POLLUTION IN THE 20TH CENTURY and GLOBAL WARMING TODAY
An eyewitness comparison of pollution from the past to the present day showing how the use of actual facts combined with real scientific theories can help you avoid becoming Chicken Little.

POLLUTION IN THE 20TH CENTURY and GLOBAL WARMING TODAY

(Oops, I mean Climate Change)

Do you believe you have already done enough research on this subject? In the case of Global Warming/Climate Change being caused by man-made pollution, especially from the United States, any serious person looking for a way to stop it in the future would have to analyze what happened in the past. The simple study of cause and effect from previous events can often tell you if the solutions you are endorsing now will truly do any good later. With that process in mind, have you ever done any research into what pollution was like in this country during the 20th Century prior to the 1980's?

The 1950's and 60's were the peak of environmental destruction, and the horrors people endured then led to the creation of the EPA, so what can people today learn from their experience? Quite a bit, actually.

If you weren't alive before 1980 you won't have any idea what true pollution was like. Allow me to enlighten you a bit. As you read, please take the time to compare the way it was in the past to the way it is now. Also, please feel free to take a few of the most outrageous descriptions found here and ask anybody you know who was alive back then whether or not they remember these things. Better yet, ask them if they remember the commercial of an American Indian (Iron-Eyes Cody) with a tear running down his cheek as he looked upon the pollution of the country. Nobody who saw that commercial ever forgot it.

Here's the way things were: Factories were everywhere, and they belched thick clouds of dark-brown or even black smoke all day long. We're talking real smoke, not the white steam you see now. In some places the smoke was so heavy it couldn't stay in the air very long. It would settle back to earth and create a nasty, smelly mist. If you wanted to get away from it all, and just go see the natural beauty of the country instead, well, guess what? It was almost impossible. You could not make a cross-country trip without seeing scores of these factories along the way just filling the air with garbage. Worse, you could be miles away from a factory, totally beyond sight of it, and you could still smell it. Not just smell it, breathe it! You got to suck up all the chemicals associated with this pollution directly into your lungs completely unfiltered. Paper mills were the foulest, but there was no such thing as a good smelling factory of any kind.

Think living on the farm was any better? Well, yes it was, but that doesn't mean those people were totally safe from pollution. They pretty much got what everybody else got; they just got smaller doses. They also were a very small segment of the population. Depending on your source, you'll find the number of people living on a farm back then was only between 14 to 16 percent. No more than 20 percent were considered Rural, so pretty much 80 percent of the folks back then lived in the cities and were exposed to the worst things pollution had to offer.

People in the cities, and people within several miles of a city, never saw a white moon at night. The air was so full of smog the moon first showed up as red. As the moon climbed higher, and the pollution in the atmosphere got thinner, the moon would lighten up enough to go from red to orange to brown, but it never got any better than light brown.

That's what pollution did at night. What it did to the daytime was worse. Blue sky was unheard of in many places, especially around the cities. Localities such as western Washington were able to still see some blue, because they had so much rain washing the pollution from the sky, but areas getting far less rain, or had extra amounts of pollution (California, and major industrialized cities, for instance) only saw the sky as gray. The best it ever got was light gray.

Many folks hearing this description of city life back then might assume it's about Los Angeles. No, Los Angeles was even ghastlier. Here the pollution monsters were allowed to run free on an enormous scale, and the resulting levels of dirty air found in LA went far beyond being a visible nuisance. They easily entered the realm of sheer torture. It is still hard to believe so many people chose to live there anyway.

As a visitor, even if you were coming from any other large city full of pollution, you quickly discovered Los Angeles smog was in a class of its own. When you first entered this city you entered a world so gray you wouldn't know it was surrounded by mountains. The density of the smog prevented you from seeing through it far enough to even detect the mountains. You know that gray haze you get when the sky is covered with cloud cover? Well, Los Angeles had that haze all the time, even on days considered sunny. In fact, it was actually worse on the so-called clear days. Rain and drizzle at least helped remove some of the crud from the air. Due to weather and other factors this haze could vary from being extremely thick on some days to a good deal thinner on others, but it was always there, and it was always gray.

Seeing this grayness everywhere was merely your first impression. The next thing you noticed was the stink. So, okay, everybody in those days would have been familiar with the smell of pollution, but not to this degree. Los Angeles smog was denser and more odorous than most smog found anywhere else except directly from the smokestack. This smell quickly became the least of your concerns as your eyes began to burn. Before too long your eyes would get so watery and agitated your nose would begin to run. Seriously, it was the same as being exposed to weak levels of tear gas all day long. The residents of LA would tell you it wasn't so bad; it only took a week or two to get used to it, but that was no help if you were only in the area to visit Disneyland or Knott's Berry Farm. As you can imagine, crying all day had a tendency to spoil some of the fun.

