Crawling from the Wreckage (46 page)

Ehud Olmert really doesn’t care anymore. He is serving out his time as Israel’s prime minister until next month’s election, but then will spend a long time fighting the corruption charges that forced him to resign, and he won’t be going back into politics afterwards even if he wins. Not after two bloody, futile wars in three years, he won’t. So he’s very angry, and he tells it like it is.

On Thursday, January 8, he had a problem. The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was going to vote for a United Nations Security Council resolution that called on both Israel and its Palestinian enemy, Hamas, to accept a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Indeed, she had been largely responsible for writing it, and Olmert was furious. He wanted more time to hammer Hamas, so he phoned up George W. Bush and yanked on his choke chain.

According to Olmert’s account of what happened, given in a speech on January 13 in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, “I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone.’ They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said, ‘I don’t care: I have to talk to him now.’ They got him off the podium, brought him to another room and I spoke to him.”

“I told him, ‘You can’t vote in favour of this resolution.’ He said, ‘Listen, I don’t know about it. I didn’t see it. I’m not familiar with the phrasing.’ ” So Prime Minister Olmert told President Bush: “I’m familiar with it. You can’t vote in favour.”

Bush did as he was told: “Mr. Bush gave an order to Secretary of State Rice and she did not vote in favour of it—a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and manoeuvred for,” said Olmert triumphantly. “She was left pretty shamed, and abstained on a resolution she arranged.” The Security Council passed the resolution 14–0, but the United States, its principal author, abstained.

Senior Israeli politicians are usually much more circumspect about the nature of their relationship with the occupants of the White House, and Olmert’s colleagues were appalled that his anger had led him to speak so plainly. It is one thing to talk to the president of the United States that way. It is quite another thing to reveal to the American public that Israeli leaders talk to U.S. presidents in that tone of voice.

The Bush administration, deeply embarrassed, tried to deny Olmert’s account of the conversation. The State Department spokesperson, Sean McCormack, said that the story was “just 100 percent, totally, completely not true,” and the White House deputy press secretary, Tony Fratto, said more cautiously that “there are inaccuracies” in Olmert’s account of events. Olmert’s office replied curtly that “the prime minister’s comments on Monday were a correct account of what took place.” He really doesn’t give a damn anymore.

There is little reason to doubt Olmert’s story: he may be extremely cross, but why would he make it up? After all, he did get his way. And there is every reason to doubt the Bush administration’s denials. Not only does the story humiliate Bush personally, but it gives wings to the suspicion, already widespread in the United States, that under Bush the Israeli tail has consistently wagged the American dog.

Merely to mention this issue is still to court accusations of anti-Semitism, but the fear of such accusations, which once silenced any
serious examination of Israeli influence on American foreign policy, has dwindled in the past few years. Indeed, Olmert’s little indiscretion has opened up a wider question: is it normal for Israeli leaders to speak to American presidents like this?

There can be little doubt that Ariel Sharon, Olmert’s predecessor, also spoke to Bush in a bullying way, because he bullied everybody. Did Binyamin Netanyahu give orders to Bill Clinton? Probably not, because silken menace is more his style, but he certainly got his way almost all of the time. Did Yitzhak Shamir talk to George H. W. Bush that way? He wouldn’t have dreamt of it, and the senior Bush would never have stood for it.

These discussions usually end up being about the alleged power of the “Jewish lobby” over U.S. foreign policy, and in Congress it is obviously huge. The vast majority of the members of Congress will always vote for bills that involve aid or support for Israel, in many cases because they know what will happen at the next election to those who don’t. But the key foreign policy decisions are made in the White House, not in Congress, and the presidency is different.

At the top, it really depends on who the president is. Ronald Reagan always gave Israel everything it wanted, whereas Bush senior forced Shamir to start talking to the Palestinians after the first Gulf War and paved the way for the Oslo Accords and the peace process. The United States is still a sovereign country and it can choose its own Middle East policy, if it wishes.

Which way will it go under the new administration? Well, can you imagine Barack Obama letting an Israeli prime minister talk to him like that?

Over the last forty or fifty years there has been a rapid accumulation of threats to life on Earth as we know it—or rather, there has been a rapid growth in our knowledge of such threats. They were always there; we just didn’t know about them
.

For most of human history, the world seemed to be a safe stage upon which to play out our human dramas, but it turns out that we can be ambushed at any time by many different natural disasters that would affect much or all of the world: asteroid strikes, mega-tsunamis, global plagues and massive bursts of gamma radiation from collapsing stars, to mention only the leading candidates
.

Things we know now that we didn’t know twenty years ago:

We know that most stars have planets: in the past decade astronomers have identified around two hundred planets circling nearby stars. They are all gas giants like our own Jupiter and Saturn—only massive planets like these can be detected by our present techniques—but most stars are probably also surrounded by smaller, rocky planets like Earth that we cannot yet detect. How likely is it that our own solar system, which contains four gas giants and five smaller, rocky planets, is unique in a universe of gas giants?

We know that there are abundant quantities of organic molecules, the chemical building blocks of life, in interstellar space, and the hypothesis that life on Earth was seeded from space, first advanced by astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, gains ground by the day. But if that is how life emerged on Earth, then why not on many of those trillions of other planets in this enormous universe?

We also know that relatively local events like asteroids or comets crashing into planets can devastate the entire biosphere: there have already been five known “extinction events” in the history of life on Earth. And now we know that distant cosmic phenomena like collapsing stars can have just as great an impact. Dr. Adrian Melott of Kansas University and his colleagues have just made a convincing case that the first of those events on Earth, the Ordovician extinction of 440 million years ago, was caused by a ten-second burst of gamma rays emitted by a dying star several thousand light years from here.

