PREFACE
1. Meteosat-1, the first European geostationary weather satellite, was launched in November 1977 from Kourou, near the equator in French Guiana. This came a few years after the first American geostationary, but it was the first to include a water vapor channel, i.e., to observe at infrared wavelengths at which the water vapor in the atmosphere prevents radiation from the surface from escaping to space. Like all geostationary satellites, whether for Earth observation or communications relay, Meteosat is in a circular orbit at an altitude of 36,000 km (22,400 mi.), moving around Earth in the same time that it takes our planet to make a complete rotation. Its normal position is above the intersection of the equator and the Greenwich meridian (longitude 0). The Meteosat series has been extremely successful, and spare models kept in reserve have at times been shifted to other longitudes.
2. In the original: “Mit Eifer hab ich mich der Studien beflissen; zwar weiss ich viel, doch möcht ich alles wissen.” I remember this line so well because my mother would often quote it and other lines from Goethe, which she remembered from her school days in Berlin. But sometimes I wonder if these particular lines were not to make fun of me.
PROLOGUE
1. The same is true with the Greek pneumatikos for the Holy Spirit as well as ordinary breath, and in words derived from Latin such as spirit and respiration.
2. If it appears politically incorrect to write of man and his mastery, let me object that men have played at being masters long enough to take the blame for their mistakes. But women have nearly always been the ones to carry the water from the wells.
3. This is the explanation often given for the decline of the Harappan civilization in the Indus valley, or that of the Sumerians along the Euphrates (Jacobsen 1958), but it is not the only one. Other environmental disasters have been invoked, such as catastrophic floods subsequent to a major earthquake.
4. Now that we see satellite images of Earth on television weather channels every day, we’ve all become extraterrestrial observers. Of course, Venus is entirely cloud-covered, as are the giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, etc.); clouds are rare on Mars, and totally absent on Mercury. On Earth, clouds are common but not constant; the extraterrestrial (or satellite) observer who wants to see the surface (for commercial, military, or other reasons) has good chances of doing so, but must take clouds into account.
5. As noted by Alistair C. Crombie (1959:129), the idea that rain is the source of the water for springs and rivers was developed earlier by Conrad von Megenburg (1309–1374) and goes back to the Roman architect Vitruvius in the first century B.C.
6. Bernard Palissy (1510–1590) had many artistic accomplishments (architecture and ceramics, in particular polychrome enamelware) in addition to his writings on “natural philosophy.” Although he lived to eighty, he died in terrible circumstances in the Bastille jail after a last-minute reprieve from execution as a “heretic.” It was risky to be a Protestant and a free spirit in sixteenth-century France. A street in Paris is named after him.
7. Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac (1778–1850) also has his street in Paris. So do Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) and Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) as well as Berthollet, Fourcroy, and Guyton de Morveau.
8. At standard conditions of atmospheric temperature 14°C and pressure 1,000 hectopascals (or millibars).
9. After the definition of the metric system, a standard bar of length one meter was fabricated (and it is still kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, in Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris). Later, it was decided to maintain that bar as defining the meter even though new measurements slightly changed the size of Earth expressed in those meters. Also, the planet Earth is not a perfect sphere. The circumference around the equator is 40,077 km; along a meridian, passing through the poles, it is 40,032 km. Note that the changes amount to less than 0.2 percent of the 40,000 km (about 25,000 statute miles, where a mile was originally the Roman unit of 1,000 paces). The Earth’s circumference around the equator is 21,600 nautical miles (360×60, since 1 nautical mile is by definition exactly one arc minute). However, the British Admiralty and the U.S. Coastal Survey disagree slightly on the exact value in feet.
10. These issues are explored at a nonspecialist level in the book by Philip Ball (1999), and new research results continue to appear.
11. Mediterranean water also exits that way to the northeast. In their book Noah’s Flood, William Ryan and Walter Pitman (2000) note that sailors heading north in the Bosphorus (between Istanbul and Asia Minor) once used weights suspended from their boats into the current of salty Mediterranean water flowing along the bottom of the strait toward the Black Sea, to help them fight the surface current flowing the other way.
1. BEGINNINGS
1. Fred Hoyle (1920–2001), English astrophysicist, cosmologist, and science fiction writer, never was convinced of the Big Bang (Hoyle, Burbidge, and Narlikar 2000).
2. The development of modern cosmology is narrated in many popular books and college texts on astronomy and the history of science. See, for example, Munitz (1957), Weinberg (1993).
3. American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) pioneered the use of light and easy-to-assemble structures for enclosing small and large spaces. He formulated the geodesic dome concept in 1942, based on abstractions of pure geometry. The discovery that nature used the same design on much smaller scales came much later: an example of what Paul Davies (1993) calls “The Mind of God"?
2. THE CHURNING OF THE EARTH
1. David S. McKay and colleagues at the NASA Johnson Space Center found microscopic structures inside meteorite ALH48001, known to have reached the Earth coming from Mars, which they identified as fossil Martian bacteria. Other researchers cite contamination problems and certain details of the meteorite’s mineralogy as evidence against this (Gibbs 1998).
2. The Mars science fiction trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson (1993) treats this theme, developed as a possible real-life scenario by Christopher P. McKay (1999) of the NASA Ames Research Center.
3. Of course, there have been some disappointments (1999–2000), with the grotesque failure of one mission because of inconsistency between the metric units used by NASA scientists and the “English” units dear to industry engineers, and the still unsolved mystery of the last lost Mars Lander. But continued analyses of data from unmanned satellites put in orbit around Mars confirm that there were once oceans on Mars, and that in at least one area liquid water may have emerged at the surface quite recently, i.e., thousands or millions rather than billions of years ago (Zorpette 1999; Malin and Edgett 2000). Although more and more data will be sent by robot systems, the urge to send men and women to Mars may yet prove irresistible before the first half of the 21st century is over.
4. The NASA interplanetary probe Galileo, which first entered the Jupiter system in December 1995, provided key data on the oceans of Europa (Pappalardo, Head, and Greeley 1999).
5. Already in the seventeenth century, satirist and playwright Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) wrote about life on other worlds; best known as the swordsman hero of Edmond Rostand’s play of 1897 (also a movie), Cyrano really existed. In 1686, Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) published a volume of Conversations on the plurality of inhabited worlds with Madame la Marquise de G****). See also Shklovskii and Sagan (1966:2–10).
6. In 1999, uncontaminated inclusions of extraterrestrial water in liquid form were identified in a meteorite fallen in Monahans, Texas, thanks to the quick reaction of the boys who found the meteorite and brought it without delay to the NASA center in Houston.
7. Predicting just how bright a comet will be is very risky, especially if the predictions are exaggerated in the media. There have been dismal disappointments and spectacular surprises. In the spring of 1997, I was astounded to be able to see comet Hale-Bopp in the sky amid the lights of downtown Paris from my apartment terrace.
8. An “excited” atom is one in which one or more of the electrons is found in a higher orbit than usual, the “kick” coming either from radiation or from a collision with another atom or other particle.
9. See, for example, Dessler (1991), Deming (1999), and Frank and Sigwarth (1999).
10. The question of a (nearly) completely ice-covered “snowball Earth” is again a “hot” topic, after discovery of geological evidence of low-latitude sea-level glaciation some 400 million years ago, that only a part of the then-tropical oceans remained ice-free, and that this situation played a major role in biological evolution before violent and prolonged volcanic activity put an end to it by copious emissions of greenhouse gases (Hoffman and Schrag 2000).
