenhower Administration. While capitalists had always opposed the expansion of labor’s rights and publicly-funded benefits, and government’s protection of them, labor’s New Deal gains remained secure during the Post-War Boom (1948-1971), the period of greatest general prosperity in the United States; and worker protections and benefits were even enhanced by the efflorescence of social, civil rights and environmental legislation during the Johnson and Nixon Administrations.

The fiscal weight of the Vietnam War, combined with the cost of US social programs, a continuing reluctance to raise taxes and refrain from deficit spending, and a loss of confidence in the US dollar by resurgent European and Asian economies, suddenly sank the US Post-War Boom in 1971. The immediate results were: 1) collapse of the Bretton Woods system (negotiated in 1944) to regulate monetary relations between major industrial states; 2) a sharp recession in the US; and 3) many capitalists lost confidence in US president Richard Nixon because of his drastic, unilateral and impulsive shift in US monetary policy, the “Nixon Shock” that precipitated the economic collapse.

Resentment by the Big Money over the Nixon Shock is probably the reason Nixon’s impeachment and removal proceeded to finality without opposition. The Big Money also decided it was time to invest in a long-term coordinated assault on the social contract, to eliminate all the labor and related social gains introduced since the New Deal — the neo-liberal agenda.

* * * *

The neoliberal agenda is the stated orthodoxy of capitalism, and is advanced in the US by people who describe themselves as politically “conservative”. Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is the literary and philosophical deity of laissez-faire capitalism, and inspiration to later avatars of the cult like Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the US, from 1987 to 2006).

Out of politeness, or as a necessary matter of deception, the actual credo of capitalism is rarely stated because it is: pure greed, get something for nothing, take everything you can get. If you understand fraud, plunder, piracy, enslavement, theft and rape, then you understand the objectivism of capitalism.

We could state the kernel of neoliberal philosophy (never was such an elegant word more brutally misused) with a libertarian cast, as “I don’t want to be taxed by obligations because of what I have, nor restrained by barriers to my grasping for what I want. I don’t want to pay for the expense of government beyond what is needed to protect my horde and enable my take. I don’t want government to enrich people economically beneath me, racially darker, or culturally different.”

If you wish to optimize your selfishness as an economic predator chewing through a prey population with naïve conceptions of its socializing contract, then you need verbal and procedural mechanisms of obfuscation to cloak your naked intent from public view.

Simply put, thieves lie. Lying is the sound of theft, and its literature. Lies are the noise of theft in progress. When you detect lies, you should immediately ask “what is being stolen?” How much better the US would be today if more people had vigorously applied this principle to the speech of George W. Bush.

Recognizing that lies are the sound and scripture of theft, and that “conservatism”, “libertarianism”, “neoliberalism”, “free market ideology,” and other related labels all tag the same camouflaging verbiage shielding pure predatory greed, we can cut through the crap to the objective reality by ignoring all the noise. Every word uttered by capitalist touts is a lie, including “a”, “and” and “the”.

The great and continuing crime of capitalism is the physical and social degradation of the world. The physical degradation exhibits itself as pollution, environmental damage and global warming; the social degradation exhibits itself as the atomization of society, impoverishment, hunger, disease and war. Capitalism does not create wealth; it robs the common good to increase the monetized accumulation of its select perpetrators.

Neoliberalism’s most successful US champion was Ronald Reagan, president during 1981-1988. During careers as a radio announcer in the 1930s, a B-movie actor from the late 1930s to early 1960s, and a public relations spokesman for the General Electric Corporation in the 1950s (where Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was also employed by PR!) Reagan honed his smooth delivery of folksy palaver that later shaped his exquisitely effective psycho-political ICBMs encasing warheads of neo-liberal ideology launched to explode throughout the national consciousness. Reagan’s facility with vocalizing scripted text and maintaining the continuity of his delivery despite lapses of memory or unexpected interruptions gave many the impression he possessed a much deeper intellect than was actually the case. He was the gold standard of neo-liberal touts, as compared to the brass of Rush Limbaugh, the lead (Pb) of Sarah Palin, and the hydrogen sulfide of George W. Bush.

The “Reaganomics” of 1981 combined a tight money policy (imposed by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker) to control inflation, with reduction of government spending (except for the military where it increased), and reductions of taxes and regulations. Noam Chomsky characterized such economic policies as “bribing the rich.” Despite ignoring the deep recession of 1980-1982 during his first year in office, Reagan managed to bob-and-weave his way out of public disapproval with a subsequent and significant increase in corporate (not income) taxes and a loosening of the money supply for a lowering of interest rates, and so economic recovery before Election Day 1984. The economic gods smiled on Reagan’s second term, and his administration blithely continued slaughtering uppity Central American peasants, shredding the social fabric, grinding down labor unions, and chewing up the environment.

With Alan Greenspan fresh on the job as Federal Reserve chairman, world stock markets crashed in October 1987, the fall in New York on the 19th was almost 23 percent. The US economy absorbed the shock well and trading activity soon recovered, but this jolt initiated a crisis in the tottering US savings-and-loan industry that led to the recession of 1990-1992. Reagan’s second term ended untarnished by recession, but his vice-president and successor, George H. W. Bush was doomed. Bill Clinton, “it’s the economy, stupid!,” became president in January 1993.

* * * *

The George H. W. Bush Administration (1989-1992) had been more concerned to foist neo-liberalism on the emerging post-communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, to redefine NATO as a military tool of American imperial power beyond Europe, and to exert control over Middle East oil, than it was about the misery felt by American workers during the 1990-1992 recession. One would have thought this collapse of Reaganomics, which lifted the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton back into power, would have initiated a reinvigoration of the social contract.

Ah, but Clinton learned that “it’s the economy, stupid!” was a double-edged taunt, that a presidential political career depended on placating the demands not just of the workers who suffered the effects of the economy, but of the capitalists who affected the parameters of that economy: employers, their financiers, and the buyers of deficit-spending bonds. Clinton’s ascendancy may have been buoyed by popular aspirations, but he had financed it with corporate backing. One foot was in the social contract, another in neoliberalism. Could he serve both? No. Neoliberalism is intolerant; there can be no human considerations standing before its imperatives of profitability.

Throughout the history of the republic, there had been presidents with at least several toes on the side of labor and the social contract, for how else could any of the existing labor rights and social gains have been won? The possibility of an American president having both feet in the social contract, like Eugene V. Debs, had been killed in the 1920s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have given us the New Deal, but he was looking over his shoulder at the shadow of Debs, and Roosevelt’s purpose was to save capitalism. The Rooseveltian accommodation between labor and capital — New Deal capitalism — was supported until the Reagan Revolution overturned it. Neoliberalism insisted the US president be its exclusive agent, fully engaged in the undoing of the social contract.

Clinton’s innovation for career success was: 1) to champion the neo-liberal policies of his Republican political opponents so as to vacuum enough corporate backing away from them to stay in power; and 2) to apply his social contract rhetoric to retain popular support despite these actions. In essence, the innovation was expediency; it was called “triangulation.”

Republicans have more difficulty in adopting the triangulation strategy because they are already one hundred percent neoliberal, and voicing any social contract rhetoric is seen as a weakening of their stances. As considerations of the social contract were squeezed out, triangulation moved the popular images of Democrats and Republicans into convergence. The two major parties came to exhibit similar organizational “personas” on the substantial issues of government: the economy, monetary policy, the military, and management of the empire (also called foreign policy).

To enliven the political theater necessary for individuals to attract attention from both the public and potential corporate backers, and to differentiate themselves from their rivals, politicians will seek to splash out on trivial or emotion “social issues” that usually entwine race, religion, sex and death. Affirmative action, abortion and gay marriage are examples. (I suppose that marriage is much too important to ever be gay, and must remain dour.) The convergence of both major political parties to servitude of neo-liberalism has increasingly discouraged the public, and the distancing they feel from their supposed representatives has produced support for third party and independent campaigns that champion the social contract.

The presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 each presented the public with a pair of neo-liberal (major) party candidates who were fairly similar on matters of policy, and only significantly different along parameters of political theater. It is no wonder the outcome in 2000 was a statistical tie, which was called in favor of the deepest prejudices of neoliberalism.

The eight years of the George W. Bush Administration (2001-2008) have taken the US from the relative prosperity and stability of the Clinton Administration to a military quagmire, financial ruin and political disgrace. Blood, treasure and honor have all been lost, and in vast proportions. How could we have expected otherwise, when the entire motivation was the destruction of the social contract to facilitate looting by plutocracy, and the only appeals made to the public by George W. Bush and his would-be successor were to its vilest prejudices and ugliest forms of selfishness?

Today, we await the inauguration of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama on January 20, 2009.

