* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download From the Washington Post, 10-12-09
ExxonMobil climate change controversy wikipedia , lookup
2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference wikipedia , lookup
Economics of global warming wikipedia , lookup
Fred Singer wikipedia , lookup
Media coverage of global warming wikipedia , lookup
Attribution of recent climate change wikipedia , lookup
Climate change in Tuvalu wikipedia , lookup
Fossil fuel phase-out wikipedia , lookup
Effects of global warming on human health wikipedia , lookup
Scientific opinion on climate change wikipedia , lookup
Global warming wikipedia , lookup
Climate change mitigation wikipedia , lookup
Climate governance wikipedia , lookup
Climate change and agriculture wikipedia , lookup
Effects of global warming on humans wikipedia , lookup
Climate change, industry and society wikipedia , lookup
Public opinion on global warming wikipedia , lookup
Surveys of scientists' views on climate change wikipedia , lookup
Climate change in Canada wikipedia , lookup
Climate engineering wikipedia , lookup
Reforestation wikipedia , lookup
Climate-friendly gardening wikipedia , lookup
Climate change in the United States wikipedia , lookup
Carbon governance in England wikipedia , lookup
Effects of global warming on Australia wikipedia , lookup
Solar radiation management wikipedia , lookup
Climate change feedback wikipedia , lookup
Climate change and poverty wikipedia , lookup
Citizens' Climate Lobby wikipedia , lookup
Low-carbon economy wikipedia , lookup
Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme wikipedia , lookup
Mitigation of global warming in Australia wikipedia , lookup
Biosequestration wikipedia , lookup
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report wikipedia , lookup
Politics of global warming wikipedia , lookup
Association of Energy Engineers New York Chapter www.aeeny.org October 2009 Newsletter Part 2 A Bid to Cut Emissions Looks Away From Coal By Matthew L. Wald, NYTimes, Nov 1 09 Kevin Riddell for The New York Times The nation's first project for capturing and separating carbon dioxide from a coal plant began Oct. 1 at American Electric Power's coal-fired plant in West Virginia. WASHINGTON — As Congress debates legislation to slow global warming by limiting emissions, engineers are tinkering with ways to capture and store carbon dioxide, the leading heat-trapping gas. But coal-fired power plants, commonly identified as the nation’s biggest emissions villain, may not be the best focus. Rather, engineers and policymakers say, it may be easier and less costly to capture the carbon dioxide at oil refineries, chemical plants, cement factories and ethanol plants, which emit a far purer stream of it than a coal smokestack does. Carbon dioxide typically makes up only 10 percent to 12 percent of a coal plant’s emissions, they note, and the gas is so mixed with pollutants that it is difficult to separate. Cheaper strategies for sequestering carbon dioxide could prove especially important if Congress passes a law setting up a so-called cap-and-trade system. That would set a national ceiling for overall emissions and allot pollution allowances to utilities, manufacturers and other emitters, which could then trade them among themselves. Companies that exceed their carbon dioxide emission allowances could buy credits from those that pollute less. Under such a system, a coal plant that had exceeded its allotment might pay a chemical plant that could separate a ton of carbon dioxide more cheaply. “If we have a cap-and-trade scheme, it will happen wherever it is the most cost-effective,” said Jeffrey R. Holmstead, a lawyer and former assistant administrator for air and radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency. Lending momentum to this thinking, a Texas company, Denbury Resources, is building a 320-mile pipeline for carbon dioxide that will run from Louisiana to Houston. Initially the pipeline will take natural underground deposits of carbon dioxide in Mississippi to the aging oil fields of east Texas, where it can be used to force more oil to the surface. But as the pipeline threads its way through more and more refineries and plants — the chemical heartland of the United States — manmade carbon dioxide captured at those sites could also be added and stored. Sequestering a ton of carbon dioxide from a chemical plant would have the same effect on the Earth’s atmosphere as storing a ton from a coal plant, scientists and industry executives emphasize. “Sequestration is not a coal technology — it is a greenhouse gas abatement strategy,” said S. Julio Friedmann, leader of the carbon management program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Last month, the Energy Department announced $44 million in grants to develop the technology, known generally as carbon capture. Among them was $1.72 million for Praxair, a chemical company based in Connecticut that operates two plants near Houston that make hydrogen for use in oil refineries. The money will go toward developing engineering studies on how to capture carbon dioxide from the hydrogen production and