11. This theme was first developed in modern terms by Ichtiaque Rasool and Catherine De Bergh (1970), then at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
12. The French title—L’Ecume de la Terre—meaning “the scum of the Earth,” was not retained in the English translation (Allègre 1988). Claude Allègre, who won the distinguished Crafoord Prize in geology in 1984, more recently made the news in his role as French Socialist minister of education and research, working hard to introduce some necessary reforms but ending up being thrown to the wolves.
13. Similarly, the death toll was very high in the Izmit (Turkey) earthquake of August 1999. Although the building codes took proper account of the seismic risk, they were not well observed in too many cases. India was badly hit in January 2001.
14. The death toll (several hundred) was not negligible even so, but without evacuation it would have been far worse. Of course, there was no way to avoid the effects on the environment and the atmosphere, and the slight blockage of sunlight by particles resulting from the eruption partially reversed the course of global warming over the following two years.
15. More recently, on July 17, 1998, a local tsunami drowned thousands in Papua New Guinea. Frank González (1999) discusses its causes.
3. ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE
1. Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), who made important contributions on electrolytic dissociation, was the first to raise the question of global warming by reinforcement of the greenhouse effect due to fossil fuel burning (at the time, in 1895, about 500 million tons of carbon per year, more than ten times higher today). The warming of a few degrees that he calculated for the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere is quite close to modern estimates.
2. Indeed, Thomas Gold (2000) has argued that such heat-loving bacteria populate a massive “deep hot biosphere.”
3. American Harold C. Urey (1893–1981) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for his discovery of the deuterium isotope of hydrogen, and of heavy water (HDO and D2O). During World War II, his group at Columbia University developed the science of uranium isotope separation as part of the Manhattan Project. He made numerous important contributions to the science of planetary atmospheres, so that many astronomers consider him as much an astronomer as a chemist.
4. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) first earned his living in Holland as a draper, but later turned to playing with lenses. Although he never knew much about natural history, his invention of the microscope and his precise descriptions of the marvelous world of the small earned him the title of “father of protozoology and bacteriology.”
5. I here allude to the idea that a monkey typing at random long enough would end up producing all of Shakespeare’s plays and indeed everything ever printed using that character set (but a real monkey would get bored long before, and even if not, the world might end).
6. In his book The Double Helix, American biochemist James D. Watson (1981; originally published 1968) describes vividly the race for discovery of DNA structure, for which he and his English colleagues Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, working at the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge, U.K.), received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Many observers believe that Rosalind Franklin, working in the same team, should also have received a share in the prize.
7. See Danchin (1990).
4. CATASTROPHES
1. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), French Jesuit priest, geologist, paleontologist, and philosopher, made important discoveries on the origins of modern man during his long stay in China. He later popularized a personal philosophy of evolution. Although initially the Roman Catholic church viewed his writings with disfavor and forbade him to teach in Catholic establishments, it eventually relented.
2. See Gould (1991).
3. For a philosopher’s exploration of the role of chance in the world and the affairs of man, see the book Luck by Nicholas Rescher (1995).
4. Erwin (1993, 1996) has argued for lowered sea level as the cause of this extinction, but also considers extraordinary volcanic activity as a possible factor. Dramatic release of methane has also been discussed.
5. Genera: plural of genus. In biological classification, the genus is the division just below the family and just above species. Thus, we humans are in the Animal Kingdom, in the Phylum of Chordata, in the Class of Mammalia, the Order of Primates, the Family of Homonidae, Genus Homo, Species Homo sapiens.
6. See Shklovski and Sagan (1966:100), still a very enjoyable book.
7. Some specialists estimate the age of the boundary at 68 million years, some at 65 million. The exact value can be argued about, but what is important is the fact that whatever the event was, it changed things radically in a relatively short time, less than a million years.
8. One often speaks of volcanic dust, and indeed there can be a lot of it in the air immediately after an eruption, and on the ground not much later. What counts for climate is the veil of particles (aerosols) that form and remain suspended for long periods in the stratosphere, where the particles can’t be rained out. The most important of these are sulfuric acid crystals and other sulfate particles formed from the sulfur dioxide gas (SO2) exhaled in the eruption.
5. ICE, MOON, AND PLANETS
1. From the story by H. G. Wells (1927):
You see, when Mr Fotheringay had arrested the rotation of the solid globe, he had made no stipulation concerning the trifling movables on its surface…. So that the village, and Mr Maydig, and Mr Fotheringay and everybody and everything had been jerked violently forward at about nine miles per second—that is to say, much more violently than if they had been fired out of a cannon.
2. Although the Red Sea is usually given as the Exodus crossing site, most scholars note that the Hebrew Yam Suf is better translated as the Sea of Reeds, probably referring either to a shallow northward extension of the Red Sea or to one of the Bitter Lakes further north. It was much later that the battle of Jericho was fought and prolonged by Joshua 10:12: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”
3. Some scientists were so incensed that a serious university press could publish such a book that they threatened a boycott of that press’s textbooks, a type of pressure that created quite a scandal at the time. Macmillan took the book and made a bundle on it.
4. The title of the French equivalent of the Nautical Almanac, prepared by the astronomers of the Observatory of Paris and the Bureau des Longitudes is the Connaissance des Temps (“knowledge of time”).
5. For a given pair of masses, gravitational attraction varies as the inverse square of the distance (10 times closer, 100 times stronger); but the tidal force, a small difference in gravitational attractions, varies with the inverse cube of the distance (10 times closer, 1,000 times stronger).
6. The great English poet Alexander Pope wrote the following epitaph for Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
7. They also provide information on the rise (or fall) of mean sea level relative to the land. In general, sea level has been rising, but in some places this is exaggerated by the sinking of the land, while in other places (such as Scandinavia) sea level appears to be falling because in fact the land has been rising by rebound of the crust since the melting of the heavy ice cap.
8. Mills harnessing tidal power on a small scale go back practically a thousand years, and some ambitious tidal power plants were proposed as early as 1935 (Gibrat 1966). However, the Rance facility is the only one in the world supplying significant power to an electric power grid, and even its output (less than 100 MW or megawatts on average) is quite small compared to a typical nuclear (or coal-fueled) power plant.
9. Confessions of St. Augustine 7.6, translated by F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 112.
10. Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), a pioneer of analytical mechanics, led the Lapland expedition. The results refuted the arguments of Paris astronomer François Cassini (based on Descartes’ mistaken ideas and a survey of the meridian from Dunkirk to Perpignan in France) that the Earth was elongated rather than flattened as it is.
11. Very freely translated by me from Voltaire’s 4th discourse on Man (“De la modération”):
Héros de la Physique, argonautes nouveaux,
Qui franchissez les monts, qui traversez les eaux,
Ramenez des climats soumis aux trois couronnes,
Vos perches, vos secteurs, et surtout deux Lapones,
Vous avez confirmé dans ces lieux pleins d’ennui,
Ce que Newton connut sans sortir de chez lui
Vous avez arpenté quelque faible partie
Des flancs toujours glacés de la terre aplatie.
12. French philosopher Auguste Comte wrote (1835:32–33): “It is certain that changes in the distance of the Earth from the Sun, and consequently in the duration of the year, in the obliquity of the ecliptic, etc., which in astronomy would merely modify some coefficients, would largely affect or completely destroy our social development” (my translation).
13. Translated by me from Milankovitch (1920:v–vii).
14. The chaotic nature of the obliquity of Mars, ranging from practically zero to values as high as 85°, appears to be well established (Ward 1973; Laskar and Robutel 1993). The Orbital Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor orbiting the planet revealed details as small as several meters, providing much new information on ancient and recent volcanic activity, on groundwater formation, ancient floods, and ice formation (Malin and Carr 1999).