[On November 11th I received the following item, which I have not been able to confirm:

“Enjoy a funny election postscript from a source in Washington D.C. It is widely reported that a large group of people were tossing rolls of packing tape over the fence at the White House last night -- there were NO arrests --- and the Secret Service agents were reported to be laughing too hard to do much about it.”

Perhaps apocryphal, certainly indicative.]

* * * *

Why was Barack Obama elected president? Because the American people want to share in the benefits of the American Empire.

Let us characterize votes for Obama, McCain and Baldwin (Democratic, Republican and Constitution Parties, respectively) as votes in favor of the American Empire; votes for Nader, Barr and McKinney (Independent, Libertarian Party and Green Party, respectively) as anti-imperial; and votes for Nader and McKinney as purely social contract votes. We find that the electorate split 98.93 percent pro-empire, 1.07 percent anti-empire (these add to 100 percent); and that only 0.67 percent of the voters (1 out of every 150 people) expressed an unqualified endorsement for restoring the social contract, and an absolute rejection of neo-liberalism.

We each have a personal socialist and a personal neoliberal within us; the proportions of each vary widely among individuals. Our personal socialist is that part of our consciousness that welcomes sharing and sacrifice in exchange for the company of like-minded people. Our personal neoliberal is the pure Freudian id that wants what it wants, and exults in the success of the hunt like a cat proudly tossing its kill, and feeling the thrill of warm blood spurting against its tongue as it sinks its fangs into the fresh limp flesh of its victim.

Nobody likes being taken for a fool or treated like a waste product by a remote juggernaut of exploitation. People want to feel secure that they can sell their labor with dignity and be assured of steady work and good wages with adequate buying-power to support families in decent circumstances. Obama was elected because a majority of the voters saw him as their best chance of restoring the social contract to achieve this end throughout the country.

Working people also want to satisfy their personal neo-liberalism, with fattening 401k portfolios and rising real estate values, which they dream will fund the comfort, leisure, travel, hobbies, luxury purchases and health care of their retirement years, and their financial legacies for their children. Obama was elected because a majority of the voters saw him as their best chance of protecting them as savers and small investors, and of assuring them equal access to profit-making participation in the financial markets, which would now be well regulated to eliminate “insiderism”, and to ensure financial security.

While there is an obvious racial-equality symbolism in Obama striding triumphantly into the most exclusive of white men’s clubs, the White House, there may be an even wider resonance with the popular imagination, for the inclusion of us, the suckers excluded from neoliberalism’s prosperity club. Obama was elected because the voters are fed up with having to pay heavily to maintain the high profits of the crony capitalist elite that destroyed the financial industry and savaged people’s accounts and assets and futures.

Those of us in the 0.67 percent and the 1.07 percent understand that Obama is 98-plus percent mortgaged to American capitalism and its empire. We do not expect him to be an agent of revolutionary change. However, he could reprise the Rooseveltian bolstering of the social contract. Seventy-six years after the dawn of the New Deal, Obama faces the challenge of initiating his national administration from the rim of a freshly opened, deep economic chasm of such horrendous grandeur that history might record the following period as the Grand Canyon of Depressions. Like Roosevelt, Obama could realize that the press of dire economic circumstances combined with his party’s prodigious electoral success have given him all the power he needs to revamp the rules of American capitalism sufficiently to placate the masses, and to command capitalist cooperation in this effort because they would be sold on Obama’s reassurances to shield them from truly revolutionary reforms. Obama was elected because 98-plus percent of everybody wants the game to continue so they can have a turn and a chance of winning.

What we, the one percenters, can hope for is that Obama “succeeds” — within the limited scope we realize political success is confined to — by repairing, conserving and expanding the social contract. We can pressure, cajole and remind the Obama Administration to consider the impact of its proposals and decisions on the social contract: “does this include everyone?,” “is this a rip-off of the many for the few?,” “will most people accept this as fair?,” “will this raise up the fortunes of workers?” Using this line of reasoning, we will have more leverage to influence policy than by attempting to impose one percenter specifics on major areas of government oversight (e.g., energy, economic and monetary policies, foreign policy), since our voices are muted to at most 1/98th the volume of the pay-per-access capitalist channels.

It is even possible that one percenter perspectives on pressing issues of little public interest (sadly), like the imperial wars for land and oil and against Islam from Palestine to Pakistan, will be carried along by our discussion of the domestic social contract, and tinge Obama Administration awareness. (Illogically optimistic.)

* * * *

Let’s imagine a possible inaugural address by Barack Obama. It begins with gracious salutations, and then to the first substantive declarations.

“The greatness of America is in the unity of its people. It is by sharing both the burdens and the rewards of American life that we enable each other to succeed, both as individuals and as a people.

“When we allow ourselves to see divisions among us, we divert our national strength into frictions that can lead to bitter conflicts, based on race, or economic class, or region, or differences of social orientation. America would have no future if we allowed intolerance to dominate our thinking.

“But, I know that is not the case, and the proof is in the fact that I am standing here, before you, today. I know that my success is based on the love, care, teaching, good will, decency and tolerance offered by family, friends, teachers, and many other Americans going back generations, who contributed to make this country what it is, which allowed me to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, taken care of when ill; to have economic opportunities, and to be able to raise my family with a sense of security. I am immeasurably grateful.

“When you recognize such gratitude, you become aware of your responsibility to the future. The torch has been passed to us, to create the reality of America, everyday, by the care of our families, by our work, by the way we treat each other. All of this creates the America that our children are born into, and that must sustain them. We repay our gratitude for the America we were given, by continuing it, maintaining it, continuously recreating it, and improving it, so we can pass it on to the following generation with pride.

“It is impossible to experience this gratitude if you are unable to include the entire spectrum of people across this nation as being part of your idea of America. Who are the real Americans? All of them. Which of them are important for your well-being? All of them. Which of them are you concerned about in times of adversity? All of them. Which of them are you willing to share the burdens of sustaining America with, and which of them are you willing to share the rewards of prosperity with? All of them.

“My administration will face many specific national problems, and make many detailed decisions. However, there will only be one guiding principle to my choices of action, and it is this: is this in the best interests of the nation?, is this for the greater good of all Americans? This is my social contract with you.

“Each of us must make the honest effort to work for the betterment of ourselves, our families and our communities; and each or us must accept every other American as an indivisible part of our personal community. It is our unity that uplifts us, protects us, and inspires us. Dare to be grateful and embrace the entire nation, and in return it will embrace you.

“Given the circumstances our nation finds itself in today, I can guarantee you that many changes will be made. I am not going to ask for your patience or tolerance with these decisions, because that places you in a passive role. Instead, I will adhere to our social contract, and ask for your energy to be applied in the many ways you create America daily, because it is you, the people of the United States, who are the real agents of change. This country is the sum of how you engage with each other.”

* * * *

What can we expect? Probably more than Bill Clinton, probably less than Franklin Roosevelt.

My WAGs follow (G in WAGs = guess).

WAG 1: Obama will last through two terms, and will be young enough and popular enough to win a Senate seat again.

WAG 2: Joe Biden will run in eight years, and probably pick a female VP, perhaps black, but most definitely a governor or senator.

WAG 3: But, not Hillary Clinton who will challenge him unsuccessfully, looking more weathered and less appealing (speaking politically) with each election cycle. Bill is unlikely to age as an enviable marital asset, and Hillary will eventually get hooked off the presidential contenders’ stage, leaving tears of rage and claw marks.

WAG 4: Republicans will try cloning the cell samples taken from Ronald Reagan and locked in a cryogenic safe at an undisclosed location, in a desperate effort to grow a winning candidate for 2016.

What should we one percenters do? What we know is right, and what gives our lives meaning. So, enjoy life (it beats the alternative).

“A la batalla!”

I consider the first school of thought to be of rationalists and realists and the second school to be of irrationalists and fantasists. “Faith-based” is a synonym for irrational, and a strong belief in conspiracies — with insufficient evidence — is an irrational expression of fear. And it is fear, ultimately, which is at the root of the obsession by so many with 9-11. We, in these United States, are deeply afraid because we are deeply uncertain about the continuation of our personal comforts (jobs?, housing?, health?, global energy resources?), and even our personal survival (crime?, military draft?, more 9-11s?). If you can see through to the source of your fear, you will be free. I can never tell you anything more important.

The psychology of fear is involved, but I am impatient with it, thus “unsympathetic”. The presence of a large population of fearful people creates opportunities for alert charismatic opportunists to profit, by resonating with the archetypes of the shared mass-mindedness and stroking it to spasms of “comfort” — as the fictional Elmer Gantry did. In our commercialized world, the infotainment produced for this purpose is now a torrent. One of the mantras of the faith (of a US government conspiracy to engineer 9/11 and its subsequent perceptions in the public mind) is that “we need an ‘independent’ investigation” to expose the inner workings of the presupposed conspiracy, thus ‘awakening’ the American people to popular unanimity in toppling the Bush Administration and punishing all its associated hench-people. After this, nirvana supposedly. Much of the mail I get from conspiracists (my term for school #2) takes me to task for failing to support the idea of the desired investigation.

