ASK DR. SCHUND
                    (C)1989 Alan M. Schwartz

Dr.  Schund, what is the Greenhouse Effect?

The Greenhouse Effect is the source of all life on Earth, cruelly 
warped into a propaganda password now meaning a hysterically 
described approaching thermal catastrophe leading to total 
destruction of the Earth's biosphere -- the environment of the 
seas, the land, and the atmosphere that supports all life on 
planet Earth -- and that life itself, in truth caused by the 
insane monomaniacal depredations of environmentalists, 
vegetarians and lawyers.  Supercomputer-based mathematical 
modeling of the biosphere already hints that it may be too late 
to save the Earth and its children from the odious effects of 
whale overpopulation, biome hyperdiversity, chlorofluorocarbon 
depletion, carbon dioxide insufficiency, radionuclide decay, 
manure scarcity, stratospheric ultraviolet absorption...  In 
short, the Earth may already be irreversibly on the road to 
disaster because environmentalist Luddite fanatics seeking to 
recapture the pure and primitive suffering of the Maunder Minimum 
and the Little Ice Age have been given their way.
 
Let us rise above the crude and shrill hucksterism constituting 
the bulk of the environmentalists' dogma and examine the facts.  
The Earth is not especially well placed to harbor life.  It is 
only through the finely tuned chemical alteration of the 
biosphere that complex life can survive at all.  This alteration 
is intrinsic to the life process itself.  The sun's output is 
1367 watts/square meter from the deep ultraviolet to the far 
infrared at our orbital radius.  892 watts/square meter are 
transmitted through the atmosphere.   236 watts/square meter are 
absorbed at Earth's surface.  At a mean temperature of 59 degrees 
F, the Earth's surface radiates 390 watts/square meter.  It is by 
the narrowest escape imaginable that we have avoided becoming a 
great orbiting iceball, lifeless and unable to pay taxes.  It is 
only because organisms learned to keep the heat in by producing 
copious quantities of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, 
chlorofluorcarbons...  precisely those substances deranged 
environmentalists would have us forever ban, that Earth has 
managed to survive and, let us militantly demand, greatly prosper 
into infinity.  This is the normal Greenhouse Effect, the loving 
accumulation of lifegiving warmth via the essential byproducts of 
life.  Would you have this end?  I say, NEVER!

Environmentalists have responded to an ever increasingly crowded 
Earth by demanding that the snail darter, the Furbish lousewort, 
the whole dripping, stinking, rotting Amazonian rainforest be 
forever preserved and unboundingly enlarged both in space and in 
numbers.  What amusement is to be had by viewing massed lawyers 
demand the salvation of the condor, a 70 pound vulture that eats 
well-rotted meat and is too stupid to reproduce except in 
captivity?  There is enough human suffering in Biafra, 
Bangladesh, the Sahel...  to be sufficient to mollify bloodlusting 
environmentalist shock troops, screaming harpies decrying the 
minutest alteration of the natural land.  A single Ralph's or 
Von's or Safeway allowed in a shopping mall in any of these 
countries could save millions of lives, forever ending the pall 
of starvation and death for tens thousands of children.  What 
kind of world do you want for your children:  Abundant food, 
health, leisure, wealth, and Garfield dolls stuck on car windows; 
or bloated bellies, starvation, intestinal parasites, and oceans 
greasy with whales and land covered by weeds-as-God-meant-them-
to-be?  Take your pick, air conditioning or swamps full of 
alligators.

There were no environmentalists and there were no environmental 
problems from the earliest dawn of human awareness to about 1960.  
Starting in that accursed decade, the environmental movement was 
created and, very oddly, environmental problems were discovered  
too.  As the numbers and militancy of those in the environmental 
movement continued to unboundedly grow, like some metastasizing 
cancer in the body politic, so has the life-created, life-giving 
environment of the Earth continued to deteriorate.  Like 
fire eaters kindling their own fire, the environmental movement 
has sacrificed the entire foundation of organic life on Earth to 
their own cheap thrills and petty profits.

The Greenhouse Effect is the natural warm embrace of life on 
Earth for its own planetary mother.  The evolution of human life 
and technology has now made it possible to enhance this "hug in 
celebration of life" through the production and release of carbon 
dioxide, CFCs, and many other materials and processes possible 
only through our inventiveness, labor, and dedication to 
prosperity.  Ice ages and the suffering and death they would 
bring would be necessary to get rid of the rainforests.  We can 
do it in a single generation by clearing them to grow cattle for 
our fast food restaurants.  Do not shrug off your responsibilities 
to your natal planet.  Eat, excrete, and party!