My company, www.cliffsidesoftware.com created a software application Plan AHEAD (all hazard exercise administration and development) that scripts any disaster training exercise (like the quake exercise last week in California, only for Nuclear plants, or violence in the workplace, or bio-terrorists, or whatever you wish to consider a disaster...turns out that a tornado is a disaster to a city, but, every "management plan" has a set of disasters associated with it...Consider, a competitive price decrease could be a disaster to a marketing plan. My product can improve the performance of ANY MANAGEMENT PLAN. You'd think that someone might actually want a product that could improve managment plans...but, while it is a fact that my product could save the world we discovered the world doesn't want to be saved!)
1. Terrorism
Conventional wisdom: A nuclear attack is the biggest terrorist threat we face.
But even if a nuclear bomb fizzles, can't it spread deadly radioactivity? And what about a "dirty bomb," a smaller weapon specifically designed to do just that?
A dirty bomb has NOTHING to do with a nuclear weapon. Just strap some uranium around some dynamite, and set it off in NYC anywhere. That's a dirty bomb. Has nothing to do with killing people, but the terror of radiation experienced by the average Joe and Jane Schmoe will render NYC uninhabitable for years to come.
I sat with dozens of NBC experts (nuclear, biological and chemical is what they used to call it) and listened to them spell out this very scenario 10 years ago. Nothing has changed, it's an ugly one, and while Mr Muller may feel comfortable wandering around the deserted city of NY after the dirty bomb, believe it, not many others will for a very long time afterwards...duck and cover every one, even if it isn't necessary, it's what we've all been taught.
Cleaning up after it will cost billions, regardless of how small it was to begin with, and the psychological damage will wreak havoc.
What we MUST do about terror is return to the Pre-BUSHCO definition:
"Terrorism - criminal acts in pursuit of political goals" period. Emphasis on CRIMINAL acts is the key.
This would allow a POLICE, not a MILITARY, response...and would be far more effective.
Coordination of POLICE in various countries is far more appealing to all the populace in all those countries. Our "unmanned-predator" incursions into Pakistan is going to do nothing but bad things. If the police in Pakistan were given tools to deal with terrorists, they could actually make headway and the population would thank us!
The "war on terror" was a sham to begin with. It was ALWAYS about oil and oil alone.
You cannot go to war on a tactic first of all. And no amount of military response will ever quash terrorists...
Secondly, if we're at war, to whom ought we surrender? Kinda difficult since we aren't at war in the first place y'all. Wars are fought against and between countries. Terrorists are state-free entities.
Police them out of existence, share their fingerprints, give them no where to hide, that will erase them...instead of making them into local heros in Swat (that's a real place).
2. Energy While I agree with the author that energy not used is the most effective thing we could do (better insulation, no more "fast on" TVs and PCs, no more led clocks in every appliance, turning off PCs at night, turning up thermostats in summer and down in winter, more sweaters!) it isn't going to help, until the world recognizes there are too many people on the planet, and that's the real culprit.
Of course the author makes no statement about this elephant in the room...what does his "physics" have to say about overpopulation?
You can "save energy" to the nth degree, and simply go out of business.
The author makes no statement about where energy ought to come from...(although I read a really cool (literally) idea about how the liquid hydrogen we'll need for cars could be transported around in pipes and thereby provide for supercooled and superconducting electrical lines to make them far more efficient (no loss during transmission from hydro/nuclear/solar/whatever generation!). So we solve the availability of hydrogen as an energy source while providing far greater efficiency of the electrical grid at the same time....possibly producing enough additional electricity (that is currently lost in tranmission) to crack the water needed to make the hydrogen...but oh well...
3. Nuclear Energy
Conventional wisdom: Nuclear power would be great if only we could figure out how to get rid of the horrific waste. Plutonium lasts 24,000 years. There is absolutely no way we can keep that waste safe for such a ridiculously long time.
He just said it all. No consideration of those 10,000 years from now, who won't be around anyway since there are far too many of us destroying the entire ecosystem of the planet currently to sustain human life in any form for that long regardless.
4. Space
4. Space
All of our greatest space science has come from robots.
Fine, so what? Space spending is a true nit in the budget. While many wonderful things have come of it (like Tang)...who cares about manned versus unmanned. We have a world we're killing right here, and space ain't going to provide shelter anytime soon.
5. Global Warming
5. Global Warming
Conventional wisdom: Because the United States is responsible for about one fourth of the excess carbon dioxide that drives the greenhouse effect, the key to solving the problem is for America to go green.
This guy is a jingoist nut. We've not paid for our excesses, the world is now got our inheritance, and, sure, while we not growing our footprint as fast as China and India, what does that have to do with anything?
We're certainly not shrinking our footprint in the SLIGHTEST, unless you consider the recent gasoline prices and recession to have slowed our carbon outputs...
We're certainly not shrinking our footprint in the SLIGHTEST, unless you consider the recent gasoline prices and recession to have slowed our carbon outputs...
Some say the United States needs to set an example. But it already has: Once a country is wealthy, it can afford to cut back on carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, by the time China is as wealthy as the United States, the world will very likely be 5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.
Full of crap.
How has the US cut back on CO2 emissions? What are we doing about the warming arctic and the methane bubbling up from the depths and the permafrost? What about the glaciers that are disappearing, and thereby destoying the watersheds downstream? What about the agricultural excess fertilizers that create over 400 dead zones in what were the most productive ocean estuaries and their offshore fish nurseries and the bleaching coral reefs?
The world is doomed for human life. Period. but hey, I said that already!
By the way, just to really add some truth, burning coal releases TONS of uranium into the atmosphere every year. No one seems to know or know what to do about that little tidit...
Message for Obama: If we want to stop global warming, then our focus must be on the developing world. Wealthy countries could start by financing clean coal in China. For $50 billion per year, we could at least make sure that new coal plants in China are capable of sequestering carbon dioxide. Sending that kind of money to China would have been a tough sell during the election, but now that the campaign is over, it is time to come clean—about getting clean—to the American people.
How are we to "ensure new coal plants are capable of sequestering carbon dioxide"? That's insanity, there is no such thing as "clean coal" unless we found a way to build a space elevator (not totally impossible, stable platform at 26,000 miles up, with a long buckyfibre rope or two to allow for the transport of all kinds of nasty stuff into space (radioactive stuff, carbon stuff, etc.)
Carbon sequestration is a chimera of the coal industry, no demonstration plant even yet.
And no sense that it will stay down in the shafts we shove it, or not migrate to spoil aquifers, etc. etc. etc. Pure Unadulterated "prayer" and equally effective without any basis in physics or reality.
Richard Muller, he's a true dick!
Richard Muller, a MacArthur Prize winner, is the author of Physics for Future Presidents (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008) and a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Dear President Obama:
The market will sort out the energy stuff, the energy companies don't like the idea of not having any consumers around to buy it, so they'll wake up soon.
Similarly, the market will sort out the pollution and dying fisheries and agricultural runoff etc.
What you can do is promote freedom from children, world wide, through education of women (and men), freely available contraception to all, and let people have a true choice in the matter.
They always choose smaller families, given a choice.
Erase any and all laws that encourage larger families, like child tax credits, any benefits to marriage in relation to children, etc.
That's how you can help save the planet President Obama.
Cheers,
Frish
See: www.vhemt.org for the only answer that provides for the future of life on Earth.
Can't wait to read the reactions, thanks Gary for the opportunity to rant!
