HERE IS GOD'S JUDGEMENT ON CALIFORNIA!

In 1892, Alejandro Posadas, an intern in Buenos Aires, described a 36-year-old Argentine soldier who had experienced a dermatologic problem since 1889, beginning with a lesion on his right cheek [1]. Later, more red, itchy spots appeared and evolved into papules that ulcerated and discharged pus. In 1891, Posadas, then a medical student, first saw the patient, who had a large purple, fungal-like mass covering much of his right cheek, several ulcerative vegetations on his nose, one on his arm resembling a cauliflower, and many papules on his extremities and trunk. Posadas thought that the patient had the malignant skin disease, mycosis fungoides, but examination of skin biopsy specimens revealed organisms resembling the protozoan Coccidia. The patient eventually died in 1898 after 7 years of recurrent fever and progressive cutaneous lesions [2]. In the meantime, Posadas had successfully transmitted the infection to several mammals, including a dog, a cat, and a monkey, by inoculating them with material from his patient [3]. A year after Posadas' initial report, a 40-year-old native of the Azores entered a San Francisco hospital with skin lesions similar to those of Posadas' patient [4]. In 1886, shortly after emigrating to California, where the patient was a manual laborer in the San Joaquin Valley, he had developed a slowly enlarging sore on his neck. New lesions appeared nearby and on his eyebrows, causing fungating masses that extended to cause swelling of both eyelids. The painful skin lesions progressed, becoming hideously disfiguring and horribly destructive; he lost both eyes, his nose, much of his upper lip, and half of one ear. Some of the mutilation presumably resulted from his treatment, which included not only topical methyl violet, iodine, bromine, oil of turpentine, carbolic acid, and potassium permanganate, but also excision of individual lesions and extensive curettage under chloroform anesthesia, followed by scrubbing of the raw surface with a brush soaked in bichloride solution. Nothing helped, and the patient finally died in early 1895. At autopsy, numerous nodules occupied the lungs, adrenals, lymph nodes, liver, peritoneum, prostate, spleen, and testes. On microscopy, they were granulomas, often with caseous necrosis similar to that from miliary tuberculosis, but containing abundant protozoa-like organisms. Specimens sent to 2 microbiologists yielded no organisms for one, and the other grew a mold that he discarded as a contaminant [5]. While the patient was alive, Emmet Rixford, a surgeon at San Francisco's Cooper Medical College (which became Stanford University Medical School in 1908), studied whether the skin disease might have spread by inadvertent self-inoculation. Apparently not, because no new lesions developed after Rixford rubbed some material containing the organism on the patient's abraded skin. Rixford experimentally created a chronic ulcer by suturing infected tissue from the patient into a rabbit's subcutaneous tissue, and the pus that formed revealed the organism. He also inoculated some of the patient's tissue containing the microbes into a dog's leg. A lesion appeared, expanded, and ulcerated, and organisms consistently appeared in the pus exuding from the wound. T. Caspar Gilchrist, Rixford's coauthor on this report [4] in 1896 and a pathologist at Johns Hopkins Medical School, examined the material, confidently concluding that the microbe was not a fungus. Instead, it was a protozoan resembling Coccidia, and helped by an eminent parasitologist, C.W. Stiles, Gilchrist and Rixford named the organism after both its morphologic and clinical features: Coccidioides (“resembling Coccidia”) immitis (“not mild”). Gilchrist's self-assured conclusion that the organisms were protozoa had short-lived authority, because just 4 years later, William Ophüls and Herbert C. Moffitt cultured material from another patient with a fatal case in California and grew a mold that Ophüls initially considered to be a contaminant [6]. They inoculated tissue and pus from the case patient into the peritoneum of male guinea pigs, however, causing infection, including prominent orchitis, and they isolated the organism from the affected organs. They injected mycelia from the cultured mold into a rabbit, which developed typical nodules containing the visible organisms in various tissues. These findings proved that C. immitis was not a protozoan but was a fungus that existed in 2 forms: mycelia when in culture and spherical protozoan-like bodies (later called “spherules”) in tissue where they reproduce—not by budding, but by developing numerous spores within them. In the life cycle of this tissue phase, the parent organism's capsule bursts, releasing the endospores, which themselves then develop into spherules. After Ophüls observed spherules in pus from a guinea pig, he incubated the slide and, on reexamination the next day, mycelia had developed. In a later experiment, he injected mold into a rabbit's ear, producing an abscess, and over the next 3 days, he observed that the organisms in the pus changed from mycelia to spherules [7]. In these studies, Ophüls conclusively demonstrated the transitions between the 2 fungal forms and the conditions under which they occur. In 