15. The stabilizing effect of the Moon has been shown by calculations made at the Paris Bureau des Longitudes (Laskar, Joutel, and Robutel 1993). This contradicts the hypothesis that the obliquity of the Earth’s ecliptic was once much larger than now, proposed to explain how ice could have covered sea-level areas close to the equator some 2.2 billion years ago. With high ecliptic, seasonal changes would have been enormous, but on average, conditions would have been colder at the equator than at the poles, permitting ice at the equator but not over the whole Earth. With obliquity stabilized close to the present value, it is on the contrary difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Earth was then completely covered by snow and ice, and the problem then is to explain how life survived and how such a “snowball Earth” could warm up afterwards.
16. Compare, for example, Goudie (1977; esp. ch. 7), Mason (1976), and Imbrie and Imbrie (1979).
17. Jacques Labeyrie (1993) has emphasized the changes in the Nile valley and in the Persian Gulf. Very recently, oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman (2000) of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have argued that the story of the Flood corresponds to a much more dramatic and cataclysmic event, the sudden flooding some 7,600 years ago of the present-day Black Sea (then a freshwater lake below sea level) by a breakthrough of waters from the Mediterranean that had been gradually rising for a few thousand years along with sea-level in general.
18. These results were first obtained at the glaciology laboratory of Grenoble in France (see, for example, Petit et al. 1999 for the definitive report on the Vostok ice core) and confirmed by laboratories in Bern (Switzerland) and elsewhere. A major difficulty is making sure that the bubbles of ancient air are not contaminated by modern air between the ice core extraction and the laboratory analysis.
19. Rereading this as I translate, I find that I may have overemphasized the potential role of the atmosphere (but the book is about “water from heaven"!) and neglected the oceans, which also “[bathe] Greenland, Europe, North America, the Tropics, and Antarctica.” For the most part, changes in the circulation of the oceans are slower than atmospheric changes, no doubt about it, but new results suggest that some features of the deep ocean circulation can change very quickly indeed. I’ll come back to that in part II.
6. WATER AND ENERGY CYCLES
1. Figures are based on my interpretation of the much more complete (but sometimes mutually inconsistent) tables to be found in Baumgartner and Reichel (1975), Berner and Berner (1987), Cohen (1995), Herschy and Fairbridge (1998), and UNESCO (1978).
2. This includes about 20 W/m2 of infrared radiation emitted by the surface and transmitted to space by the atmosphere. Estimates made as early as 1900 turned out to be reasonably good, but measurements of this radiation flux to space only became possible with instruments on artificial satellites beginning in 1960.
7. WINDS, WAVES, AND CURRENTS
1. English scientist Edmund Halley (1656–1742, better known for “his” comet) published the first world map showing the trade winds in 1686, and sought to explain their link with solar heating. George Hadley (1685–1758), also English, improved on Halley’s work, attempting to take account of the effect of the Earth’s rotation. See Frisinger (1983) and Hamblyn (2001).
2. French mathematician Gustave Gaspard Coriolis (1792–1843) developed the rigorous theory of the effect of the Earth’s rotation on atmospheric motions in 1835.
3. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who was as much at ease in Paris (where he was member of the Academy of Sciences) as in Berlin, spent several years of his life exploring Hispanic America, where numerous geographical features are named after him (Meyer-Abich 1969). His Cosmos laid the foundations of modern climatology and indeed of much of geophysics. The point about climates differing between the eastern and western shores of the Atlantic figures in Humboldt (1846:378–79).
4. In fact, Walker did not limit his investigations to the South Pacific. He also defined and named the North Atlantic Oscillation (about which more later) and a North Pacific Oscillation.
5. The U.S. National Weather Service as well as research groups at Colorado State University and at the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (organized jointly by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the University of California/San Diego) now engage in El Niño-La Niña forecasting, with increasing success. However, after driving away El Niño in summer 1998, La Niña stayed longer than expected. As of September 2001, the prognosis was for El Niño to return at Christmas and stay on with moderate strength in 2002. In fact, El Niño did not return for Christmas in 2001, but as of June 2002 he seems to be well on his way for December 2002. By the time this appears in print, we should know how vigorous he is.
6. Biologist and oceanographer Rita Rossi Colwell, director of the (U.S.) National Science Foundation, has presented evidence (1996) that cholera pathogens proliferate under El Niño conditions.
7. It should be noted that El Niño conditions do not rule out particularly damaging hurricanes. Although for the most part, mild El Niño conditions prevailed from 1990 to 1995, hurricane Andrew, passing close to the center of Miami in 1992, caused record damage in terms of dollars. Very recent analysis (Golden-berg et al. 2001) warns that the next few decades may see many more (and more active) hurricane seasons than were observed in the 1980s and early 1990s, with a potential for enormous increase in damages in the Atlantic-Caribbean sector.
8. As I was working on this English-language version in April 2001, the land was completely soaked in much of France, with flooding in some areas, as a result of record rainfall in the last quarter of 2000 and the first part of 2001—one rainstorm after another coming in from the Atlantic, while temperatures remained mild through nearly all the winter.
9. This is a modern version of Walker’s North Pacific Oscillation (note 6 above), and recent work relates it and the NAO to an Arctic Oscillation affecting the entire circumarctic zone.
8. WATER’S DEEP MEMORIES
1. In 1988, medical researcher Jacques Benveniste working at Clamart near Paris claimed (in a paper published with reluctance by the prestigious scientific weekly Nature) that water did indeed retain some sort of memory that could account for claimed effects of extremely dilute solutions of other substances (solutions so dilute that no molecules of the other substance were left in the small samples considered). This briefly made the front pages of Paris papers, but was never confirmed or accepted by other scientists.
2. Some of the first results were obtained by a Danish-U.S. team at Camp Century (Greenland), and recent work on Greenland ice cores involves both American and European teams. However, the Soviet (later Russian) Antarctic research station Vostok has furnished the longest record so far (Petit et al. 1999), and indeed the ice core extraction was halted only because of reluctance to risk contamination of Lake Vostok, a remarkable body of liquid water deeper under the ice.
3. There’s not much at Rockall apart from some rocks, but that point defines an important sector familiar to all those real or armchair sailors who listen to the European maritime weather forecasts.
4. In thermohaline, the haline means salt in Greek, and indeed the chloride of sodium chloride is only one of the group of elements called halogens (others include bromine, fluorine, and iodine).
5. Recent estimates (Levitus et al. 2000) based on direct sea water temperature measurements (i.e., with thermometers) show “warming of the world ocean” since the 1950s at least.
6. I put quotes around “cold” used as a noun because, for physicists, “cold” only means less heat (measured, for example, in calories or BTUs, or heat energy measured in joules), with everything above a temperature of absolute zero containing some heat energy. The southward-drifting cold waters contain less heat energy per cubic meter than the northward-drifting warm waters, and in that sense they transport “cold.”
7. Simple as they may be, these models consist in applying the well-established laws of physics to the complex interactions of ocean and atmosphere. These laws include conservation of matter (in particular water and salt) and energy, and Newton’s laws of motion. It seems that there are different ways in which deep ocean circulation can operate, some with the conveyor-belt transport of heat, some without, and that the transition from one mode of operation to the other can be quite rapid, with our present quite efficient conveyor belt close to the limit of instability. According to one calculation, the Great Salinity Anomaly of the 1970s took the Atlantic half of the way in the direction of conveyor shutdown.
8. I refer here to the energy and environment policies of the Bush administration, installed in 2001, reneging on environmental commitments and encouraging waste of coal and oil, while at the same time proposing significant cuts in environmental research. If the message of science is bad for profits, shoot the messenger.
9. CLOUDS, RAIN, AND ANGRY SKIES
1. From Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, act 4, scene 14.
2. For a well-organized and complete description of the different cloud types, illustrated by a beautiful set of photographs, from below, within, and above the clouds (including from satellites), see Scorer and Verkaik (1989). The invention of the nomenclature is recounted by Hamblyn (2001).
