MUENCHHAUSEN
AN ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER ABOUT ENVIRONMENT,
RENEWABLE RESOURCE TECHNOLOGY,
AND RELATED TOPICS
By BOOTSTRAP PRESS, INC.
BETHESDA, MD
GREENBARON@CSI.COM
=================================================================
APRIL 6, 2004
=================================================================
WELCOME!
The Green Baron welcomes one and all who take the time to read Muenchhausen. He aims to “tell it like it is” as much as possible, and avoid advocacy and ideological positions. There are enough of those to go around in other publications.
DEDICATION
This issue of Muenchhausen is dedicated, first of all, to His Excellency, Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas of Lithuania, who accorded the Green Baron a few minutes of his valuable time for a brief interview. The occasion was a press conference following the historic accession of seven countries to NATO membership and three to candidacy. The Green Baron also acknowledges with thanks the assistance of Mr. Mantas Zurba, of Vilnius, Lithuania, who offers services in conference interpreting and translations (mantasz@takas.lt) in translating the Green Baron’s questions and the Prime Minister’s replies from English to Lithuanian and back. In addition, grateful acknowledgment is extended to those at the Embassy of Slovakia and the National Press Club (Washington, DC), who made it possible to interview Mr. Brazauskas, however briefly. Finally, as always, the Green Baron expresses his great esteem for the scientists, engineers, and technicians who expand knowledge of environmental science and related disciplines.
THE SOVIET ENVIRONMENTAL LEGACY IN LITHUANIA
Lithuania, a Baltic nation, like many of its neighboring countries, has, to put it mildly, received an adverse environmental legacy during the years of Soviet occupation (in fact, in 1940, Lithuania was forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union, under whose hegemony it remained until 1991, with the exception of Nazi occupation between 1941 and 1945). What can Lithuania do to reverse the effects of this legacy?
Prime Minister Brazauskas told the Green Baron, “It will take much time, patience, and funding to mitigate what was done to us before our recent independence.” The challenge is all the greater because Lithuania is to join the European Union (EU) this May. The EU has numerous stiff environmental standards that Lithuania, and other new EU members in its category joining in May, eventually will have to meet.
Prime Minister Brazauskas also expressed his concern to the Green Baron about the Russian plan to explore and possibly drill for oil in the Baltic Sea off its enclave of Kaliningrad. This Russian enclave is wedged between Lithuania to the northeast and Poland to the west. The Baltic Sea is a not-quite-landlocked body of water in northern Europe—it has an exit to the North Sea and thence to the Atlantic Ocean—but given its geographical configuration, cold climate, and surface salinity lower than that of the Atlantic Ocean, it is ecologically sensitive. That sea is, for example, the source of the famous Baltic herring (which the Green Baron enjoyed for breakfast when he visited Finland as a guest of that country’s Ministry of Industry in April 1988). Oil contamination in the Baltic Sea would be dire, indeed, for its ecological health and that of humans who live on or near its shores. For more detailed information concerning the Baltic Sea environment, please visit www.envir.ee/baltics, www.grida.no/baltic, and their linked Web pages.
Some historical background: Until 1945, when World War II ended, Kaliningrad was known as Koenigsberg, the capital of Germany’s region of East Prussia (which was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1945). Koenigsberg, the city of the seven bridges, was where the great 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, made his home. It also was a major Hanseatic League trading city and port (the League was formed during the 1200s and for centuries controlled the trade in northern Germany and Baltic and Scandinavian ports). The Baltic Sea coast from around Koenigsberg eastward to Klaipeda, Lithuania (formerly the Hanseatic port of Memel), and on to Ventspils, Latvia, is the source of nearly 90% of the world’s supply of amber. Conceivably, this industry, too, could be adversely affected by a Baltic oil spill.