For the record, I am in favor of further investigation. Seymour Hersh did it in 1969 to uncover the My Lai massacre by US troops in Vietnam (based on the original heroic investigation by a soldier, the late Ron Ridenhour) and he had no clearance for classified information, nor any subpoena power. Yet, he produced results that awakened the American public and prompted government hearings (”investigation”). This “independent” and public investigation of My Lai was a result of Hersh’s reporting, not a precursor to it. So, I encourage all conspiracists to investigate to their heart’s content (in fact, why don’t they?). I am sure this investigatory frenzy will thrash out like that of the Kennedy assassination, and in 40 years we’ll finally know for sure: it was airplanes crashing into the buildings (1), insulation knocked off steel, fire, metal creep, and a massive oil-fed fire in WTC 7 (2).

Isn’t it amazing that reality is not put off by our preferences among improbabilities, that it does not find it necessary to unfold in a reflection of the hierarchies of cause-and-effect, controlling persecutors and helpless victims which our uncomprehending minds insist on projecting upon it? Isn’t it amazing that non-white “natives” from far away can make so many white people in the most powerful white people’s country scared? Reality couldn’t possibly turn out that way if we can’t imagine it, could it? Are we really to believe that a small band of swarthy raiders from Islamic lands could possess the imagination, the cunning, the determination, the ruthlessness, the grit and the courage to scare the living hell out of the superpower populace? How is it possible for these “nobodies” to have a greater impact over us than our own powerful lords? Are we to believe that “the natives” smote us? Reality can present us with “an obvious” that our racist thinking is blinded by: “Dick Cheney,” “Project for a New American Century”, “controlled demolition” (3); inhale, “connect the dots”, regain your equilibrium, now you see that the world is as it SHOULD be.

Why is it so imperative to the conspiracists to convert everybody else? No one prevents them from “investigating,” no one prevents them from running engineering simulations of the Towers collapses to demonstrate their claims “scientifically” (commercial software is available to do this, and various universities, like Purdue, are touting their research software by applying it to the 9/11 events). Why the missionary zeal to infect me with their disease? Really, it’s a virus; it propagates by corrupting consciousness — like the invasion of the body snatchers — so the new human carrier is propelled into a rabid invasion of the consciousness of others.

The moon rises low over the night horizon this time of year, and probably calls out the zombies in greater numbers. Let them enjoy their dreams, their moaning and dancing releases their tension, and the tight coil of their consciousness will keep them captivated for the duration. They want us to meld into their trance, and we want them to awake and help with the tasks at hand. But, really, neither of us has the right to direct other lives to the purposes we deem important. Leave them to their revels. Why antagonize them? Let us make do with those we can talk to.

And, after all this wrangling, what have we done to 9/11? We have but forgotten the only two lessons worthy of carrying out of it, and after such a high price paid for them, too:

– “our way of life” has caused a holocaust of unspeakable pain and suffering in much of the world, and for generations;

– the anguish of the victims and the sacrifices of the rescuers are wasted if we fail to recognize the universality of human anguish and our direct contributions to it.

[1] Giulio Bernacchia, www.911myths.com.

[2] From Mr. K. S. by e-mail to MG, Jr. on August 27, 2007:

“WTC7 Collapse, So What?”

Hi,I read your piece on the CounterPunch site with some interest. I was just a tourist to New York on 9-11, so I come to you not as an expert on any of this. But, I have read, and consumed hundreds of hours of information on the Kennedy assassination over the last forty plus years. So, I’m familiar with the wild theories fueled by the paranoia of US Government secrecy. Many of these suspicions seem to be well founded, some not. But, I was there at 9/11. Hasn’t anyone looked at local or national footage during the afternoon of 9/11? That building was an inferno all day long. To me it was really special. I’ve never seen a 47-story building burn like that. Every once in a while the wind would shift off the water, and you’d feel the heat come down the street two, three blocks away depending on where I was standing at the time. It was a huge fire, with flames coming out of most of the windows on the north side of the building. It was raging. I don’t know how it could have survived. What is the conspiracy about this building? The NYFD, and the rest of them knew it was going to collapse, they started running away from the area waving and screaming for everybody to get back. I figured I’d better run too. When you see all of them rescue people running, it’s time to go. Then the whole street shook, it was unnerving, or disorienting like losing your equilibrium, it was weird. But, what’s the conspiracy? That building burned for what, seven hours? That scene reminded me of the Pearl Harbor pictures, I mean with the raging fires and the twisted metal of those battleships; the result of the intense heat. If you were down there, you’d appreciate the scope of the fire.Thanks,Ken S.

[I do not release the name/address for the sake of privacy; if this causes you to dispute the authenticity, so be it]

Homework project: how long do explosives and detonators remain intact in a fire? See (3).

[3] Zachary Wick, “WTC CD?”, www.911myths.com

It is commonly known that the next USAmerican Pharaoh will be selected by a committee of representatives of the property interests of the nation, and the candidates chosen for the road shows of the primaries and electoral events of 2008 will be a batch of individuals who are deemed most likely to carry the crowds along the channels laid out by the Big Money. It might be the Shrike “against” the Dour Doughface in the finals, or it might be some other pair pleasing to the owning elite.

The eighty to ninety percent of eligible voters (a decreasing proportion of the USAmerican population under the Rovian Regression of democracy), outside the management, will exhibit a variety of delinquent and passive-aggressive behaviors: failing to become enthused about the
mandated choices, manning public protests, becoming active in third party politics and even abandoning voting altogether. Many clueless of “effete intellectual snob” (thanks, Spiro) persuasion will agonize about “how to register” and “who to vote for” in order to maximize the effectiveness of their single vote.

Since most USAmericans are now marginalized by the political system, they tend to share the same type of fantasies. They wish they could somehow vote for a real change — whether that change is for a new Christian Kingdom or a Socialist Revolution — and they wish they could somehow vote to throw out all the careerist bums who confidently punch their tickets in the government gravy train from its Washington D.C. locomotive down through its fifty state luxury sleepers, the county administration box cars and down to its city council cabooses. But, voters can’t get what they really want if they vote obediently.

However, voters do have one option that is primarily symbolic and generally ineffective, unless they happen to share a very wide agreement: they can write in a candidate. So, friends, here is my suggestion. Instead of swallowing hard to accept another “morning after” Democrat, or hoping Ralph Nader can somehow miraculously combat the accumulated malevolence of a rigged electoral system fully under the control of the pharaonic parasites, act like a rebellious jury that ignores all instruction from the judge and just decides what it damn well thinks is just. Act out the equivalent of a “jury nullification” as “voter nullification”, and write in Cindy Sheehan as president.

“But, I’ll be throwing my vote away!” you may cry. If you want an immediate end to the Iraq War, taxation of corporations and a equitable use of national resources for the benefit of the national population, your vote doesn’t count anyway. If you live in the wrong neighborhood or have too rich a complexion, your right to vote will be questioned more strenuously — even rejected — under the new Rovian eligibility criteria. If you vote for the pretty face that looks like yours from among the approved contenders, you will get a black, or female (or whatever) mask over the the same kind of guardian (and errand boy/girl) of white power capitalism we always get, whether with a horizontal Texas drawl or a vertical Massachusetts nasal pinch. Obedience is not in your interest.

“But Cindy Sheehan has no experience running a government!” you might fret. Honestly, are you happy with the results garnered by our “government experienced” would-be Pharaohs? Is there anybody who believes that Cindy Sheehan is less trustworthy, less honest, less truthful and less concerned about the USAmerican people than anyone in the dugout of Big Money approved presidential pitchmen? Number One barks out the orders and hires and fires as needed to get them done. Do you really believe Cindy Sheehan is less capable of doing this than the careerist androids of the Big Money Brat Pack. [Insert John Belushi saying "Please"].

The flaw in this suggestion is the same flaw as in John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” Yes, it is true that if most people had the same vision they could overcome war, hunger, nationalism, religion, and all the scourges of humankind. But, humanity has proved unable to share such a compassionate vision, even though humans everywhere say they want “peace” and justice” and other forms of universal good. Note, however, that the flaw is based on probability, not possibility. It is not probable that most people would share a common humanistic vision, but there is no logical impediment to such an outcome, and in fact if most people did choose to share such a vision — through their actions — then the desired humanistic compassionate state (and world) would necessarily have to emerge. It is the same with the elections in the U.S.A., if enough people choose to vote for a given candidate, in this case by write-in balloting, then regardless of the shenanigans by partisan election officials, and the hacking of electronic voting machines, the “will of the people” will become clearly evident. The success of any such act of mass disobedience would be the beginning of the end of the current syndicates running USAmerican politics as a continuing criminal enterprise for the enrichment of corporate sponsors.