3. The tropopause is the level separating the troposphere—i.e., the lower atmosphere, where temperatures generally decrease with altitude and where most weather phenomena take place (see fig. 7.1)—from the stratosphere, where temperatures increase upward. Tropopause altitude generally increases with atmospheric temperatures, and can be as high as 18 km (59,000 ft.) above the equator, as low as 10 km (33,000 ft.) at high latitudes in winter. But at high latitudes, cumulonimbus clouds form mostly in summer.
4. Haloes and other optical phenomena of the atmosphere have been described and illustrated by Minnaert (1954) as well as Scorer and Verkaik (1989).
5. Indeed, recent research suggests that in addition to producing easily detected shiptracks, maritime traffic has had a significant effect on cloud brightness over the North Atlantic as a whole. Cloud brightness is only part of the story. Working with satellite and aircraft data at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Daniel Rosenfeld (Rosenfeld and Lensky 1998) argues that smoke and urban pollution also significantly affect convective clouds and rainfall. More numerous but smaller droplets make clouds brighter, but they may reduce precipitation in the polluted areas.
6. Not all aerosols brighten clouds. Dark particles such as soot, related to inefficient industrial or biomass burning, reduce cloud brightness and warm the cloud layer, but at the same time they block sunlight to the surface. Enormous pollution of this kind, coming from south Asia, was observed during the international Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) campaign in early 1999.
7. The question has not yet been answered whether contrails have (or can have in coming decades) a detectable effect on climate on the global scale. There are some indications that cirrus cloud cover has increased in the major air traffic corridors. Another debate is whether cosmic-ray particles arriving in the upper atmosphere, in greater or lesser numbers depending on solar activity, play any role in formation of cirrus.
8. Long a puzzle, ball lightning appears to result from fairly slow burning of a balloon-like structure a couple of feet in diameter, composed of vaporized carbon and silicon and formed after lightning heats the ground above 1,000°C, according to two scientists from New Zealand. Sprites are beautifully colored electrical discharges above clouds, observed from manned spacecraft and occasionally from aircraft, but not from the ground.
9. These are sea-level atmospheric pressures (the weight of the air above a unit area), with standard pressure (one “atmosphere”) being 1,033 millibars (actually, the official international system would have us say 1,033 hectopascals) or 14.7 pounds per square inch. Many people are more familiar with the analogous readings in a mercury barometer corresponding to the height of the column of mercury (a very dense but liquid metal) that atmospheric pressure can support: 76 cm or 29.9 inches.
10. Both British and French weather services, as well as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, did predict a powerful storm with strong winds, but the U.K.’s Met Office underestimated how bad it would be, and the seriousness of the risk did not get across to the British public, resulting in unnecessary injuries and loss of life. The circumstances were the subject of an investigation and reform. That storm was (luckily) well forecast in France.
11. Satellites in circular orbit above the equator at a distance of 36,000 km (22,600 mi.) go around the Earth in 24 hours, and so since the planet makes a full rotation in the same time, the satellite appears stationary, allowing continuous observation of the same real estate. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has the responsibility of maintaining two such Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites in operation: GOES-East, for eastern North America as well as South America, much of the Atlantic Ocean as well as the eastern South Pacific; and GOES-West, for western North America and the eastern Pacific Ocean. The Japanese Meteorological Agency has consistently maintained coverage of eastern Asia and the western Pacific. The European Meteorological Satellite consortium (Eumetsat) maintains Meteosat on the Greenwich meridian, observing Europe and Africa; Eumetsat loaned a spare Meteosat to the United States between 1992 and 1995, when premature GOES failures and delays in replacement would have left the U.S. with a single satellite, not enough to monitor both Pacific and Atlantic storms, and also provided a spare to support the Indian Ocean research campaigns (INDOEX) from 1998 to 2000. The United States moved a spare GOES to cover the Indian Ocean position as part of an earlier (global) campaign in 1979. That sector has always raised problems, the USSR (later Russia) never having got a working satellite up in position there, China also having had little success, and India having provided hardly any data to scientists even when its satellite worked.
12. In his book Isaac’s Storm, Erik Larson (1999) tells the terrible story, with a critical perspective on the responsibilities of Isaac Monroe Cline and the U.S. Weather Bureau in the inadequate forecast of the hurricane’s threat to Galveston. Fairly accurate warnings from Cuba were ignored. Cornelia Dean (1999:1–14) also describes the Galveston disaster, and the lessons that it should teach us for the future.
13. As noted earlier, under some conditions additional particles may lead to the formation of additional very small water droplets, too small to fall as rain, so that cloud seeding would be counterproductive. This would certainly confuse the statistical studies.
14. Smith (1872:413). Smith also writes: “A few centuries back we, perhaps, had arrived at such progress in filthiness of habits that we attained the dignity of producing epidemics amongst ourselves.”
15. In the United States, the Clean Air Act as amended in 1990 was a major factor in the reduction of SO2 emissions, with the institution of tradable emissions rights helping to make the cost of such “scrubbing” much less than was originally feared by industry lobbyists. Similar strong measures to reduce emissions were taken in the European Economic Community (now the European Union). The results are now measured in a reduction of rainfall, stream, and lake acidity in many areas of Europe and North America.
10. EARTH’S WATER, BETWEEN SKY AND SEA
1. Sahel is Arabic for shore, but it is used to denote the limit of the desert (a navigable expanse for caravans) as well as for the shore of the sea.
2. Many scientific terms for soils are in Russian because modern soil science—pedology—was founded in Russia, notably by V. V. Dokuchaev, in the 1870s. See also Zachar (1982).
3. Although often an oasis is thought of as a gift of nature, the people of the desert learned long ago that sometimes they could force Mother Nature to do more, when the wells they dug provided a continual (but not inexhaustible!) flow supporting vegetation as well as drinking water for them and their herds. In the long term, the water will run out.
4. Bernard Palissy (1510–1590) made the case for this in 1580 in his “Admirable discourse on water and fountains.” However, he is perhaps better known for his work in ceramics and decorative art. He narrowly escaped the anti-Protestant massacre of Saint Barthélemy in 1572, but after having been accused of “heresy” and sentenced in 1588 to be hanged and burned, he died in prison at the Bastille. In the seventeenth century, Edme Marriott (1620–1684) and Pierre Perrault (1611–1680; one of seven brothers active in areas ranging from architecture to finance, science, and writing fairy tales) proved the case by experimental research in the Paris basin, measuring in particular the flow in the Seine River. In the twentieth century, isotopic analyses have yielded much more complete data on the time that rainwater spends underground.
5. Reminder: a cubic kilometer (a billion cubic meters) of water has a mass of a billion metric tons. Another way of putting it: 80,000 cu. km of water on 8 million square kilometers of land (the area of the 48 conterminous states of the U.S.) represents a layer of water 10 meters (33 ft.) thick.
6. Wei, Ledoux, and de Marsily (1990) have developed a model of this regional underground flow.
7. See Craig M. Bethe and Stephen Marshak, “Brine Migrations Across North America—The Plate Tectonics of Groundwater,” in Dietrich and Sposito (1997:253–81).
8. See Bonell (1993).
9. Continuous study of precipitation chemistry and how it affects soil and forest has been carried out at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire since the 1960s (Likens 1999).
10. For Steven Pinker (1995:64), this is a myth. In his view, which he illustrates by quoting some of the terms used by Boston TV meteorologists, English has as many words (about a dozen) for snow as has Inuit or Yupik.
11. The word levee (or French levée), a raised river embankment, comes from the French-speaking colonists of Louisiana describing the banks of the lower Mississippi.
