This is the Environment Show. It's about our stewardship of the earth and the beauty and mystery of life in all its forms.
The Environment Show is a national production made possible by the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Oliver S. and Jenny R. Donaldson Charitable Trust, and Heming's Motor News, the Bible of the Collector Carhabi, 1-800-CAR-H-E-R-E, your host is Peter Burley.
Coming up on this week's Environment Show, we meet Robert Stanton, who has just been sworn in as the new director of the National Park Service.
Northeastern states petition the Environmental Protection Agency to restrict pollution from Midwestern power plants.
Otherwise, they'll have to take stronger action against their own industries.
Who needs cars in San Francisco? Bicycleists are shaping a new city.
And in the Earth calendar, we take to the wing with shorebirds who have left the Arctic and are on their way to South America.
These stories and more coming up on the Environment Show.
A recent study of our national park system by a coalition of nonprofit organizations found that our parks are overused, under maintained, and in need of $6 billion worth of work on buildings and roads and backcountry repair.
Facing this donic challenge is Robert Stanton. He's just become the nation's new director of the National Park Service and the first African-American to hold the post.
Mr. Stanton started his career in the park service as a seasonal ranger in the Grand Teton's in Wyoming in 1962.
And he served the last eight years as regional director of the National Capital Region of the Park Service in Washington, D.C.
There he was responsible for the sites that are familiar to all of us.
Like the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. He joins us now.
Minity Park is a confront the National Park Service has to do with providing opportunities to our employees and to our partners and others to contribute to the preservation of our national parks.
We currently have the stewardship responsibility for managing 375 parks from the South Pacific, Maine, to Alaska and Alaska to the US Virgin Islands.
And obviously it requires a great deal of effort on the part of the National Park Service to care properly for these parks.
We rely upon not only congressional appropriations but assistance from many of our partners as well as the fees or revenues if you will that are generated through the public use of various park activities.
So one of the major requirements that I am dealing with now is to establish an adequate financial base for the National Park Service to assure that the short term as well as the long range preservation requirements for these areas is well in hand.
My understanding is that there is really a huge backlog of repair maintenance both the facilities and the backcountry.
That is correct. I am discussing with the leadership of the National Park Service and Minera Staff not only here at the national level but our regional and park level as well in terms of what the relative priorities are for the so-called backlog.
Obviously with the large number of buildings both historic and those that are for administrative use which may not be historic, many are in need of repair.
We also have a large number of roads and bridges that need rehabilitation.
Certainly the preservation of the natural resources with some resource management projects requires staff as well as financial assistance to bring those to not only to bring them up to standards but to maintain them and standards as well.
So what we are doing we are looking at a combination of financial assistance again through congressional appropriation as well as the application of our approaches with partnerships and the use of fees that are being collected at a number of parks to apply those fees to correct some of the infrastructure deficiencies.
Let me ask you something else and that has to do with the acquisition of more parkland. Some people say we are not maintaining what we have got so we should not get any more others say this is a vanishing resource and we ought to get it and hold onto it so we can develop it in the future.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
I think we can appreciate the point of view that let us stabilize or consolidate our gains if you will as opposed to expanding the land base of our national park system.
I think it should be pointed out that some of the the the the acquisitions that are identified in our priorities are parcels of land that are within existence parks.
Many of those are instilled in private ownership and they could then they are subject to development and therefore if that were to happen it could have a in some instances could have a detrimental impact on a joint in parkland.
So there are some critical lands that need to be acquired in existence parks as opposed to establishing new parks.
I think one of the things that most of us who love our national parks worry about is that our parks are being loved to death and as a result there have been various proposals about doing other things to restrict access and the disperse use.
I assume this is a problem that can only get worse as our population increases. What are your views as to how we deal with this issue?
We are approaching it from three plus points. One is that we have an obligation to make available information to the public about all of the parks.
Therefore encouraging a visitation to what we sometimes categorize at least internally as lesser known parks so that the the public would understand that while everyone perhaps will have an interest in going to some of the more popular parks there are other there are other magnificent parks.