Amber played an interesting role in Russian history. In 1716, the King of Prussia presented the Amber Room, a masterpiece of Baroque art, to Russian Czar Peter the Great. Catherine the Great later commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to embellish the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to her new summer abode in Tsarskoye Selo, just outside the city. “When the work was finished, in 1770, the room was dazzling,” wrote art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigoriy Kozlov. “It was illuminated by 565 candles whose light was reflected in the warm gold surface of the amber and sparkled in the mirrors, gilt, and mosaics.”
This opulent gesture of friendship between Russians and Germans later would come to serve as a potent symbol of their divisions. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, his troops overran Tsarskoye Selo, dismantled the panels of the oversized jewel box, packed them up in 27 crates, and shipped them to Koenigsberg, Germany (today's Kaliningrad, Russia). In January 1945, after air raids and a savage ground assault on the city, the room's trail was lost. Currently, there is no known clue to its whereabouts. For more information concerning the Amber Room, visit http://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/amber.htm. The Amber Room also was the subject of a novel of intrigue, The Amber Room, by Steve Berry (details can be found at www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345460030.
One component of the Soviet environmental legacy in Lithuania is the nuclear power plant at Ignalina, which, like the ill-fated plant at Chernobyl’, does not have a containment building as nuclear plants in the Western world do. Thankfully, no major accident has occurred at Ignalina, which is a huge installation rated on the gigawatt scale; Unit 2 alone generates 1,249 GW. As of mid-1999, Ignalina was generating about 80% of Lithuania’s electricity (visit http://www.abilene2000.com/wire/sov0810.html). For more information about Ignalina, visit www.iae.lt. One can find information about the plant’s performance, history, electricity generation, safety, and decommissioning projects. Query: If Ignalina is indeed decommissioned, what will then be the major source(s) of Lithuania’s electric power?
RESISTANCE TO ANTIBIOTICS REVISITED
The Green Baron really didn’t want to revisit this topic, but a few things still need to be said. In 1969, praising a huge array of vaccines and antibiotics, then-U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart told a Congressional hearing, It is time to close the books on infectious disease” (Nelson, R. Washington Post, March 30, 2004, p. F1). Ah, would that this were true then and now!
In her article, Ms. Nelson, a registered nurse in Seattle, WA, reminds us that if infectious disease was vanquished, someone forgot to tell that to the microbes. True, there is an arsenal of 150 antimicrobials now exist, according to the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO). However, as the Green Baron wrote in the last issue of Muenchhausen http://muenchhausen.blogspot.com, Feb. 25, 2004), bacteria are fast developing resistance to currently available antimicrobials, so, as John Bartlett of the Infectious Disease Society of America, notes, resistance to antibiotics is “predictable, and we’re going to need a constant inflow of new antibiotics. We’ve always stayed ahead of it, because we were always developing drugs. What is scary is that we’re getting down to a smaller … number, and it takes a long time to develop an antibiotic.” Moreover, citing poor profits, antibiotic makers are withdrawing from the market.
“Resistance is increasing across the board. It’s increasing in incremental amounts, but it is growing,” warned Donald Poretz, president-elect of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID), some of whose press conferences the Green Baron has attended. Dr. Poretz is an infectious-diseases specialist based in Annandale, VA. He has spoken of patients at Fairfax Hospital who have drug-resistant tuberculosis. Please see Ms. Nelson’s article in the Washington Post for a partial list of bugs and drugs they have outsmarted. The Green Baron also has a list in his archives.
One other thing should be mentioned: After a period of chemotherapy, certain cancer cells develop resistance to therapeutic agents, much in the same manner that bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics.
THE DEAD SEA—DISAPPEARING?
In the Jan. 7, 2004 issue of Muenchhausen, the Green Baron added his writing to the many articles that have appeared about the ecological crime committed against the Madan, the great marshes that existed in Iraq, in the area where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet. These marshes were drained and poisoned, and the people of the Madan killed, impoverished, and scattered. This attack on the Madan and its people had been ordered personally by Saddam Hussein, then President (autocratic dictator) of the then-prison state of Iraq.