Unlike the two mass extinctions known to have been caused by asteroid strikes, 251 million years ago at the end of the Permian period and 62 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared, the Ordovician one happened at a time when most life on this planet was still in the seas and nothing had even developed a backbone yet. About 60 percent of the marine species then in existence suddenly vanished from the geological record, but there is no asteroid collision associated with this upheaval.

Until recently, the only explanation we had for the Ordovician extinction was the sudden onset of an ice age, but that didn’t really make a lot of sense. Even severe environmental stress and loss of
habitat caused by falling sea levels shouldn’t have killed off 60 percent of existing species—and besides, why did the planet suddenly tumble into an ice age after a long period of stable, warm climate? So along come astronomer Adrian Melott, his colleague, palaeontologist Bruce Lieberman, and other colleagues at Kansas University with a much more plausible—and worrisome—explanation.

Stars above a certain size have a life cycle that ends with collapse into a black hole—and, as they collapse, they emit a pulse of energy, mostly made up of gamma rays, that is so intense that it carries all the way across the universe. It is a highly directional pulse, however, and it can only be detected if your home planet happens to lie within the cone of radiation from the particular star in question.

Down here on the Earth’s surface, astronomers only detect about one gamma-ray pulse a month: the thick blanket of atmosphere muffles most of the weaker, more distant ones. But these stellar collapses are happening all the time here and there in the universe, and satellites simultaneously scanning all parts of the sky for these brief bursts of radiation would see about a dozen a week.

We are caught in the cone of gamma radiation from one dying star or another about a dozen times a week. Most of them are safely millions of light years distant—but it has been calculated that if such an implosion occurs within six thousand light years of us, and happens to emit its beam of gamma radiation in our direction, it would strip the protective ozone layer off our planet and leave all life on the surface exposed to deadly ultraviolet radiation for up to five years. It would also fill the upper atmosphere with nitrogen oxides that absorb the sun’s heat and could easily push the Earth into an ice age.

Dr. Melott and his friends believe that this double-whammy is what caused the Ordovician extinction 440 million years ago. What actually happened—first a rapid die-off of many species that were presumably killed by
UVB
radiation, then an ice age to finish the job—fits the profile of a gamma-ray event very closely. They also calculate that such an event is only likely to hit the Earth two or three times per billion years, so it won’t have an immediate impact on real-estate prices. But the larger pattern that emerges from all this is not pretty.

We inhabit a universe in which there are probably trillions of planets that broadly resemble the Earth and many, if not most of them, may be
home to life of one sort or another. Nobody has a clue how many might harbour consciousness or intelligence, now or in the future, or how many have done so in the past, but even that number could easily be in the billions. And we have reason to suspect that each year hundreds or thousands of these planets are hit by close-range bursts of gamma rays from collapsing giant stars.

We know a lot more about the universe than we used to, and the knowledge is not very comforting.

Of course, as the science improves some of the conclusions have to be changed. The asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous era that killed off the dinosaurs sixty-two million years ago has been confirmed by a dozen different kinds of evidence—they have even found the crater it left, on the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula—but it turns out that the even bigger end-Permian extinction (“the Great Dying”) probably was not due to an asteroid. In the article above, I said that it was, but my information was a year or so out of date
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Scientists have been looking for the same telltale signature of a big asteroid strike in the geological record at the times of the other mass extinctions, and they have not found them. Now the leading suspect for the end-Permian event, and for the three other biggest mass extinctions in the geological record, is runaway global warming caused by massive volcanic eruptions that lasted thousands of years. The hypothesis is that the warming produced stratified, largely oxygen-free oceans that were taken over by sulphur bacteria that emitted vast amounts of hydrogen sulphide gas, destroying the ozone layer and poisoning most land-dwelling life directly. Does that make you feel better?

Asteroids, at least, are relatively straightforward. You
might
be able to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth if you had spent the money and acquired the relevant technological capabilities in space beforehand. Otherwise, you just tuck your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye. There’s not much you can do about massive volcanic eruptions, either. But many of the potential disasters we face pose acute political dilemmas. Like Cumbre Vieja, for example
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The western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands is going to slide into the Atlantic one of these days: a diagonal fracture has already separated it from the main body of the volcano, and only friction still keeps it attached. “When it goes, it will likely collapse in about 90 seconds,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre at University College London. And when it goes, probably during an eruption, the splash will create a mega-tsunami that races across the Atlantic and drowns the facing coastlines.

Fortunately, the nearest coast to the Canary Islands, where the waves will be around one hundred metres high when they hit, is lightly settled Western Sahara. Few people living in the densely populated coastal plains of Morocco, southwestern Spain and Portugal will survive either, but the waves will drop in height as they travel. The coasts of southern Ireland and southwestern England will also take a beating, but by then the wave height will be down to about ten metres.

The real carnage will be on the western side of the Atlantic, from Newfoundland all the way down the east coast of Canada and the United States to Cuba, Hispaniola, the Lesser Antilles and northeastern Brazil. With a clear run across the Atlantic the wall of water will still be between twenty and fifty metres high when it hits the eastern seaboard of North America, and it will keep coming for ten to fifteen minutes.

Worst hit will be harbours and estuaries that funnel the waves inland: goodbye Halifax, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.; Miami and Havana go under almost entirely, as will low-lying islands like the Bahamas and Barbados. Likely death toll, if there is no mass evacuation beforehand? A hundred million people, give or take fifty million.