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re: global warming



Although it is apparently too late to submit more e-mails to Carol Browner,
the EPA administrator, the following letter is another example of the type
of e-mail that physics teachers can write in the future. Such
communication is very important! As Gordon says, "We need to be good
stewards and pass our children and their children a world worth living in."

Date: Thu, 01 May 1997 19:28:35 -0400
From: aubrecht@MPS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Gordon Aubrecht)
Subject: your meeting with G7 colleagues
To: browner.carol@epamail.epa.GOV
Cc: hansen.fred@epamail.epa.GOV
MIME-version: 1.0

Dear Administrator Browner:

I am the author of a textbook on energy (titled _Energy_, what else?)
published in 1995 by Prentice-Hall and I am writing to you because a
colleague alerted me to the meeting of G7 environment ministers to take
place soon in Miami.

As I report in two chapters of my book (Chs. 14 and 15, referring to the
scientific evidence), global warming is very possibly a serious problem
that requires urgency in minimizing deleterious impacts. We should
immediately support no-cost or low cost actions to ameliorate the problem.
These options are outlined in the book _Policy Implications of Greenhouse
Warming_, published by the National Academy Press in 1992. This action is
important because, if the worst case scenarios are true, we will be in big
trouble. If the worriers are wrong, putting these measures in place will
have cost nothing (or even saved quite a lot, as the authors of the
National Academy study show).

US leadership in this effort is important as a symbol. I hope you will take
the lead and articulate our position in favor of immediate negative cost,
zero cost, and low-cost measures to control global warming. With Vice
President Gore so knowledgable about this problem, one would think that the
administration's policies would have been along these lines in any case. We
need to be good stewards and pass our children and their children a world
worth living in, at least as comfortable a world as we inherited from our
forebearers.

Children in all countries, rich and poor alike are threatened if we
continue to do little. If the weather patterns recently observed are
indications of what will happen with increased warming, as many believe,
there will be more hurricanes, more 500-year floods, more tornadoes. They
will strike here as well as elsewhere. There will be new dust bowls and new
areas of increased rainfall, even too much rainfall.

Floods can adversely affect water quality, and in turn the quality of life.
Drought can affect the quality of life. The defenseless, such as children,
are at greatest risk. Natural disasters can adversely affect immune systems
even in rich countries, and poorer countries have conditions that make
natural disasters more disasterous. Children, especially young children,
have immune systems that are not fullly developed.

The US should also take the lead in investigating the scientific aspects of
global warming, and in planning for responding to the problem if (or when)
it becomes apparent that what has been done is insufficient. This planning
must be done now, before there is a crisis, so that we can act responsibly
to the advent of a crisis. I hope you will take the opportunity of hosting
the forthcoming G7 environment ministers meeting to exhibit the leadership
the world so desperately needs to address this difficult problem involving
so many unknown quantities and unquantifiable effects.

Sincerely,

Gordon Aubrecht
Professor of Physics
Ohio State University

Gordon Aubrecht
OSU Physics
Marion Campus (614) 389-6786, ext. 6250
FAX (614) 292-5817

check out my web sites through my home page
http://www-physics.mps.ohio-state.edu/~aubrecht/



Jane Jackson (Prof. of Physics, Scottsdale Comm. College--on leave)
Dept.of Physics, Box 871504, Arizona State Univ.,Tempe AZ 85287-1504.
jane.jackson@asu.edu (602)965-8438 FAX:965-7331
Modeling Workshop Project: http://modeling.la.asu.edu/modeling.html