1905, Ophüls summarized the available information about the infection, which he called “coccidioidal granuloma” [8]. He delineated the diversity of the anatomic areas affected, including the skin, lungs, pleura, bones, adrenal glands, genital tract, lymph nodes, and meninges. He described a few patients in whom cutaneous involvement was absent but pulmonary lesions occurred, and he suggested that some cases develop from inhalation of the organism, rather than from inoculation through the skin. In fact, subcutaneous injection of organisms into animals did not readily produce infection [7]. During the next 2 decades [9], important articles described additional cases, emphasized the lung as the major portal of entry for the organism, presented the radiologic features of the disease, and distinguished it from infections caused by other fungi—especially blastomycosis, which Gilchrist had first reported in 1894 [10]. As with C. immitis, he had originally misidentified the causative organism as a protozoan, a mistake that he later corrected himself [11, 12]. In 1905, after an autopsy of a patient in the Panama Canal Zone, Samuel Darling made the same error when he detected what he felt was a protozoan, which he called Histoplasma capsulatum [13]. In fact, it too was a fungus. Thus, the 3 major endemic fungi in the United States were all initially misidentified as protozoa. In 1914, studies on the immunology of the disease began when Cooke [14] used an extract of dried culture specimens of the organisms as an antigen for skin testing and for serologic studies of precipitin and complement fixation reactions in a case of disseminated disease. Only the results of the precipitin test were positive. In 1924, intradermal injection of a suspension of the fungus produced a positive skin test result in a patient with disseminated infection [15], and in 1927, a filtrate of culture specimens obtained from another patient with disseminated disease provoked positive reactions when injected into the skin of the patient herself, but not into a human control subject [16]. Infected guinea pigs also reacted to the material, but uninfected animals did not react. Such filtrates, later called “coccidioidin,” became widely used in skin testing to delineate the epidemiology of infection. In 1929, a major insight to coccidioidomycosis inadvertently developed from the experience of a 26-year-old, second-year medical student, Harold Chope, who was studying C. immitis in the laboratory of Ernest Dickson at Stanford University Medical School (San Francisco) [17–20]. On his first day, Chope opened an old, desiccated culture to examine it more closely, and as he breathed on the plate, a cloud of spores arose, some of which he inhaled. Nine days later, he developed severe pleuritic chest pain, followed by a painful cough and purulent sputum, sometimes streaked with blood. A chest radiograph showed right upper lobe pneumonia. His chances of surviving coccidioidal infection seemed remote, and authorities at Stanford University, no doubt distraught about their student's impending demise, provided him a private hospital room and the impressive perquisite then of a radio. Newspapers and American Weekly [17], a national magazine, featured him as a young investigator facing imminent death, soon to become a martyr to science. One month after his exposure, he developed erythema nodosum, and sputum specimens demonstrated spherules on microscopy, yielded the organism on cultures, and caused infection when inoculated into the testes of a guinea pig—the confirmatory test then used to identify the fungus. Over the next few months, Chope gradually improved. The significance of Chope's illness became apparent when Dickson visited Kern County, California, in 1936 to solicit cooperation with the local health authorities to pursue studies of coccidioidal infections [21]. In 1934, Myrnie Gifford, a former student of Dickson's, had joined the Health Department there, which was interested in a disease called “San Joaquin fever,” “Desert fever,” or “Valley fever,” a common disorder consisting of acute cough, chest pain, fever, pneumonia, and, later, erythema nodosum. In 1936, while reviewing case histories of C. immitis infection in preparation for Dickson's visit, Gifford noticed that 3 of 15 patients had developed erythema nodosum with the disease [21]. When she mentioned this fact to Dickson, he immediately recalled Chope's case, and they hypothesized that San Joaquin fever represented C. immitis infection. After Dickson's visit, the Kern County Health Department began obtaining epidemiologic histories and performing skin testing with coccidioidin for all cases of San Joaquin fever. This investigation resulted in several important discoveries: most patients described a history of dust exposure; all had positive skin test results, compared with 25% in a random sample of persons in the county; and among 104 patients with San Joaquin fever, 94% were white, whereas 60% of cases of disseminated disease occurred in those who were not white [21]. These observations indicated that coccidioidomycosis was common in the area; racial differences, in part, determined the host's response to the fungus; and infection presumably occurred by inhaling dust containing the organism. The