There are other magnificent resources that are not been overcrowded if you will. So it's a public awareness and some public information on obligation that we have.
Secondly in those parks where there is a heavy concentration of visitors we have the responsibility to provide information that creates and awareness appreciation of how the visitors should make use of the park.
Also we will couple that with looking at alternate transportation systems. In other words in some of the more crucial areas or critical areas or fragile areas of the park we may suggest that the visitors not take their private vehicle into that area but you a transportation system in which we may be able to take 20, 30 or 40 visit one time as opposed to 30 to 50 individual cars.
That was Robert Stanton our new director of the National Park Service.
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in 126 of the Clean Air Act, which has never been used before.
John K. Hill is the Commissioner of Environmental Conservation of the State of New York, and
he describes why he's looking for help from the EPA.
Well, Peter, we filed a Section 126 petition, which under the Clean Air Act provides that
a statement, a petition, the EPA for finding that stationary sources of air pollution, basically
of these large utilities are emitting pollutants, which significantly contribute to our problem
of air pollution here in New York.
And we are looking to EPA to address that, to forcing these facilities to install technology
that would restrict the amount of pollutants that are coming out of those facilities and
affecting us here in New York and in the Northeast.
Now, these facilities are located in the Midwest.
That's right.
The Midwest and they're also in the Southwest, there are also some facilities on Tennessee
and Kentucky that have been identified as sources of pollution from New York, but it's
primarily geared towards utilities in the Midwest.
Concerns about air pollution of so-called downwind states have increased as the EPA has put tougher
standards into effect.
If you are a downwind state and the air is dirty by the time it gets to you, more controls
have to be opposed on factories and utilities and on-o bills within your own state to meet
the new standards.
Again, New York Commissioner Cahill.
Right now, New York State is an anonymous payment, meaning it doesn't mean national
and Indian air quality standards.
And even if we shut down all our facilities in New York, even if we went home and turned
off all the lights, turned off all of the utilities, turned off all the cars, we would still
be anonymous because of the transport of pollution from the Midwest.
So we can't meet the standards now, the existing standards because of pollution for the Midwest.
There is clearly no possible way that New York State can meet the new tougher standards
that are being proposed by EPA, which Governor Pataki strongly supported, unless the Midwest
states take aggressive action to curb pollution from their major utilities.
New Jersey is one eastern state that is not filed a petition with EPA.
New Jersey Commissioner of Environmental Protection Bob Shin says the EPA already is supposed
to tell the Midwestern states, as well as everybody else, what air quality standards they
should meet.
This will happen in September.
He says that New Jersey will only consider filing a petition with EPA if it considers
the directions to be inadequate.
While the state petitions and EPA requirements make a procedural morass, positive things
are happening which will help clean the air.
Thirty-seven states, including those in the Northeast, have been working with EPA to develop
a common computer model to help predict the movement and transport of pollution in the
atmosphere.
After two years of work and negotiation, they have finally agreed on which model to use.
This means that for the first time in history, both the states and EPA are working off the
same model.
Commissioner Shin.
It's the first time in my memory.
I can tell you that.
It really solves a lot of problems because different models react differently as you know
in different situations.
Those modeling differences, you spend more time debating the modeling differences and
arguing over the science than the policy issues.
So at the end of this process, we were focused on policy all the way through.
I think it had a good result.
The combination of petitions of the Northeastern states and the sood to be published requirements
of EPA for new state implementation plans, as well as the tougher standards for ozone and
particulates that have just been adopted.
And the agreement to a common computer model to measure and predict transport of air
pollution, do mean that more forces are now at work to bring about better air quality
at the end of the nation's tailpipe in the Northeast than ever before.
I'm Peter Burley.
We want to hear from you, so give us a call and tell us what you think.
Our toll free number is 1-888-49-Green.
Our email address is green at wamc.org.
You can visit us anytime on the internet where you can hear the environment show.
It's at www.enn.com-slash-envshow.
I'm Linda Anderson and this is Ear to the Ground with stories about people affecting
change in the environment.
