Letter from America - 5 April 2002

We were talking the other week about words, scientific terms mostly, mostly in medicine, which were new to me when I arrived here but were used familiarly by young college people because they knew what they meant, because they had all had biology in High School where as we in England had not.

But now how about the buzz words tossed around with equal confidence by British and Americans alike? Words they don’t know the meaning of, I’m thinking of words like syndrome, virus, Alzheimer’s, halzheimers, in current cocktail chatter it’s used as a synonym for senility, and Virus you know the French doctors say “Virus” is a word American doctors use when they don’t know what’s wrong with you. Just as a distinguished French doctor said “We tell patients they have a liver crisis, we figure that since the liver has over a hundred functions it must be affected by everything from a pimple to a stomach ache, so if we tell everybody its nothing more than a liver crisis they go away happy. If we said they had a virus they’d go into panic. So I suppose Americans feel better with a virus but would become hysterical if you told them they had a liver crisis”.

I had my troubles with “Virus” and was made to feel very, very foolish. Once at a very small party, four or five people. Somebody, maybe it was me was sniffling and I airily suggested it might be a virus. I didn’t know that there was a doctor present, but he sucking his teeth said “I doubt it, I don’t think it has protein coat”. Now that was a stopper if ever I heard one, I made a point of finding out about it, and when years later I was addressing a couple of thousand doctors assembled in California from around the world I quietly tipped off a friend to ask a pre arranged question, Shocking, disingenuous, bouderish? Presidents of the United States do it routinely before every press conference. Anyway at the end of the address I looked out over an ocean of eager faces when a man, I wonder who, got up and said “Would you mind giving us your own definition of a virus?” Certainly I said trippingly off the tongue “a virus is one of numerous kinds of simple organisms smaller than bacteria, mainly of nucleic acid in protein coat, existing only in living cells and able to cause disease” it brought the house down.

Well now this brings us to a phrase that I hear or read everyday, but its one I don’t dare use because while I know what the standard definition is I’m not sure when it happens and when it doesn’t. Because the world seems to be divided into two sets of very opinionated people, those who say “its global warming” and those who say “it got nothing to do with global warming!” I think we’d better look into it as something happened last week that some people believe signifies the coming end, the coming end of all of us in this hemisphere any way by drowning.

First let’s agree on the simplicities. The earth absorbs radiation from the sun, and sends it back into space as heat. Some of this returning heat is trapped by what are called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which therefore increase the warmth of the earth’s surface and the atmosphere. The principle villain or suspect in greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide, which is given off by burning what they call “fossil fuels” coal, oil, natural gas which we use abundantly for travel transport, electricity, heating. We incidentally are in order of usage or “guilt”, the United States, China, Russia and Japan, India and Germany. We have respectable statistics to show that since 1800 the concentration in the world atmosphere of carbon dioxide has increased with the progress of the industrial revolution, by thirty percent. Other gases methane for instance by a hundred and forty five percent. The only way to slow things down they say is to find other ways than coal, oil, natural gas of producing energy, which is quite an order when you considered the hundreds of ways in which millions of humans let off carbon dioxide, among several other “trapping” gases into the atmosphere.

In this country which has more than half the worlds motor cars, environmentalists go on angrily about the need to stop using these nocuous sources, I ought to say I have never heard of an environmentalist who has given up his car for a horse. But of course they are right, though they do tend not to take account of the rather frantic research that many governments are doing to find a replacement source of energy that will be available and cheap. Car Pooling insulating better light bulbs are well intentioned, but very much a “quick fix” measure.

In this country NASA, the national space agency, is working on a very ambitious project of making wind powered turbines and the raw material they are working on is nothing but air turbulence itself.

In Germany they’re working on an automobile whose tailpipe emits only water vapour, and Japan as you might expect is on to something which sounds really exciting and doable, solar sun cells thin as paper and just a cheap which could make every house and cottage the source of its entire need for electricity.

In the mean time the greens accuse the government and the oil companies of resisting stricter laws to reduce the emission of the villains we know about, and the industry replies that to do so would greatly damage industrial production, which would wound the economies everywhere and head us into a depression before we find the “magic bullet” or “non-emitter” worse predictions are to hand.

Two weeks ago the marvellous satellite pictures showed us an unimaginable scene of the sudden breakaway of the Larson ice shelf in Antarctica. The shelf is a floating extension of the ice cap that covers the whole of Antarctica it’s twelve thousand years old it’s two hundred metre thick and weighs five hundred billion tons of ice, and all this collapsed and broke away in a few weeks, and what does it portend? As max wall used to say “but what does it all mean?” Well here is the response in a letter to the New York Times of a dedicated environmentalist who knows a great deal about the perils of global warming. “This sudden collapse” quote, he says “indicates that the risk of fossil fuel dependency may be too high, failure to act ensures several more oil spills, more pollution in the lungs of city dwellers, more terrorists, more alliances with inhumane regimes not to mention the unlikely but horrible possibility of a global climate so altered as to cause environmental damage and human suffering more vast than any war”.

Well now let us bring in the testimony of another expert Professor Stott, Professor of Biogeography ant London University no less. He’s written a powerful and for some of us a persuasive book with a challenging title of “Science, Myth and Power” I’m always attracted to any historian who puts the word myth in his title, because it shows at once he is aware of how much myth and unauthenticated legend go into the regular school and college teaching of history of any kind. Well Professor Stott has taken up the huge case of what he calls “The dramatic demise of the Larsen B ice shelf” reminding us that it’s only one of five ice shelves that scientists have monitored, he begins by reassuring us on one point that is the main point of people who fear vast floods, and the drowning of our especially north eastern American seaboard. “because Larsen is a floating part of a huger ice sheet and not over land it’s melting does not raise the level of the sea. Antarctica Indeed” this brash fellow says “is more complex than that and provides little support for a simplistic myth of the “apocalypse now” school of journalism. Ice leads or shelves in open water that cause such alarm to cruise ship passers by, will break up in strong winds and find smaller reaches of open water, in fact” says Professor Stott “research on the west Antarctic ice sheet has shown precisely the opposite trend that Larsen B is getting thicker not thinner, Antarctica” he reminds us “has many climates and many glaciological regime, and the temperature in the centre of this ice sheet has been falling throughout the last fifty years. Extreme greens and sensational journalists” he laments “pretend that every environmental event is of our making” If only! “in spite of the point five centigrade rise in temperature of our planet in the past hundred and fifty years” The professor says “this is a short term interruption in the main trend which is coming, another ice age, cool comfort” he says “for global warmers!”

His clinching point is that there’s pretty conclusive evidence that the ice sheet in the Ross sea area poses no threat to eastern long Island or Frinton-on-sea. That it’s actually growing by as much as twenty six point eight gigatonnes a year, and if you don’t know what a gigatonne is we shouldn’t even be discussing this thing, at least not in front of the children.

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