During this time -- that is, beginning in the Fall of 1976 -- environmental law piqued my interest. After working part-time as a paralegal at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, I moved over to the Environmental Protection Agency, where I worked as a paralegal with his own unit, charged with devising a legal and economical means to dispose of millions of cubic yards of sewage sludge, suffused with poisonous heavy metals, stored in enormous lagoons next to the oil refinery at the convergence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers in Philadelphia.
As I worked on the poisonous sludge disposal project -- ultimately, an amazing adventure and study in youthful naivete -- I was introduced for the first time to the topic of global warming by engineers in the Environmental Protection Agency, when papers on that subject, being circulated through the EPA, caught their attention.
They explained to me that there was a growing fear that human activity was causing a net absolute increase in the global inventory of the atmospheric gases
CARBON DIOXIDE (CO2)
METHANE (CH4)
NITROUS OXIDE (N2O)
each of which had enormous power to increase the average world temperature.
They showed me graphs of data from Mount Washington in New Hampshire and Mauna Loa in Hawaii, showing a persistent annual increase in atmospheric CO2.
They talked about the probable need, in the near future, to treat greenhouse gases as pollutants, so that government and international treaties could try to control them to keep the ice caps and other land-bound ice from melting.
I was sold. I realized that I was looking at the world's biggest worry.
I was sorely disappointed when I was unable to break-into environmental law on behalf of the government, either at the federal level or at the state level, for various reasons.
But, I never stopped watching the development of global warming concerns in the media.
Since the mid-1970s, scientific knowledge about the true nature of global warming and the dangers it entails has increased by leaps and bounds.
At a particular point, it dawned on environmental scientists that their analyses were all absurdly tame, because "straight-line thinking" suffused their math.
To give a simple -- but extremely important -- example, it is NOT true that for every 1 degree of world atmospheric temperature increase above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, X amount of ice melts.
Instead, it ALL melts above 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
Scientific estimates of how long it would take for polar ice on Greenland and Antarctica to melt were instantly divided by a factor of 10 !
And then they had to be re-divided by 10, again !
And now science is flirting with another decrease of how much time we have to a disastrous melting, by a factor of 10, for a third time !
This change in thinking -- and the alarming conclusions it leads to, namely that we only have a few years to solve global warming problems -- is referred to as the arrival of "tipping-point logic."
Next, scientists measuring the increase in global warming gases were puzzled by a new, strictly modern change in the data -- the relatively low levels of methane in the atmosphere, with its enormously greater global warming power -- 20 times that of CO2 -- suddenly began to "go asymptotic" on the graphs: The amount of extraordinarily dangerous methane in the atmosphere suddenly began to shoot-up alarmingly, like a rocket.
Why? Where was all of the extremely dangerous methane coming from?
Two places, it turned out. As CO2 heated the atmosphere, the seas got hotter, decreasing their ability to hold dissolved methane.
And, as CO2 heated the atmosphere, the Asian and Alaskan tundra began to defrost, releasing shocking amounts of methane into the atmosphere, as ancient, previously-frozen animal and vegetable matter under the ground began to rot again. Suddenly, a new "sport" took root in Siberia and Alaska -- setting invisible methane geysers on fire ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI
Suddenly, out of the blue, mankind's global warming problem has been multiplied by a factor of 20, as the methane graph now outstrips the carbon dioxide graph in illustrations depicting global warming gas increases, because methane is 20 times as bad as carbon dioxide, for global warming purposes.
Next, scientists, greatly puzzled by radical temperature increases in the seas near the poles, made another astonishing, deeply-discouraging discovery -- the ocean currents work like conveyor belts transferring ocean heat increases due to global warming from the hot Equator to the cold polar regions, concentrating it there.
Because of the currents, every ONE degree in ocean temperature increase at the hot Equator, directly under the sun, generates a FOUR degree ocean temperature increase at the cold, dark poles !
Suddenly, the risk of polar ice cap melting had been multiplied and accelarated AGAIN, by a factor of FOUR !
As science came to terms with these new realizations, some began to calculate the amount of land-bound ice in the world, being melted by global warming.
The amount is astonishing.
When all factors are calculated into the estimate, the total increase in world sea levels, if ALL land-bound ice were to melt, comes to 225 feet.
225 feet ABOVE current sea levels.
Now, think about that. On the average, Magnolia, New Jersey is 23 meters, or a little over 75 feet, above sea level.
What that means is, If all of the land-bound ice above sea level in the world were to melt from global warming, on the average Magnolia will be 150 feet BELOW the surface of the seas !
150 feet !
The best way to understand that figure is to be made aware that the deepest I could dive, when I was a SCUBA diver with tanks, years ago, is 165 feet.
The water above Magnolia, when all of the melting is done, will be so deep that normal SCUBA diving methods will barely be adequate to reach your front doors!
That seems ridiculous, doesn't it?
But it's NOT ridiculous.
It's starting to actually HAPPEN !
No joke.
Currently, the oceans at our latitude are become about 1/32 of an inch deeper each year.
You can understand why, when you look at YouTube videos of Greenland ice melting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EMCxE1v22I
Very soon, it will be 1/16 of an inch per year.
As July's grow hotter and hotter and hotter, it will become 1/8 of an inch per year.
Then 1/4 of an inch per year.
Then 1/2 of an inch per year.
1 inch per year.
2 inches per year.
4 inches per year.
8 inches per year.
And so on.
In other words, that 1/32 of an inch per year IS ONLY FOR THIS YEAR. We DON'T have 225 feet x 12 inches x 32 years, or 86,400 years. We have 40, or maybe 30, or even as little as 20 years.
Until the sea water creeping up the railroad tracks toward Magnolia from the direction of Clementon reaches Warwick Road.
This is where things are going.
As scientists and some political leaders absorbed and quietly discussed these facts, they also looked at the consequences in a more realistic fashion, geographically and demographically.
In most estuaries -- the bays, rivers and creeks subject to tides -- every 1 inch increase in ocean depth yields an invasion of about 1000 inches of land to the left and right. That's 83.3 feet to the left and right, for a total loss of 166.6 feet of inhabitable estuary shore.
The best way to understand this figure is to look at the hotels on the beach at Miami in Florida.
A few inches of ocean depth increase will decrease their value from HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to $00.01 -- one cent !
Now, here is the real problem with ocean depth increase -- about 65% of humanity lives on land adjacent to estuaries.
That means that very shortly, 65% x 7.4 billion people in the world, or 4.8 BILLION people -- including every human being in Magnolia -- are going to have to move upland.
As the chaos generated by such a move accelerates, it will be more than any political system in the world can handle. Governments everywhere will collapse. The uncanny ability of modern movies to anticipate things, like "Mad Max: Fury Road," will once again be proven, in spades.
This is the near future, friends.
Soul-less Governor Christie (who can never confront constituents with truth -- instead, he says what he needs to say, and takes WHATEVER position he needs to take, to get elected) says that global warming is real, but it's not enough of a problem to be a serious concern. His false words remind one on Hoover's description of Prohibition as "the noble experiment." In truth, if you look at this year's films of Greenland melting, you will be frightened.
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