12. The Colorado State University Flash Flood Laboratory writes: “In the Eastern U.S. the flash floods associated with hurricane landfalls can offer up to 12 hours of lead-time. In the West, flash floods can offer less than one-hour advance warning. In arid and semiarid environments, steep topography, little vegetation, and infrequent precipitation in the form of intense thunderstorms typify the flash flood hazard areas of the Western United States.”
13. The Field Museum expedition’s findings are reported in Nials et al. (1978).
14. One might ask whether it isn’t excessively watered, with 5,000 to 10,000 mm (200 to 400 in.) of rain per year. In fact, the situation is in a sense worse because most of that abundant rain falls in only a few months, with dryness dominating the rest of the year.
15. At the time, much was made of this drought as one of the signs of “global warming.” But in the spring of 2001, the flooding in northern France due to overabundant rains in 2000–2001 was also being attributed to “global warming.” Is all this just the usual media exaggeration? Some serious scientists believe that the climate changes summarized under the slogan of “global warming” may indeed involve increasing variability, i.e., both droughts and floods alternating, with increasing severity, at least in some parts of the world.
16. The twin GRACE satellites were successfully launched on March 17, 2002, from Plesetsk cosmodrome (spaceport and ICBM base) in northern Russia.
11. WATER AND MAN’S RISE TO CIVILIZATION
1. In the Scottish highlands and even more in the Alps, ecotype islands subsist, composed of plant, animal, and bird species that ranged over large areas of Europe when conditions were colder but find themselves confined to higher altitudes since the climate warmed. This process continues, reinforced by the recent warming, but also certainly influenced by the increasing afflux of city people with their heated ski lodges.
2. Certainly the corn that European colonists found on their arrival in the Americas had already dramatically changed from the earliest natural corn that existed. Genetic modification by breeding and selection is ancient, but opponents to modern genetic modification argue that we still don’t know what we’re doing. Nor will we learn more if extremists who vandalize research farms in France and elsewhere have their way.
3. Jared Diamond (1991:286–303) cites, among other cases, the extinction of the moa after the colonization of New Zealand by the Maoris, the disappearance of many native bird species on Hawaii, and the desolation on Easter Island.
4. The tree-ring results check with what has been directly measured since 1896. The study is reported by Stahle et al. (1998).
5. Read Jared Diamond’s books (1991, 1997), among others. An interesting perspective on the development of civilization in the Americas is given by Peter Farb in his 1968 book Man’s Rise to Civilization.
6. Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams (Genesis 41:15–36, 41–57) led to Pharaoh adopting stockpiling of grain to prepare for years of drought. Steve Schneider and L. E. Mesirow gave the name The Genesis Strategy to their influential 1976 book on the importance of preparing for climate change.
7. Rosetta is where the famous Rosetta Stone was found, with a decree of Ptolemy V (196 B.C.) engraved in Greek, demotic, and in hieroglyphs, making it possible for Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) to decipher the hieroglyphs and the ancient Egyptian language.
8. In his 1993 book L’Homme et le Climat (Man and climate), Jacques Labeyrie (pioneer in using radioactive isotopes to study ancient climates) noted that two relatively rapid oscillations of two to three meters of sea level occurred in the three thousand years following the maximum of 5400 B.P. (3450 B.C.), and has hypothesized that this may explain the story of the Flood in Sumerian legends as well as in Genesis. However, as noted earlier, Ryan and Pitman (2000) set the Flood in what is now the Black Sea, but to them too it was in part a consequence of the 130-meter rise in sea level.
9. Camilla Calhoun reminds us of these figures in her fascinating “Perspective on New York City’s Water supply,” to be found at www.westchesterlandtrust.org/watershed/olive.htm.
10. Robert Koch (1843–1910), a pioneer of medical bacteriology, started his career as a country doctor in Germany. He became world famous in 1882 when he discovered the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis; he discovered the cholera vibrion the following year, and he made major contributions to the fight against plague, typhoid fever, and malaria, as well as tuberculosis and cholera. He was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine.
11. In a Hoover Institution essay, Thomas Gale Moore (2000) describes the progress of the epidemic, which started from Chancay, Peru (near Lima), in January 1991 and spread to many other Latin American countries in following years, causing over a million cases and 11,000 deaths. He cites Anderson’s (1991) report that the major factor for the epidemic’s spread was Peru’s decision to halt chlorination. Note, however, that Rita Colwell (1996) has explored links between El Niño events and cholera outbreaks.
12. The case against chlorine has been argued forcefully by biologist and former Greenpeace scientist Joe Thornton (2000) in his book Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy, enthusiastically reviewed by Terry Collins (Nature, July 6, 2000), but criticized by Ferdinand Engelbeen (Nature, September 28, 2000). Collins mentions a defense of chlorine in Howlett (1997). Many or most public health professionals consider that abandonment of chlorination of drinking water would be an unmitigated disaster (see note 11 above). As for THMs, although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not established a maximum contaminant level (MCL), the New York State Department of Health’s MCL is 100 micrograms per liter, a value exceeded on occasion in some parts of the New York City water supply system, but not on average in 1999. Concern remains regarding contamination by various microbes, in particular Giardia and Cryptosporidium. The EPA has judged that water coming from New York’s Croton watershed (supplying 10% of the city’s water on average, but 30% during droughts) may not meet health standards because of bacterial contamination. However, the project to build a new water treatment plant in the city’s Van Cortlandt Park (Bronx) appears blocked by community groups and a state court decision (New York Times, February 9, 2001); the city is liable for fines retroactive to 1999, and its water quality report must include the statement: “Inadequately treated water may contain disease-causing organisms. These organisms include bacteria, viruses, and parasites, which can cause symptoms such as nausea, cramps, diarrhea, and associated headaches” (emphasis in original).
13. La Butte aux Cailles (“quail butte”) is today a lively neighborhood of Left Bank Paris, where you’ll find quail at some butcher shops and on restaurant tables, but nowhere else. The artesian well supplies warm water to a large public swimming pool. The butte also was the place where Pilâtre de Rozier and the marquis d’Arlandy landed at the end of the first hot-air balloon (montgolfière) flight on November 21, 1783. The start of that flight, to the west in Passy (now also part of Paris), was witnessed by Benjamin Franklin as well as the Montgolfier brothers.
14. The Ecole Polytechnique (polytechnic school) was founded in 1794 to train scientists and engineers for public service to the young Republic of France. Having taken the title of emperor, Napoleon put the Ecole under military control with the mission of training engineers for his army. Although administratively it remains a military school, today’s Ecole should be compared to MIT rather than West Point. Its students, selected after fierce competition, actually pay no tuition; instead, they receive a “presalary” but owe ten years’ service to the State unless they or a prospective private employer buy back the “debt.” The Ecole trains engineers and scientists, many of whom go on to top-level public or corporate administration. Originally located in the Latin Quarter of Paris (so-called because students from all over Europe worked and conversed there in Latin in the Middle Ages), the school outgrew its quarters and moved in 1974 to a suburban site in Palaiseau, 25 km (15 mi.) to the south. Several research laboratories (including the one where I work) were installed on the same site.
15. The flood level of 1910, marked on many buildings in the historic center of Paris, is hip-high in many places, even though the street level is at least one story above the usual Seine level. The banks of the Seine (and the express roadways unfortunately built there in the 1960s) are often flooded at the end of the winter, but the water has not reached street level since 1910.
16. Gerard Koeppel (2000) has written an engaging history of New York City’s water supply, also summarized briefly in the National Research Council’s (NRC) assessment of the city’s strategy (O’Melia 1999). See also note 9 above.
