richard lightner

Sep 15 min read

Global Boiling

Jeff Goodall. The Heat Will Kill You First” life and death on a scorched planet. 2023

Global Boiling is here. This book, published in 2023 by writer Jeff Goodall, details the current climate catastrophe. Fortunately, he offers solutions to avoid the Goldilocks Zone, or habitable zone in the solar system and perhaps the universe.

“Definitions of extreme heat, like definitions of pornography, depend a lot on context. . . . in Texas, a temperature rise of one or two degrees is imperceptible. In Antarctica, however, a change of one or two degrees can be the difference between ice and water and between stability and collapse.” (169)

NASA climate scientist James Hansen believes that “estimates were far too conservative and that the waters could rise by as much as ten feet by 2100.” (171)

“In the world before air-conditioning, there was less CO2 in the atmosphere to trap the heat and less asphalt and concrete on the ground to radiate it back to you.” (207)

“The rise of air-conditioning accelerated the construction of sealed boxes, where the buildings’ only airflow is through the filtered ducts of the air-conditioning unit. It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at any old building in a hot climate, whether it’s in Sicily or Marrakesh, or Tehran. Architects understood the importance of shade, airflow, insulation, and light colors. They oriented buildings to capture cool breezes and deflect the worst of the heat of the afternoon. They built with thick walls and white roofs, and transoms over doors to encourage airflow. Anyone who has ever spent a few minutes in an adobe in Tucson or walked on the narrow streets of old Seville knows how well these construction methods work. But all this wisdom about how to deal with heat, accumulated over centuries of practical experience, is all too often ignored. “In this, air-conditioning is not just a technology of personal comfort; it is also a technology of forgetting.” (222)

The cause of the “killer heat” affects those not responsible for it as well, such as Pakistan, which produces precious little CO2 emissions. (224)

“The heat wave ranking system used by the National Weather Service (NWS) has very little scientific rigor. The NWS ranks heat in three categories: watches, warnings, and advisories. Heat watches are the least severe in this ranking system; heat advisories are the most severe.” (233)

Goodall writes of deadly heat waves throughout the world. In Seville, Spain, July heat killed “about fourteen and fifteen a day. . . . During the heat wave, we had many days when deaths numbered in the twenties. And some were in the thirties.” (242)

Until recently, Paris’ summer temperatures stayed around the 70s degrees Fahrenheit, so no one had air-conditioning.

By 2003, Paris experienced a heat wave. In August, temperatures rose to “95 degrees, sometimes spiking up to 104 degrees. It didn’t cool off much at night either.” (246)

“Even working around the clock, burials and cremations could not keep up with the number of deaths.” (247)

“For cities, the challenge of thriving on a superheated planet is twofold. . . . . Another fifty years of suburban sprawl is not the answer. Cities need to be denser. Cars need to be replaced with bikes and public transit. New buildings need to be not only efficient and built of sustainable materials but also safe for people during increasingly intense heat waves. That means more green space, more trees, more water, more shade, more thermally intelligent urban design.

“The second, and more difficult, challenging is figuring out what to do with existing buildings and cityscapes. The vast majority of existing buildings are ill-suited for the extreme climate of the twenty-first century: poorly insulated, poorly sited, dependent on air-conditioning to keep them habitable.” (250)

Different places worldwide are working to make their areas survivable throughout Global Boiling. Urban gardens, clean water, plexiglass awnings. (251)

Fifteen thousand people died in “France in the 2003 heat wave.” The French response was, “We have to take better of old people.” (252)

Many cities worldwide have never had extreme weather, so there was no concern about global warming. (252)

Nineteenth-century Paris constructed zinc roofs. However, these were counterproductive in the twenty-first century. Today, “zinc roofs are deadly.” (254)

“Ripping off the roof” people had to confront preservationists. “It would take years to get a permit, and then, most likely, you will be denied.” (255)

In 2018, the new mayor of Paris was rebuked for limiting cars, and this caused the so-called yellow vest protests. (257)

“Paris recorded its highest temperature ever: 108.7 degrees.” (258)

“There used to be a lot of nice big shade trees in Phoenix, but they cut them all down in the 1960s because they were worried about how much water they used.” (260)

