"The greatest threat before humanity today..."

[Thanatoast]

Bush Pushes for Renewed Targeting of WMD
(AP) - President Bush, pointing to a black market weapons network led by the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, said Wednesday that no new countries should have the ability to enrich or process nuclear material. He argued that international efforts to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction have been neither broad nor effective enough and require tougher action from all nations. "The greatest threat before humanity today is the possibility of secret and sudden attack with chemical or biological or radiological or nuclear weapons," Bush said. the rest (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=5&u=/ap/20040211/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_weapons_14)
I call ************.

There are plenty of issues facing humanity today that will do us more harm in the long run than the need to consolidate nuclear power in the hands of a few powerful nations.

Our continuing dependence on oil as fuel, which by current projections will disappear in 100 years, and we have no realistic plan for a transition to a different source of energy is one.

Or the ever-present issue of third world underdevelopment and starvation, perhaps?

How about the acceleration of environmental collapse brought on by the continued use of greenhouse-gas producing matierials as our main source of energy?

The first and third issues will kill humanity more surely than an errant nuclear weapon (as much as that would suck). I believe the second issue is far more important than keeping Iran from building the bomb. Bush is simply trying to deflect the public from his ****ty presidency and scare the nation into re-electing his sorry ass.

And I particulary love this quote:
"Those actively breaking the rules should not be entrusted with enforcing the rules," the president said.
/rant

[Dont Hurt Me]

you forgot Asteroids, it will only take one rock. Looks like Bush has forgotten this.

[diamond geezer]

Just more scare-mongering by Bush to suit his own purposes.

I think that this is a far greater danger:

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17711

While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al Gore's recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere Ð a sudden shift into a new ice age. What they're finding is not at all comforting.

In quick summary, if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age Ð in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset Ð and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the "little ice age" of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world.

Here's how it works.

If you look at a globe, you'll see that the latitude of much of Europe and Scandinavia is the same as that of Alaska and permafrost-locked parts of northern Canada and central Siberia. Yet Europe has a climate more similar to that of the United States than northern Canada or Siberia. Why?

It turns out that our warmth is the result of ocean currents that bring warm surface water up from the equator into northern regions that would otherwise be so cold that even in summer they'd be covered with ice. The current of greatest concern is often referred to as "The Great Conveyor Belt," which includes what we call the Gulf Stream.

The Great Conveyor Belt, while shaped by the Coriolis effect of the Earth's rotation, is mostly driven by the greater force created by differences in water temperatures and salinity. The North Atlantic Ocean is saltier and colder than the Pacific, the result of it being so much smaller and locked into place by the Northern and Southern American Hemispheres on the west and Europe and Africa on the east.

As a result, the warm water of the Great Conveyor Belt evaporates out of the North Atlantic leaving behind saltier waters, and the cold continental winds off the northern parts of North America cool the waters. Salty, cool waters settle to the bottom of the sea, most at a point a few hundred kilometers south of the southern tip of Greenland, producing a whirlpool of falling water that's 5 to 10 miles across. While the whirlpool rarely breaks the surface, during certain times of year it does produce an indentation and current in the ocean that can tilt ships and be seen from space (and may be what we see on the maps of ancient mariners).

This falling column of cold, salt-laden water pours itself to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it forms an undersea river forty times larger than all the rivers on land combined, flowing south down to and around the southern tip of Africa, where it finally reaches the Pacific. Amazingly, the water is so deep and so dense (because of its cold and salinity) that it often doesn't surface in the Pacific for as much as a thousand years after it first sank in the North Atlantic off the coast of Greenland.

The out-flowing undersea river of cold, salty water makes the level of the Atlantic slightly lower than that of the Pacific, drawing in a strong surface current of warm, fresher water from the Pacific to replace the outflow of the undersea river. This warmer, fresher water slides up through the South Atlantic, loops around North America where it's known as the Gulf Stream, and ends up off the coast of Europe. By the time it arrives near Greenland, it has cooled off and evaporated enough water to become cold and salty and sink to the ocean floor, providing a continuous feed for that deep-sea river flowing to the Pacific.

These two flows Ð warm, fresher water in from the Pacific, which then grows salty and cools and sinks to form an exiting deep sea river Ð are known as the Great Conveyor Belt.

Amazingly, the Great Conveyor Belt is the only thing between comfortable summers and a permanent ice age for Europe and the eastern coast of North America.

Much of this science was unknown as recently as twenty years ago. Then an international group of scientists went to Greenland and used newly developed drilling and sensing equipment to drill into some of the world's most ancient accessible glaciers. Their instruments were so sensitive that when they analyzed the ice core samples they brought up, they were able to look at individual years of snow. The results were shocking.

Prior to the last decades, it was thought that the periods between glaciations and warmer times in North America, Europe, and North Asia were gradual. We knew from the fossil record that the Great Ice Age period began a few million years ago, and during those years there were times where for hundreds or thousands of years North America, Europe, and Siberia were covered with thick sheets of ice year-round. In between these icy times, there were periods when the glaciers thawed, bare land was exposed, forests grew, and land animals (including early humans) moved into these northern regions.

Most scientists figured the transition time from icy to warm was gradual, lasting dozens to hundreds of years, and nobody was sure exactly what had caused it. (Variations in solar radiation were suspected, as were volcanic activity, along with early theories about the Great Conveyor Belt, which, until recently, was a poorly understood phenomenon.)

Looking at the ice cores, however, scientists were shocked to discover that the transitions from ice age-like weather to contemporary-type weather usually took only two or three years. Something was flipping the weather of the planet back and forth with a rapidity that was startling.

It turns out that the ice age versus temperate weather patterns weren't part of a smooth and linear process, like a dimmer slider for an overhead light bulb. They are part of a delicately balanced teeter-totter, which can exist in one state or the other, but transits through the middle stage almost overnight. They more resemble a light switch, which is off as you gradually and slowly lift it, until it hits a mid-point threshold or "breakover point" where suddenly the state is flipped from off to on and the light comes on.

Worst case scenario is that Norrth America could be under ice in as little as 5 years, thanks to global warming and ice melting.

Strange paradox huh.

[Sayhey]

I would disagree with you Thanatoast. I think Bush is right that the greatest threat does indeed come from WMDs. However, the existence of the stockpiles of nuclear warheads in the hands of the US and Russians are the gravest threat to humanity. It is only these two nations that have the capacity to destroy life on the entire planet. Any legitimate discussion on the need to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons (something sorely needed) must include these weapons.

[zimv20]

Originally posted by diamond geezer

I think that this is a far greater danger:

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17711


_that_ was certainly an interesting read. i'm not digging the idea of a polar UK

[2jaded2care]

A chemical weapon attack would be really bad.

A nuclear weapon attack would be disastrous.

A biological attack could be catastrophic. The Spanish Flu claimed 20 million worldwide, and it wasn't even "engineered"... Who knows what some lab somewhere might create? Or already have?

The "greatest threat" depends on your point of view, I guess.