domain in which C. immitis ordinarily resides had, in fact, been discovered in Kern County in 1932, with isolation of the fungus from soil specimens collected from around the barracks of a ranch near Delano, which was chosen as a site to investigate, because 4 cases of infection with C. immitis had occurred among the Filipino crew working there [22]. After Chope left Stanford Medical School, Dickson recruited a classmate, Charles E. Smith, to replace him in studying the organism [17]. During his early investigations, Smith developed pleuritic chest pain that he thought might be tuberculosis, but he was relieved when his sputum acid-fast smear results were negative. In fact, as he later recognized, he had failed to diagnose his own case of coccidioidomycosis, which he, like many others working with this organism, had acquired in the laboratory [17]. In 1937, Smith began a 17-month study of coccidioidomycosis in Kern and Tulare counties in the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley [17, 23]. By contacting health departments, labor camps, and physicians in the area, he obtained the names and addresses of patients with Valley fever, defined in his study as erythema nodosum or erythema multiforme caused by C. immitis, as evidenced by positive coccidioidin skin test results or isolation of the organism from sputum culture specimens. He visited 432 victims, half of whom were migratory farm laborers who had come to California in the 1930s after escaping from the “Dust Bowl” of the Midwest, especially Texas and Oklahoma. There, poor agricultural practices and harsh drought had severely dried the topsoil, which winds blew, along with the farm crops, creating dust storms that darkened the skies, making breathing difficult and cleanliness impossible. From his collected information, Smith made several fundamental conclusions about coccidioidal infection. Knowing the interval between exposure and disease in Chope's case and a few others with clearly defined times of acquisition, he determined that the incubation period for the disease was between 1 and 3 weeks (usually ∼2 weeks). By repetitive skin testing in several patients, he discovered that response to coccidioidin developed 2–17 days after symptoms began. Furthermore, cutaneous reactivity seemed long-lived. To help confirm this impression, Smith persuaded Chope, who had experienced Valley fever 9 years earlier and who had no exposure to C. immitis for 6 years, to undergo his first coccidioidin skin test. It produced a large area of erythema and induration that blistered and necrosed, leaving a permanent scar. Chope decided that his first coccidioidin skin test would also be his last [17]. Smith realized that the immunologic response to an attack, as reflected by skin reactivity to coccidioidin, seemed to protect people from further infection with C. immitis; only 2 of the 432 patients in his study may have had Valley fever twice (although both cases were dubious), and doctors in the area rarely diagnosed 2 episodes in the same patient. Moreover, among the workers in Smith's laboratory, no cases of infection occurred in those with a positive skin test result [23]. Smith also concluded that transmission of disease from one person to another did not occur, but instead, infection arose by inhalation of fungal spores. Most of the patients who he studied had shared their bed with at least one other person, and only rarely did their partners develop disease within the established incubation period. Furthermore, 18 people working in his department developed laboratory-acquired infections that could only have occurred by inhaling the organism [23]. Smith found that infection was much more common during the summer and fall, in part because the other months were wetter, but also possibly because agricultural workers did less field work during the winter and spring. Fortunately, the disease was usually self-limited, healing without clinical sequelae, but Smith noticed that persons of dark-skinned races rarely developed Valley fever. They were not exempt from C. immitis infection but, instead, had disseminated disease much more frequently than did white persons. Indeed, Gifford had earlier estimated that, compared with white persons, the risk of death from dissemination in Kern County was 23 times greater for black persons and 170 times greater for Filipinos [21]. In Smith's study, most of the persons with Valley fever were newcomers to the region, two-thirds having arrived within the previous 2 years. He figured, however, that these cases represented only a small percentage of all coccidioidal infections occurring during his investigation. Coccidioidin skin testing that Gifford had performed on 2718 schoolchildren showed that reactivity increased according to length of residence in the area—∼80% of children had positive results after ⩾10 years—but only ∼5% of them had had Valley fever. Using this information, Smith calculated that his 432 patients reflected about 8000 new infections in the region [23]. In 1938, Farness and Mills [24] reported a case of a primary coccidioidal lung infection that produced an upper lobe cavity that healed spontaneously. This finding further supported the idea that C. immitis infection occurred through a respiratory route and could be