deliver it to Denbury. Carbon dioxide makes up 20 percent of the gas resulting from hydrogen production, twice the concentration found in a gas stream from a typical coal plant. Recovering it from this stream rather than a coal plant smokestack would therefore be cheaper and simpler. In the oil industry, drillers have for years tapped underground reservoirs of carbon dioxide, brought it to the surface and moved it by pipeline to oil fields. Then they inject it into the fields to help force oil to the surface in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” If the oil industry left the natural carbon dioxide where it was, and drew on carbon dioxide from industrial plants instead, far less manmade carbon dioxide would enter the atmosphere, experts say. What oil drillers pay for carbon dioxide depends on the value of the oil it will help produce. When oil is at $70 a barrel, carbon dioxide goes for $10 or $11 a ton, said Tracy Evans, the chief executive of Denbury, the Texas company building the carbon dioxide pipeline. Should the Congressional legislation mandate a cap-and-trade system, that modest price could be very important. “Wherever you can go to store a ton of carbon the most cheaply, you will go,” said Mr. Holmstead, the former E.P.A. administrator for air. 2 Another likely source of pure streams of carbon dioxide are plants that refine natural gas. The natural gas usually comes out of the ground mixed with carbon dioxide, which natural gas sellers routinely remove so the natural gas can be considered “pipeline quality.” That carbon dioxide is sometimes reinjected into the ground, but sometimes vented. Then there are cement kilns, which produce a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide. For now, no one is sure what it will cost to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from coal plants because the first such project in the nation, at American Electric Power’s coal-fired plant in New Haven, W.Va., got under way only last month. At the moment, the process consumes 30 percent of the coal plant’s energy, but engineers are working to cut that in half. Even so, experts expect the price to run to $60 a ton or more. But pure streams could be captured for the cost of drilling a natural gas well and compressing the gas into liquid form — perhaps $10 to $15 a ton, Dr. Friedmann of the Livermore laboratory said. Bruce Nilles, director of the National Coal Campaign at the Sierra Club, also cites natural gas plants as a promising avenue for carbon capture. Natural gas has only half as much carbon dioxide in it as coal does. So the equipment needed to separate and sequester the carbon dioxide at a gas plant would be half as big as the machinery at a coal plant of the same size, and would cost less to build and operate. Mr. Nilles and others say that biomass fuels, derived from wood, waste and alcohol, could offer an even better opportunity for carbon capture. If an electric plant burns wood chips or other plant material in place of coal, it produces a stream of smoke from which carbon dioxide can be taken and then injected deep into the earth. The advantage is that if a tree is cut down and burned in a boiler, a new tree can grow in its place, and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That makes the process “carbon negative;” for each ton burned, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will decline. Eventually, Mr. Evans of Denbury said, most of the carbon sequestration will come from the power sector, because it is a far larger emitter than the chemical or refining sectors. But for the moment, he said, for companies like his, which use carbon dioxide to drill for oil, there is something of a shortage. His company is still drilling for natural deposits of carbon dioxide, he said, and “we don’t have any to sell to others.” Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company ADVERTISEMENT The Superintendents Technical Association (aka the Supers Club) is the first technical society of multifamily building maintenance personnel. For free e-mail edition of monthly newsletter, visit our Web site: www.nycSTA.org or ask Dick Koral, [email protected] 3 Current NY Chapter AEE Sponsors: The New York Chapter of AEE would like to thank our corporate sponsors who help underwrite our activities. Please take a moment to visit their websites and learn more about them: Duane Morris LLP Constellation Energy Innoventive Power Association for Energy Affordability R3 Energy Management If you or your firm is interested in sponsoring the New York Chapter of AEE, please contact Jeremy Metz at [email protected]. The Book That Contains All Books The globally available Kindle could mark as big a shift for reading as the printing press and the codex By Stephen Marche, Wall Street Journal, Oct 17 09 ON MONDAY, THE KINDLE 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The ereader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text. The question is how. And the answer can be found in the history of earlier book forms. Most literate people are familiar with at least some of the consequences of the print revolution of the 15th century, but