April 1, 2015 · The New Paradigm for Mankind Show
Transcript now available—Benjamin Deniston is joined by Megan Beets and Liona Fan-Chiang for a review of Deniston’s latest paper, “New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis”, for a discussion which Lyndon LaRouche called “a shocker for the practical issues of how to deal with the water crisis… This program is the most important thing that is being circulated in the United States right now.”
Megan Beets: Hello, this is April 1, 2015. My name is Megan Beets. Welcome to this week’s New Paradigm for Mankind. I’m joined in the studio today by Liona Fan-Chiang and Benjamin Deniston of the LaRouchePAC Science Team.
So, before I turn it over to Ben, let me just say a few things in terms of the context of today’s discussion.
People may know that yesterday was the deadline for nations to apply as founding members of the new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, being sponsored by China, and by yesterday’s deadline, despite the fact that the Obama Administration had issued hisses and boos and warnings to its allies not to join such an evil institution, 46 nations had applied to be founding members of this bank, including the United States’ supposed best allies, Britain, most of the European nations, including France, Germany, Italy, all the Scandinavian countries. Also the BRICS nations and their allies, such as Russia, Brazil, and Egypt.
So, this is huge. And there was a meeting taking place over the past days in Kazakhstan, of many of the founding countries, to work out the articles of association; a draft of that has been issued. The bank is expected to be operational by the end of the year, with an initial capitalization of $100 billion.
So, you add the AIIB to the New BRICS-sponsored New Development Bank, which is in the process of coming into being. That has $100 billion capitalization. You add to that the planned Shanghai Cooperation Organization Bank, China’s funds for the New Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road, which total $60 billion. And what we’re looking at is the coming-into-being of a new financial architecture in the world, which is something that Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, and this organization, have been fighting for about 40 years.
So, this is happening, and it’s unstoppable. And what Lyn said on this yesterday, in reaction to this development, he basically was saying, in paraphrase, that we’re coming into a period where there will be no more empires. And where the idea of sovereign nation states with separate interests, as popularly understood, is going out of existence.
Now, I think that only underscores the urgency of the ousting of Obama, and his crew, from a position of power in the United States. And Lyn really underscored this point yesterday: As long as Obama is in the presidency, mankind faces a very imminent danger of extinction warfare. And I think that’s only illustrated by the fact that, at this moment, the United States is preparing to put 290 troops, on the ground, in Ukraine, to train the Ukrainian National Guard—which includes the very famous Azov battalion, which is a group of neo-Nazis, which have been incorporated into the offical government-sponsored National Guard.
So, I think this really makes the point, that unless we oust Obama, mankind is really hanging by a thread of provocation against Russia and China, which would escalate very quickly.
But to make the point, and sort of turn toward our topic today, what Mr. LaRouche underscored is that the only way to actually win for humanity, the only way to pull mankind back from the brink, is not merely to reverse the current policy. He said, there is no practical solution to what mankind faces today. The only way we can save mankind, is if we can envision, and forecast, a new future for mankind, something which is qualitatively different, and beyond any past experience. And he said, what’s crucial is to have the insight to define the possible, and to define how to bring that possibility into existence.
On that light, Ben, he’s pointed toward an article which you just completed, called “A Memo to the Next President: New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis.” And as our viewers know, this is available on the LaRouche PAC site, and it’s also in the newest issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
With that, I won’t say any more. I’ll let you tell us what it’s about.
Ben Deniston: Thank you, Megan. This obviously comes in the context of a worsening water crisis in California, which is grabbing a lot of headlines. This new year’s getting started. The last winter was very low in terms of precipitation, so it’s kind of a new stage in the crisis, and it’s starting to get to the point of, if it’s not silly bickering between regions of the state about who gets what water, it’s a point of practical crisis for certain people.
So, in discussions with Mr. LaRouche—really, over the past couple of years, a year and a half, two years, something in that range, Mr. LaRouche has stressed that the solution to the water crisis in California, and also the West more generally, and then really globally—this water issue is global, that we have to deal with as well. But in the context of all these calls for solutions, and what do we do with the California situation, he’s come back repeatedly to the activity of China.
He says, that’s the reference point. Let’s just get serious, guys. Don’t come to me with trying to have this little gimmick, or that little gimmick, or now, I have the program, or this thing’s going to work. If you want to get serious about what’s going on, look at what China’s doing. China’s the reference point right now for how you address problems like this.
And he went further, which I want to get into a little bit today, but I want to try to situate it a bit, give it a little bit of context. But he went further and said, really, what China’s doing, most exemplified by what China is doing with their space program, where they’re right now in the process of moving towards the completion of their lunar exploration program, which gathered a lot of headlines when they made this excellent landing of this rover on the moon a couple of years ago. Which is the first time that had been done since the ’80s, I believe.