For such an act of national liberation by mass disobedience to ever occur, it would be necessary for many voters to see beyond their assumed self-interests as co-conspirators with the political machines they pledge allegiance to. They have to see “their” interests and the nation’s interest as being above and different from “the party’s” interest. In the 18th century, this was called patriotism. Being patriotic might cost you money, it might contradict your prejudices, and it might challenge your patience. But it will bring you into a closer brotherhood and sisterhood with a great number of other people who also think of themselves as “Americans.” When you vote for Cindy Sheehan as president, you are declaring “I do not wish to make war on other Americans by seeing them as a threatening ‘other’ race, religion, class or type; I do not wish to enslave, depreciate and discard my fellow countrymen and countrywomen because it is advantageous to my pocket to do so; I do not wish to invest my county’s blood and treasure in piratical ventures around the world, whether alone or in league with foreign bandits whose thievery and bloodletting are enabled by our resources.”

So — imagine — we all go to the polls in 2008, ask for paper ballots and write in “Cindy Sheehan” for president. Imagine, the vote is overwhelming. Imagine the panic of the pharaonic class. Imagine all the court decisions trying to stem the tide, all the resistance to democracy, even perhaps the calling out of the National Guard (and imagine what side they would prefer). Go ahead, imagine another country, possible if we have the courage to hold a common vision. Why Cindy Sheehan? Her patriotism is compassionate, based on the power of motherhood and the eternity of grief for a lost child. Who doesn’t prefer this over cynical self-aggrandizement leaving a failed adventurist war hung around a gutted nation’s neck like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s albatross, by a gang of con-men marketing facile prejudices to an inattentive public — “the sting”.

What does Cindy Sheehan think of this nomination? I have no idea; I didn’t ask her, I have never met her nor communicated with her in any way. I have read about her, and more importantly I have read her essays, speeches and interviews. In the past I have voted for more than one mass-murdering Pharaoh on the basis of much less information, so what more do I need to know about Cindy? “What if she refuses the mandate?” you may wonder, fearful of being caught in a rebellion gone awry. Do not worry, if we can muster the mandate, then Cindy or an equally worthy citizen of our choosing [sic] can be positioned to implement the authentic will of the people. “When in the course of human events…”

Is the world heating up because of a build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere? If so, does human activity — like burning fossil fuels — produce enough CO2 to be a decisive factor, or is the process largely natural? Would such global warming be a good thing for humanity and life on Earth, or a danger? Can science give us an accurate measure of the amount of heating per unit of CO2 emission? Does such a process continue monotonically and indefinitely, or does it change character by accelerating wildly — a nonlinear or chaotic behavior — beyond a certain concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Can nonlinear and chaotic behavior lead to a completely new climate, like an Ice Age? How quickly can such changes take place? How soon will we know all the answers? How much control will we have over our destinies? How will the world politics of global warming play out, and how can I be a winner in that game?

This article will describe some of the technical considerations that go into making a climate model, and in this way give some context to the many claims and counterclaims made about global warming. As with any phenomenon that has the potential of changing the status quo of human socio-political and financial arrangements, there are many self-interest factions who each have a stake in the molding of public opinion on the topic. Unraveling the truth from the propaganda begins by listing the fundamental scientific considerations needed in order to understand the linked and complex phenomena we call climate.

1. Introduction
2. A historical analogy with the birth of modern physics
3. How greenhouse gases hold heat
4. Water vapor and anthropogenic greenhouse gases
5. A note about ozone
6. How climate models work
   6.1 Models and links
   6.2 Space and time, scales and resolution
7. Solar Heat Into The Geartrain Of Climate
8. Justifying the IPCC consensus
9. Criticizing the IPCC consensus
10. The Open Cycle Closes
Endnotes

2. A Historical Analogy with the Birth of Modern Physics

Climate research in 2007 may be at a similar point of development as physics research was in 1907, poised for revolution.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) found that the mechanics of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was only a low speed, low mass limit of “general relativity,” a reality where space, time and gravity are linked, as are mass and energy.

During these same years, Max Planck (1858-1938) introduced his “quantum theory,” which was soon expanded by Einstein and Neils Bohr (1885-1962). Quantum theory revolutionized the 19th century view of electromagnetics, so elegantly stated by Michael Faraday (1791-1867), James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), and other scientists of their time and before (e.g., Coulomb, Ampère, Biot, Savart, Hertz). The “old” electromagnetics assumed that a “luminiferous aether” existed in otherwise empty space, and it was the oscillations of this massless “material,” which manifested electromagnetic waves, and as a result all known electrical effects. This idea was a logical extension of the observation that mechanical waves in solids (e.g., elastic waves, earthquakes) and fluids (e.g., water waves, sound waves) were the motion of vibrations through matter.

The great difficulty of 19th century experimental physicists was that they could never devise any experiment to actually detect the luminiferous aether, despite the obvious reality of electrical effects and the many motors, generators, radios and other devices built by Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Thomas Edison (1847-1931) and other electrical engineers. An experiment to detect the aether (in 1887), by Albert Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward Morley (1838-1923), was famous for establishing that the speed of light in a vacuum was a constant (299,792,458 meters per second, a standard value adopted in 1983) regardless of any motion by the measuring device itself (Einstein’s interpretation). Another paradox was that light could exhibit a wave-like nature, as when it refracted (bent) on passing through a glass-air or water-air boundary, and when it diffracted (separated by color) on passing through a prism or narrow slit; and light could also exhibit a particle-like nature in its very precise and selective initiation of luminescent or electron (charged particle) emission from atoms.

Einstein and the quantum theorists resolved the paradoxes of electromagnetism with the quantum theory. It stated that the luminiferous aether did not exist (thus agreeing with all experiments) and that the seeming contradiction of light (and all electromagnetic radiation) having both a wave and particle nature simultaneously was in fact true. The “wavelength” of a particle or “quantum” of light was exactly proportional to its energy content as given by Planck’s formula, E = h×c/wavelength, where h is Planck’s constant, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum. Despite the seeming oddness of ascribing a wavelength to a single particle (quantum), this model of electromagnetic radiation has proved to be consistent with all measurements. Light has both a wave and particle nature, a fact exploited in electrical, communications, optical and photo-electronic technology.

Now, consider the analogy to climate research today. A consensus has developed, and is voiced by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC), that the accumulation of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere does cause an accumulation of heat in the atmosphere and biosphere of the Earth. Furthermore, human activity, primarily the burning of fossil hydrocarbon fuels, is a significant cause of this CO2 accumulation. This case has not yet been definitively proved, but the majority of scientists and their professional organizations have reached the conclusion that this case passes the test of being true beyond a reasonable doubt. They see an improving agreement between the many complicated and highly regarded (for theoretical rigor and predictive abilities) numerical (computational) models of climate, and the growing body of paleo-, historical, and current climate data.

The vastness of this entangled problem makes it impossible to know and calculate every conceivable detail “exactly,” so there are many scientist critics of the IPCC consensus. Exceptional scientists and many others of equivalent learning and capability to the consensus scientists are among the critics. However, they appear to be in the minority of scientific opinion on the issue of CO2 and climate change.

We can ask, are the climate change critics of today like the relativity and quantum theory revolutionists of 1900, their ideas not yet expressed compellingly enough to overturn a highly developed consensus view like luminiferous aether, which was orthodoxy taught in the universities by the teachers of Einstein and his generation? If so, then the “real story” has yet to emerge and revolutionize thinking on climate change.

The other possibility is that the revolution in understanding climate change has already begun, being the IPCC consensus, which will be borne out as more data is gathered, bigger computers are used and models of superior refinement are devised. Are the critics resistant to adopting a still fairly nebulous new idea, and to abandon the certainties of their long-standing views — like luminiferous aether a century ago — and the technical doubts they have about the new models, doubts which some can articulate with great logic and precision?

Science will march along and in time we will know the answers. However, our social and political problem is that if the IPCC consensus is correct (and, worse yet, if it is conservative) then we have little time to do anything about the predicted negative consequences of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere.

3. How Greenhouse Gases Hold Heat

The significant greenhouse gases are water vapor (H2O, 36-70%), carbon dioxide (CO2, 9-26%), methane (CH4, 4-9%), ozone (O3, 3-7%), nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons. The chemical symbol and the percentage contribution to the greenhouse effect on Earth by that species appears in parentheses for the first four gases.¹

Sunlight that penetrates the atmosphere and is absorbed by the lands and oceans of the Earth warms its surface. In turn, the Earth’s surface radiates heat in the form of infrared radiation up into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases absorb and retain this heat, and this effect is due to their molecular nature.