Now that you know the worst you could experience, let's examine everyday things people who didn't live in LA had to put up with. Jet airliners were something most people were able to see because they flew everywhere. Way up in the atmosphere jets would produce lovely white contrails which didn't appear to be pollution at all, but closer to earth it was a much different story. At low levels of flight you could easily see the dark trails of jet exhaust being expelled with great force and in massive quantities. This was especially true during take-off.

Driving by an international airport was a startling experience. It was quite common for 707's to take off while you were passing by, and this was a thing you could never forget. All four engines would be blasting at full power causing huge black clouds of smoke to be blown back towards the roads running beside the airport. By the time this jet exhaust crossed the first road it had stopped being four separate clouds and had turned into one large cloud. It is no exaggeration to say this cloud of smoke was sometimes so dark you could not see through it once your car entered it. You truly could be blind for a second or two until you got clear. At some airports you could even see one or two other planes taking off before you reached the one creating the fresh cloud for you to drive into. You ended up driving through waves of brown or black gunk until you passed the airport. Imagine going through that foul air every day on your way to work and again on your way home, especially if your window was rolled down. Putting aside the possible hazard this presented to motorists, just consider what this was contributing to the overall pollution problem.

Now consider what the city dweller was going through when not even driving a car. Naturally, all the smog created by factories and airplanes was hanging around the cities but so were other things. Trucks and buses freely disgorged their burnt gases completely unchecked. There were no filters of any kind installed in vehicles to clean up the exhaust. Cars were always blamed for being the worst contributors to air pollution, but their emissions never smelled as bad as the big rigs and buses.

If you relied upon public transportation, and you spent any time waiting at a stop for a particular bus, you ended up having to deal with the exhaust gases being spewed from every other bus stopping in front of you until your bus finally arrived. This fact should not be glossed over. Unless you've ever experienced it yourself, you have no idea how awful pure diesel exhaust is. Every bus leaving the stop would blast a putrid brown cloud of diesel smoke as it pulled away from the curb, and that cloud could linger for quite a while. Nasty doesn't even begin to describe how bad it was. The old guy on the bench smoking a White Owl cigar was a blessing compared to this exhaust. Moreover, you didn't even have to ride the bus to experience that horrible smell. Just waiting for a light to change at the crosswalk in an intersection could expose you to several buses spouting smoke as they took their turns moving through.

Count yourself lucky if you never had to smell it, and, if you weren't around back then, don't get any ideas you ever did have to smell it. Diesel fuel and gasoline were refined much less cleanly then, and there are no vehicles today producing obnoxious smells even remotely close to those produced by the old diesel buses.

Ever wonder if the people back then knew they were great polluters? They answer is yes they did. Did most of them like it? Nope. As with almost all big issues in life, the majority of people didn't always agree with the way things were. However, thanks to such things as political interference and personal indifference, the majority opinion didn't much matter.

It has always been so. You will find opinions on most important situations tend to break down to only three groups. There is a small group of people strongly in favor of the situation, a small group strongly against that situation, and a rather large group who aren't overly concerned about the situation. The majority of that last group will normally have an opinion on the subject, and they may even mostly all lean to the same side, but until the situation has a detrimental effect upon them they won't be interested enough to do anything. Therefore, the folks strongly against pollution went on a campaign to get more of the disinterested people to believe the situation was detrimental to them.

The campaign basically broke pollution down into two categories: Health Threatening, and Eyesore. Eyesore mostly meant littering, but billboards along the highway were also targeted. Health Threatening was Water and Air Pollution. Tom Lehrer, the piano playing comedian, had a popular song about that titled, appropriately enough, Pollution. One line was, "Fish gotta swim, and birds gotta fly, but they don't last long if they try!" The song was funny, but the subject matter was no joke.

Water pollution was just as bad as air pollution because there were very few restrictions upon what could be dumped into bodies of water. All manner of hazardous chemicals were disposed of in this manner. Rivers and lakes became areas where you never wanted to swim. Forget swimming, you never even wanted to be within sight or smell of them! I made a trip to the Great Lakes in the summer of 1968, and all I remember from that visit is the dead fish. The beaches were covered in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dead fish, and every wave that washed to shore was silver from the thousands of fish floating 'belly up' on top. It was disgusting.