This is kind of the exploratory phase, setting the groundwork for a real expansion, and Mr. LaRouche has really emphasized this as the pinnacle of what mankind needs to be doing at this point. And again, the reference point for how you come back and handle problems like the water crisis.
So, just to give that a little context, to get into that: If people haven’t seen… there’s headlines now saying California has one year of water left, potentially, in the reservoirs for certain regions. That’s true to some extent. In some places, they already don’t have water—it’s not one year left, it’s nothing left, because they’ve already run out of water. There are cities where you turn on the tap, and the water doesn’t come out.
If you ask the farmers, many of them have already run out of water. You have half a million acres of farmland go unplanted last year. And this is some of the most productive farmland in the entire countries. Now, estimates are that this next season, it could be double that, it could be a million acres going unplanted. Again, you’re looking at potentially zero to maybe 20% of the normal allocation of the state’s water project—the Central Valley Project, and the California State Water Project—able to be allocated to the farmers in certain regions of the state.
So, either maybe one-fifth, at the most, of what they would normally get, in terms of water from these state projects, or maybe nothing at all.
So, this is a building crisis. And at this point, some people are raising, maybe we have to move people out of the state, and that’s the point we’re talking about. We’re talking about reaching the point at which there’s open discussion of not being able to support the population of California, and needing to lower the population.
So, this is the level of insanity we’re come to.
Now, we here, having worked with Mr. LaRouche, we have a certain, frankly, obligation to emphasize Mr. LaRouche’s history on this issue. Because if you think this is a surprise, then you’ve got your head in the sand. A crisis like this doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Mr. LaRouche has been saying, since the ’70s and ’80s, California, the West, they need more water. You’re not going to solve the situation there by just managing the existing water supply.
You may get some benefits by just increasing efficiency, increasing the use, but he’s been saying, emphatically since the ’80s — we put out a report, a pamphlet that we produced, entitled “Won’t You Let Your Grand-Children Have a Drink of Fresh Water?” And that was a question he put to people in the 1980s.
And now, those children and grand-children have been born, and now they don’t have a drink of fresh water, because people didn’t listen to what Lyn was saying back then.
And we have solutions. We were talking about desalination, nuclear-powered desalination. We had been promoting this NAWAPA project, which again, wasn’t new to us. [See: Increasing the Productivity of the North American Water Cycle: The Nuclear-Thermonuclear NAWAPA XXI, by Benjamin Deniston] In the ’50s and ’60s, people were talking about this, needing to address the growing crisis of the water in the West, the water needs in the West, and to be able to continue to grow and expand and develop, you’re going to need to bring in new water supplies. So this grand design of NAWAPA was developed, and planned, and proposed, and fought for already in the ’60s. [See: LPAC Feature Film: “NAWAPA 1964”] And then, you know, Mr. LaRouche picked that back up again in the ’80s, and promoted that.
We picked that up again, we were promoting that in the ’90s. We picked that up in a big way five years ago, and started promoting it.
So, there have been options. There have been solutions available for decades now. So it’s not like this is a big surprise out of nowhere, that we’re in a crisis.
So, to underscore this, I wanted to —so, the point being, it’s not just a lack of solutions, or objective solutions, or objective options. Mr. LaRouche was saying last night, what we have to attack at this point, is the failed culture of the United States. This is a clear expression of it. We’ve had these options available. We haven’t had a culture that’s committed to creating the future, that’s been willing to fight to make these things happen, and now people are suffering because of that cultural failure, that moral failure.
Now, compare that again, going back to Lyn’s emphasis, compare that to China.
In the last couple days, I had some fun producing this graphic, comparing some of what China’s done [Figure 1, a Century of Water Diversion]—this doesn’t cover everything, but this includes some of the keystone projects, some of what China has done on the issue of water, directly, and comparing that with what the United States has done, and hasn’t done.
Figure 1: A Century of Water Diverson
So, these are water diversion projects, river diversion projects. China’s obviously on top. What you see here are the three routes of their South-Water-North Water Project. The eastern route and the central route, are basically in the process of being completed right now. The western route is still in the planning phases, and designs.
Already, the eastern route and the central route together are going to deliver, they have the capacity to deliver annually, about 27-28 cubic kilometers per year. Taken together, that’s significantly more than the flow of the Colorado River, for example, just to put that in a reference. And these were initiated in the past decade, for the most part, the past 10-15, you could probably go back a little bit further for all the planning and everything, and designs. But these things have been built in the last 10, 15 years.
So, this time in which— when you compare that to the United States and Southwest, for reference. Here you have indicated 5 of the most significant river-diversion, water-diversion, canal projects in the Southwest, with the All-American canal; the Colorado Aqueduct, serving southern California, Los Angeles, San Diego, the Imperial Valley; you have the Central Valley Project, and the California State Water Project, servicing the Central Valley and other parts of the state. You have the Central Arizona Project, branching off into Colorado, taking water out into the central Arizona.