Although the draining and poisoning of the Iraqi Madan was done deliberately, with malice aforethought, the continuing disappearance of the waters of the Dead Sea, located between Israel and Jordan, is not a matter of malice. It is, however, a matter of human carelessness, to put it charitably.
The Dead Sea (or Sea of Salt, as it is called in Hebrew) is the lowest point on Earth. About 50 years ago, its surface was at 1,292 feet (about 404 meters) below sea level. Its salinity was about 164 parts per thousand; by comparison, the average salinity of the North Atlantic Ocean stands at 35.85 parts per thousand, which makes it the saltiest of the oceans. The only water that substantially feeds the Dead Sea is the Jordan River and water from its tributaries, particularly the Yarmuk.
The surface of the Dead Sea is lowering dramatically (Schulman, M. The International Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2004, p. 9). According to Israel’s Ministry of the Environment, it has been dropping at the rate of about 80 cm to 1 meter per year, or 25 meters—that’s 82 feet—over the last 30 years. The inland sea’s length has decreased from 75 km (46.5 miles) in 1990 to 55 km (34 miles) in 2004. Some scientists believe that is this trend continues, the Dead Sea might disappear entirely by the year 2100.
Once upon a time, the Jordan River discharged 1.37 billion cubic meters of water into the Dead Sea. That is a lot of water; the reason the level of the Dead Sea did not rise was because the rate of evaporation—the area is very hot, climate-wise—equaled that of inflow. The rate of inflow now is about 250 million cubic meters, thanks to the huge diversion of Jordan River water. By the late 1970s, the water level dropped so much that the southern portion of the Dead Sea became detached from its northern portion. Most of the Jordan River’s water was diverted to Israel’s National Water Carrier and Jordan’s King Abdullah (Ghor) Canal. This diversion was done to meet industrial, agricultural, and industrial needs in Israel and Jordan.
The lowering of the Dead Sea level has resulted in sinkholes forming in the land around it. This has resulted in severe agricultural and structural losses and some personal injury around towns such as Kibbutz Ein Gedi (of Biblical fame, from the Song of Solomon). For instance, in Ein Gedi, sinkholes have resulted in the reduction in date harvest from 2,000 to 1,500 trees. On the Jordanian side, sinkholes have resulted in damage to the Arab Potash factory.
The ultimate fate of the Dead Sea might not so much be its disappearance as its reduction to about 67% of its original size, according to Valerie Bracha, director of environmental planning for the Israeli Environment Ministry. “The lowest place on Earth will be even lower,” she was quoted as saying. She also expects that the sinkhole appearance will continue unabated unless steps are taken to control the Dead Sea’s receding level.
The decision to divert waters from the Jordan River was made without accounting for the needs of the Dead Sea and surrounding ecosystems, according to Dani Livney of the Jerusalem-based environmental law firm Laster Gouldman. However, if governments in the area were to take a decision tomorrow to repair the situation, “it would take at least 25 years just to stop the [Dead Sea’s] level from dropping,” estimates geologist Eli Raz of nearby Kibbutz Ein Gedi.
As stated above, the lowering of the Dead Sea’s level might be ascribed more to carelessness in water management than to deliberate policy. By comparison, the heavy damage to the Sea of Aral in Central Asia was caused by deliberate environmental policy initiated under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev and continued under his “virgin lands” program to establish farmland in the basins of the rivers Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya. When a Russian ecological scientist protested against this policy, he was told, “We have written the Aral Sea off.” Unlike the shrinkage of the Dead Sea, the shrinkage of the Aral Sea has had severe effects on local climate and pollution. The Aral Sea will be the subject of a future issue of Muenchhausen.
HURRICANES DON’T OCCUR IN BRAZIL!