This week, Critical Mass, bicycling home together in San Francisco.
Bicycling in the Bay Area has taken a new spin.
What began as a friendly bike ride home for work on Fridays has grown into a parade of
sorts that has summoned the city of San Francisco up in arms.
According to a Critical Mass founder who has to be known as the Cycle Analyst, but
might just as easily be called the Cycle Anarchist, this event involves bicycles, but is about
more than just cycling.
In September of 1992, the analyst says about 45 people began meeting once a month at the
foot of Market Street.
Sure, riding bikes would help them gain more autonomy from the economy, help keep the
environment clean, but more importantly, and to the heart of Critical Mass was the
hope of creating a new social and public space.
Critical Mass to a great extent is about reconnecting to the broader dimensions of human experience
and part of that is a collective experience.
And experiences we share together and if we can start sharing our experiences in a more
deliberate fashion that it's a say we create our experiences and we know we're creating
them and we do it together with a sense of fun and inspiration.
Well, who knows what could happen, we might actually change life and I think that's part
of the motivation we have.
American culture, the analyst believes, is creating one-dimensional dead and human beings.
You know, couch potatoes.
People become so entirely focused on buying and selling things he thinks they forget to
experience life.
And that's why Critical Mass has such an appeal.
It's a wake-up call, a movement that has struck a chord in some 5,000 participants.
When Critical Mass began, it was clear to the founders that there was to be no agenda.
No demands, no leader, hence the alias name.
The psychoanalyst says Critical Mass was designed to take on a life of its own, creating
pressure at the grassroots level of society to create social change.
However, with growth comes a greater potential for conflict.
This past July, Critical Mass cyclists clashed with San Francisco officials.
Tensions the analyst says have been mounting as numbers of participants have increased
to the point of seriously affecting motorists.
The monthly bike rides have now been declared illegal.
There's no way to crack down on this.
There's 5,000 people in the streets, mostly their nice middle class people on their bikes.
You can't just start meddling mass arrests.
They're not breaking the law.
You know, running a red light, doing traffic in the fractions is not justifying mass arrests.
The organized planned routes of the past 5 years are out.
Now Critical Mass calls on cyclists to bike everywhere on every street, obeying every
law.
They can't stop us from riding our bikes.
The psychoanalyst says.
Basically, bicycles are a legitimate form of transportation and have all the rights and
responsibilities of motor vehicles under the California State law.
There's nothing in the city of San Francisco can do to change that.
So they can't declare it declared an illegal assembly that you show up on bikes.
They can't.
The first amendment of the Constitution says they can't do that.
They can't say riding your bike is illegal.
Or being on a bunch of bikes is an illegal assembly because you're in the streets.
The cars are falling in the street every day.
They don't go out and tell everybody, waiting to stuck in two mile long backups to get
on the bay of Rishet.
You're an illegal assembly.
You're now under arrest.
The analyst says city officials can't figure out what to do.
Critical mass, he believes, will keep growing and spreading to other communities.
He sees critical mass as a celebration of a vision of alternatives.
In this case, bicycling over car culture.
He claims until we begin challenging a whole range of technological choices at their roots,
our lives and the planetary ecology are likely to continue worsening.
Here, on the streets of San Francisco, he says, things are changing.
With ear to the ground, I'm Linda Anderson.
And now it's time for the Earth calendar.
Even though a lot of the country is sweltering under August heat, shorebirds have left their
nesting areas in the Arctic and are now beginning their long journey to the coasts of South
America.
Shorebirds are those little birds that you see dashing up and down on the beach.
They include plubbers like killed ear that sometimes people see in their very own backyards
and sandpipers and a few very large birds that have down curved beaks called curloughs.
That was Susan Roenit-Drennan, vice president for Ornithology at the National Audubon Society.
She says some shorebirds migrate 12,000 kilometers or 25,000 kilometers for a round trip.
Their schedule is driven by the short Arctic summer.
The breeding season is so short up in the Arctic.
These birds migrate under a great deal of stress from South America, get up to the Arctic
and some of them even start laying their eggs in the snow up there before it's really
summer up there.
