As surely as the cherry blossoms will emerge after another cold,
bleak Washington winter, so will the global warming muezzins resume
calling us to prayer at their green altar. But now, thanks to
National Geographic’s Charles Choi, we are reminded that
if global warming actually occurred, any American president can not
only end it but reverse it with the push of a button.
In a brilliant but little-noticed article, Mr. Choi
reports that a small nuclear war — one that employed only 0.03
percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal — would result in reversing
earth’s long-term warming trend and result in global cooling by
2.25 degrees, according to NASA computer models. It’s a wonder that
Al Gore didn’t think of this a decade ago.
The NASA modelers apparently found that explosions of 100
Hiroshima-sized warheads would produce the desired effect by
blasting so much dirt and dust into the atmosphere as to reduce the
effect of the sun’s rays.
The model is based upon historical fact. The eruption of
volcanoes, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the
Philippines, actually caused this effect but more briefly. And we
don’t want to overdo it. The eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora
in 1815 caused widespread famine and unrest. In the NASA model, the
one hundred warheads being set off would cool the tropics, Europe,
Asia, and Alaska by about 5-7 degrees and parts of the polar
regions would actually warm a little. The globe’s temperature would
be cooled by about one degree Fahrenheit for a decade.
Agriculture would be affected, and the earth would, for a
while, be “…a colder, hungrier planet.” But how much colder and
hungrier will the world be after the nuclear explosions than it
would be if, say, a carbon tax scheme such as the one Henry Waxman
and Nancy Pelosi wanted were made law? Or if the Kyoto Treaty were
revived to impose cap-and-trade on the world’s productive economies
while those such as China and India were exempted? Or if we allowed
the Arab world rebellions to starve us of oil because we are
crippled by liberal group-think that prohibits offshore drilling
and the construction of new nuclear power plants?
Mr. Choi doesn’t report any NASA modeling on those
prospects, but from the economic studies of cap-and-tax and such,
we know that food will be more expensive and scarce, people will
earn less and subsistence farming may become the new fashion on the
Upper East Side.
But there is a better way, and it makes use of the best
technology and skills of NASA. We need a Kubrick annex to a new
Kyoto Treaty.
Stanley Kubrick, the genius who created Dr.
Strangelove based on Peter Bryant’s novel, centered us on the
idea of the “Doomsday machine,” a Soviet superbomb designed to
destroy all life on earth by creating the “nuclear winter,” a
century-long version of the Mount Tambora eruption. It was to be
detonated automatically in the event of a nuclear attack on
Russia.
Under the Kubrick Annex, all of the signatories to a new
Kyoto Treaty would agree that their nation would be the site of one
of the hundred Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons modeled by NASA. No
nation could be trusted to detonate one on its own soil, so someone
of unimpeachable character and authority — the UN Secretary
General — would have to be the keeper of the keys. And, because
the SecGen might be someone such as Nancy Pelosi or Ban Ki Moon,
the occupant of that office shouldn’t be given more authority than
to maintain the nuclear weapons and the computer controls over them
that would detonate them all simultaneously and automatically if
the temperature of the globe rose more than the agreed
amount.
Nations such as China and Russia could easily agree to
this, given their geographic expanses. But for smaller countries
such as France and Great Britain it would be a far greater burden.
So the Kubrick Annex would have to allow them to pay
other nations to host the warheads that could otherwise destroy
vineyards or sheep moors. The nations would be left to their own to
negotiate a fair “nuke and trade” rate of payment.
And, of course, there would have to be a Khamenei Codicil
to the Kubrick Annex. Nations (and the Palestinians) that have
demonstrated a fondness for suicide bombings would not be eligible
to host nuclear weapons or to pay for other nations to host weapons
for them unwittingly.
The elegance of this system would be obvious to all
concerned, especially the global warmists. They would gain the
absolute assurance that global warming will not end life on earth,
though they would have to give up their moral superiority to a
supervening authority. Unfortunately, this would mean that they
would all have to get real jobs, which they can seek in government
or academia. The smartest of the lot will seek employment at the
UN, where the bureaucracy is so magnificently overpaid that they
can only be compared to California public sector union
members.
For those of us who believe global warming is a scam, the
benefits will be immediate and personal. No longer will we have to
endure cocktail party lectures about our duty to trade our
500-horsepower Mustangs for Toyota Priuses and Chevy Volts. No more
will our college-age children come home for the sole purpose of
measuring our carbon footprints and redesigning our lives’ plans to
achieve social responsibility. We might even be able to buy
incandescent light bulbs again even though they use more
electricity than their dimmer mercury-filled counterparts. (We will
have to think of another solution to another liberally-manufactured
problem to restore our ability to buy toilets that flush rather
than stir.)
Think of all the green jobs that would be created. The
design and manufacture of hundreds of nuclear warheads and computer
controls for them, the transportation, maintenance and all that
equipment are sure to require the creation of thousands of jobs in
hundreds of countries. President Obama, this is your moment. It is
a time for international leadership. And it is all within your
grasp. Or not.