When the Green Baron took courses in weather analysis more years ago than he cares to admit, one of the truisms he was taught was that tropical storms and hurricanes do not occur in Brazil, or anywhere else in the South Atlantic Ocean, for that matter. Apparently, someone neglected to tell this to Mother Nature. On March 28, 2004, a hurricane—“the first ever”—hit the states of Santa Caterina and Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil.
That the storm was indeed a hurricane is a matter of controversy. According to Brazilian observers, winds did not attain hurricane force. Scientists in the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other cognizant agencies, however, maintain that the storm’s rotational wind velocity did indeed reach hurricane force (67 knots or greater), and have shown satellite images showing a storm with a well-defined eye.
Is this storm a manifestation of global climate change? The jury is still out on that question, but the Green Baron is confident that many contrasting comments in this regard will be made!
WHAT IS BOOTSTRAP PRESS?
Bootstrap Press is a nonprofit organization founded in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A., to promote the development and management of technology and businesses based on renewable resources. We also encourage the preservation of our Earth's natural habitats and its plant and animal species. So do a lot of other organizations, and more power to them for doing so!
Bootstrap Press is different because its members believe that the development of renewable resources and the preservation of habitats and species are receiving far more lip service than the financial and technical support needed to achieve these goals. We also think they will continue to be subjects of more talk than action until someone can show how renewable resources and the diversity of biological species can be the basis for potentially profitable businesses as well as a matter of ethics. Bootstrap Press intends to provide a forum for the discussion of how to build up such business, and of related topics.
There's one more thing we should mention about Muenchhausen and Bootstrap Press. We try to present only the scientific and technical facts that are correct to the best of our knowledge, belief, and good faith. It is up to Muenchhausen's readers to draw their own conclusions and make their own judgments.
NOTE: The mention of a product or service in MUENCHHAUSEN is in no way to be regarded as an endorsement of that product or service by MUENCHHAUSEN, Bootstrap Press, The Green Baron, or any other contributor to MUENCHHAUSEN.
AN ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER ABOUT ENVIRONMENT,
RENEWABLE RESOURCE TECHNOLOGY,
AND RELATED TOPICS
By BOOTSTRAP PRESS, INC.
BETHESDA, MD
GREENBARON@CSI.COM
=================================================================
APRIL 6, 2004
=================================================================
WELCOME!
The Green Baron welcomes one and all who take the time to read Muenchhausen. He aims to “tell it like it is” as much as possible, and avoid advocacy and ideological positions. There are enough of those to go around in other publications.
DEDICATION
This issue of Muenchhausen is dedicated, first of all, to His Excellency, Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas of Lithuania, who accorded the Green Baron a few minutes of his valuable time for a brief interview. The occasion was a press conference following the historic accession of seven countries to NATO membership and three to candidacy. The Green Baron also acknowledges with thanks the assistance of Mr. Mantas Zurba, of Vilnius, Lithuania, who offers services in conference interpreting and translations (mantasz@takas.lt) in translating the Green Baron’s questions and the Prime Minister’s replies from English to Lithuanian and back. In addition, grateful acknowledgment is extended to those at the Embassy of Slovakia and the National Press Club (Washington, DC), who made it possible to interview Mr. Brazauskas, however briefly. Finally, as always, the Green Baron expresses his great esteem for the scientists, engineers, and technicians who expand knowledge of environmental science and related disciplines.
THE SOVIET ENVIRONMENTAL LEGACY IN LITHUANIA
Lithuania, a Baltic nation, like many of its neighboring countries, has, to put it mildly, received an adverse environmental legacy during the years of Soviet occupation (in fact, in 1940, Lithuania was forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union, under whose hegemony it remained until 1991, with the exception of Nazi occupation between 1941 and 1945). What can Lithuania do to reverse the effects of this legacy?
Prime Minister Brazauskas told the Green Baron, “It will take much time, patience, and funding to mitigate what was done to us before our recent independence.” The challenge is all the greater because Lithuania is to join the European Union (EU) this May. The EU has numerous stiff environmental standards that Lithuania, and other new EU members in its category joining in May, eventually will have to meet.