You can imagine how stressed these birds are to not just find a mate but also to court
and then breed and then turn right around and head south again.
The journey itself is so, it's such a long journey.
Drennan says the migration routes are such that you can see shorebirds on the move in a
lot of places in the United States.
A lot of these shorebirds stick with the coasts and they're my migratory corridors run
down the Pacific or the Atlantic coasts.
Or you see them often on the Gulf of Mexico.
Some of these shorebirds actually come through the great plains but the really interesting
thing to remember is that when these birds are migrating on their southern roots, they
leave the Arctic, the parents usually leave, this is sort of an amazing feat.
The parents usually leave the young in the Arctic and go ahead without them.
If usually two weeks afterwards the young start migrating without having ever done it
before and without the help of parents.
And yet this journey goes on year after year.
It's a predictable long distance journey and how birds, how young birds do it, leaving
those northern latitudes and ending up in the warmer latitudes is still really miraculous.
To make the long journey, shorebirds need stopover areas where they can gather food.
These are like rungs in a ladder.
And if they're destroyed, Drennan says the birds will perish even though they're nesting
habitat in the Arctic or their winter habitat in South America is preserved.
If you're on the beach, you can recognize one shorebird by the way it moves.
We have the most common birds that people will see on their beaches right about now and
later.
Our birds call sanderlings, they're short little fat shorebirds that people always talk
about them as being sewing machine birds because they move along the beach very, very rapidly
poking their bills into the sand, trying to get invertebrates that will give them a lot
of strength to continue their migrations.
Another shorebird which does not nest in the Arctic may be familiar because of the way
it sounds.
The kildiger especially calls its own name, kildir, kildir, and this is a bird that so many
people have seen and experienced firsthand because they nest.
This is a bird that does not go to the Arctic.
They nest locally.
They nest in gravel along people's driveways, for instance.
They nest in fields and they do a wonderful thing.
They do what is called a distraction display.
So if you get a little bit too close, they start calling frantically and dragging a wing
and luring you, of course it's a little hard to not follow a bird when it's acting like
that, but in fact what you are doing is being lured away from its young or its eggs.
So if you're vacationing on the beach and forget the potato chips and soda pop, try eating
a few crustaceans under the sand.
If they can supply enough energy to send a sanderling, winging to South America, they surely
can energize you to roll over on the beach blanket so you can get cooked on the other side.
Thanks for listening.
This is the Environment Show and I'm Peter Burley.
Still ahead, should more be done to reduce the chances of oil spills by ocean-going tankers?
One tanker crewman thinks so.
We talk green about changing the weather.
For 250,000 bucks, you might be able to hire someone to make it rain in your own garden.
And radioactive frogs are jumping all over the place, at least in the mind of Fred
Small, who sings hot frogs are on the loose.
Hundreds of oil tankers ply the seas.
When they run aground or bump into things, the resulting oil spill is environmental disaster.
You've heard the names.
The Exxon Valdez, the Torrey Canyon.
The Environment Show's Rachel Phillips, talks with a lawyer and a sea captain.
Who think if tankers are loaded differently, less oil will be spilled.
Seven years ago, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act requiring tankerships that haul oil
across the seas to have double hulls.
A double hull ship is basically a ship with in a ship.
So if the outside shell is ruptured by grounding or collision, oil won't spill.
The law phases in slowly, so it will be 15 to 18 years before double hulls will be required.
In the meantime, the Coast Guard was supposed to enact regulations affecting the current
single hull tankers to reduce the chance of oil spills.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, a national environmental group, is challenging
the U.S. Coast Guard because it says the regulations it has drawn up are inadequate.
Sarah Chasis is a senior attorney with the NRDC.
It's a lawsuit against the Department of Transportation and the Coast Guard for promulgating a rule
under the Oil Pollution Act that fails to, in our view, comply with the requirements of
that statute.
And in essence, our concern is that as many people know, tankers are going to have to operate
with double hulls, but that's not going to happen for many, many years in some cases.