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio was famous for having the chemicals in it catch fire in 1969, but that was neither the first, nor the worst, time the river started burning. It was, however, the fire that finally got people to say they'd had enough of pollution. The Clean Air Act was granted more power to force companies to stop polluting the air in 1970, and The Clean Water Act of 1972 did much the same thing for water. It took a few years for the mess to clear up, but by the mid 80's people had blue sky in daytime, white moon at night, and clean water to swim in. It only got better from there.

Pollution as it stands now: Today most of what is considered pollution comes from nature. Ever see a reddish, orange, or brown haze on the horizon either early in the morning or at sunset? Know what it is? It's predominantly dust. The planet doesn't know it isn't supposed to kick the stuff up. The pollution mankind used to produce was far worse than this, and actually bore almost no resemblance to dust, but you wouldn't know that unless you ever saw real pollution.

Know who else realizes this is dust? The EPA. The EPA has deliberately placed devices to measure pollution, by Parts Per Billion (PPB), in areas with the most dust. These "sniffers" may have other locations, but the ones in open, windy areas get the most attention. Whenever a dust storm kicks up, the closest city to it gets blamed for the PPB level going beyond the acceptable standard, and the EPA then makes that city pay a fine. (Have doubts? Look up Tucson, EPA and dust storm. Then try a few other cities close to empty land areas). Dust particles from 2.5 to 10 micrometers always get the EPA excited. What's a city supposed to do, shrink-wrap the entire desert?

As an aside, if you truly care about protecting the planet, have you ever pondered whether the EPA is doing more harm than good? If dust really is a hazard, and mankind actually does have some ability to control it, wouldn't it make more sense for Congress to fine the EPA instead for failing to protect the planet? After all, isn't that the EPA's job? If the EPA can't be bothered to protect the earth from itself, what right do they have to expect anybody else to do it?

Now think about what would happen if the blame did get placed upon the EPA. You can bet it wouldn't take them long to produce scientists who'd say they just discovered dust isn't a hazard after all. It wouldn't stop there. The next thing to happen would be the EPA telling us dust is actually beneficial, and after that it's practically guaranteed they'd find a way to claim dust storms were nature's way of letting us know the EPA had succeeded in making the earth healthy again. Naturally, they'd then have to hit us with a "Thank You" tax.

That's not a joke. Any open-minded person would come to that same conclusion once they noticed the EPA was more interested in extortion than in solutions. Think about it. The EPA levies enormous fines against cities and private industries, even for things beyond their control, but when's the last time you heard of them fining the federal government? Shouldn't Yellowstone Park have to pay billions in fines for all the noxious sulfur and gases it allows to escape?

How about present day Los Angeles? Doesn't it still have pollution? Yes, it does. Man-made? Not so much. Los Angeles is nowhere near as bad as it was in the 50's and 60's, but it's pretty close to what it was like when white Europeans decided to settle there. The Indians in the region had no use for large portions of the area because it stunk, and the explorer Juan Cabrillo, all the way back in 1542, called nearby San Pedro Bay the "Bay of Smokes".

Where did the smell and smoke come from back then? Same place it does now. The earth itself. Los Angeles sits over an area with a lot of gases under it. Contrary to popular myth, Los Angeles doesn't sit over a volcano, but it does have many areas where methane and other natural gases escape in large amounts. One such area is the La Brea Tar Pits, and there really is nothing mankind can do to stop this pollution.

Let's pause to consider that a few moments. Just suppose mankind ever did manage to stop all the natural gases from escaping the earth. What could possibly happen? One theory is our planet might eventually lose its atmosphere and end up as dead as Mars. Science can't seem to agree if our atmosphere came from the earth or from outer space, but if the earth really is one source for it we should be very careful about doing anything to make our atmosphere thinner. Science also doesn't agree on why Mars lost its atmosphere, but I've had college professors say they believe it's partly because Mars stopped emitting gases from its core. Mars has low gravity, so it can't hold an atmosphere in place very long, and that means when Mars did have an atmosphere it required constant replenishment from core gases to continue existing. Once the core died the atmosphere dissipated. Doesn't sound like something Earth should emulate. Oh, sure, Earth has more gravity than Mars, but does anybody know if our gravity is strong enough to keep the atmosphere from eventually drifting away?

While we are at it, has any research been done to determine if our atmosphere has been steadily getting thicker over the centuries as gases escaping from the earth have been rising into it, or do these gases somehow slowly drift away or otherwise dissipate? If the gases do somehow dissipate, does anybody know how much gas must be produced from the earth each year to keep our atmosphere thick enough to protect us? On the other hand, if the gases don't dissipate, and our atmosphere has been getting thicker for millions of years, can anybody explain how the small amount produced by mankind in all that time is somehow more dangerous? Also, does anybody really know how long it would take for our atmosphere to get so thick it would choke off all life?