Prime Minister Brazauskas also expressed his concern to the Green Baron about the Russian plan to explore and possibly drill for oil in the Baltic Sea off its enclave of Kaliningrad. This Russian enclave is wedged between Lithuania to the northeast and Poland to the west. The Baltic Sea is a not-quite-landlocked body of water in northern Europe—it has an exit to the North Sea and thence to the Atlantic Ocean—but given its geographical configuration, cold climate, and surface salinity lower than that of the Atlantic Ocean, it is ecologically sensitive. That sea is, for example, the source of the famous Baltic herring (which the Green Baron enjoyed for breakfast when he visited Finland as a guest of that country’s Ministry of Industry in April 1988). Oil contamination in the Baltic Sea would be dire, indeed, for its ecological health and that of humans who live on or near its shores. For more detailed information concerning the Baltic Sea environment, please visit www.envir.ee/baltics, www.grida.no/baltic, and their linked Web pages.
Some historical background: Until 1945, when World War II ended, Kaliningrad was known as Koenigsberg, the capital of Germany’s region of East Prussia (which was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1945). Koenigsberg, the city of the seven bridges, was where the great 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, made his home. It also was a major Hanseatic League trading city and port (the League was formed during the 1200s and for centuries controlled the trade in northern Germany and Baltic and Scandinavian ports). The Baltic Sea coast from around Koenigsberg eastward to Klaipeda, Lithuania (formerly the Hanseatic port of Memel), and on to Ventspils, Latvia, is the source of nearly 90% of the world’s supply of amber. Conceivably, this industry, too, could be adversely affected by a Baltic oil spill.
Amber played an interesting role in Russian history. In 1716, the King of Prussia presented the Amber Room, a masterpiece of Baroque art, to Russian Czar Peter the Great. Catherine the Great later commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to embellish the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to her new summer abode in Tsarskoye Selo, just outside the city. “When the work was finished, in 1770, the room was dazzling,” wrote art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigoriy Kozlov. “It was illuminated by 565 candles whose light was reflected in the warm gold surface of the amber and sparkled in the mirrors, gilt, and mosaics.”
This opulent gesture of friendship between Russians and Germans later would come to serve as a potent symbol of their divisions. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, his troops overran Tsarskoye Selo, dismantled the panels of the oversized jewel box, packed them up in 27 crates, and shipped them to Koenigsberg, Germany (today's Kaliningrad, Russia). In January 1945, after air raids and a savage ground assault on the city, the room's trail was lost. Currently, there is no known clue to its whereabouts. For more information concerning the Amber Room, visit http://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/amber.htm. The Amber Room also was the subject of a novel of intrigue, The Amber Room, by Steve Berry (details can be found at www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345460030.
One component of the Soviet environmental legacy in Lithuania is the nuclear power plant at Ignalina, which, like the ill-fated plant at Chernobyl’, does not have a containment building as nuclear plants in the Western world do. Thankfully, no major accident has occurred at Ignalina, which is a huge installation rated on the gigawatt scale; Unit 2 alone generates 1,249 GW. As of mid-1999, Ignalina was generating about 80% of Lithuania’s electricity (visit http://www.abilene2000.com/wire/sov0810.html). For more information about Ignalina, visit www.iae.lt. One can find information about the plant’s performance, history, electricity generation, safety, and decommissioning projects. Query: If Ignalina is indeed decommissioned, what will then be the major source(s) of Lithuania’s electric power?
RESISTANCE TO ANTIBIOTICS REVISITED
The Green Baron really didn’t want to revisit this topic, but a few things still need to be said. In 1969, praising a huge array of vaccines and antibiotics, then-U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart told a Congressional hearing, It is time to close the books on infectious disease” (Nelson, R. Washington Post, March 30, 2004, p. F1). Ah, would that this were true then and now!