And a majority of the fleet serving U.S. ports is currently single hulled and will be
for some time to come and measures that would reduce the outflow of oil in the event of
a grounding or collision could be employed on these tankers, but the Coast Guard rule
fails to require these measures.
Something that's important to underline here is the Coast Guard under the Oil Pollution
Act was required to promulgate a rule requiring interim, so-called interim measures for single
hull tankers.
A year, one year after passage of the Oil Pollution Act, and the Oil Pollution Act was passed
unanimously by Congress in 1990.
And a year after that would have been 1991.
So here we are.
In 1997, the Coast Guard took six years, it promulgated the rule six years after it was supposed
to, and what it concluded is nothing is required.
What the Coast Guard did require is more training and record keeping, but nothing affecting the
way oil itself is handled.
It did not do more in part because it believed other measures weren't cost effective.
In industry expert disagrees, he's Arthur McKenzie, Director of the Tanker Advisory Center.
He spent many years at sea on tankers and holds a captain's license.
Annually he publishes a book which rates every oil tanker in the world on its acceptability
for charter operations.
I tend to agree with the environmental groups that more could be done and should be done
until all vessels have been required to have double hulls.
Things are built something like a box of eggs, you might say.
Pretend you had three rows of eggs instead of the usual two.
And they carry this oil then in these three sets of tanks that are right alongside of
each other.
We call this the center row, the center tank.
That holds about half of all the oil.
And the other half is carried in what we refer to as these wing tanks on either side of
the center tank.
And in vessels that were constructed after 1975, following some massive oil spills, the
international community agreed that vessels are to be fitted out with empty tanks that
will only be used to carry ballast water.
And today a very high percentage of vessels, tankers, have some protection on these sides
in these wing tanks where they have empty tanks when they're loaded, but it's only 30%
of the length of the vessel.
One thing that could be done to make a significant difference in oil spills with bees say that
single hull tankers should not carry any oil in those wing tanks.
This would mean that they would have probably nearly 100% protection against collision damage
causing an oil spill.
And about 50% protection against bottom damage.
McKenzie says another technique that could be used to reduce oil spills is something called
hydrostatic loading.
When the tanker is fully loaded, probably 20% of the cargo in the tanks is higher than
the surrounding seawater.
And when the vessel sustains a collision or a grounding in the tanks are penetrated,
that level of oil above the level of the ocean immediately runs out of the tank.
When the tank gets at the level of the ocean, why then there's an equalization that takes
place and this much less oil runs out.
So some advocates suggest that you carry oil only up to the sea level.
And in the event you did penetrate the hull, there would be a much less amount of oil run
out.
McKenzie acknowledges that if these practices were required, we'd feel it at the gas pump.
To the consumer in America, today at your gasoline pump about 2 to 3 cents of that dollar
and 20 cents you're probably paying for a gallon of gas, 2 to 3 cents is the cost for
tanker transportation to bring the oil in the United States or to move it around the coast.
If tankers were required to adopt this method mentioned, we're not carrying any oil in the
wing tanks, then it would increase that cost about a penny a gallon.
In considering the NRDC's challenge to the Coast Guard, the federal court will have to
decide whether the Coast Guard acted appropriately when it decided more controls on single-haul
tankers aren't worth the cost.
As major oil spills from tankers keep recurring, there have been two off-Japan and one off whales
in the last three years.
The problem will be with us for some time.
For the Environment Show, I'm Rachel Phillips.
We're talking green and I'm your host Peter Burley.
Today we're talking about weather modification, I guess to most of us that probably means
rain making.
This has been something that has bothered human communities for centuries.
Native Americans had rain dancers, I know that many communities in modern times have had
prayer sessions to deal with drought, and today we're talking with two experts that know
a lot about this and are engaged in it.
One is Joseph Golden, he is senior research meteorologist with the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration and he's also the director of the Federal Government's
Atmospheric Modification Program.
And the other is Tom Henderson, he's president of Atmospheric Sciences which is a private
company and is in the business of weather modification.
He's located in Fresno, California.