And, as you can see here, on the comparative timeline on the bottom, these things were started in the late ’20s, ’30s, continuing up the ’60s. By the end of the ’60s, we haven’t done anything. We’ve been coasting on what was developed from the bookends from Franklin Roosevelt to Kennedy. We had this surge of development. This was some of the leading activity in the world, in terms of water management projects. It created the whole conditions for California to become one of the most productive states, the most productive state in the whole country, a huge agricultural breadbasket, population growth, development, etc.
Since the ’60s, we’ve done nothing. We’ve flatlined. Again, so this is the context in which the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, LaRouche is saying, we’ve got to expand, we’ve got to grow. You’re going to hit a crisis if you don’t grow, if you don’t expand.
If you compare that, compare this flatlined, this moral decay, this lack of development, in the United States, with just in the past 2 decades, China has surpassed our activity. And they’ve done it more quickly than we did it. And they’re vectored towards going even farther with their projects.
So again, it’s not like there aren’t solutions, there aren’t things that can be done, and it’s not like we live in a world where this is impossible to do anymore. China’s done it. They’re doing it. They’re going further.
We live in a culture where people have lost their connection to mankind being a creative force, improving the conditions of their nation, of the land, and of the biosphere, of the planets, and we’re suffering the effects of this degeneracy, really.
So, I want to just put this out here as an opening contrast, because I think it’s important to get this key point across. The objective solutions, options, are there. They have been there. It’s been this subjective failure of the United States, this shift away from the Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy tradition and orientation, that’s brought us to this crisis point.
Now in this context, Mr. LaRouche has said—and we’re going to get to it in a minute—China’s space program in particular, not just their water projects, but also their space program, needs to be the reference point for mankind today.
Now, to get to that, I want to discuss what you’re really dealing with in terms of water, water cycles. And I cover this in more detail in the EIR Special Report, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge,” so if people want more information on how to think about managing water systems, water cycles, there’s much more in that report. That’s kind of background to this article that I just wrote. And that’s available now, and should also be referenced.
So, what are you dealing with when you are talking about water? Water is not something you use up. It’s not something you just use, and throw away.
Beets: It doesn’t disappear from the universe.
Deniston: It does not disappear from the universe. Photosynthesis uses a little bit of it, and that’s good. But we’re not using up water. We’re tapping into cycles of water.
California has been managing a water cycle. You get precipitation, you get snow pack in the Sierra Nevadas, and around California; you get precipitation in the Colorado River basin, which feeds the Colorado River. That water doesn’t just magically appear, new, created, never having existed before in those regions. It comes from the ocean. It comes from evaporation, and precipitation.
Obviously, there’s all kinds of details, and sub-cycles, and additional components, but in the most general sense, you’re dealing with cycles. You’re dealing with input flow, output. This is a very, very simplistic illustration of the average global cycles [Figure 2]. You can just intuitively see very quickly how much water evaporates from the oceans every year. How much of that then falls back into the oceans, without ever going over land. A huge amount.
Figure 2: Global Water Cycle and Cosmic Inputs
Some of that goes over land. The water that goes over, is then put back up into the atmosphere by either evaporation, or plant activity, and then falls back on the land again. And then you get a roughly equivalent amount of run-off back into the ocean. So, you’re dealing with cycles.
So the issue that mankind has been dealing with, from the history of mankind, is how do we manage and improve these cycles. How we take, go back to the early, early man. How do we take small rivers, small streams, and build irrigation systems, improve the use of these water cycles. Ensure that this water, that— the Sun is working its butt off evaporating all this water. The amount of energy the Sun puts into evaporating water is massive. So, it’s putting all that up into the atmosphere. Only a small percentage of that, about 10% of what evaporates from the ocean even makes it over land.
So we owe to the Sun to do something good with that water, right? I mean, the figures are pretty remarkable how much energy the Sun’s putting into this system.
So it comes over land, and the history of mankind has been using it to better effect, making sure more plant life uses that water, irrigation systems, crops; ensuring that we have flood control systems, so you get nice, stable environments, where you don’t have whole cities, whole regions of a particular place wiped out by periodic floods. That’s what California’s done, California’s been managing a certain water cycle. They’ve reached the point, again, already known in the ’50s and ’60s, that the continual existence and growth of the West, California included, but more broadly, is going to require moving beyond just managing the local, regional water supplies. Again, that’s been known, that was why NAWAPA was designed. That was why you had top Senators fighting for NAWAPA and other projects. That’s why we continued to push these projects into the ’70s and ’80s, after you had this shift toward cultural degeneration.
Now we have a new factor adding into this crisis, so it’s been known that the kind of pitiful, small amount of water in the West is not enough to manage that existing supply, to sustain the population there, and to sustain some real growth.