far fewer are as aware of the much more profound change that occurred when rolls were replaced by codices—pages bound between covers—in the late Roman period. Think of the scattered, tattered remainders of the Dead Sea Scrolls—each text is isolated and vulnerable. Codices were originally minilibraries, much more useful and easy than storing masses of loose individual texts. In "Christianity and the Transformation of the Book" (2007), Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams argue that the codex was one of the keys to the nascent power of Christianity in the late Roman period: "The rise of the codex, with its compact proportions, greatly intensified the physical—as well as the symbolic— concentration of cultural power that a sizable library embodied." The Gospels became both a single object and a small library. The simple act of binding involved the bringing together of voices and interests, a move from having the Lamentations of Jeremiah and histories of the Kings of Israel and the laws of Moses to having the Bible which contains them all. The development of the codex was a shift from thinking of literature as a unique object, like a painting, to seeing it as an institutional object. Conversely, as the codex came to dominate as a means of intellectual transmission, the scroll began to take on the status of a holy object, which is why synagogues keep the Torah in scrolls. The introduction of the printing press brought a similarly enormous change to the nature of reading. One of the most interesting figures in that transformation is the great Benedictine scholar Trithemius. He lived in Sponheim in the 15th century and managed to amass a library fully half the size of the Vatican library, an 4 incredible achievement. He was also the author of "In Praise of Scribes," the foremost defense of scribal practice, in favor of writing things out and against printing them. Amazon The Kindle, which will be available internationally next week. He reminds me particularly of Nicholson Baker, who disapproves highly of Kindle 2. I mean the comparison absolutely as a compliment to Mr. Baker, who recently published a diatribe against Kindle with the subtitle "Centuries of Evolved Beauty Rinsed Away." His argument boils down to how much he likes the feel of paper. Trithemius had stronger arguments against the newfangled technology of the press: Printed books could never match the beauty and uniqueness of a copied text; copying produced a state of contemplation which was spiritually beneficial; and copying was a way of reducing error, which indeed it was at first. His central claim was that hand-produced books were inherently holy. His leading anecdote is the story of a scribe who died after decades of copying texts. When they disinterred him, the three fingers of his right hand, his writing hand, had not decomposed. Anyone who has held a handmade medieval missal—or even a handwritten letter—knows what Trithemius is talking about: the sense that someone is communicating something to you personally. But "In Praise of Scribes" is a good object lesson in the impossibility of avoiding technological change. Trithemius didn't have his book copied. Too few people could have read it that way. It went straight to the printing press (just as Nicholson Baker's polemic against Kindle 2 is available online). Trithemius was the first in a line of would-be Luddites who couldn't resist the power of the new. My paper library consists of 2,000 volumes, making it both much too big and much too small. I consider a working library to have about 5,000 volumes, but a mere 2,000 has been sufficient to be one of the most continuous problems of my life. Moving it around is a nightmare. A hundred boxes of books is a terrible burden in the 21st century. Yet I know that I will never get rid of them. I'm too attached now. Just as the ancients respected the scroll more after the development of the book, just as the hand-written manuscript became sacred after the invention of print, the printed book is now beginning to glow with its own obsolescence. 5 Scala/Art Resource "The Trial of Christ; The Death of Judas' from the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, early 6th century. But I am immensely excited for the new phase of the book. So far the new technology has been called the "e-reader," a term obviously picked by engineers, not poets. In literary terms it's a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books. Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly wonderful possibility? A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of ultimate text. We are still in early days, but it is obvious where the transbook is headed: It will eventually provide access to all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in or out of "print." Kindle 2's boast of being able to hold 1,500 titles will eventually sound as ludicrous as those early ads for floppy disks boasting that they could hold up to 64k of data. We will want everything and we will get it. Possibly there will eventually develop a subscription service, which provides access to all books for a monthly fee. At any rate, a single object will contain the contents of all the world's libraries. It's just a matter of when that will happen. And who will profit. Kindle 2 isn't really about what we may or may not want as readers and writers. It's about what the book wants to be. And the book wants to be itself and everything. It wants to be a vast abridgment of the universe that you can hold in your hand. It wants to be the transbook. —Stephen Marche is the pop culture columnist at Esquire magazine. His most recent book, "Shining at the Bottom of the Sea," is a literary anthology of an invented country. Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 6 Associated Press The Dead Sea Scrolls. Women In India Refusing To Wed Men Without Toilets From the Washington Post, 10-12-09 In rural parts of India, an increasing number of potential brides are refusing to wed a man who cannot provide them with indoor plumbing and a toilet. About 665 million people in India -- about half the population - lack access to a toilet and are forced to use public restrooms or an open field. "No loo? No 'I do,'" says Vimlas Sasva, 18, parroting a radio slogan popularized by a "No Toilet, No Bride" campaign that kicked off two years ago. Sure, I Can Teach That ... By Gene C. Fant Jr., The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct 19 09 ONE OF MY FRESHMAN-COMPOSITION STUDENTS plopped noisily in a seat next to my desk. "I failed my art appreciation paper. I don't understand this. How can I fail an art paper?" I scanned the essay and asked him what grade I might have assigned the paper. He looked over it for a bit: "I guess you would have failed it too. I see several misspellings and some incomplete sentences. But it's an art paper, not an English paper! It's not the same thing." I smiled at his naïve comment, even as I disabused him of its false premise. I see teaching writing as foundational for other subjects, as I employ my professional training to eradicate weaknesses in student work. I build this foundation carefully through well-thought-out assignments and one-on-one conferences. Even 7 students who enter the university with strong skills have poor habits that I can address. When they move onto their other subjects, they need to carry with them the skills that I have imparted and they have refined. I mention this because of a burgeoning development in general education: the replacement of disciplinary courses with student-learning outcomes embedded in a wide variety of courses. In the latter view, professors in almost any course can document student achievements in areas as diverse as public speaking, computation, research, basic science, and, of course, writing. Certainly we need to embed these skills throughout the curriculum, but the problem that arises is what has been called "Polymath Syndrome," the belief held by many professors that they can teach almost any subject or skill. In such a configuration, a biology professor, for example, requires an oral presentation in a freshman-level course and submits a formal evaluation of the skill to a central records-keeping office to document the learning outcome. That professor might very well be able to recognize good skills or poor skills, but that professor is not likely equipped to remediate deficiencies. As I have heard some professors in the department that specializes in the skill lament, "That professor in [another discipline] is telling me that he knows how to do what I do, including all of the trouble-shooting that I have learned in six years of graduate school and a dozen years of teaching. I'm sorry, but that's more than a little insulting." The turf issues attached to such models are massive: If English, communication arts, math, and other departments no longer hold exclusive courses in general education but are reduced to trouble-shooting roles, their positions will disappear, replaced by yeomen remediators who work in academic labs and not classrooms. It's a significant challenge. Are such laments regarding Polymath Syndrome legitimate or are they just blustering over shrinking influence related to general-education courses? War Games Start to Include Climate Change A recently published document (August 09) shows that US military and intelligence officials now understand global climate destabilizations as a key factor in future planning. (Thank you John Nettleton for submitting this.) "THE STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE of the U.S. Army War College publishes national security and strategic research and analysis which serves to influence policy debate and bridge the gap between Military and Academia." This is from a public document, cleared for release from the Strategic Studies Institute United States Army War College http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=932 Synopsis: Climate change, in which man-made global warming is a major factor, will likely have dramatic, long lasting consequences with profound security implications, making it a challenge the United States must urgently take up. The security implications will be most pronounced in places where the effects of climate change are greatest, particularly