Chemical Winter

[gullyfourmyle]

I read the Global Warming thread and was disappointed at how little seems to be understood about what is happening to Planet Earth.

Our chance to fix what is wrong is quickly slipping away.

Global Warming is most likely caused by human activity. But the planet has endured warming and cooling trends in the past. Life went on. But each time, there was a wave of extinctions that changed the dominant life forms.

All of this happened so long ago that virtually no one can relate to those events that must have been gruesome in the extreme each time.

The big difference between then and now is that we are alive and the next wave of extinction has started. As smart as people think they are, the outcome looks like being the same since collectively we are not smart enough to stop what we are doing that's causing the end of the age of mammals.

The thing we are doing that's causing the life extinction process is burning fossil fuels.

Burning is one thing. The emissions are another thing altogether. What's in the emissions are tiny molecules known as VOC's - Volatile Organic Compounds. These compounds are mostly deadly. A good many of them belong to the Benzene group of chemicals of which there are many thousands. They are all man-made.

VOCs are emitted every time we burn crude oil or anything that was manufactured or derived from crude oil. When those chemicals enter the atmosphere, they become a component of smog. They also become part of the process that is transforming earth's atmosphere from oxygen based to solvent based. The surface water, both salt and fresh is being transformed as well.

The transformation is called acidification. Acid is a life destroying substance. It causes the dissolution of molecular bonds and the molecules themselves. In short, what VOCs touch, they attempt to change into a corrosive puddle. No substance is exempt from the process long term - especially living tissue.

The emissions we are fouling the atmosphere with initially go up into the air but eventually, like everything else, they eventually come down. That's gravity for you.

When the emissions come down, they do so as an industrial strength coating composed of the same chemicals our most powerful pesticides are manufactured from. That's what comes out of jet engines, cars, trucks, ships, trains, motorcycles, scooters, lawnmowers, industrial machinery, furnaces and so on. There is no form of energy we use or make that is not contributing to our immanent extinction.

When you or any other living breathing organism on earth inhales or ingests these chemicals, they do what I mentioned earlier - they do their best to dissolve you.

Currently the chemical load is too small in most cases for you to notice unless you live in a heavily polluted area. Whether you notice or not, you are not exempt from damage.

Asthma, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, Agent Orange Syndrome and Gulf War Syndrome all have one thing in common - they are caused by the same chemicals - the VOC's that burn away respiratory tissue.

Asthma is sort of an entry level of the condition. It is not an allergy. It is a chemical injury.

Most people who have asthma don't stop to think that other life forms are suffering from the same conditions or that the other life forms may be exhibiting different symptoms.

Frogs for instance literally die on the spot - scientists have described their symptoms as immunological disorders. Bees have immunological disorders as well. So do mayflies and countless other species. What causes immunological disorders is the destruction of immune systems.

When a human or any other species inhales corrosives, first contact causes a cooling followed by a burning sensation if anything at all can be felt. It depends on the amount of damage.

In human infants, there is an opening at the top of the bridge of the nose where the olefactory nerves travel from the lining of the inside of the nose through the tiny channels in the skull to the brain. Until the age of two years, the spaces between the olefactory nerves and the bony channels are open to the atmosphere. The membrane that protects the brain through most of our lives does not start to form until the age of two years. So human infants are very vulnerable to the corrosive effects of airborne chemicals.

But in our quest to look outside the box, it pays to consider what spaces human babies and other life forms inhabit. Mostly they are close to the ground where the poisons are most highly concentrated. Now think about the height baby carriages are and and the height of automobile and truck tailpipes. Would you suck on a tailpipe? Probably not but that's what millions of mothers do to their children in cities every day. For some reason, Newspapers won't print that and TV and Radio won't touch it with a barge pole. I've tried. You would think people would be more compassionate. Dogs and cats suffer the same fate but to a certain extent, can take avoidance measures. Except in our heavily toxic, high emissions in-home environments that is.

Until the twentieth century, brain cancers were relatively rare except in heavily industrialized areas. Now the planet's air has become a corrosive. Oxidization has always been a factor but with the added threat of literally millions of new man-made chemicals floating about in the air, the situation has become much worse.

What I described there is happening to everything, not just human infants.

The chemicals are settling on everything. All animals including us, eat the coated vegetable material. As the chemicals move up the food chain, each succeeding animal takes on what is known as a chemical body burden. They are chemical deposits in your organs including skin that accumulate over the years.

Our body burdens are accumulating rapidly. Since these are corrosive chemicals, rest assured these chemicals aren't sitting there in you passing the time of day doing nothing.

Since every breath you take is contaminated to some degree, as your body neutralizes the damage done by your resident chemicals, they are replaced by more chemicals because you are still inhaling and exhaling.