Now we have a drought. This drought has provoked certain people to say, well, let’s take a deeper look at what the climate of California is really like. Let’s look at things like tree rings, from trees that live hundreds and hundreds, and hundreds of years; some trees live thousands of years. And the tree rings that can actually help you record how much water was available, year to year to year and get a sense of the climate, the environment going back, thousands of years. You have all kinds of other records, little microscopic, single-celled organisms, that will grow in bodies of water, and you can measure how much water there was by the activity of these little critters left in the records.
So some people have looked back and gotten some idea of the climate in California over the past couple thousand years, and they’ve seen a rather remarkable and important surprise, that the last century in California was actually an anomaly, an anomaly in two ways: One, it was wetter, there was actually more water than you’d expect on average for this past couple-thousand-year period; so all of our management of the existing water cycle from 1900 up to 2000, this past century, in California has been managing a water cycle that was luckily overabundant, compared to what it normally is. These things actually fluctuate more than we had realized.
Two, so the 20th Century averaged wetter; it also averaged more stable. You get dramatic fluctuations generally over the past couple thousand years. We have luckily not experienced any super-dramatic fluctuations, either way — so-called mega-droughts lasting years, decades potentially, where you just have 20 years of practically no water; on the flip side, mega-floods. This has happened in the 19th Century. The entire Central Valley of California has been flooded, it’s a huge territory, a massive lake, 20 feet deep, created over hundreds of miles throughout the center of California, because you had just some system, probably one of these atmospheric rivers, dumping an insane amount of water, for days, and days, and days, into California.
So you get these wild extremes, the point being, you’re dealing with cycles. We’re realizing, being blind-sided so to speak, in our realization that these things actually fluctuate more than we realize; they’re not just stable, constant, steady things. The climate changes — maybe that’s a surprise to the people in the IPCC, that the climate actually changes, with or without us!
The question for mankind, is, how do we, then, with this greater realization, for California and West as our case-study here, how do we continue to improve, and expand and grow and improve the conditions of the land, recognizing that these cycles change, these water cycles vary, they fluctuate, and we’re in this drought period?
Just briefing, I want to reference, obviously, this NAWAPA project, which is something, again, that’s been put on the table, designed and available for decades now. One step would be going to a larger system: If the local or regional system doesn’t have enough water to sustain the activity you need, if the water cycle there is just not enough to sustain a vigorous biosphere, strong activity of life, is there options on a larger scale, on say a continental scale?
And in North America, it was recognized that it looks like there is. You do get on average, significantly more precipitation up north, in Alaska, Yukon Territory, British Columbia, this whole region gets a lot of water, a lot of which unfortunately, again, to the detriment of the hard work of the Sun, a lot of this water just falls on the coasts, mountain ranges, and flows right back into the ocean without getting a chance to do much with itself.
Think of the poor water molecule, right? It’s probably sitting in the ocean for some of these things, probably for thousands of years, sitting in the ocean doing nothing, it finally gets a chance to get up into the atmosphere and do something useful, do something productive — and then a couple of weeks, it falls, and it’s right back into the ocean. It’s going to wait a long time for the next cycle to come around.
So this has been known, and this is one perspective on the situation for the West: Expand the cycle. And again, this is not just to clear out the idiocy that tends to arise in the culture today. This is not “stealing water from the North.” This is not taking some big pool of water that’s sitting up there. There’s not some giant lake that we want to drain up in Canada, and steal Canada’s water. This is water that is part of this cycle: It precipitates up there and falls back into the ocean.
What NAWAPA is, really, it’s just augmenting that cycle. It’s saying, instead of that water returning right to the ocean right up North, why not bring it down through the Southwest, and then return it to the ocean? [See Figure 3, Total Photosynthesis] If people were real proponents of Green, this is the kind of thing they would have gone for. For example, the Colorado River is tapped dry. It usually doesn’t even flow into the ocean. With this, you could make the Colorado flow into the ocean again. The Colorado could be regularly flowing, vigorously, back into the ocean at the rate it used to. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Figure 3: Total Photosynthesis (billions of tons)
So this augmenting, managing these cycles on a bigger scale is an option that’s been known for a long time. And what you’d really be doing, is increasing the productivity of the existing cycle.
That stated, we’re in a deeper crisis now. One, this would take decades to construct. This is not a small project. We’re in an immediate crisis. Two, we’ve got to really take into account, and have a better study of and consideration of how these water cycles fluctuate and change. Again, this study that California’s past century has been an anomaly, is a little bit of a blind-side to what people had thought; it wasn’t something expected.
So I think it forces in principle, a need to go to a higher level in our conception. Instead of just assuming that precipitation patterns as they exist, rivers, snow-pack, etc., are just going to be there, and always going to be there, and we can just tap into what’s there, we need to go to a higher level. Not just a larger scale, but a higher level, a different conception of what we’re dealing with. Which means we need a better conception of what the water cycle is as a whole.