self-limited. The following year, Smith and a Stanford pathologist, Alvin Cox, undermined the concept of coccidioidal infection as a usually lethal disease even more when they published an account of 4 cases of arrested coccidioidal pulmonary infection discovered during routine autopsies [25]. The specimens included nodules, scars, and lymph nodes that contained caseous, sometimes calcified, material harboring spherules. In the one case in which they could culture the tissue, C. immitis grew. Additional evidence of this process came from a radiographic study of calcified pulmonary nodules among 3024 Native Americans of the United States and Alaska who had negative tuberculin skin test results [26]. Such findings were markedly more common among Pima Indians residing near Phoenix, Arizona, than among tribes in other areas, such as Wyoming and South Dakota. The authors demonstrated that this difference almost certainly occurred because of C. immitis infection among the Pima Indians, nearly all of whom had positive coccidioidin skin test results before the age of 20 years, whereas test results among Native Americans in the other locales were rarely positive. In 1939, Smith stumbled onto an alternative to skin tests for diagnosis of coccidioidomycosis—serologic testing [17, 27]. He had tried to determine whether serum samples from infected guinea pigs could inactivate coccidioidin in vitro—with no success—but his delay in cleaning the laboratory glassware led to an important discovery. When he eventually examined the test tubes a week later, he saw a discrete “button” of precipitate on the bottom. This finding became the basis for the serum precipitin test. Smith's particular preparation of coccidioidin employed for the precipitin test became an effective antigen for complement fixation as well, and in 1940, he started performing both tests simultaneously to diagnose coccidioidal infections [27]. He found that the precipitin test was helpful for detecting acute infections, and the complement fixation serologic test was especially useful for diagnosis of disseminated disease. Smith gained additional insight into the acquisition of C. immitis by investigating the first reported epidemic of coccidioidomycosis [28]. In April 1940, 10 Stanford University students and 4 faculty members participated in a biology field trip to San Benito County, near the San Joaquin Valley. Ten to 16 days later, 7 of the 14 participants, all students, became ill with symptoms that included headache, backache, chest pain, fever, and night sweats. All had abnormal chest film results and positive serologic test results for coccidioidomycosis, and 4 grew C. immitis from sputum specimens. The only time that an exposure could have occurred to infect the 7 victims, and not the others, was when a student vigorously dug into a ground squirrel hole into which he had seen a rattlesnake crawl, dispersing considerable dust in the process. Four months later, Smith accompanied the student back to the hole and recovered C. immitis from the soil. At approximately this time, contemporary political conditions provided Smith with other newcomers to study besides migrant agricultural workers. During 1940–1941, with war appearing imminent, military commanders decided to train Army Air Forces pilots year-round at airfields in the San Joaquin Valley because of the many days of good weather and the unlimited space for emergency landings [17, 29, 30]. Smith and others warned them of the risk of coccidioidal infection, but he and the military concluded that the training advantages of the area outweighed the medical hazards. They recommended, however, that ground forces not practice maneuvers there. Moreover, they decided to conduct a systematic investigation of coccidioidal infection by skin testing all recruits on arrival at Minter Field in Bakersfield and Gardner Field in Taft, both in the southern San Joaquin Valley, and then semiannually for those whose test results remained negative. These studies confirmed that those with previous skin reactivity to coccidioidin did not develop disease and that the incidence of infection was greater during the summer than the during the winter. In fact, cases were especially common when dry months followed heavy rain during the winter and spring, presumably because the extra moisture allowed more robust growth of the fungi, and the winds dispersed the spores when the hot weather converted the soil to dust [31]. Smith's studies also revealed that 60% of infections were asymptomatic, and erythema nodosum occurred in ∼5% of white men [32]. In 1943, arrival of members of the Women's Army Corps provided a comparison of sex differences, revealing that erythema nodosum occurred in 25% of white women with coccidioidal infection. Racial differences were even more impressive: erythema nodosum rarely occurred in black persons, who also had a rate of dissemination >10 times greater than white persons, even though they had the same food, housing, and medical care. Another important discovery was that dissemination of infection almost always developed during the course of the initial illness—during the weeks to months afterwards—rather than years later, as occurs in many cases of miliary tuberculosis [32]. An additional significant insight emerged