affecting weak states already especially vulnerable to environmental destabilization. Two things are vitally important: stemming the tide of climate change and adapting to its far-reaching consequences. This project examines the destabilizing effects of climate change and how the military could be used to mitigate global warming and to assist at-risk peoples and states to adapt to climate change, thereby promoting stability and sustainable security. Recommendations are made on the importance of U.S. leadership on the critical issue of global warming, on defining and dealing with the strategic dimensions of climate change, and, as a case in point, on how Sino-American 8 cooperation in Africa would not only benefit areas where climate change effects are already pronounced, but also strengthen a crucial bilateral relationship. ....What is new is that climate change poses security threats unmatched among environmental phenomena. Climate change is a multifaceted threat to America’s well-being, and the world’s. The life-sustaining capacity of our planet may be in jeopardy. Fears are growing that climate change, that which is already occurring and the even more dire consequences that may lie ahead, will generate instability and lead to conflict. The most violent conflict is foreseen in and near areas that become uninhabitable, for example, due to desertification or sea-level rise. The nature, underlying uncertainty, growing prevalence, and possible intractability of climate change exacerbate its tensions, risks, and threats.... (1) projected climate change is a serious threat to America’s national security; (2) climate change will make some of the most volatile regions of the world even more unstable; (3) projected climate change will increase tensions even in stable regions of the world; and (4) climate change, national security, and energy dependence are related, global challenges. Based on these findings, the panel had five recommendations: (1) the security implications of climate change should be fully incorporated into national security and national defense strategies; (2) the United States should play a stronger role, nationally and internationally, in the mitigation of climate change; (3) the United States should build partnerships that help less-developed nations adapt to climate change; (4) the Department of Defense (DoD) should enhance its operational capability through more energy efficient combat power; and (5) DoD should assess the impact on U.S. military installations worldwide of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and other projected climate change impacts over the next 30 to 40 years. The panel’s findings and recommendations are compelling... Conclusions and Recommendations From a national security perspective, too much and too little can be made of climate change. Thus far, too little has been made. Conversely, the Obama administration must avoid making too much of climate change, lest its response be perceived as yet another pretext for American hegemony. The security challenge of climate change must be taken up, however, and soon, while options are more numerous, the prospects for success are greater, and the likelihood of major conflict is far less. Climate change will have dramatic, accelerating, and long lasting consequences with profound security implications. Adapting to and mitigating climate change and its destabilizing effects are vital efforts the United States must undertake earnestly and remain committed to indefinitely. The security implications will be most pronounced in places where the effects of climate change are greatest, particularly weak states already vulnerable to environmental destabilization. Two things are paramount: stemming the tide of climate change and promoting stability. 9 Prof. Michal’s Solo Show Focuses On Brooklyn’s Industrial Past, Toxic Present (From NYC College of Technology News and Events) Citizens Manufactured Gas Plant operated on 5th & Smith Streets to the Gowanus Canal from about 1860 until 1960. Today, the resulting contamination reaches down into the soil more than 120 feet. THE LEGACY OF BROOKLYN’S INDUSTRIAL past and the spectrum of pollution in which we live are captured in City Tech Assistant Professor Robin Michals’ photography exhibition, “Toxi City: Brooklyn’s Brownfields,” at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 4th Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, from Sunday, October 25, through Sunday, November 8. The exhibit hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. The public is invited free of charge. 