I won't even pretend I know the answers, but I do find it interesting the people who claim greenhouse gases are going to destroy us never even attempt to address these questions at all. It's as if they prefer we just blindly accept their doctrine. What I do know is science tells us the atmosphere protects us from the worst radiation coming from the sun, but ultra-violet rays are able to get through. The ultra-violet rays hit the earth, get converted to infra-red, and then bounce back to the atmosphere. Infra-red can't pass through our atmosphere, so the heating effect created by all this ultra-violet being converted to infra-red stays inside our atmosphere. This is why our planet is warm enough to sustain life. I can understand how too much infra-red could possibly end up overwarming the planet, but I fail to see how man-made gases could create more infra-red. The atmosphere was perfectly capable of blocking the escape of infra-red rays long before mankind came along, and it doesn't seem logically possible a few hundred years of man-made gases could out produce millions of years worth of Co2 produced by forest fires and volcanic activity.

{This section may seem a bit off-topic, but it is somewhat related, and it's going to blow your mind. Are you aware water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere? Even if you are aware, don't start thinking ahead. That's not what's going to blow your mind. Water vapor is a natural occurrence anywhere hydrogen and oxygen mingle together, so that's no big deal, but did you know there's a possibility the water vapor in our atmosphere might have once been massively larger than it is now, and many scientists are deliberately shying away from studying this possibility? Can you guess why? Consider what it might mean to discover the earth may have once been surrounded by so much water sunlight as we know it was never seen. A world where enough ultra-violet rays and water mist existed to ensure life could flourish, and daytime was bright enough for creatures to see, but also a world where rainbows did not exist. Can you see how such a possibility would disturb atheists or other skeptics who have been relying on science to prove them correct? For a long time atheists have been mocking the Bible for saying such things as "The waters over the earth, and the waters under the earth." They've even produced pictures of a flat earth with a body of water floating over it and a body of water floating under it, just to prove how stupid the Bible is. Now they call this idea of the earth once containing a large amount of water in the atmosphere the "canopy theory", and they love to say it's discredited, but the truth is they don't even want to seriously look into it. Discredited is not the same as disproven. Not only could this theory help explain what that phrase from the Bible meant, but it also could explain the flood story and the reason why the rainbow was mentioned. Or not. Who knows? The point is this theory and other scientific theories conflict with things scientists with agendas want to believe, and for that reason they are pushed aside. These scientists also think the sun could have been 30% weaker back then, but that brings into question whether man-made gases are causing global warming or whether it's the sun causing it. You'd think serious scientists would at least want to figure out how much water could float in the atmosphere until it would have to surrender to gravitational pull. Could it even be enough to cause a huge flood? I'd sure like to know that answer, and I'd also like to know why scientists are so selective about what theories they wish to make publicly available. At any rate, it's time to get back to modern day Global warming questions.}

Now the big question is, if man-made gases are actually making the earth warmer now, and we truly can eliminate them, has anybody done any research to see how much colder the planet would get without them? After all, man-made gases are no different from nature-made gases, and the planet still produces more gases of all types than humans do, so would removing the man-made ones be enough to cause any cooling at all? More importantly, if it is enough, how much can you safely remove without creating an ice age? Seems to me serious people would want to find out, and that brings up another question. Isn't it incredible the folks loudly proclaiming science is on their side can't even bother to use any steps from the Scientific Method themselves before they start spreading panic?

So now, dear open-minded reader, you know how bad pollution once was, and you know how much cleaner it is today, does it really make sense for anybody to claim we are currently destroying the earth worse than ever before? The primary question you need to figure out is this: With man-made pollution being reduced 80 to 98 percent (depending upon the pollutant) from 1960's levels, and with it having been this much cleaner for twenty or more years already, isn't there a way to figure out if this reduction has had any effect at all? If not, what in the world extra could mankind, let alone this country, possibly do to reverse global warming now?

It might be nice to first figure out if our massive reduction in pollution made the earth's climate any better. If it didn't, perhaps we need to look for something else to blame. Oh, and don't try saying twenty years of results isn't enough to figure that out. Twenty years of bad guessing has seemingly always been more than enough for the panic-meisters to make terrifying future predictions, and since when do future guesses outweigh actual past results? It all comes down to a basic mechanical truism: "Can't fix it till you know what's broken."

Let's figure out what's broken before we start implementing massive changes based upon mere guesses.


PS: Life to America!

Posted March 9 2015 by Robert O'Connor
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