during World War II from other Army Air Forces camps: recognition of the areas where C. immitis is endemic. Earlier, the organism was thought to be nearly confined to the San Joaquin Valley, but diagnoses of active disease and skin testing demonstrated that it was also present in southern Nevada and Utah, western Texas, and, especially, Arizona, whose southern and central areas seemed to impose the highest risk of infection in the United States. In fact, at Minter Field in the San Joaquin Valley, about one-fourth of the susceptible recruits became infected during the first year, but at Florence and Williams Field in southern Arizona, the infection rate was ∼50% during the first 6 months alone [32]. Among susceptible recruits at 2 camps in Kern County, the annual incidence of infection was 20%–25% during 1941–1942 [32]. In the summer and fall of 1941, during construction of the airfields, dust was ankle-deep and billowed in clouds over the area, and in the single month of August, >5% of all susceptible recruits became infected at one of the camps. Controlling dust by planting lawns, paving roads, and surfacing the airfields reduced the infection rate by half. In addition, construction of swimming pools encouraged aquatics as a substitute for field sports, further diminishing the recruits' dust exposure. At one camp, spraying highly-refined oil on the athletic areas used for calisthenics, volleyball, baseball, and other physical activities seemed to decrease the infection rate even more. In 1942, another group of newcomers arrived in areas where C. immitis was endemic. In February, President Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the Secretary of War and any designated military commanders to prescribe “military areas” from which any or all people could be excluded. In May, Lieutenant General John DeWitt directed all people of Japanese descent living in “Military Area Number 1” (the Pacific Coast) to report to assembly areas from which they would be sent to “Relocation Centers.” More than 110,000 people, about two-thirds of them US citizens, resided for the remainder of the war at 12 of these internment camps, one of which was on the Gila River Indian Reservation that was ∼50 miles southeast of Phoenix. There, outbreaks of coccidioidomycosis occurred among the ∼13,000 residents [29]. Nearby, still another group of involuntary newcomers resided—prisoners of war, initially primarily from North Africa after the surrender of General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in April 1943. By the end of World War II, >425,000 enemy prisoners, mostly Germans, but also ∼50,000 Italians and 5000 Japanese, were incarcerated in the United States [33]. Approximately 13,000 of these prisoners lived on what had been a military reservation in Florence, Arizona, including all prisoners with active tuberculosis who were assigned there because of its supposedly salubrious climate. Unfortunately, the climate was salubrious for C. immitis as well. Smith visited Florence in early 1944 and discovered that acute coccidioidomycosis was rampant among the prisoners. He speculated that two-thirds to three-quarters of new arrivals would become infected in 1 year [29]. Two had died of coccidioidomycosis, and of 89 patients with tuberculosis, 10 had become infected with C. immitis, acquiring the organism either while outdoors or by inhaling spores carried by breezes into the living quarters. Although the patients did not seem especially harmed by the superimposed coccidioidomycosis, the military decided to send them to other hospitals to protect them from any health hazard that C. immitis might impose and to avoid any criticism about violating the Geneva Conventions of 1929 governing the treatment of prisoners of war. Previous SectionNext Section Conclusions Similar to many scientific enterprises, the discoveries and insights about coccidioidomycosis came from a slow accretion of information derived from numerous sources, including the contributions of 2 medical students (one unwittingly) and many gifted investigators. In the early history of coccidioidomycosis, however, 2 sources of discovery are especially impressive. First is the enormous contribution of the apparently indefatigable Charles E. Smith in his diverse investigations of C. immitis and the infection that it causes. He devoted his professional life to this focus of study, and even after he became Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley in 1951, he continued to investigate coccidioidomycosis until his death in 1967. The other striking element in the early history of coccidioidomycosis is how certain kinds of social disruption provided crucial clinical and epidemiologic information. The migration of people from the “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s and the movement of military personnel, Japanese internees, and Axis prisoners of war to the San Joaquin Valley and other areas of endemicity in the Southwest during the early and mid-1940s as a consequence of World War II furnished the opportunity for Smith and others to study the disease. In that way, they added substantially to the fundamental discoveries of microbiology, epidemiology, clinical findings, and diagnosis that had emerged since Posadas' initial case report in 1892.