Tom Henderson I'd like to start with you, your company modifies the weather I gather.
If I want some rain, do I call you up and if so what do you do and how do you do it?
Boy can I give you the 30 minute talk?
You may not.
I was afraid of that.
Well yeah, we are.
We're a weather resources management firm as the common term nowadays and we do make
attempts to increase precipitation for a broad range of organizations, people like hydroelectric
power companies, municipalities, farm irrigation groups and so forth.
And so do they traditionally contact you and for a price you go out and do something?
Is that correct?
Normally they have more price quotation and we provide that and then go do the program.
And as a lawyer I can't help but asking you is this a contingency figure and he got
paid whether it rains or not?
No, good question.
We get paid whether it rains or not.
There's no guarantee that we're going to have the right kinds of clouds which can be
seeded to produce additional rainfall.
Sure.
Now how do you do that when you talk about seeding clouds?
What's that all about?
Well it sounds rather simple.
First it requires a little knowledge about rainfall mechanisms, how does nature produce
rain in the first place.
Once having learned a little bit about that then it's possible to influence that process
by adding a compound called silver iodide and it was discovered the way back in the late
40s by some researchers at GE research and this compound has the ability to produce more
ice crystals in clouds than nature would have otherwise produced if the clouds are the
right kind and then those ice crystals grow and fall out as either snow on the ground
or melt and form raindrops.
It's a lot like just lending nature a helping hand.
We're just influencing that natural mechanism to produce more droplets.
What is the process by which you get the silver iodide in the cloud?
Yeah.
You can't grind silver iodide small enough.
The particles have to be very, very small because it takes between 1 million and 5 million
raindrops or I'm sorry, cloud droplets to produce one raindrop.
The particles of silver iodide to influence those droplets must be small.
The only way to do that is to burn it, put it through some combustion process and that
can be done by dissolving the material in a compound called acetone and burning that
solution or it can be put into flares and those flares hooked on airplanes and burned
while you fly in and around the clouds.
And hopefully that then causes the raindrops to form and the rain to fall.
Joseph Golden, let me ask you what the federal government does in its atmospheric modification
program.
I don't think too many taxpayers know that they're supporting this kind of an effort.
What do you do?
I should correct you.
The taxpayers were supporting the last remaining research effort on whether modification in
the United States up to two years ago and unfortunately Congress deleted the budget for that
program, the atmospheric modification program from Noah's budget.
Up to two years ago we had supported since the late 1970s a piggyback type of program whereby
the federal government through atmospheric modification program that I managed augmented
the funding it was contributed by the states for operational cloud-seeding activities and
other activities related to weather modification with research.
And ironically just the last few years of the program we were making a tremendous progress
towards an improved understanding of the conditions under which one can expect to increase
rainfall or in another modification weather modification activity in North Dakota to suppress
hail.
And so is all that activity stopped now?
Yes.
The federal government engaged in any way at this point.
No, unfortunately there is no research support in this country anymore for weather modification.
Even though there are now a continue to be about 40 operational weather modification projects
all over the United States and of course the Tom Henderson has some of the longest running
operational programs in the high Sierra California and Nevada.
Well, having been engaged in research on this subject does it work?
How good is the likelihood that the kind of activities that Tom has described actually
produce right?
Well, as in all of life you don't get something for nothing but Tom's pioneering work as
well as some other work that was extended in my program in other states surrounding
California.
We had participation in my program from the states of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Illinois, Texas
and North Dakota.
And so three of those states were primarily summer convective rainfall enhancement or
hail suppression in the case of North Dakota.
And the other three in the west were primarily to examine the feasibility of increasing winter
snowpack.
And our results, the research results have shown that under the right flow conditions and
under the right cloud conditions you can expect to achieve seasonal increases over a
winter of about 10 to 15 percent in the snowpack which doesn't sound like much but it turns
out that the runoff that one measures from that snowpack has tremendous economic value
to farmers.
And a huge impact on keeping reservoirs.
Oh yeah.
And so the science has advanced significantly over the last 10 to 15 years particularly with
the improvement in aircraft and ground-based instrumentation.