17. The NRC’s assessment (O’Melia 1999) also notes that “while New York City has retained control over its system, and has encountered much anti-City hostility in its source regions, the metropolitan Boston system has long been administered by agencies serving a region containing more than half the state’s population and therefore has gained broader political support in its efforts to protect its water supplies.” In particular, “New York City has had to engage in lengthy and delicate negotiations with upstate interests.”
18. However, growing awareness of real (or imaginary) risks related to the presence of small amounts of organochlorines in drinking water has led to tighter standards (see note 12 above) and an escalation of requirements. What, after all, is “reasonably” safe? In Paris, new standards on the allowable amount of lead will lead to expensive replacement of plumbing (the word comes from the Latin and French words for lead, long the material of choice for such applications) in buildings, at owners’ and tenants’ cost; alternatively, systems for removing the lead in the water at the supply to individual apartments may turn out to be reliable and cheaper.
19. In the United States the Bangladesh crisis was reported in the New York Times on November 10, 1998, as what could be “the biggest mass poisoning in history.” Many additional reports have appeared in the British press, both scientific and lay (Nickson et al. 1998; Pearce 2001), and of course in Bangladesh and India. Ongoing developments can be followed at the Internet site www.bicn.com/acic.
For the United States, the EPA’s interim maximum contaminant level (MCL) for arsenic in drinking water used to be 50 micrograms per liter, five times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommendation. In 1996, Congress required the EPA to propose a more stringent standard in 2000, and EPA proposed adoption of the 10 micrograms per liter limit (EPA 2001). Early in 2001, the Bush administration sparked lively controversy when it announced its intention not to lower the allowed arsenic level in drinking water supplies; arsenic being well-known as a poison, this position is hard to defend, even in the 2001 Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Dangers of long-term exposure to such low (not Bangladeshi) levels of arsenic are discussed in a report by the National Academy of Science’s Commission on Life Sciences (1999).
20. Water experts Peter Gleick, Sandra Postel, and Diane Martindale discuss these issues in several articles in the February 2001 issue of Scientific American.
21. It may be remarked that all agricultural exports involve in effect the export of water, and that apparently profitable Israeli citrus exports depend on strong government subsidy of the water infrastructure and supply for irrigation. There must be more real profit in exporting high technology. See also Plaut (2000).
22. According to Peter Gleick (note 20 above), there are more than 70,000 dams in the United States alone.
23. René Dubos (1901–1982), though born and trained as an agronomist in France, made nearly all his career at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Discoverer in 1940 of the first antibiotic (gramicidin) used in medicine, he made important contributions to biology and medicine and later in raising awareness of environmental problems (Dubos 1970, 1980). He was the first to use the slogan “Think globally, act locally.”
24. News on these techniques is given in the magazine Agroforestry, published by the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), based in Nairobi, Kenya.
25. Spraying (though not with DDT) has made a comeback with the appearance in 1999 of West Nile encephalitis in the United States and Canada, with many birds and some horses and humans as victims. The virus is carried by Culex mosquitoes, and the infection probably reached America by airplane, as the disease first appeared in the vicinity of international airports in the New York area. Similarly, the Aedes albopictus (Asian tiger) mosquito, which can carry dengue fever and is suspected of carrying eastern equine encephalitis, has been extending its range in southern Europe, and may soon reach France. In the United States, it was identified in Houston, Texas, in 1987 had has since reached southern New Jersey.
26. For a vivid description of the frozen pond’s beauty, and the full story of the ice harvest, see Thoreau (1897: ch. 16, “The Pond in Winter”). Through his book Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) profoundly influenced the beginnings of the American environmentalist movement. In addition, his 1849 essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience inspired Gandhi and his organization of civil disobedience first in South Africa, later in India.
27. Zbigniew Jaworowski (1999) of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection (Warsaw, Poland) argued that even in the case of the Chernobyl accident, damage to health has been grossly exaggerated, where the low radiation doses associated with fallout (not the high doses of the “liquidators”) are concerned. Strong letters of objection and Jaworowski’s vigorous rebuttal appeared in the April and May 2000 issues of Physics Today. The debate continues on whether or not thresholds limit deleterious health effects of low radiation doses.
28. I prefer to write Medvedev’s given name as Jaurès because it honors French pre-World War I socialist leader Jean Jaurès and becomes Zhores only after two-way transliteration into and out of the Cyrillic alphabet.
29. Medvedev’s 1977 book Nuclear Disaster in the Urals remains an excellent introduction, especially in the newer editions including extracts from CIA archives, declassified thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. Bradley, Frank, and Mikerin (1996) have discussed nuclear contamination from both Soviet and American weapons complexes, with a fairly detailed map of the Mayak area where the 1957 disaster took place and where radioactive waste discharge was routine since 1949. They also discuss the even larger routine discharges into surface water and underground from the Tomsk-7 and Krasnoyarsk-26 complexes in Siberia.
30. For physicists’ perspectives on these issues, see the June 1997 special issue of Physics Today on radioactive waste.
12. PROBLEMS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
1. Most scholars agree, however, that the count is wrong, and that Jesus of Nazareth was born near Bethlehem a few years before 1 A.D. See Stephen Gould’s Questioning the Millennium (1997) for a discussion of calendar problems.
2. Compact and readable discussions of world population history are by Cipolla (1978) and by McEvedy and Jones (1978). The very complete and readable book by Joel Cohen (1995)—How Many People Can the Earth Support?—has strongly influenced my own thinking developed here. Robert W. Kates also discusses the issue in Ausubel and Longford (1997:33–55). A very recent paper by Lutz, Sanderson, and Scherbov (2001) is explicitly titled, “The End of World Population Growth.”
3. The dietary Calories with which most people are familiar are in fact kilo-calories, one calorie being the quantity of heat needed to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Centigrade. A kilocalorie or Calorie raises the temperature of a kilogram of water by the same amount.
4. The argument that human activities now dominate both freshwater and the biosphere is made by Postel, Daily, and Ehrlich (1996) and Vitousek et al. (1997).
5. In one of his 504 Maximes (from one-liners to long paragraphs) on all sorts of subjects, François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) wrote that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” It seems to me that some though certainly not all of the complicated arguments in defense of the environment, invoking the economical value of the services that certain ecosystems render, constitute a tribute that virtue is paying to vice (or to the “dismal science” of economics). Of course, this may also be viewed as more or less effective political tactics, and I may be naïve in seeing this tendency as an unnecessarily cynical view of what moves my fellow citizens of the planet. That could bring us into the debate about “sustainable development” and whether such a term has signification or is simply a shibboleth. We could, especially sitting around a jug of good wine, also get into the discussion of the value of an environmental ethic for the survival of Homo sapiens, just as there has been discussion concerning the origins of altruism, a reaction that improves the chances of the species in the arena of evolution by way of natural selection, although it often leads to the death of the individual. See also Wilson (1998).
6. Rain, water from heaven, is indeed the gift of God in the Old Testament, at least for those who “hearken unto the voice of the Lord,” to whom “the Lord will open …His good treasure the heaven to give the rain of thy land in its season, and to bless all the work of thy hand” (Deuteronomy 28:1 and 12). Note that the seasonal rhythm is respected, and that humans must supply work. Withholding of rain figures as punishment (Deut. 28:24).
In the Koran (Qur’an), too, lifegiving rain, is indeed a gift of God. For Islamic law, or shari’a, water is first of all a free commodity. At the same time, its nature as a value-added commodity is recognized. Prior appropriation is legitimate, but any surplus must be distributed, and the owner is liable for misuse. See Dolatyar and Gray (2000:172).