125 Years Of False Science , Failed Doom, History

Global Warming or Cooling?

121 years of Failed Climate and Environmental Predictions

Is our climate changing? The succession of temperate summers and open winters through several years, culminating last winter in the almost total failure of the ice crop throughout the valley of the Hudson, makes the question pertinent. The older inhabitants tell us that the Winters are not as cold now as when they were young, and we have all observed a marked diminution of the average cold even in this last decade. - New York Times June 23, 1890

The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions - New York Times - February 24, 1895,

The Oceanographic observations have, however, been even more interesting. Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never been noted. The expedition all but established a record�.Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society - January 1905

�Fifth ice age is on the way�..Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.� – Los Angles Times October 23, 1912

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot.... Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone... Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. - Washington Post 11/2/1922

Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada, Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that �another world ice-epoch is due.� He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be �wiped out.� – Chicago Tribune August 9, 1923

The discoveries of changes in the sun's heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age - Time Magazine 9/10/1923

America in longest warm spell since 1776; temperature line records a 25 year rise - New York Times 3/27/1933

�Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right�weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.� – Time Magazine Jan. 2 1939

A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a "serious international problem," - New York Times - May 30, 1947

Greenland's polar climate has moderated so consistently that communities of hunters have evolved into fishing villages. Sea mammals, vanishing from the west coast, have been replaced by codfish and other fish species in the area's southern waters. - August 29, 1954

After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder. - New York Times - January 30, 1961

Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age. - Los Angeles Times December 23, 1962

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Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two. – New York Times - February 20, 1969

The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages. – New York Times - July 18, 1970

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The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. -- Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968)

It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content [in the atmosphere] will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth�s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.- - Presidential advisor Daniel Moynihan 1969

By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half..." Life magazine, January 1970.

Get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters--the worst may be yet to come. That's the long-long-range weather forecast being given out by "climatologists." the people who study very long-term world weather trends�. Washington Post January 11, 1970

Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor "...the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born," Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. -- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

"Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation," - Barry Commoner Washington University Earth Day 1970

"(By 1995) somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct." Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.

�By the year 2000...the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine,� Peter Gunter, North Texas State University, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

Convection in the Antarctic Ice Sheet Leading to a Surge of the Ice Sheet and Possibly to a New Ice Age. – Science 1970

�In the next 50 years fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun's rays that the Earth's average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age." – Washington Post -  July 9, 1971

"By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Paul Ehrlich 1971

New Ice Age Coming---It's Already Getting Colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes�..Los Angles Times Oct 24, 1971

Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000. - Los Angles Times - May 16, 1972

"There is very important climatic change (Global Cooling) going on right now, and it�s not merely something of academic interest. It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.� – Fortune Magazine February 1974

�Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age� – Time Magazine June 24, 1974

A number of climatologists, whose job it is to keep an eye on long-term weather changes, have lately been predicting deterioration of the benign climate to which we have grown accustomed�.Various climatologists issued a statement that �the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade,� If policy makers do not account for this oncoming doom, �mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence� will result. New York Times - December 29, 1974

Regardless of long term trends, such as the return of an Ice Age, unsettled weather conditions now appear more likely than those of the abnormally favorable period which ended in 1972. – Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society - October 10, 1975

A RECENT flurry of papers has provided further evidence for the belief that the Earth is cooling. There now seems little doubt that changes over the past few years are more than a minor statistical fluctuation – Nature - March 6, 1975

Scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world�s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth�s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. – The Cooling World Newsweek, April 28, 1975

�Scientist ponder why World�s Climate is changing; a major cooling is considered to be inevitable – New York Times May 21, 1975