In her article, Ms. Nelson, a registered nurse in Seattle, WA, reminds us that if infectious disease was vanquished, someone forgot to tell that to the microbes. True, there is an arsenal of 150 antimicrobials now exist, according to the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO). However, as the Green Baron wrote in the last issue of Muenchhausen http://muenchhausen.blogspot.com, Feb. 25, 2004), bacteria are fast developing resistance to currently available antimicrobials, so, as John Bartlett of the Infectious Disease Society of America, notes, resistance to antibiotics is “predictable, and we’re going to need a constant inflow of new antibiotics. We’ve always stayed ahead of it, because we were always developing drugs. What is scary is that we’re getting down to a smaller … number, and it takes a long time to develop an antibiotic.” Moreover, citing poor profits, antibiotic makers are withdrawing from the market.
“Resistance is increasing across the board. It’s increasing in incremental amounts, but it is growing,” warned Donald Poretz, president-elect of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID), some of whose press conferences the Green Baron has attended. Dr. Poretz is an infectious-diseases specialist based in Annandale, VA. He has spoken of patients at Fairfax Hospital who have drug-resistant tuberculosis. Please see Ms. Nelson’s article in the Washington Post for a partial list of bugs and drugs they have outsmarted. The Green Baron also has a list in his archives.
One other thing should be mentioned: After a period of chemotherapy, certain cancer cells develop resistance to therapeutic agents, much in the same manner that bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics.
THE DEAD SEA—DISAPPEARING?
In the Jan. 7, 2004 issue of Muenchhausen, the Green Baron added his writing to the many articles that have appeared about the ecological crime committed against the Madan, the great marshes that existed in Iraq, in the area where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet. These marshes were drained and poisoned, and the people of the Madan killed, impoverished, and scattered. This attack on the Madan and its people had been ordered personally by Saddam Hussein, then President (autocratic dictator) of the then-prison state of Iraq.
Although the draining and poisoning of the Iraqi Madan was done deliberately, with malice aforethought, the continuing disappearance of the waters of the Dead Sea, located between Israel and Jordan, is not a matter of malice. It is, however, a matter of human carelessness, to put it charitably.
The Dead Sea (or Sea of Salt, as it is called in Hebrew) is the lowest point on Earth. About 50 years ago, its surface was at 1,292 feet (about 404 meters) below sea level. Its salinity was about 164 parts per thousand; by comparison, the average salinity of the North Atlantic Ocean stands at 35.85 parts per thousand, which makes it the saltiest of the oceans. The only water that substantially feeds the Dead Sea is the Jordan River and water from its tributaries, particularly the Yarmuk.
The surface of the Dead Sea is lowering dramatically (Schulman, M. The International Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2004, p. 9). According to Israel’s Ministry of the Environment, it has been dropping at the rate of about 80 cm to 1 meter per year, or 25 meters—that’s 82 feet—over the last 30 years. The inland sea’s length has decreased from 75 km (46.5 miles) in 1990 to 55 km (34 miles) in 2004. Some scientists believe that is this trend continues, the Dead Sea might disappear entirely by the year 2100.
Once upon a time, the Jordan River discharged 1.37 billion cubic meters of water into the Dead Sea. That is a lot of water; the reason the level of the Dead Sea did not rise was because the rate of evaporation—the area is very hot, climate-wise—equaled that of inflow. The rate of inflow now is about 250 million cubic meters, thanks to the huge diversion of Jordan River water. By the late 1970s, the water level dropped so much that the southern portion of the Dead Sea became detached from its northern portion. Most of the Jordan River’s water was diverted to Israel’s National Water Carrier and Jordan’s King Abdullah (Ghor) Canal. This diversion was done to meet industrial, agricultural, and industrial needs in Israel and Jordan.