7. These problems are treated in many different ways by different legal systems, even by different states of the U.S. Federal law applies to interstate waterways (for example, the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers), and international treaties govern rivers that flow through or between different countries (for example, the Rhine and Danube Rivers in Europe). Some countries insist on the distinction between international or common waters of rivers that form a boundary between two countries or states, and transboundary waters of rivers that cross a boundary flowing from one country or state to another. But many rivers are both: the Colorado River defines part of the border between Arizona and California and Nevada, but its waters come mostly from Colorado by way of Utah, and a residue flows through Mexico. The Rio Grande (or Rio Bravo del Norte) defines the Texas-Mexico border, but comes from New Mexico and Colorado. The U.S.-Mexican water treaty of 1944 includes the statement that the treaty “excludes the idea of a legal obligation” (G. Rowley, in Amery and Wolf 2000:233). Where Syria and Iraq consider the Tigris and Euphrates as international waters to be shared, Turkey insists on their transboundary character, and rather than accepting an obligation to share, it proposes “equitable, reasonable, and optimal utilization.”
8. The Austrian and Ottoman Empires signed a treaty concerning the Danube as early as 1619, and France and Germany codified navigation rights on the Rhine in a 1697 treaty. Vlachos (1990:186) notes that “by the early 1970s, about 286 international treaties concerning water resources had been signed.” See also Glantz (1994:88–112) for brief discussions of the role of regional organizations.
9. Syed Kirmani discusses the Indus and Mekong River basins in Vlachos (1990:200–205); Richard Kattelmann (Vlachos 1990:189–94) examines the need for cooperation between India and Nepal for better flood management in the Ganges plain.
10. James London and Harry Miley Jr. discuss this in their article (in Vlachos 1990:231–35) on “The Interbasin Transfer of Water: An Issue of Efficiency and Equity,” mostly on the basis of U.S. experience. They note that the states of Washington and Louisiana, “discussed as potential sources of water supply for the states of California and Texas, respectively,” have adopted restrictive instream flow provisions “targeted more at external threats than at instate conflicts.”
11. This is a rough translation of what Claude Allègre (1990) wrote in his book Economiser la Planète (Economizing the planet).
12. Smith and Al-Rawahy (Vlachos 1990:217–22) consider that even without specific projects for the Blue Nile, the increasing population and water needs of Egypt are already creating a crisis with potential for conflict.
13. The Turkish acronym GAP stands for Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi, or “southeast Anatolia project.” Some 90 percent of the annual mean Euphrates River flow originates in Turkey, and 38 percent of the Tigris. President Türgut Özal of Turkey did propose construction of a “peace water pipeline,” in particular to satisfy Syrian needs, but this was regarded by Syria as proof of perfidious Turkish intentions to restore the Ottoman Empire. See Tekeli (Vlachos 1990:206–16) and Starr (1995) as well as Berkoff (1994) and Amery and Wolf (2000).
14. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres promised autonomy both to Armenians and to Kurds, but the proposed U.S. mandate for Armenia in northeast Anatolia (Lake Van, Mount Ararat) never came about, and with the strong Turkish rebound under Gen. Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), the French withdrew their troops from Cilicia (southeast Anatolia). Despite vigorous resistance, Armenian survivors of the 1915 genocide were able to maintain themselves in the area around Erevan only as part of the Soviet system, and recovered independence only after the breakup of the USSR in 1991. As for Kurdistan, strong Turkish resistance, and British and French reluctance to see the oil-rich territories around Mosul in northern Iraq go to a Kurdish state, led to the abandonment of the project.
15. A sizable “neutral territory” was defined in the 1920s between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, just west of Kuwait, in order to give equal access to wells (of water!) to Bedouin tribesmen coming from any direction. Some of the borders between Saudi Arabia and its neighbors remained undefined until the last quarter of the twentieth century.
16. Depending on which etymology you prefer, Beersheba can mean the well of seven lambs, or the well of the oath, or the well of good fortune (Hertz 1967).
17. When Moses presents the full set of (613) commandments to the children of Israel, he begins the description of the Promised Land with: “For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks and water, of fountains and depths, springing forth in valleys and hills.” (Deuteronomy 8:7).
18. The Siloam Pool, located within the walls of the City of David, lies outside the walls of the present “old city,” whose plan corresponds to the period of the Second Temple and later. The spring gushes water for half an hour every four hours. An earlier open tunnel existed in the time of King Solomon (965–928 B.C.). Construction of Hezekiah’s tunnel is mentioned in (2 Chronicles 32:2–4 and 32:30 and in 2 Kings 20:20). The Siloam Inscription describing the piercing of the tunnel was discovered in 1880 and can be viewed in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul; a copy exists in Paris.
19. This did not protect the other towns of Judah, many of which were destroyed by Sennacherib’s army. Also, Hezekiah still ended up paying tribute to Sennacherib, who claimed victory. See Tadmor (in Ben-Sasson 1976:139–46), and also Issar (1990). Note that the prophet Isaiah decried Hezekiah’s temporary alliance with Babylon against Assyria (2 Kings 18–20; Isaiah 36–37).
20. Jesus cured a man blind since birth (not “visually challenged,” blind!), sending him to the Siloam Pool (John 9:6–7).
21. From 1949 to 1967, some of the eastern shore of Kinneret, contested by Israel and Syria, was a demilitarized zone. After the Six-Day War, the Israeli Defense Force occupied this territory as well as the Golan Heights.
22. In a sense, this constituted partial unilateral implementation by Israel of the 1948 Lowdermilk plan, which envisaged using practically all the Jordan River’s flow into the salty Dead Sea (396 meters below sea level) for irrigation, replacing it by water from the Mediterranean and using the altitude difference to generate electric power. Getting freshwater from Kinneret (normally at 209 meters below sea level) to the National Water Carrier (NWC) requires power to pump it to an altitude 151 meters above sea level. When rainfall over the upper Jordan basin is low, as in recent years, excessive pumping can degrade water quality in Kinneret, the lower Jordan River, and underground. Nevertheless, by 2001 the Israel Hydrological Service lowered the “red line” in Kinneret 30 cm below the already record 214 meters below sea level (David Rudge in the Jerusalem Post, March 6, 2001). Note that in parallel with Israel’s NWC, the Kingdom of Jordan constructed the King Abdullah Canal, diverting water from the Yarmuk River upstream of its confluence into the Jordan, using it for irrigation east of the Jordan River and restoring the residual water to the lower Jordan above the Dead Sea. Israel’s NWC removes water from the Jordan basin. Beginning with the Lowdermilk plan, and the later and somewhat different Hayes and Johnston plans, the international community and the United States have repeatedly sought to promote international cooperation in using water in this water-scarce region.
23. Then Israeli Defense Minister (now Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon has been characterized as a “water hawk,” advocating transfer of Litani River water to the Jordan. However, in a 1991 interview, quoted by Woolf (1995; ch. 2), also by Amery and Wolf (2000), Israeli Gen. Avraham Tamir declared: “Why go to war over water? For the price of one week’s fighting, you could build five desalination plants. No loss of life, no international pressure, and a reliable supply you don’t have to defend in hostile territory” (see also Tamir 1998).
24. Drawing the exact northern borders of Palestine in 1919 involved negotiation between Great Britain as mandatory power for Palestine on the one hand, and France for Syria and Lebanon on the other. Arab Palestinians and Jewish immigrants had little voice on the matter, although it is true that Chaim Weizmann (thirty years later the first president of Israel) had expressed to the British the desirability of including important water sources within the northern border. Those ambitions were only partly satisfied.
25. This quote was translated from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (January 1, 1993) by the PEACE Middle East Dialogue Group (www.ariga.com/peacewatch). Issar returned to the question in June 1998, noting the interrelated issues of Jewish settlements, the convoluted Israel-Palestine border, Israeli security concerns and water resources, and concluding that “the debate slides into a well-known weary pattern.”