Again, here’s our very simple, generalized graphic of the Global Water Cycle [Figure 2], but this is not really what it is. This is the annual flows of water, estimated. And usefully depicted as a single system, because you’re dealing with a single, global system. But it’s not really a global system. The whole thing is driven by cosmic processes. I don’t think anyone’s going to deny that the Sun plays a role in driving the world’s climate and precipitation system, its hydrological cycle: That’s what makes the whole thing go, is solar activity. It doesn’t come from the Earth, this is a cosmic process.
The Sun powers the whole water cycle: All the water that’s pumped up into the atmosphere that forms the basis for precipitation everywhere, is driven by solar activity. That opened another whole avenue of discussion, which I’m not going to get into here, but, when the Sun changes, what does that mean? And that’s a really important question; that needs to be studied a lot more.
Whereas, again, our naïve assumption that stability is a principle of the universe has been putting us in very bad positions, because it’s giving us a false idea. The Sun is going through changes right now, that were not expected. It’s weakening, to a degree that it’s a large surprise; only a handful of people had been watching this and warning, the Sun is changing. And what that type of change will do, to the climate and the weather and the precipitation, the hydrological cycle, is not really known. There’s abundant correlations indicating that there’s certainly going to be some effects. What exactly those effects are, how big they are, that’s really something that needs to be studied much more seriously.
Liona Fan-Chiang: The last minimum was really not that long ago. The last time the Sun went into hibernation, I guess you could say, was really not that long ago.
Deniston: Yeah, it was about — you had kind of a small minimum in the 1800s; you had a large grand minimum about 400 years ago; and we’ve hit these grand minimums every 400 years for the past couple thousand years. So even just by the cycle, we’re right at the point where you’d expect another grand minimum, just from records of the cycles of solar activity.
Fan-Chiang: And those reports from that time, that agriculture had a big crisis, and there was starvation and so on.
Deniston: Yeah, absolutely: Major cooling in the North, a lot of records in Europe, the so-called “little Ice Age” in Europe hit.
So these things really need to be studied, and this is another reason to throw this IPCC and British genocide climate-change gang out of the picture, because they’re trying to suppress studies of this. Because their whole thing is: The climate doesn’t change, only man changes the climate. We don’t study and we’re not going to allow other people to seriously study, the types of natural factors that cause the climate to change, because that would distract from and create other explanations, which wouldn’t allow us to pin everything on mankind, which is what they’re trying to do. That’s the intention of the whole thing.
So anyway, the Sun changes, that’s going to have an effect. But what I want to talk about here, this is kind of a set-up context; the point I really want to get to is, that we have to go to a higher level and look at this galactic input, the effect of galactic activity.
And one reference to this, is a study that just came out by an Israeli-American scientist, Dr. Nir Shaviv, who had already done studies looking at the motion of our Solar System through the galaxy and showing that as our Solar System moves through the spiral arm regions of the galaxy. And people have seen pictures of galaxies, they have these nice spiral arms where you have a greater density of activity in the galactic system.
Already, over a decade ago, he had worked with others, and they’d shown that to the best of our understanding, it looks like as our Solar System moves through these galactic spiral arms, that’s when you get major glaciation and cooling, and not just these glacial periods, but what are sometimes called “global icehouse events” where much of the whole planet is covered in ice, glaciers moving all the way down towards the mid-latitudes.
You tend to get these major, major icing glaciation events associated with the passage of our Solar System through these spiral arms. That totally changes what we’re thinking of when we think about weather and climate. It’s not a terrestrial process; it’s not even a terrestrial/solar system process. It’s a terrestrial/solar system/galactic process.
And again, just to throw it in there, it’s been known that galactic cosmic rays, very high-energy cosmic radiation, radiation from the galaxy more generally, from interstellar space, is constantly flooding our atmosphere, and it’s constantly having a direct impact on the electrical properties, the ionization properties of the atmosphere. So we’ve known that we’re not an isolated body in empty space, unaffected by the cosmos around us. And we’ve known that it’s not just activity from the Sun, which in bulk energy terms is the major component of cosmic radiation into our Earth system, but it’s also this galactic factor, this high-energy galactic cosmic radiation.
If you haven’t seen Frank Capra’s “The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays,” I highly recommend for our viewers that they watch that, for a very entertaining pedagogical through the process of discovery of this cosmic ray effect.
This is an aspect that now really needs to be further investigated, in terms of its potential role as a factor in climate, in cloud formation, in condensation of water vapor; all that water vapor in the atmosphere, what causes it to decide when to change into liquid, form into clouds and fall? There’s a lot of indications that we need to start looking more closely at these factors, such as ionization and related electrical effects — tapping into the global electric circuit is another component of this whole process.
