Last Gasp

THE LAST GASP

TREVOR HOYLE

Copyright (c) 1983 by TREVOR HOYLE

For David and Sue Richards What friends are for

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank the following people and organizations for their invaluable advice and assistance in the research for this book:

Dr. Leslie F. Musk and Dr. David Tout, Geography Department, University of Manchester; Dr. E. Bellinger, Pollution Research Unit, University of Manchester; Dr. F. W. Ratcliffe, librarian and director of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Special thanks to Dr. Phillip Williamson, then of the Wellcomt Marine Laboratory, Robin Hood's Bay, Yorkshire, for hours of fruitful and enlightening discussion.

The following publications and research papers were extremely useful: Climate Monitor, issued by the Centre for Climatic Research, University of East Anglia; World Meteorological Organisation Bulletin; Yearbook of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, California; 'National Climate Program' in Oceanus, vol. 21, no. 4; 'Continuous Plankton Records: Changes in the Composition and Abundance of the Phytoplankton of the North-Eastern Atlantic Ocean and North Sea, 1958-1974' by P. C. Reid of the Institute for Marine Environmental Research, Plymouth, in Marine Biology.

Of many other useful sources of information, I should like to acknowledge the following: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S.; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, U.S.; P. P. Shir-shov Institute of Oceanology, Academy of Sciences of USSR, Moscow; Scottish Marine Biological Association, Argyll, Scotland; Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Huntingdon, U.K.; Natural Environmental Research Council, Swindon, U.K.; Marine Biological Association of U.K.;

World Meteorological Organization (an agency of the UN); World Climate Research Program (joint venture of the WMO and the International Council of Scientific Unions); World Climate Conference held in Geneva, 1979; Global Weather Experiment; POLYMODE. the Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment, U.S. and USSR; NORPAX: the North Pacific Experiment; CLIMAP: Climate and Long-Range Investigation Mapping and Prediction; National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado; World Oceanographic Data Center, Washington, D.C.; U.S. Council on Environmental Quality; Interagency Coordinating Committee of Atmospheric Sciences, U.S.; International Conference on the Environmental Future (Iceland, 1977).

As reference sources, I made use of the following: Population, Resources, Environment, Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (Freeman, 1970); Planet Earth (Aldus Books, 1975); Journal of Environmental Management; Environmental Pollution; Science; New Scientist; Only One Earth, Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (Andre Deutsch, 1972); The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner (Jonathan Cape, 1972); Pollute and Be Damned, Arthur Bourne (J. M. Dent, 1972); The Doomsday Book, Gordon Rattray Taylor (Thames & Hudson, 1970); The Ultimate Experiment: Man-Made Evolution, Nicholas Wade (Walker & Company, 1977); Colonies in Space, T. A. Heppenheimer (Stackpole Books, 1977).

And finally--last but certainly not least--I should like to record my appreciation of Nick Austin, who five years ago over a bottle of Chivas Regal gently dropped the idea into my mind and waited for something to happen.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

EDMUND BURKE

. . . Let us strike the keynote, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the pistons of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

CHARLES DICKENS

Hard Times

Half of all the energy consumed by man in the past two thousand years has been consumed in the last one hundred.

ALVIN TOFFLER

Future Shock

If the present growth trends in world population, industrial pollution, food production and resources depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.

Limits to Growth

The risk from lung cancer due to breathing New York air is about equivalent to the risk of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

BARRY COMMONER

The Closing Circle

1990

1

The mystery man arrived just before the five-month antarctic night set in. Two days later and he would never have been found.

Like a mole from its burrow, Gavin Chase emerged that morning from the prefabricated bunker eighteen feet belowground. Six years ago the bunker had been on the surface. Now, shored up with buckled iron ribs and creaking timbers, it was gradually sinking deeper and deeper and being crushed in a clamp of ice. Soon it would be necessary to abandon and build anew.

It was still dark. The spread of stars was etched into the firmament with hard, diamondlike precision. Above the icebound continent of five million square miles--nearly twice the area of Australia--the insulating troposphere was so shallow, half that at the equator, that the marine biologist felt directly exposed to the vacuous cold of outer space. Cold enough to turn gasoline into jelly and make steel as brittle as porcelain.

Chase stepped carefully from the slatted wooden ramp that led below, a bulky figure in outsize red rubber boots, swaddled in waffle-weave thermal underwear, navy-issue fatigues, an orange parka, and, protecting his vulnerable hands, gloves inside thick mittens thrust into gauntlets that extended to his elbows. A thin strip, from eyebrows to bridge of nose, was the only bit of him open to the elements. He moved across the packed wind- scoured surface to the weather-instrument tower, eyes probing the darkness.

Yesterday the temperature had fallen to 52.3 degrees below zero F. Once it dropped past minus 60 degrees there would be no more scuba diving till next summer. But he hoped there was time for at least one more dive.