26. Indeed, both the Israeli water commissioner and the companies making money from the operations claim significant success in increasing rainfall over Israel. However, most specialists are skeptical about “rainmaking,” although it is conceivable that artificial introduction of cloud condensation nuclei (see ch. 9) can change the site of rainfall. However, given the small distances separating Israeli and Palestinian lands, and the uncertainties regarding where extra rain if any will actually fall, it is doubtful that the Palestinians have a serious grievance here.
27. None of this discussion appeared in the original French edition of this book, but I was asked to develop the subject in the English-language edition; I have done so with some trepidation. Every day (from autumn 2000 to mid-2002) the news is worse and worse, and I have found it surrealistic to read the often quite optimistic recent books and reports (Amery and Wolf 2000, Dolatyar and Gray 2000, Hillel 1994, Starr 1995, Tamir 1995, and Woolf 1995, as opposed to Chesnot 1993 and Clarke 1993).
13. BUTTERFLIES AND HUMANS IN A WARMING GREENHOUSE
1. This story, with its numerous scientific and political ramifications, has been described in several books, in particular by Roan (1990). Some illicit manufacture of CFCs has continued outside of North America and Europe since the phase-out decided in the 1987 Montreal Protocol, but only in small amounts. A major challenge is the recovery and recycling of all the CFCs still in refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment, before they escape into the atmosphere when such equipment is junked at the end of its lifetime.
2. Pierre Simon Laplace (1749–1827), named count by Napoleon in 1806, became a marquis after the Bourbon restoration in 1817. He made major contributions to mathematics and in particular probability theory and celestial mechanics. There is a Rue Laplace in Paris, and a Promontorium Laplace on the Moon.
3. During the Rio “Earth Summit” of 1992, a UN Framework Convention on Combating Climate Change was drafted and later signed by most governments; in the case of the United States, President Clinton signed the treaty, previous President Bush having refused signature. In order to translate that very vague accord into some modest but significant quantitative goals, governments of developed countries (including the U.S.) signed the Kyoto Protocol at the end of 1997. The agreement was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by percentages ranging from 0 to 8 percent with respect to the 1990 emissions levels by the period 2008–2012. Agreed reductions were more for some European countries (12.5% for the United Kingdom and 21% for Germany) but less for others (8% for the European Union as a whole). The United States commitment was for 7 percent, that of Canada and Japan for 6 percent. Australia agreed only to limit its increase of emissions to 10 percent. Developing nations made no commitments, considering that their per capita emissions rates were (and still are) much lower than those of the rich countries. Hardly any country actually ratified the protocol before 2001, and in the U.S., after three years during which the elected Clinton-Gore administration did not dare present the protocol for ratification to the Senate, the newly installed conservative Bush administration declared its intention to withdraw the U.S. signature. Note that even if the Kyoto Protocol’s provisions were to be fully respected, global greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by very little (Bolin 1998). The significance of following through on the Kyoto Protocol would be that it would force technologically advanced countries to consider seriously how to maintain and develop the world’s economy with less use of fossil fuels (Weizsäcker, Lovins, and Lovins 1997; Rosenfeld, Kaarsberg, and Romm 2000), and generally how to produce more real wealth with less energy consumption. Recent reports (Erik Eckholm in the New York Times, June 15, 2001) indicate that China has maintained rapid economic development while slowing its greenhouse gas emissions, i.e., keeping its per capita emissions at a very low level (0.6 metric tons carbon equivalent compared to 5.6 for the United States and 1.9 for France). Figures of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center show that between 1990 and 1996, efficiency of energy use in China rose from 0.66 to 1.15 million dollars (M$) of gross domestic product (GDP) per thousand tons (kT) of emitted CO2 (in the more technologically advanced United States, from 1.17 to 1.42 M$ GDP/kT CO2; in nuclear-powered France from 2.87 to 3.50 M$ GDP/kT CO2).
The countries of the European Union finally ratified the Kyoto Protocol in May 2002, as did Japan, and with ratification by fifty-five countries the protocol comes into effect without the United States.
4. For example, one model’s prediction of rainfall and runoff changes indicates an easing of the water crisis in China’s Yellow River (Huang He) basin, taking into account predicted population change, but making things worse along the Yangtze Kiang (Chang Jiang River) to the south. That model also has climate change providing more water in much of the western United States and Canada and part of Mexico, but reducing water availability in the eastern U.S. and central Canada. See Vörösmarty et al. (2000). Other models give partly contradictory results (IPCC 2001). Obviously more research is needed to see where we are going.
14. BACK TO THE ICE AGE
1. Indeed, in 1972, crop failures in the Soviet Union, coupled with a sharp El Niño-induced drop in the anchovy fishery off Peru, led to agricultural prices being sharply pushed up by sly Soviet grain purchases and the shortage of fishmeal for animal feed. The CIA (1974) commissioned a report on the possible geopolitical impact of future climate accidents of this type, a report eventually made public. In 1975 the (U.S.) National Defense University published an inquiry into the opinions of a number of climatologists regarding the likelihood of warming or cooling between then and the year 2000. One may note that the majority prognosis, a limited warming, turned out to be correct. The United States and other countries began organizing climate research programs at about the same time, and the first World Climate Conference took place in Geneva in 1979. It decided that the situation merited attention, but that it was too early to convene an international conference at the ministerial (cabinet secretary) level. That changed over the next decade, leading up to the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit.”
2. This point is developed in a recent Club of Rome study (Weizsäcker, Lovins, and Lovins 1997). Even leaving aside issues of what constitutes a better quality of life, modern high-tech societies such as the United States (Rosenfeld, Kaarsberg, and Romm 2000) have already learned how to produce more and better material goods with less expenditure of energy. It is grotesque that the U.S. government, hijacked in 2000–2001 by the oil and coal industries, should maintain that the high-tech U.S. economy depends on wasting crude oil and coal. Short-term difficulties may arise, but even in the medium term, not to mention the long term, the United States and other advanced societies (Europe, Japan) have every interest to use the most advanced technologies available, and to burn less.
3. From A. G. Babayev, in Glantz (1977:205). Babayev did however admit that “desolation of extensive territories stemmed not so much from weather changes as from social processes.”
4. The biblical injunction has been read by many environmentalists as the root of Western Man’s original sin against the environment. Genesis 2:5 reads, however, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it” (emphasis added). Mastery entails stewardship. One may note in any case that Eastern philosophy did not prevent the very early deforestation of China. Also, I read the Genesis phrase not so much as a command of God, whatever God may be, as a singularly prescient intuition of the destiny of human beings on this planet, considering that when those lines were written a few thousand years ago, most scientific discoveries and technological advances were still far in the future. But agriculture had begun.
5. This is in part the argument of Bill McKibben (1990) in his book The End of Nature, but I do not share all his sentiments. In particular, it seems to me that the development of human culture and agriculture put an end to a certain type of nature well before the twentieth century. However, general awareness of the fact that humans change the planet as a whole only came in the twentieth century.
15. CONCLUSION THE END OF THE STORY?
1. Paris tap water is excellent, and safe; it has less of a chlorine taste than tap water in New York City or most other places in the United States (less use being made of chlorine and more of activated carbon). Some neighborhoods are still supplied with local well water rather than treated water from upstream Seine and Marne Rivers. But many Parisians prefer to buy bottled water and lug it around. And wine is still a drink of choice. The Paris Wine Museum (Musée du Vin) is located just at the end of the Rue des Eaux (“Street of the Waters”), in the 16th arrondissement. A spring was discovered there in 1645, giving the first of the Passy mineral waters; but it ran dry in 1770 (Hillairet 1963).