10 An artist’s reception will be held Sunday, Oct. 25, 3 to 6 p.m. For more information: visit www.e-arcades.com, e-mail [email protected] or call 917.509.9516. The exhibition features 30 photographs of sites in Coney Island, DUMBO, East New York, East Williamsburg, Gowanus, Greenpoint, Red Hook, Sunset Park and Williamsburg where historic uses have saturated the soils and groundwater with a lasting toxicity. To select the sites she photographed, Michals, a Park Slope resident who teaches in City Tech’s advertising design and graphic arts department, used the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Brownfield Remediation list as a starting point to determine what qualified as a brownfield or toxic site. In addition, she consulted old maps at the Brooklyn Historical Society. “The alphabet soup of DNAPLs, NAPLs, BTEXs, PAHs, SVOCs, VOCs, TCE, PCE, and PCBs that have been left behind at these sites can never be entirely removed; their dangers can only be better managed,” Michals says. “As we careen towards the greater impacts of climate change, brownfields remind us of the damage we are willing to inflict on the environment for the benefits of industrialism.” Underscoring that the dichotomy of pristine and polluted is no longer a useful way of thinking, the exhibit will include photographs of sites in all phases of the clean-up process. Photographs of several completed remediation projects such as Pfizer and Lowe’s will be included as well as photographs of several sites undergoing remediation such as the Coney Island and Williamsburg Works manufactured gas plant sites. In addition, the show will feature photographs of as-yet unremediated sites that once housed gas plants, electrical powerhouses, petroleum facilities and manufacturing operations or were tainted by landfill or dumping. Because Brooklyn is a dense, crowded, place, many of these sites are in use in some form today despite their toxicity. Michals’ work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Rome Arts in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) Buffalo Arts Studio (Buffalo, NY) and UVM in Burlington, VT, as well as in a two-person show at Venetia Kapernekas Fine Arts in Chelsea (NYC). She has participated in group shows at the New York Hall of Science (Queens), Gigantic Artspace (NYC) and The Front Room, (Williamsburg), among others. This event is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc. (BAC), and by grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award Program. The Brooklyn Lyceum, known formerly as NYC Public Bath No. 7, is a performing arts and cultural center in Park Slope. Reopened in 1994 as the Brooklyn Lyceum, the old bathhouse now plays host to a range of performance events, festivals and cultural activities. xxxxxxxx Archive Picture This Antartica 2041: My Quest to Save the Earth’s Last Wilderness By Robert Swan ADVENTURER TURNED ENVIRONMENTALIST Robert Swan illuminates the perils facing the planet come 2041—the year when the international treaty protecting Antarctica is up for review—and the many steps that can be taken to avoid environmental calamity. In 1985, when Robert Swan walked across Antarctica, the fragile polar environment was not high in his mind. But upon his return, the earth’s perilous state became personal: Robert’s ice-blue eyes were singed a pale gray, a result of being exposed to the sun’s rays passing unfiltered through the depleted ozone layer. At this moment, his commitment to preserving the environment was born. 11 In Antarctica 2041 Swan details his journey to awareness, and his firm belief that humans can reverse the harm done to the planet thus far, and secure its future for generations to come. Despite the dire warnings Swan raises in Antarctica 2041—exponentially high greenhouse-gas levels; rising seas; massive species extinction—he says there is much we can do to avert looming disaster. Ultimately an upbeat call to action, his book provides the information people need to understand the world’s crisis, and the tools they need to combat it, ultimately showing us all that saving Antarctica amounts to saving ourselves. Robert Swan is the first person to have walked to both the North and South Poles. An active lecturer, he regularly leads Antarctic expeditions. He divides time between London, New York, and Antarctica. EXCERPT The Beardmore In the Antarctic summer of 1985 I found myself standing at the inland margin of the Ross Ice Shelf, a crevasse-riven, glacier-fed formation about the size of France. A France without baguettes and cathedrals. A totally Paris-less France. The ice beneath me ran down a thousand feet. Underneath that, the Bible-black darkness of a cold, unexplored sea. There were reasons why the Ross Sea remained unexplored. A New Zealand fishing boat once pulled from its waters a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, to distinguish the species from its smaller cousin, the merely giant squid) more than thirty feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds. That's what they had down there, that and God knows what other creatures. Perhaps only Captain Nemo could have handled it. To report my location on the Ross Ice Shelf above the Ross Sea, in other words, is another way of saying that I was in the middle of frozen nowhere, perched on the brink of an enormous nothingness. "A silence deep with a breath like sleep" is how one man who died there put it. Early Antarctic explorers called the ice shelf "the Great Ice Barrier," in honor of the hundred-foot-high vertical wall where it meets the sea. But for those early explorers, and for me, the barrier acted more as a road, an immense, human-dwarfing, windswept road, but nevertheless a