As you know the National Weather Service has just completed the installation of a national
network of Doppler radars that greatly improve our capability for measuring rainfall.
Well let me ask you something as a scientist.
I think most of us have come to understand that whenever you push nature in one direction
it has an impact somewhere else.
If through weather modification you increase the rainfall or the snowfall in one area.
Doesn't that mean there's that much less to come down somewhere else?
Not necessarily.
And I'll ask Tommy to us time to also address this but as part of the atmospheric modification
program the research that we had supported up to two years ago we looked at extra area
effects.
And we looked at those extra area effects in programs that know our seeding programs that
know had conducted in South Florida in the 1970s and we also examined the extra area effects
in our Utah program.
And what you find is with you find that there is in the right winter conditions and the
right summer conditions that there is sufficient moisture passing over a given area that even
under the most optimistic assessments of our models and so on that we're only tapping
a fraction of the available moisture by cloud seeding.
So there's plenty left to come in somewhere else?
Oh yes.
And Tom Henderson has that been your experience as well as a president of atmospheric sciences
of private company?
Yeah that's true.
I think Joe pretty much wrapped that up.
There have been quite a number of extra area effects studies made downwind from some long
range, long term projects and we just haven't been able to find any decreases in precipitation
in these downwind areas.
And I think Joe is quite right.
There is so much moisture in the atmosphere that normally that what we remove is really
a very tiny amount.
The good G-Wiz number is that if you look at all the water that passes over the United
States in one year in the form of vapor in the atmosphere and cloud water content, if
you add all that up it equals about six times the amount of water that runs down all the
rivers in the U.S. in one year.
And so what's it that just blows over as well?
The atmospheric ones are somewhere else.
Reservoir is large compared to what comes on on the ground.
Let me guess you both something about this question of what comes down and what happens.
Let's suppose I'm a municipality and our reservoirs are running dry so I hire you Tom Henderson
to see the clouds and see if you can increase rainfall.
And let's suppose my neighbor lives just outside the municipality and as a result of the
rain that you produce or perhaps a hail of it comes out that way, loses his wheat crop.
Here you have a situation where you've got two elements of society, one that needs the
moisture and one that doesn't want it at that point.
How does that get sorted out?
And I guess speaking from a business point of view, does the person who is damaged by
the precipitation have a lawsuit against you Tom for making a rain in the wrong place?
Well, that's an answer question.
Anyone that's a good question, anyone can bring a lawsuit against anybody else?
Of course, whether it's successful.
I'm interested in the larger issue about how you reconcile an issue in which an area within the same
rain shed if you like if that's the right word may have conflicting views and one of them
hires you to make a rain.
Well, one of the things is, I think that's important is that every cloud seating project in the US has
a long list of suspension criteria.
The suspension criteria, project suspension criteria deal with a lot of things.
One of them is focused on what you're talking about.
If there is a possibility of rain extra rainfall, by the way, extra rainfall,
causing damage to somebody's crops that's near a cloud seating project target area,
then that project can be suspended for a time period until that wheat crop is in or something
like that. The same applies to flood cases, potential storm, intense storms.
Has this been a problem for you as you've been in this business?
Have you run into conflicting claims?
No, it hasn't.
So, at least in your experience, when people need rain, everybody understands that and they're
prepared to work with you to make it work.
That's correct.
It's important to point out here that, you know, in previous years and even some areas of our
country now, there is this myth in the public that cloud seating works during droughts.
That's not generally the case.
In fact, you have to have clouds of the right stature and the right type for any type of weather
modification for either rain enhancement or snow enhancement to work.
If you don't have clouds, you can't do anything.
And unfortunately, drought conditions, that's what happens.
That's an important point.
I mean, if we're all drying up and we call Tom and say, let's have some rain please,
he may well say it just can't happen because we don't have the right kind of clouds.
That's right. And I want to emphasize too that while we've made great advances in the recent years,
having numerical models, for example, computer models that allow us to simulate
not only the clouds and precipitation within clouds, but also precipitation from clouds that are
seated. We can do that now with models that we couldn't do just five or 10 years ago.