Solutions to global boiling rely on class. Wealthy areas of Houston are “full of majestic trees.” A multi-ethnic poorer neighborhood “is an asphalt desert.” This is true of other urban areas of the world. (262)

“Heat in a supposedly cold place is terrifying. Ice is a precision thermometer, registering the most minute changes.” (274)

“For polar bears, heat equals starvation. They depend on sea ice to hunt seals.” Without the cold, they die. (274)

“There are no signs or border crossing guards at the edge of the Goldilocks Zone. If we cross over, no alarms will go off. Depending on where you live, you may cross over sooner than others. But unless we take dramatic action now, we may all discover what it’s like to live outside the zone.” (292)

“And it wasn’t just the scientists who knew. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson was warned, as have been many presidents after him. By 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil) not only knew that decades of burning fossil fuels would heat up the atmosphere but developed in-house climate models that projected those changes with remarkable accuracy. Despite that know wedge, we have not only continued burning fossil fuels, we have continued burning them with reckless abandon. . . . beyond the Goldilocks Zone.” (292)

People can make the necessary changes, and technology is available to save humanity. However, there is no “political will, and big oil and gas companies wanting to milk their investments as long as they can.”

If we reach the Goldilocks Zone, some people will make it, and some won’t. Trees will die. Beaches will be under the ocean. “Mosquitoes and other insects will be year-round companions.” (293)

In some areas, “outdoor life will become virtually impossible. People will flee . . . to . . . cooler climates.” (294)

“The first and most striking consequence of the human race’s trip out of the Goldilocks Zone will be the widening of the thermal divide, the invisible but very real line that separates the cool from the suffering, the lucky from the damned.” (294)

As we are confronted with immense catastrophe, all we can do is argue over minutiae. “In the long run, extreme heat is an extinction force.” (295)

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Different Points of View over the future of Atomic weapons.

During the Afghan War, President Donald Trump (GAG!) authorized a General to use the Mother of all Bombs, a bomb just shy of the power of an atomic bomb, on his own. Notice that this had no positive affect for the US in the outcome of the war. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/asia/moab-mother-of-all-bombs-afghanistan.html)

There is a plethora of information about the development and use of the atomic bomb during World War II. Much of the world was astounded that the US used such a bomb on civilians. Others said, drop more.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 9, 1945, “served as the symbolic coronation of American global power.” Nevertheless, the use of the atomic bomb in World War II brought international condemnation. At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials of 1946-1948, Justice Pal of India cited the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as war crimes. U.S. President Harry S. Truman responded by publicly saying that the atomic bombs were dropped “in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans.” However, President Truman in correspondence with John Foster Dulles that his reasons for dropping the atomic bombs were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the murder of our prisoners of war. “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

“In the summer and fall of 1945, US atomic policy left us troubled and perplexed. Roosevelt, we thought, had been committed to a policy of international understanding and conciliation. . . . Truman’s policy, however, appeared to have the opposite aim: to keep a monopoly of the atomic bomb in U.S. and British hands, and to use it as a strong trump card in tough political bargaining with the Soviet Union.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xi)

And, well before the bombings FDR and Churchill “rejected steps that might have led to the international control of atomic energy.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

According to nuclear physicist Hans Bethe who worked on the Manhattan Project, “Many of us had been influenced directly or indirectly by Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist. He argued that only international control of nuclear weapons could save the world from a nuclear arms race, and that such a race would imperil, not enhance the security of the United States and Great Britain. Many other scientists, especially at the University of Chicago Metallurgic Laboratory, at the initiative of Leo Szilard, had come independently to the same conclusion.

Martin Sherwin, George Mason University History professor who specialized in the history of nuclear weapons, wrote that, this interpretation by physicists and historian is wrong. Roosevelt decided, with Churchill, “that the bomb should remain and Anglo-American monopoly.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xii)

However, this is not mentioned in Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Gregg Mitchell.

KOREA

There are numerous arguments about whether or not the atomic bomb should have been used in Korea, Vietnam, or other existential circumstances.