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. -- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976

An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. - New York Times - January 5, 1978

One of the questions that nags at climatologists asks when and how fast a new ice age might descend. A Belgian scientist suggests this could happen sooner and swifter than you might think. - Christian Science Monitor - Nov 14, 1979

Evidence has been presented and discussed to show a cooling trend over the Northern Hemisphere since around 1940, amounting to over 0.5°C, due primarily to cooling at mid- and high latitudes - Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society - November 1980

A global warming trend could bring heat waves, dust-dry farmland and disease, the experts said... Under this scenario, the resort town of Ocean City, Md., will lose 39 feet of shoreline by 2000 and a total of 85 feet within the next 25 years - San Jose Mercury News - June 11, 1986 

Greenhouse Effect Culprit May Be Family Car; New Ice Age by 1995?...As the tropical oceans heat up (due to increased greenhouse gases), more of their moisture is evaporated to form clouds. The increasing pole-tropic wind systems move some of these additional clouds toward the poles, resulting in increased winter rainfall, longer and colder winters and the gradual buildup of the polar ice sheets. This phenomenon has come to be widely recognized by climatologists in recent years. What most of them do not recognize is that this process may be the engine that drives the 100,000-year cycle of major ice ages, for which there is no other plausible explanation....we may be less than seven years away, and our climate may continue to deteriorate rapidly until life on earth becomes all but unsupportable.... New York Times - Larry Ephron , Director of the Institute for a Future - July 15, 1988

[In New York City by 2008] The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won�t be there. The trees in the median strip will change. There will be more police cars. Why? Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up... Under the greenhouse effect, extreme weather increases. Depending on where you are in terms of the hydrological cycle, you get more of whatever you�re prone to get. New York can get droughts, the droughts can get more severe and you�ll have signs in restaurants saying �Water by request only.� - James Hansen testimony before Congress in June 1988

STUDY FORESEES 86 NEW POWER PLANTS TO COOL U.S. WHEN GLOBE GETS HOTTER: Global warming could force Americans to build 86 more power plants -- at a cost of $110 billion -- to keep all their air conditioners running 20 years from now, a new study says...Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010, and the drain on power would require the building of 86 new midsize power plants - Associated Press May 15, 1989

U.N. OFFICIAL PREDICTS DISASTER SAYS GREENHOUSE EFFECT COULD WIPE SOME NATIONS OFF MAP - entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees," threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect - Associated Press June 30, 1989

'New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now,' - St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sept. 17, 1989

Some predictions for the next decade (1990's) are not difficult to make... Americans may see the '80s migration to the Sun Belt reverse as a global warming trend rekindles interest in cooler climates. - Dallas Morning News December 5th 1989

"(By) 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots... "(By 1996) The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers... "The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands". - Michael Oppenheimer, The Environmental Defense Fund - "Dead Heat" 1990

Giant sand dunes may turn Plains to desert - Huge sand dunes extending east from Colorado's Front Range may be on the verge of breaking through the thin topsoil, transforming America's rolling High Plains into a desert, new research suggests. The giant sand dunes discovered in NASA satellite photos are expected to re- emerge over the next 20 to 50 years, depending on how fast average temperatures rise from the suspected "greenhouse effect," scientists believe. -Denver Post April 18, 1990

By 2000, British and American oil will have dimished to a trickle......Ozone depletion and global warming threaten food shortages, but the wealthy North will enjoy a temporary reprieve by buying up the produce of the South. Unrest among the hungry and the ensuing political instability, will be contained by the North's greater military might. A bleak future indeed, but an inevitable one unless we change the way we live.....At present rates of exploitation there may be no rainforest left in 10 years. If measures are not taken immediately, the greenhouse effect may be unstoppable in 12 to 15 years. - 5000 Days to Save the Planet - Edward Goldsmith 1991

''I think we're in trouble. When you realize how little time we have left - we are now given not 10 years to save the rainforests, but in many cases five years. Madagascar will largely be gone in five years unless something happens. And nothing is happening.'' - ABC - The Miracle Planet April 22, 1990

The planet could face an "ecological and agricultural catastrophe" by the next decade if global warming trends continue - Carl Sagan - Buffalo News Oct. 15, 1990