I'm afraid our time is up, but we have time for a last question.
And Tom Henderson, if I want to hire your team to produce some rain in my community, what is it cost?
White variations, but just a typical number to do an annual project for a hydroelectric company,
for example, that has five or six powerhouses and wants more water to run through them,
something around 250 to 300,000 dollars per year to produce that extra increment of water.
Okay, sounds a little bit too much for my tomato patch, but I think it probably has tremendous
significance in other places.
Well, you ought to take up the technology yourself and you can work on the tomato patch.
Okay, we're talking green in the environment show. Our time is up. We've been talking about weather
modification. And my guest has been Joseph Golden, who has seen your research meteorologist at the
National Oceanic and Atmospharic Administration. And Tom Henderson, he's president of a private
company called Atmospharic Sciences, located in Fresno, California, that is engaged in Atmospharic
modification. I'm your host, Peter Burley. Our telephone number is 1-888-49-Green, and we want to hear
from you. Even though we think we do a great job on the environment show, some people don't think
the media handles reporting on the environment well at all. Here's singer's songwriter Fred Small,
explaining his dig at the media in Hot Frogs on the Lose. People ask me sometimes where I get my
ideas for songs. This is a newspaper clipping. I had it laminated.
From the Boston Globe, so I know it's true. August 4, 1991, page 16, headline,
radioactive frogs on the loose in Tennessee. Officials warn.
Associated press, Knoxville, Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Officials have issued
a warning that tiny radioactive frogs are on the loose. The fugitive amphibians,
Tom Paxton probably said it best. He says some people you don't have to satirize, you just quote
them. The fugitive amphibians are brownish green, one and a half to two inches long with skinny legs,
and apparently healthy, except that they can set off a gyro counter with radiation levels
well above normal. Officials say the leopard frogs are safe unless eaten.
Workers at the Department of Energy Installation, about 35 miles west of Knoxville,
reported radioactive tires on their cars and trucks, apparently from running over the creatures.
The frogs became contaminated while growing up in the mud of a half-acre holding basin for
wastewater from the lab's nuclear research of the 1940s and 1950s. Now, set a spokesperson,
the laboratory plans to install frog fencing. A fine mesh screen about three feet high
to prevent the creatures from escaping again. Well, needless to say, as soon as I read that article,
I realized that the public information folks at Oak Ridge were in desperate need of a songwriter.
Because Tennessee is quite a distance from here, but that clipping is over a year and a half old now.
And by now, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if those frogs were on the outskirts of the
greater Cambridge, Massachusetts metropolitan area.
Oh my god!
If you kiss the bride for the tongue, the frogs aren't leaving.
Hot frogs on the loose. You can put the pedal to the metal to the rubber squeals.
Squishin' with your tires, you got hot wheels. Now you know how it feels to be hot frog on.
Please do not keep them as pets. So tame them may bring regrets. Make us citizens the rest of a hot frog on the loose.
Frogs for peace, frogs for defancy. Don't be nervous, don't be tense. We've got to sure
fire three foot fans to keep the hot frogs and get them loose.
Give me the hopper to hear. They come, radio I did looking for fun. You kiss the towel to the tongue.
Hot frogs on the loose.
Hot frogs on the loose.
Hot frogs on the loose.
Hot frogs on the loose.
Hot frogs on the loose.
Hot frogs on the loose.
Hot frogs on the loose.
That was Hot Frogs on the loose from Flying Fish Recording Artist Fred Small.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show. I'm Peter Burley.
If you want to make it rain in your garden, you need a copy of this tape.
Call 1-888-49-Green and ask for show number 399.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible for its
content. Dr. Alan Shuttak is the executive producer. Produces a Rachel Phillips and Stephanie
Goysman. The Environment Show is made possible by the W. Alton Jones Foundation,
the Turner Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Packer Foundation, the Oliver and
Jeannie Donaldson Charitable Trust, and Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the
collector Carhobby, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E. So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