So we need to introduce a recognition of this galactic factor, as an active factor in play, in what we experience as our “climate,” our hydrological system, our water cycle. This particular graphic [Figure 4] illustrates a more recent study, just released this past winter by Dr. Shaviv and some of his associates, looking at the motion of our Solar System, not just around the galaxy, but also above and below the disk, something we’ve discussed on the show before, that our current understanding of how our Solar System interacts with and moves through the galactic system, is that it’s travelling around it, but it’s also kind of bobbing up and down. You know, the galaxy is this disk-like structure, and our Solar System seems to move above and below that disk, passing through the mid-region within our plane as it does.
Figure 4: The 32-Million Year Galactic Cycle
And this is something that on the one side, has been associated with periods of extinction, of life, and change and development of new life forms, and changes of biodiversity on the evolutionary scale. That Dr. Shaviv just showed is that it also seems to be associated with changes in climate: So you have here indicated, it’s roughly, generally a 32-million-year cycle, as indicated there, from the peak, the highest point we reach on say, the northern side, down to the lowest point we reach on the southern side; so like peak to trough, that’s about 32 million years. And people think these cycles vary a little bit in length, so it’s not like clockwork, exactly 32 every single time. There’s other factors that will play into modulation to these periods, but roughly about 32 million years.
So, 32 million years, peak to trough, also about roughly 32 million years from mid-plane crossing to mid-plane crossing. They’re both indicated here. What Shaviv showed, working with some other people who had a nice, thorough data set of various indications of climate, over the past 400 or 500 million years, indications that there was a cycle, roughly around 32 million years, of warming and cooling of the climate over this past 400 million year period. And the cycle of warming and cooling corresponds to what we understand about the motion of our Solar System through the galaxy.
Again, another line of evidence — and there’s more too, but just to keep things within the bounds of the timeframe here — this is just another indication that these galactic activities, the galactic processes are an active factor at play. We might not fully understand everything about why or how that occurs yet, but these lines of evidence indicate that if we’re going to understand what the hydrological cycle is, what the climate is that we experience and we depend upon, that we need to better improve and manage and control, we have to start thinking from the standpoint of this galactic system as an active factor at play.
And Dr. Shaviv hypothesizes that as we move through the mid-plane, these mid-plane crossings are the period where it seems to get cooler, so it’s believed that there’s a higher amount of cosmic radiation activity, galactic cosmic radiation in this mid-plane region, he believes that the increase of that activity facilitates greater cloud formation and stimulates certain cooling effects. That might be a lot of it; it might be just one part of the story, or there might be other factors that we don’t quite fully understand yet, but that’s a hypothesis that he’s put forward, that’s actually being tested and investigated by different scientists.
Fan-Chiang: At CERN [the European Center for Nuclear Research].
Deniston: Yeah, at CERN you have some activity going on there, which is already breaking new ground and opening up new insights that we had no idea were at play in these cloud formation/condensation processes. So the science is just, to put it bluntly, just not really understood. And if you take the standard textbook theories, you’re going to fail anyway, because the textbook theories have already failed. That’s another whole subject.
So this is our new perspective. What is the climate? The climate is an interaction of galactic, solar and terrestrial processes, and mankind, I guarantee you is the only species on this planet that is going to think about that. Those deer in California that might like it when there’s more water, because there’s more fresh grass for them to live, they might enjoy these beneficial and not enjoy the catastrophic changes in the climate; they’re not going to intervene to change it. That’s what mankind does: to improve and change the conditions and make them better. They’re certainly not going to conceptualize “Oh, I’m part of a galactic system. I need to start thinking about a galactic system, and then change my activity to correspond to my imagination thinking about this galactic process as a whole and situating our Solar System and our planet in the context of this galactic process.” That is mankind. That is what mankind has to do. That’s uniquely our capability and that makes it our responsibility and our obligation, to be thinking and acting on that level.
Now, somebody might look at this and say: “OK, what does a 32-million-year cycle matter for us right now — 32 million years? I just read the headlines, and California’s out of water in one year, what’re you talking about 32 million years for? Mankind’s only been around for a couple of million years.”
The point is that going to this perspective gives us a completely new, higher insight into what this hydrological cycle is, again, understanding that it’s not just the cycle of water, it’s a cycle of water that’s driven and modulated by the effects of cosmic, including galactic activity. So one thing on the table now, immediately, is, can we use this understanding to give us again, a better control over this global water cycle? And not just necessarily larger in scale, although we probably want to do things like this, but not just larger in scale, going to a higher conceptual level.
We’ve talked about a few times on this show before, there are some initial demonstrations that seem to indicate that if we simulate our own ionization and electrical effects on the atmosphere, we can actually stimulate rainfall; we can also potentially inhibit rainfall. We can tap into, at least initially, these more electrical ionization-type effects, which play a role in this whole hydrological cycle process.
