Observations on the STS Scene
by Irma S. Jarcho
We have long known that Africa, presumably the continent where AIDS first developed, is also the one where the scourge is exerting its most devastating effects. This is very clearly --- and frighteningly -- set forth in a report in the 8 November 1996 issue of Science on an October meeting on HIV/AIDS in developing countries, sponsored by the National Research Council.
The disease seems to be leveling out in North America and Europe but rates are increasing elsewhere with 68% of the newly infected living in Sub-Saharan Africa. More than two thirds of the total of the 28 million infected with HIV in developing countries live in Africa. Reasons given include male promiscuity and low condom use. Life expectancy in Africa, which before the epidemic hit had climbed to 70 years is in many places less than 40.
More women than men are now infected, with rates as high as 40% in pregnant women. Some 25% of deaths are in children and the most vulnerable are adolescent girls sought out for sex by older men, who thus think they can escape infection. As a result, girls are being infected at a rate five times that for boys.
What makes the situation worse is that although the epidemic has intensified, countries who provide aid are experiencing "donor fatigue." Whatever the reason, and I am sure there are many more than listed here, the chances of controlling AIDS in Africa appear bleak indeed.
New Reasons for Concern about Collisions from Extraterrestrial Objects
On page 25 of our Winter 1996 issue I reviewed the book, Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets, to me a frightening analysis of former and future impacts of asteroids and comets on earth. The book did not seem to make much of an impact -- unlike the death-dealers it described -- because to many it may have seemed to far-fetched and remote a possibility to start worrying about -- now!
An article in the 7 January 1997 "Science Times" of The New York Times may indicate that the time to begin worrying about possible countermeasures to neutralize such a strike is the present. Once secret military data now being released by the military indicate that the planet "is continually being struck by speeding boulders that explode in blasts the size of atomic detonations, and that the rate of bombardment is higher than previously observed."
The blasts, which create huge fireballs, occur over the sea and uninhabited lands and therefore are rarely seen. The intruders range in size from a few feet in diameter to 50 or 80 feet wide. Ground-based sensors work like sensitive ears to detect very low frequency sound waves. The observed rate of bombardment is about 12 events a year.
Once-secret data from military satellites showed that form 1975 to 19992 the earth had suffered 136 explosions. The blasts had intensities roughly equal to 500 to 15,000 tons of high explosives. The latter figure is about the same as the impact of the nuclear bomb that hit Hiroshima. To these observations the military is now adding data from secret acoustic recordings made on the ground during the Cold War. From these and other sources there are indications that each year the earth is bombarded by 10 or 11 objects six or seven feet wide. In addition, each year, an object 20 feet wide sets off a blast equal to that of 15 kilotons of high explosives. Even bigger impacts -- as big as 80 feet across -- were equivalent to a one megaton explosion. Scary!
New Support for Concern about Global Warming
Scientists who believe that the earth is warming up due to anthropogenic causes are many -- and their number is increasing. Efforts to develop a program to minimize the effects of this warming and the destruction it may cause have been stymied to date by the opposition of the oil and gas industries whose products are the sources of most human-caused carbon emissions, and who continue to spend heavily on efforts to impede international climate negotiations and to discredit scientists who brought the problem to the public's attention in the first place. The success of their efforts is reflected in the paucity of firm government programs aimed at reducing the production of greenhouse gases.
Yet help may be at hand, and from an unlikely source. World.Watch for Jan/Feb 1997 reports that a large delegation of insurers turned up for the first time at the July 1996 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Climate Change in Geneva. Under the auspices of the UN Environment Programme, some 60 insurers including multibillion dollar companies from the United States, Europe, and Japan, signed a statement calling on governments to substantially reduce emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases. According to World.Watch, they have indicated that they now plan to actively monitor -- and perhaps even lobby on -- the climate change issue.
The reason for the insurers' concern is easy to see. The frequency and severity of storms have increased worldwide. In the first half of the 1990s, insurers paid out $57 billion for worldwide losses, compared to $17 billion for the entire decade of the 1980s. The sudden rise in the frequency and severity of weather disasters has convinced insurers that human activities may have played a role.
It will be interesting to see the effect of these new hefty players in the climate change game. They may provide just the counterbalance environmentalists needed to offset the opposition to prudent moves against global warming.
(Editor's Note: One recent example of industry opposition to mitigating global warming was the attacks on chapter 8 ("Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes") of the final version of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "Second Assessment Report" by the Global Climate Coalition (an association of about 60 companies from the US energy sector) and in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times Energy Economist, and Energy Daily, as reported in Physics Today (49(8), 55-57 (Aug 96)) and Science (272 (21 Jun 96)).)
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