well-recognized path into the interior of the continent. We followed "In the Footsteps of Scott," as our expedition was called, tracing the trek to the South Pole of the great British explorer Captain Robert F. Scott. As I stood at the edge of the barrier, the question I pondered was pretty basic. Why in heaven's name would anyone want to enter the interior of Antarctica? Why would anyone freely choose to experience the most inhuman landscape available to us? It's a boogeyman of a place, good for scaring the wits out of homebodies. "The highest, driest, windiest, coldest place on earth"—that's a formulation that seems by 12 law to appear in every single piece of writing about Antarctica (the most memorable example: a book coauthored by Leonardo DiCaprio and Mikhail Gorbachev). No one had even laid eyes on the place until 1820. No one wintered over for a full year until 1898. Why was I there? With my thoughts jangled and my inner clock going haywire since the midnight sun rendered night into day, I realized I had no answer to that basic question. No answer at all. I was twenty-nine years old. With two other team members, Roger Mear and Gareth Wood, I had just spent four weeks walking— trudging, struggling, sledging all our supplies ourselves—across the Ross Ice Shelf. We were ants on an ice cube the size of France. Our ultimate goal, that of reaching the South Pole, now appeared a vain hope. By our calculations we were fifty-eight days away from 90 degrees south. Our food supply— biscuits, sausage, soup dosed with vegetable oil for added calories—was good for another fifty-five days. We were already starving. Since we hauled our own provisions for the journey, we had calculated our supply down to the gram: 5,200 calories per day per man. It was not enough. As we labored over the ice cube, our bodies were eating themselves. My weight plummeted: the "South Polar diet," we called it. Controlled lab research has demonstrated not only physiological but also psychological effects of semi-starvation: a tendency on the part of the hungry toward the so-called "neurotic triad"—hypochondria, depression, and hysteria. The triad hit me hard. I imagined symptoms, felt listless and low, and experienced periodic spikes of panic over our situation. We gave off the characteristic ketone odor of the starving vertebrate. I could smell it on myself as I wandered a short distance from the camp, late on that bright-as-day evening on the barrier. South of us, barring our way to the pole, towered the twelve- thousand-foot peaks of the Queen Alexandra mountains. The range braced the mighty Beardmore Glacier, over a hundred miles long, the second-largest glacier in the world. To get to the pole, we would have to climb the Beardmore's immense "ladders of smashed glass," as it was described by Ernest Shackleton, the man who discovered it. In the gross emptiness of the ice shelf, our camp appeared puny and insignificant, a tent with three ice sledges dumped over next to it. Robert F. Scott called this place, where he was nailed by a ten-day blizzard, "the Slough of Despond." "Miserable, utterly miserable," he wrote in his journal. "Slough" refers to an allegorical place of despair in The Pilgrim's Progress. The name joins other colorful waypoints on the path to the pole, such as Shambles Camp, Devil's Ballroom, and Butcher's Shop. 13 Our expedition had broken down. Harsh conditions, personality clashes, and, in my case, devastating self-doubt left us marooned in the most inhospitable environment on the planet. I knew by now that Roger Mear and Gareth Wood, my expedition mates, were hardly speaking to each other. The only thing they seemed to agree on was that they didn't much like me. A half decade of planning, raising funds, and untangling problems of supply and transport had come down to this—three squabbling humans just a couple of arguments away from freezing to death. There was no hope of rescue. We had no radios. We were unaware of any human presence within four hundred miles of us. At that moment I was absolutely, positively convinced that my life had ended. More distressing still—if that's possible—my dream had ended. I had scratched and clawed my way to this point. I had buttonholed famous mentors and explorer-scions such as Sir Peter Scott, Lord Edward Shackleton, Sir Vivian Fuchs, Lord Hunt, the Royal Geographic Society, and Jacques Cousteau. I had borrowed enormous sums on the basis of no more than my smile (my smile was in debt to the tune of $1.2 million). Then I slogged on ice-numbed feet to this forlorn point in front of the Beardmore, all in an effort to honor Scott and Shackleton, my boyhood heroes, by walking to the South Pole. Why? For what purpose? To fail? To die? Roger Mear was one of the world's foremost mountaineers. Gareth Wood, also an accomplished mountaineer, was a meticulous organizer and logistics whiz. What was I? I was a novice. I wasn't a mountaineer or even an outdoorsman. And I was a foolhardy novice. I had mounted an expedition to the South Pole without ever having really been camping before. Standing out there in the frozen nowhere, we somehow had to find within ourselves the