Many types of molecules will develop a slight electrical charge imbalance when their heavy nuclei rotate and vibrate relative to each other as seen along the directions of their chemical bonds. These charged oscillations can have frequencies and energies that match those of a quantum of infrared radiation. So, such molecules readily absorb incident infrared photons (”particles” of infrared electromagnetic energy), and they apply the added energy to boost themselves into a higher state of rotational and vibrational excitation. Basically, molecules store heat “internally” by fidgeting (like little children who would rather be running around than sitting at a dinner table or in a church pew). Gases made up of isolated atoms, like helium, neon and argon, cannot store heat internally (by rotation and vibration about a chemical bond); their response to being heated is to move more quickly, and this is called kinetic energy, an “external” form of energy, which adds to the aggregate effect of an increase in pressure and temperature in a volume of gas.

Nitrogen (N2) and oxygen (O2), the major gas species in Earth’s atmosphere, do not develop a significant charge imbalance when they rotate and vibrate, because of the symmetry of their chemical structure (one end of the “dumbbell” never looks more nor less positive that the other). Molecules of this type do not absorb nor emit (very much) infrared radiation. Molecules with more chemical bonds, and nuclei from several chemical elements will have more heat storage capacity, a good example being the CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, highly volatile fluids devised as refrigerants.

Molecules with stored heat (internal energy) can transmit this energy to other molecules and atoms by colliding with them. Such “inelastic collisions” can de-excite the rotation and vibration of molecules while boosting the speed of other molecules and atoms. In this way the internal energy of greenhouse gas molecules can contribute to the kinetic energy of atmospheric particles: the sensible heat of the atmosphere.

It is interesting to note that the air about you has 2.7×10²⁵ particles/meter³, spaced by an average distance of 3.3×10^-9 meters; and that each air molecule collides 10¹⁰ times/second, with an average travel between collisions of 6×10^-8 meters. These numbers characterize sea-level air.

4. Water Vapor and Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases

Nature supplies all the water vapor in the atmosphere, and much of the carbon dioxide, methane and ozone. Human activity supplies all of the very high heat capacity volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Obviously, a VOC gas whose molecules can each hold ten to one hundred times the internal energy of a CO2 molecule will be as effective as ten to one hundred times the VOC quantity of CO2. Even with this leverage, the quantities of H2O, CO2, CH4 and O3 in the atmosphere are large enough to dominate the effect of heat retention (this does not justify emitting more VOCs). So, the emission of CO2 by human activity is our most effective contribution to atmospheric heat retention.

As CO2 accumulates, the atmosphere warms, more water is evaporated, which adds heat retention capability to the atmosphere and increases warming, a positive feedback loop. A mitigating effect is the formation of clouds from the water vapor, which has a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight. Heat retention capability is called “heat capacity” in the study of thermodynamics. The effect of CO2 emission is not merely to add its own heat capacity to the atmosphere, but to act as an agent causing a further increase in the dominant component of atmospheric heat capacity, water vapor. Humans have no control over the water cycle, but they can have some control over the emission of CO2.

Today, there are nearly 380 ppm (particles per million) of CO2 in the atmosphere, whereas prior to 1800 (for about 10,000 years) there was usually about 280 ppm. The total emission of carbon from burning is 6.5 GT/y (giga-tons/year, for giga = 10⁹, tons = metric tons of 1000 kg); of this total, 4 GT/y enters the atmosphere. Individual molecules of CO2 remain in the atmosphere for several years before being taken up by biological systems or absorbed by the oceans. However, because of the many sources and sinks of CO2 (e.g., outgassing from warming seas, like a ginger ale going flat on a hot summer day) the average concentration of atmospheric CO2 will take between 200 years to 450 years to equilibrate (level out) in response to any small perturbation (increase or decrease) of its concentration. So, if all burning by human activity (anthropogenic sources) were to stop today, it might take hundreds of years for the CO2 concentration to reach an equilibrium; it would probably rise for a time, peak, then equilibrate to a steady level below the peak concentration.

5. A Note about Ozone

Ozone (O3) absorbs ultraviolet light, which is dangerous to human skin and many living things. In filtering this higher-energy component of sunlight, upper atmospheric ozone performs a valuable service for us. CFCs destroy ozone by oxidizing, they strip off an oxygen atom leaving O2. CFCs are regulated by the Montreal Protocol, to address the problem of the degradation of the upper atmospheric UV shield.

Lower atmospheric (tropospheric) ozone is produced by chemical reactions that involve auto exhaust and pollution gases. Ozone is corrosive, it damages lungs, brittles plastics and fades painted surfaces (e.g., automobiles; poetic justice?), and corrodes the stone faces of many ancient monuments. Tropospheric ozone is the species considered a greenhouse gas.

6. How Climate Models Work

6.1 Models and Links

“A climate model is a computer based version of the Earth system, which represents physical laws and chemical interactions in the best possible way. We include the sub-systems of the Earth system, which is gained from investigations in the laboratory and measurements in reality. A global model is composed of data derived from the results of models simulating parts of the Earth system (like the carbon cycle or models of atmospheric chemistry) or, if possible with the available computer capacity, the models are directly coupled. The functionality of the models is tested by comparing simulations of the past climate with measured data we already have.”²

The energy of the Sun drives the Earth’s weather and climate. We will follow this energy as it falls through the atmosphere, warming the land and the oceans, to turn over the many interlocking cycles that produce the phenomena of climate. First, consider these major subsystems of climate, and the links between them.

The atmosphere will be represented by two models, one physical (M_Atmos_phys), one chemical (M_Atmos_chem). The physics model of the atmosphere will apply mechanics and thermodynamics to account for the temperature distribution, the generation of wind, the formation of clouds, as well as the vertical variation of properties on account of gravity. The chemical model of the atmosphere will produce the concentration of species, which results from the many chemical reactions possible at any elevation, given the local temperature and density of the atmosphere.

The oceans are represented by a model (M_Ocean) that links salinity and temperature to local current, and this current conveys heat (e.g., the Gulf Stream).

The biosphere may be modeled (M_Bio) as a series of sources and sinks of gases (O2, CO2), fluids (H2O), other substances (waste production, deforestation) and heat, which interacts with the oceans (M_Ocean) and atmosphere (M_Atmos_phys and M_Atmos_chem).

The carbon cycle can be singled out as a separate model (M_CO2) acting in parallel to the biosphere model.

Links between the ocean model and the atmospheric physics model would include the force of wind on the ocean, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation, and the cycles of (infrared) radiation and heat flow (by convection) between air and water.

It is understood that the physics models of the air and oceans include the effects of the Earth’s rotation. A schematic of the global model might be as follows (M = model, L = link, directions of influence can be > [right], < [left ] or <> [2 way], see footnote ² for a picture),

[M_Atmos_chem]<<[M_Bio]>>[M_Ocean].
[M_Atmos_chem]<>[M_Atmos_phys]‹L_heat>[M_Ocean].
[M_Atmos_chem]<>[M_Atmos_phys]>L_wind>[M_Ocean].
[M_Atmos_chem]<>[M_Atmos_phys]‹L_rain>[M_Ocean].
[M_Atmos_chem]<>[M_CO2]<>[M_Ocean].

One can imagine many refinements to this basic climate model. The first is obviously to include a land surface model, and link it to the atmosphere and oceans. The land surface model could be further elaborated by including dynamic aspects of vegetation (perhaps there would be overlap with the biosphere model). Another refinement is to account for the many particulates (e.g., dust, salt, droplets) in air, an aerosol model. Aerosols can scatter and absorb light (producing the “blue” of the sky), capture gas molecules on their surfaces and act as catalysts to certain chemical reactions, and they have a major impact on the formation of clouds. The injection of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere by large volcanic eruptions has cooled the planet and affected weather globally for a time (e.g., for 5 years after the Krakatoa eruption of 1883). Given that aerosols rain out into the oceans, one could add an ocean chemistry model (especially if considering ocean sequestration of CO2 as an active scheme; this would acidify the oceans and kill a variety of marine life). Another refinement would be to include a sea-ice model (heat flow at the ocean-air interface, light reflection) with links to the ocean and atmosphere models.

6.2 Space and Time, Scales and Resolution

The limitation to model complexity is not human imagination, nor any limit placed by the inventory of known facts about natural processes; it is the finite capacity of computing machines. Computer models of the oceans and the atmosphere will be calculations performed on a three dimensional wire-mesh representation (grid) of the space taken by the air and water. Such grids may include an enormous quantity of points and yet have very coarse resolution. Typical atmosphere models have a 250 km horizontal resolution and 1 km vertical resolution; they may have 20 horizontal (spherical shell) layers in the first 30 km of elevation (90 percent of the atmosphere is below 16 km, 99.99997 percent is below 100 km). Ocean models can have 125 km to 250 km horizontal resolution and 200 m to 400 m depth resolution (ocean depth can be as much as 10,000 meters).

