16. The Coming Permanent State of Emergency
Instead of rational policies and programs aimed at mitigating climate change, and protecting the environment for the betterment of all people and all species, today and tomorrow, and over and above the obscene but ongoing tax breaks and expenditures in devastating energy industries, the military-industrial complex has invested billions of dollars into research and development of weather-as-weapon technologies.
“Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use has never been explicitly part of the United Nations agenda on climate change… The clash between official negotiators, environmentalists and American business lobbies has centered on Washington's outright refusal to abide by commitments on carbon dioxide reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The impacts of military technologies on the world's climate are not an object of discussion or concern. Narrowly confined to greenhouse gases, the ongoing debate on climate change serves Washington's strategic and defense objectives.” [275]
July and August, 2002, saw record heat waves for days straight in the western USA. For six U.S. states -- the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia in the east, Colorado and Wyoming in the west -- July wrapped up the driest August-to-July year in their history. Several Western states, struggling with arid pastures, range, and cropland, were declared agricultural disaster areas by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The U.S. Forest Service saw one of the worst wildfire years in history: More than 4 million acres burned, nearly twice the average year-to-date over the past decade. Only the state of Texas bucked the trend: Texas saw record floods in early July in what became the third-wettest July on record for the Lone Star State. [276]
In July 2002, the northern California city of Redding saw record-breaking temperatures of 115 degrees; in Bakersfield, some 400 miles away, the temperature reached 109. [277] The mercury also hit the all-time record of 108 for the second straight day in Reno, Nevada, and rose to 109 in Boise, Idaho. Meanwhile, in Texas, over a foot of rain fell in record time, causing major flooding. Massive fires raged throughout the west.
On April 28, 2002, an “unusually wide and potent swath of thunderstorms plowed across the eastern half” of the U.S., killing at least six people, inflicting 93 others with minor to critical injuries; a tornado struck New York; heavy snow hit Wisconsin and Minnesota. [278] By March 14, 2002, widespread droughts plagued most of the U.S.: Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Virginia saw the driest September to February ever. These droughts persist: in some areas the aggregate precipitation deficits “are comparable to missing a full year of rain.” The entire state of Wyoming was declared a drought disaster area. [279] Montana is reverting to desert. [280] The southern U.S. has seen an absence of frost in some areas. [281] May 18th brought over 3 inches of snow to parts of New England.
The tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland has begun to thaw, there are changes in species’ behaviors and migrations, and species even recently prolific are absent. To the horror of indigenous peoples, places where they have always known only icepack have become open sea. As we might predict from a world inclined to ignore or suppress evidence of climatic mayhem, “Explaining the quick thaw and determining its cause -- whether human or natural -- has so far eluded the experts.” [282]
The past existence of “doomsayers” and “alarmists” does not preclude the need for immediate action. Many of the so-called “alarmists” have been vindicated by evidence that their predictions greatly underestimated the imminent cataclysms. Little substantive change, in a positive sense, has occurred since the first warnings were issued decades ago, and public subsidies and public policies dictated by multinational corporations have accelerated our demise. [283]
International agreements already being implemented, and climate-change protocols on the books, and treaties currently under debate, will not stop climatic mayhem. Climatic mayhem manifests globally and locally as severe weather events: ice storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves and earthquakes.
Access to clean water and fresh air are basic human rights, and as it is with agriculture, energy, fisheries, and forestry, access to these has been compromised by the inability and unwillingness of state and federal regulators, and the people at large, to deal with human-induced climate change. In combination with other major social and environmental factors, it is expected to increasingly cause: declining agricultural production; epidemics of disease; insect infestations; fisheries depletion; mass species extinctions; economic disasters; population displacements; homelessness; societal conflict; and war. No one is immune, and, here again, it would behoove us all to recall that money cannot be eaten. [284]
Our systems of economic accounting (e.g. GDP, GNP) count as profits all the coal and oil the world consumes, but fail to enter the resulting environmental and social damage on the global balance sheet. “A nation could exhaust its mineral reserves, cut down it’s forests, erode its soils, pollute its aquifers, and hunt its wildlife to extinction – all without affecting measured income.” [285]
The science of climate change, the oil and coal industry have spent millions to tell us, is far from clear. The nuclear industry peddles its poisons, on the other hand, promising us that they are “clean and safe” antidotes to greenhouse warming. The interests of the energy industries and the policies they have peddled at the state and federal levels reflect a business-as-usual attitude that is arrogant, indifferent and hostile to all life. Indeed, the reality is that billions of dollars are being pumped into programs serving the defense and intelligence imperatives of climate modification and weather warfare.
Through the mysterious teleconnections of the earth’s climate, the effects of distant climate behavior are seen in weather instabilities, severe storms and shifting precipitation patterns – localized – throughout the United States. Cases of equine encephalitis, the worst winter drought in the history of the state (2001/2002), the decline in offshore fish stocks are all teleconnected to greater human-induced environmental instabilities. It is precisely the dearth of human scientific knowledge – in sharp contradistinction to the arrogance of western empirical science -- given the already visible effects of climatic mayhem, which dictates that a revolution in human thought and action is imperative.
We are already dealing with the dire consequences – no matter how innocent or unconscious or malicious are the causes – of human ignorance, technological arrogance, military adventurism and simple greed. [286] We have reached a point where we can no longer be sure, with absolute certainty, that day will follow night and water will always flow downhill. (As any mathematician will tell you, such is the nature of non-linear processes, threshold effects and boundary value instabilities.)