This is something that’s been, as we’ve discussed, this has been demonstrated in Mexico; it’s been demonstrated in Israel; it’s been demonstrated in Australia; it’s been demonstrated in the United Arab Emirates. There’s currently a new demonstration program going on in Oman. And to varying degrees of effect: Some of these rigorous studies show they increase the rainfall by 20%, 10%. If we were going to use this type of thing to address California’s crisis, we’d probably need more than that. But it’s an indication there’s something there that we’re potentially tapping into, that we could better understand, better discover what exactly are the principles at play, and use that greater understanding potentially, to really use these things on a larger scale.
Some of the other operations, like were going on in Mexico, appear to have significantly greater effects, and were operating on a larger scale. This Australian Rain Technologies, they ran a whole series of demonstrations in Australia. There’s thorough documentation and reports on their activity there, the successes they had. They just initiated a new series of tests, a new five-year program in Oman; the first couple of years results are available on their site here. They have independent reviews from independent university professors studying their work.
So again, indication that there’s definitely something going on there, that could be tapped into, could be expanded. And I would posit, the key is going to be approaching it from this broader galactic perspective, to actually discover, what is the science of this cosmic, atmospheric, hydrological interaction, such that we can actually use that understanding, use that galactic perspective to make things like this work, and work better.
Another outfit is called “Rain On Request” and they have similar technologies, similar approach; some differences in their technologies. But again, pursuing the same avenue of electrical ionization effects, and beginning to stimulate and modulate cloud formation rainfall, these types of things.
And ideally, what some of the scientists working in this area have played with and investigated, and are pursuing, is using these types of systems to create drafts of new, moist water from the ocean, and drawing it inland. And now we’re opening up a whole new domain of activity like this. Moving in this direction, we’re not going to be just dependent upon managing what falls on the ground. We need to think about beginning to control what’s in the atmosphere, and where it falls and where it goes. And that’s going to be, really, the only way you can absolutely secure these cycles as they exist, and also allow us to expand the cycles and develop new cycles: bring moisture overland, which wouldn’t go overland normally, and actually have a new, man-made, man-created cycle, to ensure that we have the vigorous flow of water onto land and back into the ocean again, needed to sustain strong economic activity and growing economy, and the biosphere generally, life: what mankind does, improving the biosphere, improving life.
This is an aspect. I think to put it in there in this context, another obvious thing that needs to be pursued is nuclear desalination. That’s another way we can ensure an adequate, stable supply of water, at least for the coastal regions. And again, that’s a way where we’re not just dependent upon managing existing natural cycles, which, to the surprise of the IPCC, the eminent scientists there, the climate actually changes.
Fan-Chiang: The cycles change.
Deniston: The cycles change. That would allow us to have our own control, our own input on our own cycles, that we can guarantee to continue and provide the fresh water needed.
These are some programs, you know, NAWAPA, long-term, probably we need something on that scale, to address some of the conditions of the West. In the shorter-term, we absolutely need desalination. We probably could get that going in a couple of years, if you had a real, top-down effort. guided by international cooperation with the BRICS, for example. Weather modification, these ionization systems. For a couple tens of millions of dollars, maybe $100 million, you could do a critical series of experiments, and start testing the hell out of these things: How do they work, why do they work, when do they work? Whose technology’s the best? You got this guy out here with his proposal, this guy with his proposal, why not start figuring this stuff out?
Let’s figure this out, let’s figure it out, and figure it out from the standpoint of the galactic perspective: You’re dealing with a climate that’s not an Earth-based climate. It’s a cosmic climate. We’re living in a cosmic, galactic climate. And people need to start thinking about that standpoint. And again, mankind, by our nature, we don’t just make realizations like this. We make realizations like this in discoveries, and then use that knowledge to change how we act on the system.
So I think just to round this out, the critical point we’re facing right now is, to go to this galactic perspective. Mentally, put ourselves to that point, where we’re thinking about the galaxy as a whole, the Solar System as a whole, the Solar System interacting with the galaxy, and in our minds recognize that that is the process we’re dealing with, and then really make our activity correspond to that recognition, and figure out how to make our activity correspond to that recognition, from the standpoint of allowing us to improve those systems and improve them for mankind and improve them for life on Earth.
So I think that that’s what I see as the broader challenge implied by the current situation. And that brings us back to, I think, Lyn’s emphasis on China’s space program, because that’s the direction they’re going. They’re saying, let’s get out into the Solar System, let’s make mankind an active presence, an active force on the level of the Solar System, on a Solar System scale; let’s start thinking and acting from that standpoint.
And so this perspective provided by China, by the BRICS, by their space program, by this cosmic orientation, is the future perspective from which we can begin to look for and try and find and identify the solutions needed for the water crisis. And this will apply in the West, but it’ll apply more generally. Water’s a major issue.
