Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Climate MADness - and The Lorax in 3-D!
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/dawn-stover/climate-madness
Climate MADness
By Dawn Stover | 20 June 2012
In The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss, the Yooks and the Zooks go to war over whether bread should be eaten with the buttered side up or down. The battle escalates from slingshots to guns to goo-spewing war machines, and eventually both the Yooks and the Zooks acquire a tiny but extremely destructive bomb called the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo. Neither side has any defense against the bomb, and both sides are left wondering who will drop it first.
A parable of the arms race, the book was banned from some libraries during the Cold War, but it nicely illustrates a conventional military doctrine that is so simple and intuitive even a child can understand it: mutually assured destruction, or MAD. Surely no society, not even the crazy Zooks who butter their bread on the bottom, would launch a full-scale weapons exchange guaranteed to annihilate its own citizens along with their enemies. The security of every American rests on that assumption.
But when it comes to climate change, the logic of mutually assured destruction seems to have escaped the politicians in Washington and the diplomats in Copenhagen (for an utterly Seussian take on the Copenhagen talks, click here) and Cancun and Durban and Bonn. They fail to recognize that MAD does not require the detonation of massively powerful nuclear bombs. Americans and our economic rivals can destroy the planet more slowly, but just as surely, by launching bitsy boomeroos of carbon dioxide and methane, of nitrous oxide and hexafluoroethane -- day after day, year after year -- until eventually we have ruined our water supplies, agriculture, power and transportation systems, natural environment, and even our own health and safety. Until one day, we have converted large swaths of our planet into dead zones. This is the MADness of climate change.
<snip>
It's strange that so many politicians today can't see the connection between nuclear war and climate catastrophe. Scientists long ago realized that a full-scale nuclear exchange would wreak havoc not just through bomb damage and radiation, but also by altering the climate. This realization played a major role in the Cold War endgame, when both the United States and the Soviet Union understood that a nuclear war would destroy agriculture and ecosystems over vast areas. As former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev explained in an interview with Salon in 2000: "Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation."
<snip>
If only the problem of environmental destruction were as simple as Dr. Seuss made it out to be in another great book, The Lorax, which has been called "a kind of Silent Spring for the playground set" and was recently released as a 3-D feature film. ...
<snip>
Climate MADness
By Dawn Stover | 20 June 2012
In The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss, the Yooks and the Zooks go to war over whether bread should be eaten with the buttered side up or down. The battle escalates from slingshots to guns to goo-spewing war machines, and eventually both the Yooks and the Zooks acquire a tiny but extremely destructive bomb called the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo. Neither side has any defense against the bomb, and both sides are left wondering who will drop it first.
A parable of the arms race, the book was banned from some libraries during the Cold War, but it nicely illustrates a conventional military doctrine that is so simple and intuitive even a child can understand it: mutually assured destruction, or MAD. Surely no society, not even the crazy Zooks who butter their bread on the bottom, would launch a full-scale weapons exchange guaranteed to annihilate its own citizens along with their enemies. The security of every American rests on that assumption.
But when it comes to climate change, the logic of mutually assured destruction seems to have escaped the politicians in Washington and the diplomats in Copenhagen (for an utterly Seussian take on the Copenhagen talks, click here) and Cancun and Durban and Bonn. They fail to recognize that MAD does not require the detonation of massively powerful nuclear bombs. Americans and our economic rivals can destroy the planet more slowly, but just as surely, by launching bitsy boomeroos of carbon dioxide and methane, of nitrous oxide and hexafluoroethane -- day after day, year after year -- until eventually we have ruined our water supplies, agriculture, power and transportation systems, natural environment, and even our own health and safety. Until one day, we have converted large swaths of our planet into dead zones. This is the MADness of climate change.
<snip>
It's strange that so many politicians today can't see the connection between nuclear war and climate catastrophe. Scientists long ago realized that a full-scale nuclear exchange would wreak havoc not just through bomb damage and radiation, but also by altering the climate. This realization played a major role in the Cold War endgame, when both the United States and the Soviet Union understood that a nuclear war would destroy agriculture and ecosystems over vast areas. As former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev explained in an interview with Salon in 2000: "Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation."
<snip>
If only the problem of environmental destruction were as simple as Dr. Seuss made it out to be in another great book, The Lorax, which has been called "a kind of Silent Spring for the playground set" and was recently released as a 3-D feature film. ...
<snip>