The lowering of the Dead Sea level has resulted in sinkholes forming in the land around it. This has resulted in severe agricultural and structural losses and some personal injury around towns such as Kibbutz Ein Gedi (of Biblical fame, from the Song of Solomon). For instance, in Ein Gedi, sinkholes have resulted in the reduction in date harvest from 2,000 to 1,500 trees. On the Jordanian side, sinkholes have resulted in damage to the Arab Potash factory.
The ultimate fate of the Dead Sea might not so much be its disappearance as its reduction to about 67% of its original size, according to Valerie Bracha, director of environmental planning for the Israeli Environment Ministry. “The lowest place on Earth will be even lower,” she was quoted as saying. She also expects that the sinkhole appearance will continue unabated unless steps are taken to control the Dead Sea’s receding level.
The decision to divert waters from the Jordan River was made without accounting for the needs of the Dead Sea and surrounding ecosystems, according to Dani Livney of the Jerusalem-based environmental law firm Laster Gouldman. However, if governments in the area were to take a decision tomorrow to repair the situation, “it would take at least 25 years just to stop the [Dead Sea’s] level from dropping,” estimates geologist Eli Raz of nearby Kibbutz Ein Gedi.
As stated above, the lowering of the Dead Sea’s level might be ascribed more to carelessness in water management than to deliberate policy. By comparison, the heavy damage to the Sea of Aral in Central Asia was caused by deliberate environmental policy initiated under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev and continued under his “virgin lands” program to establish farmland in the basins of the rivers Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya. When a Russian ecological scientist protested against this policy, he was told, “We have written the Aral Sea off.” Unlike the shrinkage of the Dead Sea, the shrinkage of the Aral Sea has had severe effects on local climate and pollution. The Aral Sea will be the subject of a future issue of Muenchhausen.
HURRICANES DON’T OCCUR IN BRAZIL!
When the Green Baron took courses in weather analysis more years ago than he cares to admit, one of the truisms he was taught was that tropical storms and hurricanes do not occur in Brazil, or anywhere else in the South Atlantic Ocean, for that matter. Apparently, someone neglected to tell this to Mother Nature. On March 28, 2004, a hurricane—“the first ever”—hit the states of Santa Caterina and Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil.
That the storm was indeed a hurricane is a matter of controversy. According to Brazilian observers, winds did not attain hurricane force. Scientists in the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other cognizant agencies, however, maintain that the storm’s rotational wind velocity did indeed reach hurricane force (67 knots or greater), and have shown satellite images showing a storm with a well-defined eye.
Is this storm a manifestation of global climate change? The jury is still out on that question, but the Green Baron is confident that many contrasting comments in this regard will be made!
WHAT IS BOOTSTRAP PRESS?
Bootstrap Press is a nonprofit organization founded in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A., to promote the development and management of technology and businesses based on renewable resources. We also encourage the preservation of our Earth's natural habitats and its plant and animal species. So do a lot of other organizations, and more power to them for doing so!
Bootstrap Press is different because its members believe that the development of renewable resources and the preservation of habitats and species are receiving far more lip service than the financial and technical support needed to achieve these goals. We also think they will continue to be subjects of more talk than action until someone can show how renewable resources and the diversity of biological species can be the basis for potentially profitable businesses as well as a matter of ethics. Bootstrap Press intends to provide a forum for the discussion of how to build up such business, and of related topics.
There's one more thing we should mention about Muenchhausen and Bootstrap Press. We try to present only the scientific and technical facts that are correct to the best of our knowledge, belief, and good faith. It is up to Muenchhausen's readers to draw their own conclusions and make their own judgments.
NOTE: The mention of a product or service in MUENCHHAUSEN is in no way to be regarded as an endorsement of that product or service by MUENCHHAUSEN, Bootstrap Press, The Green Baron, or any other contributor to MUENCHHAUSEN.
Labels: Dead Sea, Iraq wetlands, Lithuania prime minister, resistance to antibiotics
posted by Green_Baron00 @ 3:44 PM
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