In late 1950, following their invasion of Korea, Chinese forces surrounded U.S. Marines. “Distraught himself, the chief executive (Truman), told a press conference on November 30 that nuclear bombsight be used against the enemy and seemed to indicate that the decision would be MacArthur’s.” (William Manchester. American Caesar. 608, 610; Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 30)

The U.S. developed the ability fire an “atomic shot from a cannon.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

“In mid-May Ike (President Dwight Eisenhower) told the [American] National Security Council that using nukes in Korea would be cheaper than conventional weaponry, and a few days later the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended launching nuclear attacks against China.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

This is interesting since Eisenhower’s reaction to Hiroshima was, we didn’t have to use that awful thing on them. (Lifton, Robert Jay and Mitchell, Greg. Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial. 1995. 213)

Operation Hudson Harbor - flying lone B-29 bombers over North Korea to simulate a dropping of an atomic bomb. North Korean leaders must have had “steel nerves” as this simulation was eerily similar to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Operation Hudson Harbor concluded that the use of atomic weapons would not be “useful” as it was difficult to identify “large masses of enemy troops.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 157-159)

The United Nations/United States forces faced defeat in Korea but Truman looked strong because he “threatened to use the atom bomb against China.” However, this “made peace talks virtually impossible.” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 213)

Major General Emmett (“Rosy”) O’Donnell, commander of the Far East Air Force’s Bomber Command . . . [stated that] “We have never been permitted to bomb what are the real strategic targets, the enemy’s real sources of supply.” He said that the strategic bombing commanded been “designed to deliver the atomic offensive to the heart of the enemy” and indicated very clearly that he thought the bomb should have been used against the Chinese.”” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 245)

RICHARD NIXON

Richard Barnet, former State Department aide, activist and scholar, who founded the Institute for Policy Studies (Wikipedia) warned “of the danger that the United States government might resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Barnet then cites Vice President Richard Nixon speaking to the Executive Club of Chicago on March 17, 1955 as saying,

“The weapons which were used during the Korean War and World War II are obsolete. Our artillery and our tactical Air Force in the Pacific are now equipped with atomic explosives which can and will be used on military targets with precision and effectiveness.

“It is foolish to talk about the possibility that the weapons which might be used in the event war breaks out in the Pacific would be limited to the conventional Korean and World War II types of explosives. Our forces could not fight an effective war in the Pacific with those types of explosives if they wanted to. Tactical atomic explosives are now conventional and will be used against the military targets of any aggressive force.”

Of course, we are not aggressors by threatening China or invading Vietnam.

VIET NAM

1964 American Republican Presidential candidate Senator Goldwater of Arizona was a reserve Air Force General and “suggested that the United States could isolate the Vietcong in South Vietnam any bombing the supply routes connecting China and North Vietnam.” He also proposed using nuclear weapons “to clear the jungles where the Vietcong were presumably hiding. The public reaction to those notions was one of horrified alarm.” (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 2) It turns out that the United States bombed Southeast Asia the equivalent of many atomic bombs through out the war.

“Although Goldwater was finally persuaded to stop talking about nuclear weapons.”

Although Goldwater’s advocacy of atomic weapons scared people his idea to win the war did not. Johnson portrayed himself as “responsible” as opposed to Goldwater who he implied would get us all killed. (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 9)

Noted military writer Hanson Baldwin believed that the US should use its overwhelming technological power to counter communism even if that meant nuclear weapons. Of course, only for “defensive purposes.” “If we cannot do this, he says, we had better “call it quits.” (Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia. 52)

General Curtis LeMay advocated the use of nuclear weapons to end the conflict with communism once and for all. “We ought to nuke the chinks. . . . We are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile.” (Thomas Powers. The War at Home. 40; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Lyndon B. Johnson: the Exercise of Power. 538)

So, there is pretty much agreement that the use of the atom bomb was on the table. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki completely ignored.

In 1954 the United States “assuming the Chinese Communists intervene would engage in a “highly selective atomic offensive.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 46) However, if the “Chinese Communists do not intervene” then the use of atomic weapons would occur if it would aid the US in the war. (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 47)

McNaughton drafted a “Proposed Course of Action” to McNamara. In his long list of actions McNaughton noted risks. One was the “escalation to the use of nuclear weapons.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 442-445, passim)

Presidential assistant for national security, Walt. W. Rostow, wrote a memorandum on May 6, 1967, analyzing U.S. bombing strategy in Viet Nam. One of his conclusions was “we do not want a nuclear confrontation over Viet Nam.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 585, 588)

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