Back in the early '70s, the oil companies were forced to remove lead from fuels. They replaced lead with benzene. There was no extensive research to determine what the long term effects were. Benzene and its relatives are so lethal there is no acceptable level for them in the atmosphere. They are so toxic they can't even be tested on living things to determine a level of acceptability. There is no safe level of these chemicals in air.

Remember how tiny I said the molecules are? They are so tiny you don't have to inhale them. They are known as transdermals. That means they can migrate straight through your skin without difficulty.

Because they have such easy access to our internal works, they have access to our genetic codes - the instruction manual that makes you yourself and the instruction manual that ensures that your offspring will look human instead of something from a horror movie. But as we continue to contaminate the planet, the horror movie scenario is becoming commonplace. Essentially, our oil dependence is destroying the integrity of life on earth and its ability to re-create itself

Chemical Winter is the oil industry's version of a nuclear war. Only this war is already nearly over and hardly anyone knows it started.

Since the seventies, cancer levels have skyrocketed.

Scientists have been spending billions looking for answers.

But guess what?

It turns out the scientists, since they were nerds in school, never went to auto class and didn't become drag racers or street racers or paint automobiles. If they had, they'd have read the labels on the cans containing the chemicals commonly used by the automotive industry. They could have read the cause of environmentally sourced cancers on every tin of lacquer thinner and paint.

But scientists and medical practitioners as a group are rarely exposed to these chemicals and so KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THEM. Same goes for biologists, meteorologists (weather - think global warming and climate change), zoologists and so on. The causes are right under their noses but for the most part they don't get it.

Except for the ones I've worked with on the subject. They get it. So the message is starting to creep out there. It's a slow process slowed further by that twit covered in National Geographic.

Stating his views doesn't make him a twit. What makes him a twit is failing to remove his blinkers and look at causes and effects outside his discipline and how they relate to one another.

Specialization to a fault has made most scientists twits. If no one is looking at the big picture, they all see the obscure details and miss the blatantly obvious. That's what's happened with Chemical Winter. The nature of civilization is to cause individuals to specialize in specific fields. Individuals who see the big picture aren’t valued because they aren’t experts at anything. This situation tends to limit how much a given species can progress. If they specialize too soon, you have ants and other insects. A delay gives you mammals and a species divergence that continues until something like us happens. The we specialize and bingo – you have doctors who have lost touch with the world developing outside the walls of the hospitals and labs.

Anyone of you probably has access to science nerds of one sort or another. You should ask them what they know about the potential for industrial strength lacquer thinners to extinguish life. Those that are into paint formulation and the like will tell you in gruesome detail what can happen to anyone exposed to high levels of the stuff. Most of them don't think about long term micro doses. The other sorts of scientists are mostly clueless.

VOCs were allowed to be included as part of fuel formulation with the understanding that the solvents are neutralized by the environment within three days. What was never taken into account was the accumulation factor should the emissions exceed the environment's ability to neutralize the impacts within three days. At first the effects were not noticed.

They weren't noticed by anyone until a biologist by the name of Karen Lips found newly discovered frogs going extinct right before her eyes:

FROGS ARE US

Frogs and people have a lot in common. Our mitochondria, the stuff that binds our cells together, is exactly the same. In fact every living thing on the planet has the same mitochondria. What that means to the average guy on the street without going into a long list of building blocks we share with our frog relatives, is that what affects frogs also affects us in much the same way. Essentially if something in the environment is killing them, you can rest assured we are at exactly the same risk, it may just take longer:

The world's frogs, newts and toads are dying. They are being over-harvested for food, their homes are being destroyed, and most worryingly, entire species are disappearing for no apparent reason. That is the conclusion of more than 500 herpetologists around the world, reported in Science today. Stuart S., et al. Science, published online 10.1126/science.1103538 (2004).

“Time and again, scientists have visited woods filled with frog song just 3 or 4 years earlier, only to find them frogless. Now, researchers have finally caught a killer in the act--a new fungus that has turned up in 120 frogs and toads of 12 species in Australia and seven species in Panama during mass die-offs in relatively pristine areas. Fourteen scientists from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada will describe the fungus--from the phylum Chytridiomycota” - in the 21 July Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fungus May Drive Frog Genocide, Jocelyn Kaiser, WILDLIFE BIOLOGY, 3 July 1998

"There is the canary in the coalmine argument," says Stuart. "Because of their sensitivity, amphibians are the first species we would expect to show adverse reactions to climate change and new emerging diseases." Amphibians face a bleak future, Emma Marris, [email protected], October, 14, 2004

In 1993, a then unknown biologist by the name of Karen Lips who became internationally famous when her research into new species of amphibians found in Panama was made public. Her research was in a hitherto unexplored mountainous region of Panama where she was discovering new species of amphibians virtually one after the other. It was like finding her own Galapagos Islands. It was a different story when she returned to continue her research in 1997:

…imagine Karen's shock when she returned to her research site in western Panama and discovered dead and dying frogs everywhere: "I'd been going to Fortuna, Panama, since 1993. In 1997, I returned to find all these dead frogs. They looked fine, like they went to sleep and didn't wake up." Frogs are food to so many snakes and birds, a herpetologist could spend many seasons in some places without seeing a dead frog lying on the ground.” Kim Y. Masibay, Science World, March 11, 2002

What ties these events together is air. Nothing associated with planet earth permeates our environment as completely as air and air is a vehicle for the transportation of material that can mix or float along and become one with what we consider our atmosphere. Airplanes take great advantage of the density of air, lift and speed to fly. The waste products of the energy consumed to make this happen are exhaust emissions. If you remove the passenger and cargo component of the aviation experience and equate what an airplane does as a cordless paint-gun, you have in our aviation system, a most complete mechanism for spraying a life dissolving chemical wash over the entire globe.

Frogs have three areas of their bodies that can aid in gas exchange: skin, lungs, and the thin membranes lining the mouth and pharynx. Frogs can breathe through their skin while they are in wet places. They can also exchange gases between their blood vessels and with the outer environment. Unlike us they have mucus glands in their external skin tissue, they keep the skin moist. We have those same mucous glands but they line our nose and respiratory tract rather than our outer skin. Sweat glands are evolved mucous glands for land-lubbers. Frog skin absorbs a lot of dissolved oxygen from the ambient atmosphere.

The second respiratory surface is the thin membranes lining the mouth and pharynx. Our membranes exchange gases too, but not to the degree that those of frogs do.

The lungs are third respiratory surface, thin, elastic and lightweight, they are organs that inflate and deflate rhythmically, while the frog is at rest. Adult frogs have poorly developed lungs, due to their mostly motionless existence as they wait patiently for the next unsuspecting bug.

Now just imagine adding crude oil-derived solvents to the air the frogs must breathe. Solvents that turn their protective mucous to an acidic solution which then evaporates more quickly than pure water. You have a cooling and immobilizing effect that would tend to freeze the frog in place and strip it of its immune system (the mucous) at the same time. Since frogs live in environments that are thick with fungal spores, it is no stretch of the imagination to figure out what happens next is it? Fungal and parasitic attacks from varieties of viruses and bacteria we have never imagined existed, including viral cancer. Imagine a cancer you can catch like the common cold. It’s real. It’s in Cairns, in northeast Australia and it apparently hails from the air pollution capital of the world, southeast Asia. It is suspected of being a hitchhiker on a boat loaded with illegal Chinese immigrants. If a frog can acquire this disease, possibly from humans, it is no big thing to imagine it migrating back again is it?

The point is this: cancer, in most cases, is a man-made injury, not a disease. Cancer cannot exist in undisturbed wilderness locations. It takes time for cancer to evolve in an organism. Cancer is a complex activity that starts at the sub-microbial scale and evolves forwards, gradually acquiring mass but not necessarily shape. In nature, an animal with an injury or disability is quickly identified and consumed by its natural predator. Generally that only fails to happen if the animal is a member of a protective society, but even so, they have shorter life spans. If the predator is absent due to man’s interference or other activity such as pollution, habitat loss, hunting to name but three, an animal can persist for longer. We are now at a point where predators have been reduced so severely in most eco-systems, that chemical impairment can evolve into cancer. That is serious because cancer interferes with DNA development and integrity. If those damaged genes are passed on, you have what doctors assume is a hereditary disease rather that a migratory injury. It makes a big difference which you call it because if it is a disease, you assume the logical approach is to combat it with drugs. If it is an injury, you simply eliminate the source of the injury and DNA will respond over generations accordingly. To fail to recognize the difference, you have the medical and scientific communities perpetuating injuries and in effect marginallizing the health of our entire species eventually.

But that isn’t all. Animals don’t have cancer wards or sunglasses or sunblock. They don’t know to wash fruit before eating it and the carnivores don’t realize they can no longer consume the organ meat they get their minerals, vitamins and trace elements from because they are loaded with toxins. Animals that develop cancer advance it up the food chain through predators as well as diminishing the physiologic integrity of their species by procreating and spreading defective DNA around. Human beings are without a doubt, the most sickly organisms on earth because we have been able to prolong not only our own lives, but lives of our own predators – parasites in the form of cancer, worms and so on. By massive pollution, we have ensured that our own diseases now have a foothold at the other end of the food chain. We have cancer advancing towards us through fish, then frogs. Without much fanfare, it has snuck into the reptile population as well. Certainly, there will be plenty of biologists who will no doubt dispute this and say that cancer appears in wildlife naturally. But my research into the nature of cancer leads me to conclude that cancer is not a “normally” occurring event without some sort of unusual chemical disturbance such as a forest fire or volcano eruption or man made pollution. In short, wild animals don’t develop genetic cancer the way people do, or they didn’t before the onslaught of industrialization. And onslaught it is. There is no disputing the numbers. In 1995, 1 in 5 U.S. residents could expect to die of cancer . Ten years later it is commonly accepted that that number is 1 in 3. To be sure, most human cancers are not considered to be caused by environmental factors. Or they weren’t until the link between breast cancer and air pollution was accepted.