“Small scale physical processes which are below the size of the grid cells cannot be explicitly resolved. Their net impact on the coarse scale processes is estimated and included into the model by parameterization. In the atmosphere this is in particular the case for cloud formation, in the ocean for small scale eddies and for convection processes.”²

Climate models are supposed to predict general conditions many years in the future (and reproduce the record of the past). So, they calculate across “big” cells of space and “long” steps of time. They “average over” small spatial effects and those of short duration, what we would experience as local weather and day-night cycles. It is easy to see that the daily oscillations of temperature during a “hot” July we recall from our past do not diminish our memories of having lived through a continuing “hot spell.” Climate models aim to predict these seasonal, even monthly averages, rather than reproduce (or predict) the filigrees of day-to-day weather variations about the mean conditions.

But, don’t small scale and short time effects have some impact on the bigger picture of climate? For example, doesn’t the formation and dispersal of clouds, though brief localized phenomena, affect climate in that they can effectively block sunlight, so that over many stormy seasons and places they might have significantly reduced the solar heating of the planet? Yes, which is why such effects are estimated, and these estimates are included in climate models as “parameters,” or, as affectionately know to all scientists, “fudge factors.” A fudge factor might be a table or formula derived from data or other work, which pairs a given property, say percentage cloud cover, to a quantity of the model, say relative humidity (percentage of water vapor in the air). A fudge factor might be elaborate (e.g., a separate computer subroutine, evaluated at every space and time step) or very elementary (e.g., a single and constant value for the needed factor, arbitrarily specified by the programmer for each run of the program).

The task of any climate model scientist is to improve the spatial and temporal accuracy of the model (finer grids, bigger computers), and to eliminate as many parameters (fudge factors) as possible by replacing them with self-consistent physics and chemistry models (mathematical abstractions of the actual processes). Like any crutch, fudge factors are only a problem when we remain wedded to them instead of trying to build up our strength (knowledge) so as to eliminate them from our activity. The immensity of the problem at hand, and the reality of any person’s finite resources means that some of these fudge factors will remain in use for quite some time. Recall that fudge factors show a recognition of considerations that one does not wish to ignore even though they may be difficult to handle. I imagine that these tasks make up most of the day-to-day, nitty-gritty work of climate modeling research.

7. Solar Heat into the Geartrain of Climate

The Sun, our star, has its own cycles of behavior (e.g., sunspots with an irregular cycle of about 11 years), which have been carefully studied and are now monitored by satellites. The quantity and spectrum of solar radiation arriving at the Earth at any given time (insolation) is known. Variations of solar radiation are relatively small, and for most purposes the output of the Sun can be taken as constant. The “solar constant” (1340 watts/meter²) is defined as the solar energy falling per unit time at normal incidence on a unit area of the Earth’s surface (ignoring the atmosphere). At any moment, Earth is intercepting 1.7×10¹⁷ watts, or 170 million gigawatts of solar power.

The motion of the Earth has several cycles whose collective effect influences changes in climate; these are Milankovitch cycles (Milutin Milankovitch, 1879-1958). One is a 100,000 year “ice age” cycle, which coincides with the periods of glaciation during the last few million years, the Quaternary Period. Milankovitch cycles are the net effect of three periodicities, those of eccentricity, axial tilt and precession. The eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is the “ovalness” of that circuit. The axial tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis (~north-south axis) is the angle between the plane of rotation (~the plane of the equator) and the orbital plane (the plane of the Earth’s orbit about the Sun). The precession is the wobble of the Earth’s axis (like the wobble of a spinning top). Milankovitch cycles are a major factor in climate change, but they do not explain everything about past climate (for which there is data).³

The ultraviolet portion of the solar flux begins interacting with the tenuous and ionized upper fringes of the atmosphere (from 50 km to 1000 km), before most of it is absorbed in the ozone layer (25 km) at the threshold to the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere. The visible light streams through a generally transparent atmosphere, except where it is reflected and scattered by clouds and aerosols. Visible light eventually strikes land or water, being absorbed, or it strikes ice and snow and is largely reflected. Solar energy absorbed into the Earth warms its surface, down to a depth of perhaps 100 meters, to an average (equilibrium) temperature of 15° C (59° F). Of course, at the immediate surface (down to at most 10 meters) the temperature is set by the latitude, season and local weather. Below, say 1 km, the heat produced by the Earth’s gravitational compression of its core becomes evident, and temperature increases with depth.

The surface of the Earth (-60° C to 50° C) radiates infrared photons of about 10^-20 Joules of energy, with frequencies in the range of 15,000 GHz, and wavelengths in the range of 20 micrometers (microns). As already described, greenhouse gases can absorb these photons and add heat to the atmosphere.

The absorbed solar energy powers many cycles. In the oceans, the flow of heat involves currents that include changes of salinity and density (and thus of depth). The thermohaline cycle is a complex “conveyor belt” of salt and heat linking all the world’s oceans. In general, ocean currents transport heat absorbed in tropical latitudes up (and, in the Southern Hemisphere, down) to higher latitudes. For example, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England experience warmer climate than is usual at their latitudes, comparable to those of Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands. Western Europe is warmed by the Gulf Stream, which emanates from the Caribbean Sea. Here, heat and evaporation produce a warm, salty and buoyant surface current that sweeps north along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, cooling in the North Atlantic, becoming denser, freshening by mixing with glacial melt south of Greenland, and then sinking to the ocean floor to continue in a circuitous path that has it bobbing up in tropical latitudes and sinking in polar ones. One theory about the effects of global warming holds that the melting of Greenland’s ice cap will dump so much fresh water into the North Atlantic that the thermohaline current will become so fresh (free of salt) and buoyant (less dense) that it will no longer sink there, thus stopping the convection of tropical heat to colder latitudes (the actual stopping of the massive momentum of this worldwide current might take decades to a century). Without such warming, the poles would once again ice over, and these ice caps could easily extend to mid latitudes, cooling the Earth into a new Ice Age.

The heat absorbed by the atmosphere, combined with the forces imparted to it by the rotation of the Earth, will produce patterns of circulation and a distribution of temperature that will change in response to the Milankovitch cycles, as well as alterations to atmospheric chemistry introduced by human activity. The 36 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm to 380 ppm represents the addition of 217 gigatons (metric tons) of carbon over the last two centuries, most of it during the last 50 years. The weight of suspended carbon has increased from the pre-industrial amount of 607 gigatons to 824 gigatons today.

For completeness, we note that the incidence of any low probability natural catastrophe, like the fall of a massive comet, or a caldera eruption (an extremely large volcanic eruption) could radically alter climate (and might be fun to model).

It is easy to see that there are many, many uncertainties, approximations, and links that any particular subsystem model relies on, and which in turn affect the accuracy and reliability of any global climate model. So, there is more than enough material for critics to point to as serious deficiencies. Where the criticisms are knowledgeable and specific, they will direct the efforts of climate modelers to refine their synthesis. Breakthroughs will come from scientists who put their minds to understanding why certain disagreements between climate models and reality persist. Whether such breakthroughs will put the final polish on the models, or utterly destroy them by giving birth to new conceptions, I cannot say.

8. Justifying the IPCC Consensus

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (2007) concluded that “Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” The report defines “very likely” as a probability greater than 90% that more than 50% of the observed warming is attributable to human activity.⁴ This statement represents the consensus of the scientific community.⁵

From a scientific point of view, the IPCC is a nightmare. From a government and corporate (sadly, the same) point of view, the IPCC is a useful bureaucracy that dampens the “alarmist” potentialities of unfiltered scientific findings being broadcast to the public. From the public’s perspective, the net result may be an acceptably reliable source of sobering information that gently understates the possibilities.⁶

The IPCC was established in 1988 by two U.N. organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The purpose of this panel is to evaluate the human impact on climate. The members of the panel are representatives appointed by governments, and they include scientists as well as others concerned with socio-economic (e.g., development) and policy issues. Besides an upper management and administration layer, the panel operates as three Working Groups (WG) assessing: I, the scientific research on climate; II, the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems; and, III, options (policies) for limiting greenhouse gas emission, and otherwise countering the potential hazards.

The “report” from the IPCC is actually in three volumes, one from each working group. The IPCC does not conduct any climate research itself, its scientists evaluate the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and their consensus on the state-of-the-art is then further smoothed into summary reports by the process of “committee authorship.” The WGI volume of the IPCC Technical Assessment Report (TAR) would be the essential scientific (as in math, physics, chemistry) report.