Fan-Chiang: I think this is also why Mr. LaRouche continually says that Kepler’s space program is the space program that China is pursuing right now. And in that sense, Kepler really already defined mankind as this, at least Solar System-wide species, the species that could act based on the principles which conduct the Solar System. And now, over the past hundreds of years, we’ve just been trying to fill those shoes. So our career’s already been defined, and now you’ve been training to fill those shoes.
And that would really completely — if you think about it, it completely redefines how we would address this crisis, as you’ve been saying; not only that you would view, for example, these ionization systems from the galactic scale, as sort of tapping into another cycle, a much larger cycle, as we did with the other cycles; but also if you really want to look at a water cycle in a galactic environment, the past several years have really allowed us to do that, from the standpoint that now we know there are water cycles on many, many planets in the Solar System; there’s a water cycle on the Moon, on three of the planets at least, or the moons of Jupiter, of Saturn — at least! We know now that there at least used to be one on Mars. And those are very good indicators then, very good measures for a way to hone in on the invariant that would be the galactic process, that it’s not unique, for example, to Earth.
Because Earth has a lot of other unique aspects — life, a very big factor.
Deniston: Yeah, absolutely.
Beets: Kepler would be totally thrilled with this idea! I mean, he, already in the Harmony of the World, he dedicates a good number of pages to exploring, reconceptualizing the weather and other effects on Earth, like earthquakes and volcanic activity; he’s making a certain attempt to locate those as effects of the activity of the Solar System. Just as you’re referencing, he’s sort of subsumed what, for centuries, man had thought was just an Earth-based system, he totally subsumed that in a solar system. And put man out in the Solar System. And he attempts to do the same thing with weather conditions and locating these as an effect of the organization of the entire system.
And I think he would be totally thrilled with the idea that, OK, this isn’t just a Solar System climate system, this is a galactic cosmo-climate system.
And then, just to go back to something you referenced, quickly, Ben about what does a 32-million-year cycle matter if we’re going to run out of water in a year? We can’t afford to wait 32 million years for some other century. But it really does speak to the unique powers of the human creative process over all other processes that we’re aware of: Mankind, in understanding something which we see in a 32-million-year cycle, but then being able to have an insight into that principle and apply it now, in a new way, which has never been applied before — one example being this ionization technology — we’re literally bending and condensing something on the scale of millions of years into five years, a decade. And it really does speak to this complete superiority of the human creative process, in and over the universe, to create new principles and new forms of action that never existed before. And it’s completely contrary to the degenerate idea in the culture: That nature was good until man appeared and it’s all been degeneration since. But it’s the completely opposite idea.
Fan-Chiang: But also that human beings have to do what existed before, that anything that you created that is new to the universe is bad, is evil.
Beets: Well, as you said, it’s not that we can’t do what was done before, it’s actually against our nature, and it’ll lead to our destruction. It’s actually evil, to think that we should do what was done before. The point is, we have to do what was never done before, and that’s how we open up things which were totally unexpected. I think that’s what you’re brining up in the China program.
Deniston: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the degeneration with the current society in the United States. It’s most importantly, that’s a principle for mankind. But that’s not just a principle for mankind, it’s a principle for the universe generally. Life, our understanding of life, our best understanding of life, everything we know about it indicates, it doesn’t just do what it did before. It does what it never did before. The entire evolutionary process has been leaping to stages where you have completely new qualities of action, qualities of activity, that were never done before. And always driven by a certain vector, a certain directionality of increasing the effect of life on the planet, increasing the energy-flux density of life.
So, sustainability is not a principle of life, it’s not a principle of the universe the way it’s discussed now. Sustainability in the universe is creation of new states. From what we know about the universe, that is what’s sustainable, is the creation of new states, and when mankind is not doing that, we are degenerating and we’re failing, and we’re — you know, decaying. That’s what California is experiencing right now, this rejection of the universal principle of sustainability in creation only, and mankind’s unique capability, and therefore obligation, to pursue that in a way that only mankind can.
You know, I think, again, that’s what Mr. LaRouche sees in what China is doing, is they have some recognition, some grasp on that. That they need to grow, they need to grow by creating new states, and they are going to create an international system that allows nations to cooperate and participate in that process. As the President of China has said, “win-win” cooperation: that when mankind sustains itself by creation of new states, you create more wealth for everybody involved. And that’s what’s inherently human, and that’s the only sustainable form of existence that we have today, that mankind has, especially at this point.
Beets: Okay, I think that’s an excellent point to leave off on. I will just point our viewers to the LaRouche PAC website and also the Executive Intelligence Review, the newest issue, for your article. And thank everybody for watching, and we’ll see you all soon.
Transcript now available—Benjamin Deniston is joined by Megan Beets and Liona Fan-Chiang for a review of Deniston’s latest paper, “New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis”, for a discussion which Lyndon LaRouche called “a shocker for the practical issues of how to deal with the water crisis… This program is the most important thing that is being circulated in the United States right now.”
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