Most of the great environmental struggles will be either won or lost in the 1990s and by the next century it will be too late. -- Thomas E. Lovejoy, Smithsonian Institution �Real Goods Alternative Energy Sourcebook,� Seventh Edition: February 1993

Today (in 1996) 25 million environmental refugees roam the globe, more than those pushed out for political, economic, or religious reasons. By 2010, this number will grow tenfold to 200 million. - The Heat is On -The High Stakes Battle Over Earth�s Threatened Climate - Ross Gelbspan - 1996

"It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they're going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we'll go into a permanent El Nino. So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we'll have El Nino upon El Nino, and that will become the norm. And you'll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years," he said.  - BBC November 7, 1997

One of the world's leading climate experts warned of an underestimated threat posed by the buildup of greenhouse gases ' an abrupt collapse of the ocean's prevailing circulation system that could send temperatures across Europe plummeting in a span of 10 years. If that system shut down today, winter temperatures in the North Atlantic region would fall by 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit within 10 years. Dublin would acquire the climate of Spitsbergen, 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle. "The consequences could be devastating," said Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University's - Science Magazine Dec 1, 1997

Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people. - The Birmingham Post (England) July 26, 1999

A report last week claimed that within a decade, the disease (Malaria) will be common again on the Spanish coast. The effects of global warming are coming home to roost in the developed world. - The Guardian September 11, 1999

Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives. Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters - which scientists are attributing to global climate change - produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries. - Charles Onians -UK Independent Mar 20, 2000

Within a few years winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting even. Children just aren't going to know what snow is," Dr David Viner, Senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia - Mar 20, 2000

Officials with the Panama Canal Authority, managers of the locks and reservoirs since the United States relinquished control of the canal in 1999, warn that global warming, increased shipping traffic and bigger seagoing vessels could cripple the canal's capacity to operate within a decade. CNN November 1, 2000

In ten years time, most of the low-lying atolls surrounding Tuvalu's nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean will be submerged under water as global warming rises sea levels, CNN Mar 29, 2001

"Globally, 2002 is likely to be warmer than 2001 - it may even break the record set in 1998. - Daily Mirror August 2, 2002

 Next year(2003)may be warmest recorded: Global temperatures in 2003 are expected to exceed those in 1998 - the hottest year to date - Telegraph UK-  December 30, 2002

(The) extra energy, together with a weak El Nino, is expected to make 2005 warmer than 2003 and 2004 and perhaps even warmer than 1998 - Reuters February 11, 2005

Environmental refugees to top 50 million in 5 years --"There are well-founded fears that the number of people fleeing untenable environmental conditions may grow exponentially as the world experiences the effects of climate change and other phenomena," says UNU-EHS Director Janos Bogardi. - United Nations University news release - October 11, 2005

NOAA announced its predictions for the 2006 hurricane season, saying it expects an "above normal" year with 13-16 named storms. Of these storms, the agency says it expects four to be hurricanes of category 3 or above, double the yearly average of prior seasons in recorded history. With experts calling the coming hurricane season potentially worse than last year's, oil prices have jumped 70 cents per barrel in New York and made similar leaps elsewhere. Economists anticipate that demand for oil will rise sharply over the summer, when as many as four major hurricanes could hit the United States. -- Seed Magazine 5/19/06

This year (2007) is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, - ScienceDaily Jan. 5, 2007

Very Active 2007 Hurricane Season Predicted - The U.S. Atlantic basin will likely experience a very active hurricane season, the Colorado State University forecast team announced today, increasing its earlier prediction for the 2007 hurricane season. The team's forecast now anticipates 17 named storms forming in the Atlantic basin between June 1 and Nov. 30. Nine of the 17 storms are predicted to become hurricanes, and of those nine, five are expected to develop into intense or major hurricanes (Saffir/Simpson category 3-4-5) with sustained winds of 111 mph or greater. - ScienceDaily April 3, 2007

Warm (2007 – 2008) Winter Predicted for United States - NOAA forecasters are calling for above-average temperatures over most of the country - ScienceDailyOct. 11, 2007

Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer (2008), report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history]," David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker. - National Geographic News June 20, 2008

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