skills to sort out our difficulties and make the dream real again. We had to trek the remaining five hundred miles to our goal—tantamount to walking from the east coast of America to the Mississippi River, but on fissured, hillocky, dangerous ice. We followed in the footsteps of Scott and his polar party. That meant we were following in the footsteps of death, since the whole party died on their return from the pole. On our trek we had already passed the spot where Scott himself and two of his mates perished, and the place where Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates walked out into a blizzard in an act of selfsacrifice. Up ahead, at the foot of the Beardmore, was the death site of Taff Evans, the strongest of the group of five, and paradoxically the first to go. Antarctica itself had it in mind to murder us. Antarctica the inhuman, Antarctica the hostile, Antarctica that cares not a whit whether humans live or die but obviously prefers them dead. If we had dared to inhale an uncovered breath in some of the insane temperatures we 14 encountered during the previous winter, our teeth could have possibly cracked and exploded like so many tiny artillery shells. In the depths of the sunless months, at a temperature of 280 degrees F, toss a pan of boiling water into the air, and it freezes with an odd crinkling sound before it hits the ground. Bitter, lethally cold in winter. The lowest temperature recorded in Antarctica (2128.6 degrees F at Vostok in 1983) was 39 degrees colder than the lowest recorded temperature on any other continent. The place had its warmer and fuzzier side, too. It's the only continent that has never hosted a shooting war. Antarctica has no verified homicides, no prisons, beyond petty theft no crime at all—an absence that, as far as I was concerned, merely rendered it all the more strange and inhuman. It was relatively warm during our summer trek—we would hit a high one day of almost 40 degrees F—but still utterly alien to human life. Journeying to the continent was the closest anyone could get to leaving earth without actually resorting to space travel. Great beauty alternated with sheer terror. False suns hung in the sky, and false moons, too. I had stared at only ice and snow for so long that I hallucinated shapes in the landscape wherever I looked: a Sioux chief in full feather headdress, the profile of Queen Victoria. In Antarctica, I often got the sensation that I was gazing at the most beautiful person on earth, right at the moment when the mask was pulled off to reveal a frightening monster. I knew what kind of monster. This was the face of God. Not a kindly, patriarchal graybeard, either, but Spinoza's god, the cold, abstract, impersonal force of nature—not He but It, not Who but That, an ur-god churning out magic tricks, turning midnight into day or lighting up the heavens with the multicolored streamers of the aurora. So I tried to make a deal. I begged. Isn't that one of the stages of the human experience of death? You deny, you rage, you weep, you try to bargain. "Just don't kill us," I whispered. The winds that poured off the Beardmore took my words and whipped them instantly away. It was as though I was pleading with the whole continent. "Just don't kill us," I prayed to the monster. "Just don't kill us, and I promise I will somehow do whatever I can do to protect you." Excerpted from Antarctica 2041 by Robert Swan with Gil Reavill Copyright © 2009 by Robert Swan. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Editor’s Note: Do these issues of the newsletter add anything useful to your professional life? I would really appreciate notes from readers. Good, bad or indifferent! Dick Koral [email protected] 15 NY Chapter AEE Board Members David Ahrens Michael Bobker Robert Berninger Timothy Daniels Jack Davidoff Fredric Goldner Bill Hillis Placido Impollonia Dick Koral John Leffler John Leffler Robert Meier Ryan Merkin Jeremy Metz John Nettleton Asit Patel Dave Westman Chris Young [email protected] 718- 677-9077x110 [email protected] 646-660-6977 [email protected] 212- 639-6614 [email protected] 212- 312-3770 [email protected] 718-963-2556 [email protected] 516- 481-1455 [email protected] 845-278-5062 [email protected] 212-669-7628 [email protected] 718- 552-1161 [email protected] 212-868-4660x218 [email protected]?? [email protected] 212-328-3360 [email protected] 212-564-5800 x 16 [email protected] 212-338-6405 [email protected] 347-835-0089 [email protected] 718- 292-6733x205 [email protected] 212-460-6588 [email protected] 914-442- 4387 Board Members Emeritus Paul Rivet [email protected] George Kritzler [email protected] Alfred Greenberg [email protected] George Birman 914-422-4387 Past Presidents Mike Bobker (2003-05), Asit Patel (2000-03), Thomas Matonti (1998-99), Jack Davidoff (1997-98), Fred Goldner (1993-96), Peter Kraljic (1991-92), George Kritzler (1989-90), Alfred Greenberg (1982-89), Murray Gross (1981-82), Herbert Kunstadt (1980-81), Sheldon Liebowitz (1978-80) FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, economic, scientific, and technical issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. 16