When I first started Health Restoration research that revealed for me in 1980 , the profound direct connection between constipation and cancer, it quickly became apparent to me that in twenty years (2000) we would have a cancer epidemic. In 1990, I said we would have a diabetes epidemic in fifteen years. That is happening now (2005). In another ten years I know we will have a Candidiasis (2015) epidemic. My first prediction was met with laughter and skepticism. My second was met with indifference. No one is laughing now and when I say Candidiasis, rather than laugh, people tend to take me seriously. My point is this: when you understand what the factors are and the results of combining factors, you don’t need to be an astute mathematician to anticipate a likely outcome. They are too obvious.

Newsflash!

As I was typing this, I received an update from the BBC:

Toxic chemicals that poisoned your great-grandparents may also damage your health, US research suggests.

“Research on rats indicates man-made environmental poisons may alter genetic activity, giving rise to diseases that pass down at least four generations…

…The researchers found the damage was not caused by alterations in the DNA code, but changes in the way the genes work…

…These epigenetic changes, as they are known, are caused by small chemicals that become attached to the DNA, modifying its activity.” Poisons may pass down generations, BBC World News, 3 June, 2005, 10:20 GMT 11:20 UK

The report goes on to say that the rats were exposed to very high levels of toxins that may be artificially high, but then, a lot of people were and still are exposed to high levels of toxins in all industrial societies.

June 4, 2006

A few months after I wrote about the link between solvents in air and frog mortality, number of scientists “ found compelling links between frog extinctions and changes in temperature.

They believe the perfect conditions are being created for the spread of a fungus that is deadly to amphibians.”

“A chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) has been suggested as the prime suspect”

"We have found evidence that global warming is causing widespread amphibian extinction by triggering outbreaks of disease," said lead author Dr Alan Pounds.

"Night-time warming and day-time cooling means that you are producing conditions more favourable for the fungus," the scientist from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica told the BBC News website.

In my view, this is nonsense. Species take millions of years to evolve and planet earth has had any number of spot warming and cooling trends within that time. If a multitude of frogs died off every time earth went through a warming and cooling phase, we’d have no frogs left. I don’t believe only one eco-niche within an eco-system could fail without other obvious evidence within the system. There would have to be more than just frogs dying or their prey species would become super abundant in a very short period of time. Their main predators would be going hungry. That would have to have had discernable impact. It doesn’t seem to have happened. Most of earth’s species evolve to accommodate a range of naturally occurring temperatures. There are exceptions such as the Devil’s Hole Pup Fish in Nevada. But that is a far more secluded environment – a rock cave with a small shelf with its own constant microclimate that literally can’t change. Other closed ecosystems in caves have been found. But the frogs were not living in anything like a closed system. Certainly there was cloud cover, but temperatures did rise and fall over time.

My view is that the fungus was an opportunist. The fungus could not penetrate the frogs’s mucus layer regardless of temperature. But the fungus could certainly penetrate if the mucus layer had been compromised by air-borne solvents. No doubt, the fungus spores are a common and pervasive component of the air in those tropical forests. And equally beyond doubt, the frogs would have evolved to resist them in any naturally occurring circumstances. Solvents are far from naturally occurring circumstances. In my view, so far, nothing else makes sense.

I later discovered that in the late 1980s, aviation fuels had been reformulated from straight kerosene to new high octane super fuels to increase mileage performance.

The added chemicals were benzenes. Since that time, aircraft have been spraying the planet with high strength pesticides.

How could that be?

When fuel is burned, there is no such thing as a complete burn. Raw fuel is exhausted along with spent, burned carbon dioxide and many other transformed but still lethal chemicals. In effect, aircraft are gigantic pesticide applicators. All life on earth is its target.

We humans have a good chance of prolonging our stay beyond that of other species because we have doctors and for the most part, wildlife does not. So understanding that you could expect that people populations would be exploding and other species populations would be on the wane. In that assessment you would be right.

The most tolerant species; those that have adapted to live in close proximity to human populations have increased their numbers – like raccoons and leopards. Those that cannot tolerate human interference are losing ground or have lost it altogether.

Unfortunately, we have only an incomplete understanding of why we need those other species. But Einstein said it best when he observed that when the bees go extinct, humanity will follow in four years. The bees are in the process of going extinct right now worldwide.