Any particular technical conclusion by WGI might represent a consensus of many individual scientific efforts, perhaps hundreds of published papers by thousands of scientists. For example, the attribution to anthropogenic CO2 emission for the global warming above what would be expected from natural causes relies, in part, on the observation that climate models that include natural causes of warming and anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases reproduce the data on global temperature rise (within a reasonable error band), while climate models that only have natural causes of warming do not reproduce this temperature history.⁴

It appears that the variety of choices made about their parameters (fudge factors, like for cloud cover) by the many climate modelers who were sampled were not the decisive factors in determining the average temperature rise. The process of peer-reviewed publication ensured that all the works sampled by the IPCC met good technical standards. So, the IPCC is making technical conclusions based on the overall trend of scientific findings, the “state of the art.”

The IPCC’s emphasis on technical conservatism is paid for by the deliberate (perhaps slow?) pace of publishing its findings. The recent observation of methane outgassing from melting tundras — a potentially huge new source of a high heat capacity gas — is not included in the latest IPCC report. The measured trends of global warming (e.g. temperatures and sea level changes) are always at the top of the ranges of predictions published by the IPCC.⁷

The IPCC is led by government scientists, and most of the panelists and authors are also scientists. The “political” people in the IPCC can just as easily be scientists who manage a more than purely scientific group process, which has multiple political sponsors under the UN umbrella. Clearly, scientists who distinguish themselves in the field of climate research can be invited and appointed to the panel. However, they can also be removed when their government’s key corporate sponsors find them too “alarming.” This was the case in the replacement of Robert Watson as IPCC chairman by Rajendra K. Pachauri in 2002. ExxonMobil had beseeched the Bush Administration to lobby the IPCC for this change.⁶

Any IPCC scientist will have both compelling and restraining motivations. Their original passion for science, the interest and excitement of the work, will drive them to uncover as much of the mechanisms of climate as they can, and to tell others about their findings and the implications to human society. When their results are accepted and adopted by other scientists in their field, their esteem rises, and they become invested in maintaining their technical reputations. These two motivations, one personal the other social, combine to push scientists into becoming advocates for their fields. However, successful government scientists are supremely political creatures who have mastered the art of extracting money from political structures to fund their activities. They understand the value (to their careers) of packaging the message for sponsor consumption; so the asperity of the raw and knotty truth emerging from science’s workbenches must be slipped into the most svelte form possible that preserves the facts. It is easy to see how these forces of personal psychology will find an equilibrium that matches the institutional character of the IPCC, a measured and deliberate style and a thorough technical conservatism (all scientists except the mad ones and the geniuses are terrified of ever being wrong). Politics slows and dampens the message from the IPCC, but it does not quash it.

9. Criticizing the IPCC Consensus

I am always happy to be in the minority. Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are unreliable. They are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behavior in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
– Freeman Dyson, 2007⁸

The bad news is that the climate models on which so much effort is expended are unreliable because they still use fudge factors rather than physics to represent important things like evaporation and convection, clouds and rainfall. Besides the prevalence of fudge factors, the latest and biggest climate models have other defects that make them unreliable. With one exception, they do not predict the existence of El Niño. Since El Niño is a major feature of observed climate, any model that fails to predict it is clearly deficient. The bad news does not mean that climate models are worthless. They are, as Manabe said thirty years ago, essential tools for understanding climate. They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate.
– Freeman Dyson, 1999⁹

That portion of the scientific community that attributes climate warming to CO2 relies on the hypothesis that increasing CO2, which is in fact a minor greenhouse gas, triggers a much larger water vapor response to warm the atmosphere. This mechanism has never been tested scientifically beyond mathematical models that predict extensive warming, and are confounded by the complexity of cloud formation — which has a cooling effect…. We know that [the sun] was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly… solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle.
– Ian Clark, 2004¹⁰

Our team… has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth’s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction in cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. …most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover.”
– Henrik Svensmark, 1997¹⁰

I’m not saying the warming doesn’t cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I’m saying that the problems are being greatly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. Not to mention the preservation of living creatures on land and in the ocean.
– Freeman Dyson, 2005⁹

This sampling of criticism of the IPCC consensus captures much of the substance of the opposition. Freeman Dyson, an extraordinary scientist, creative thinker and popular author, accurately focuses on the weakest technical elements in the entire CO2 climate computer calculation construction: fudge factors and coarse resolution (and, elsewhere, on the CO2-water vapor connection). Ian Clark, a hydrogeologist and professor at the University of Ottawa, succinctly states the doubts about the connection between CO2 and water vapor, and voices a belief in the controlling role of solar variability combined with Milankovitch cycles. Henrik Svensmark, an astrophysicist at the Danish National Space Center, describes a specific mechanism claimed to control the formation of low-level clouds and which is moderated by solar variability, hence a completely alternate theory of global warming (and climate) as a completely natural process. Finally, Dyson voices a sentiment common to the opposition critics that the failings they point to are so grave or unlikely to be overcome that the funding for climate modeling work should be drastically reduced.

Dyson’s point on fudge factors is that they stand in for physics that is missing (e.g., a detailed model of evaporation from the sea, condensation in the air, and precipitation; to arrive at a dynamic and spatially resolved reflectivity of the atmosphere: clouds), and they are arbitrarily adjusted to make the calculations agree with present trends. Once a set of “good” fudge factors is arrived at by matching the data, then the code is run far into the future to predict climate. However, this procedure relies on the unjustified assumption that the operation of the physics behind any fudge factor in that hypothetical future world is exactly like the operation of that physics today, even if those future conditions are very different. How do we know that the evaporation-precipitation cycle of that future time will result in exactly the same cloud cover fudge factor as occurs today? If the composition of the atmosphere (gases and aerosols) is very different, this would not be the case. The only reliable course is to actually put in the physics of the processes covered over by fudge factors, and allow them to be calculated in a self-consistent way with the evolving conditions. This criticism is so clear and correct, that one can only presume it is being addressed directly by cloud research and advances in climate modeling. Perhaps in a few years this will be solved; and it is even possible that the fudge factors won’t be that different.

Dyson’s other point is that models of greater resolution in space and time, which reproduce localized and transient phenomena like El Niño (a periodic warming in the mid Pacific Ocean, which is big compared to cell size), will boost the credibility of futuristic predictions. One can only assume that whatever features allowed one group to predict El Niño, at the time Dyson made his comments, have been studied, duplicated and elaborated upon by others since. Again, Dyson’s critique points to what should be (and I assume is) a major focus of climate modeling efforts.

Ian Clark asks for experimental verification of the theoretical CO2-water vapor link; the idea of CO2 capturing infrared energy, heating the atmosphere, which allows more water to evaporate and itself contribute to infrared absorption, thus forming an atmospheric heating positive feedback loop. As he notes, calculations of the effect readily support the hypothesis.
Experimental proof would have to be found in either observations in the natural world, or small scale experiments in a laboratory. Perhaps a comparison of observations of cloud formation and regional air temperature changes over heavily industrialized and urban areas — expected to emit significant CO2 — and remote unpopulated areas might show what effect, if any, excess CO2 has on local humidity and heating, or cloudiness and cooling. I can imagine such measurements being performed from fixed weather stations, ships, airplanes and satellites carrying infrared sensing instruments (heat sensing), radars (aerosol, droplets, cloud probing) and particle sampling filters (aerosols, dust, salt). Again, I imagine cloud physics experimental scientists, following in the footsteps of Vincent J. Schaefer (1906-1993), Bernard Vonnegut (1915-1997) and Duncan C. Blanchard, among others, are actively working to measure the reality of the situation. Another avenue would be to build a laboratory cloud chamber (a chamber with an air space above liquid water, and external controls over volume and pressure), introduce CO2, irradiate it with an infrared laser (e.g., CO2 laser) to selectively heat the CO2, and then measure the heating of the “air” (probably just N2) by inelastic collisions with CO2, and also the change in water vapor concentration. I would be happy to conduct this experiment if given a few million dollars and a plum academic appointment.

Recent findings from the study of ice cores shows that at certain times in the past the average temperature began rising hundreds of years before the increases in CO2 concentration. Some critics point to this as proving that solar heating alone controls climate change, and the rise in CO2 is a result of outgassing from warming seas and thawing tundras. This last effect is certainly true and happening today, but the occasional lag of past CO2 increases with temperature does not prove that the reverse cannot happen. Both the data and basic physics principles support the conclusion that the presence of CO2 amplifies warming initiated by any factor. At certain times in the past, solar-orbital (solar variability and Milankovitch cycle) effects initiated a warming phase, which caused CO2 to bubble out of warming seas and thawing tundras — a lagging effect — that amplified the warming, the further evaporation of water, and so on. Today, the artificial injection of CO2 into the atmosphere has added to its heat capacity and boosted whatever warming might have been occurring from strictly natural causes — a leading effect.⁴

A criticism often hurled back at critics is “well, what’s your explanation?” If the IPCC consensus is wrong about climate change, then what causes it? Henrik Svensmark provides one answer. His claim is that cosmic rays dominate the formation of tropospheric clouds, and the variability of the cosmic ray flux directly influences the variability of the Earth’s cloud cover, and as a result its solar heating, and ultimately its climate fluctuations.

Cosmic rays are very high energy photons and charged particles produced by some combination of nuclear reactions and powerful electromagnetic accelerating effects in deep outer space. The high energy of these rays makes them extremely penetrating, some pass through the diameter of the Earth without change. However, they do occasionally collide with atomic and molecular matter, and this causes a breakup scattering numerous particles (e.g., atomic ions, electrons) from the site of the collision. These collision fragments are detected in laboratories in cloud chambers. As these fragments whisk through the humid (supersaturated) atmosphere in the cloud chamber, they collide with molecules, initiating the formation of droplets, and the trail of each fragment shows as a string of droplets that can be photographed, recording the event. Svensmark’s claim is that cosmic rays that manage to interact near sea-level initiate the beginnings of cloud formation, a process called nucleation. Cloud physics scientists usually assume (and measure) that condensation nuclei are present in the form of salt particles, dust (soil, soot, pollen, microbes) and ice crystals.

Svensmark then describes how the variability of the Solar Wind (a flux of charged particles from the Sun) affects the distribution of magnetism in space around the Earth (well known physics), and how the solar-driven fluctuations of the extent of the Earth’s “magnetic shield” will allow more or less of the cosmic rays to penetrate to the surface. Magnetic fields deflect charged particles (like those inside the atoms of a piece of metal you bring close to a magnet), and conversely a large flux of charged particles can bend or distort a magnetic field. When the emission of Solar Wind is weak and the Earth’s magnetic field is extended further out into space, then a greater portion of the cosmic ray flux is deflected away; a strong Solar Wind compresses the Earth’s magnetic field, and cosmic rays find an easier approach. So, ultimately, the variations of the Solar Wind and of the unknown sources of cosmic rays manifest as variations of tropospheric cloud cover, which in combination with Milankovitch cycles set the heating and climate of the Earth — according to the theory.

Svensmark’s model has a great deal of good and interesting physics, but to establish it as fact will require a tremendous amount of quantification. It appeals to those who prefer an explanation of global warming that does not implicate industrialized society. One questionable assumption in this theory is that cosmic ray interactions dominate cloud formation, for if they do not, then the rest of the theory is unnecessary. Cloud physics is an old and sophisticated discipline, and the observations about the role of aerosols in nucleation and condensation cannot be so easily dismissed. Svensmark’s mechanism may actually occur, but at an insignificant level. Perhaps new data will bring new insights.¹¹

Finally, we allow Freeman Dyson to sum up the sense of many critics, that climate modeling research is overfunded. Professional science is a feeding frenzy, being almost entirely a captive of government and corporate funding. The competing sales pitches of various groups and factions in science can reach such levels of hyperbole, and sometimes mendacity, that knowing onlookers become disgusted. It may well be that some climate research people are sounding the alarm of imminent doom in order to get the munificent attention of sponsors, a technique that has proved successful for the military-industrial complex. Some scientific critics of climate modeling may be people who resent their few scraps from the feeding frenzy, jealousy is not unknown among science folk. Other science critics may be allowing their ideological inclinations to overly influence their scientific judgments as regards climate modeling, again, scientists are human and they can sometimes allow their emotions to cloud their thinking. Such people are more likely to use words like “hoax” and “myth.” Criticisms that have technical substance are valuable, whatever the critic’s judgment as to the ultimate value of climate modeling work. The best response is to improve the work.

10. The Open Cycle Closes

It is so hard to give up a comforting fantasy. The shock, denial and anger expressed about global warming is really a psychological resistance to the loss of the pleasurable illusion of the “open cycle.” There is no escape from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and there is no such thing as an “open system,” even though today’s obsessed consumers, and the corporate overlordship prefer to imagine otherwise. Thermodynamically and materially, we live in a fishbowl world, there is no possibility of ejecting waste from our tails and never again swimming through the consequences.

We have enjoyed many false open cycles: disposable bottles and packaging, disposable combustion engine exhaust gases, disposable chemicals and nuclear waste, disposable inner cities, disposable under-educated and under-employed populations, disposable foreign peasants encumbering resource extraction, and private profit at public expense.

The “use” we get out of any item has to be compared to the resource and energy “cost” of producing it from its raw materials, and then of absorbing it back into the processes that produce that energy and those raw materials. When we take responsibility for the impact of the entire cycle, then we are motivated to choose products (and “services”) with the highest ratios of use to cost.

As the expanding impact of global warming cracks through the filters on consciousness of more people, there will be an increasing competition to escape and profit from the consequences. One obvious example of this is the nuclear power industry’s enthusiastic adoption of the fearfulness of global warming, “we are the solution” they say. The profit motive is shameless.¹²

Environmentalists of Luddite persuasions will urge a repentant return to a de-industrialized, agrarian style of life. The military-industrial complex will see the possibilities of “getting into the green” with sales of “green” high technology to the equally messianic capitalist elite, revolted at the idea of sliding “backward” into Third World experience, hence thrusting “forward as to war” to save “our way of life.” Photovoltaics, engineered materials and solid-state micro-electronics are impressive and capable technologies, but they cannot be produced in the quantities and at the costs needed to meet the energy needs of the Third World.¹³

I think the best response to global warming is to greet it as the next challenge to human development — it certainly presents delectable problems to be solved by any engineer and thermodynamicist interested to devise machines and structures that convert sunlight to electricity. It is time to move beyond our dependency on the burning of paleontologic leavings. It is time to ride the wave of heat washing over the Earth from the Sun. We would leave behind many outmoded technologies, political economies, behaviors and ideas, in making this change. There is nothing “dooming” humanity with the approach of global warming, except the mental inertia that seeks to preserve our petty ignorance, prejudices and greed. The laws of physics present no barrier, and economics is always an artificial construction, which we could choose to configure for the benefit of everybody.

Consider this: solar power at 1 percent conversion efficiency on 2 percent of the land area of the USA would produce the total national electrical energy use of 4×10¹² kilowatt-hours/year. That is 13,400 kWh/y for each of nearly 300 million people.

Imagine if the expense, manpower and energy that has been put into the Iraq War since 2003 had been put into solar thermal plants (up to 5 percent efficient), solar updraft towers, mountain and offshore wind (instead of oil) derricks, and residential-scale solar, wind (vortex tube) and co-generation (use of “waste” heat from water heaters) electrical generators. Imagine if we seriously tried to electrify our transportation systems and made all such networks, from the neighborhood buses and trolleys to the transcontinental rail service, as free (and quickly available) to use as sidewalks and staircases; who would drive to sit in traffic jams?

At this point we have gone beyond WGI (the science of global warming), to the topics covered in WGIII (policies in response to global warming), a good place to stop. My own conclusion is that the best response to global warming would be a fundamental change in the nature of human society. Logically, there is no requirement that human society change, but then there is also no requirement that it prosper or even survive.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Jean Bricmont and Roger Logan for interesting questions.

(web sites active on 4-5 May 2007)

1. Greenhouse Gas
2. How Does A Climate Model Work?
3. Milankovitch cycles
4. Attribution of Recent Climate Change
5. Scientific Opinion on Climate Change
6. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
7. Arctic Sea Ice Melting Much Faster Than Expected
8. More on Freeman Dyson
9. Freeman Dyson
10. Scientists Opposing the Mainstream Scientific Assessment of Global Warming
11. Vincent J. Shaefer and John Day, A Field Guide To The Atmosphere (The Peterson Field Guide Series), Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1981. Louis J. Battan, Cloud Physics and Cloud Seeding Anchor/Doubleday, 1962. Duncan C. Blanchard, From Raindrops To Volcanoes Anchor/Doubleday, 1967.
12. “Mirage And Oasis — Energy Choices In An Age Of Global Warming,” New Economics Foundation (NEF), June 2005, ISBN-1-904882-01-3. UN Facing a Backlash on Emissions Action Plan
13. “The Energy Challenge For Achieving The Millennium Development Goals,” UN-Energy, 22 July 2005. “Energizing The Millennium Development Goals, A Guide To Energy’s Role In Reducing Poverty,” United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), August 2005. “Energy For The Poor: Underpinning The Millennium Development Goals,” Department For International Development, Government of the United Kingdom, August 2002, ISBN-1-86192-490-9. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, Economics As If People Mattered (Blond & Briggs, Ltd., London; Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973).