Beamer 4.18.12
THE NEXT MEETING IS AT 7:00 PM AT WELSHFIELD
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Guests: Betsy Tomasco, Jim Pascoe.
Bob Johnson thanked everybody who attended the recent District Conference.
Mary Yeager was inducted as the newest member of BMR by Chuck White and her sponsor, Len Golding. Welcome to the club Mary!
The Aurora Club is having their Taste of Aurora Sunday, April 29th from 4-7 PM at Signature of Solon. The event will showcase about 20 different local restaurants. The price is $35 in advance or $40 at the door. A table of 10 can be reserved for $400. Buy your tickets from any member of the Rotary Club of Aurora or call 330-562-9543.
Dick Hill's barbershop quartet is going to be performing a show May 5th. Please see Dick for more details.
Environmental Issues: Alternative viewpoints. Dick Garner.
Dick continued with the second part of his presentation and focused first on the ozone layer. The ozone layer is gaseous blanket 9-25 miles up in the atmosphere. Ozone holes appear at the north and south poles in the fall and spring. Dick's feeling is that if human activity was causing the ozone layer to thin, there would be more UV radiation at the Earth's surface and this is not happening. He said we are using new instrumentation to measure things like ozone that we never had in the past and we have no historical data to compare these measurements to over time.
Dick's presentation then turned to the subject of DDT. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring discussed how DDT was causing the egg shells of birds to thin and birds were dying off as well as possibly causing other health hazards. Dick's viewpoint is that DDT is non-toxic to man (he mentioned a proponent of DDT who used to eat a teaspoon of DDT during his presentations about it) and how its past use had helped to virtually eliminate malaria and typhus in areas where it was applied. Since DDT has been banned the incidents of both of these diseases has increased while DDT's replacements, parathion and malathion, are proven to be toxic to man. Futher, he pointed to some recent studies that argue that DDT may not have effected birds the way it was initially thought it did.
Lastly, he ended his talk focusing on the "chemophobia" our society has towards the synthetic chemical industry. He argued that the development and use of synthetic chemicals is one of the major factors causing life expectancies to increase greatly worldwide over the last 100+ years and that they do much more good than harm. He pointed out that you can make any chemical sound bad because the general public lacks the knowledge to refute what they hear on TV or read in the newspapers about certain chemicals. For instance, should dihydrogen monoxide be banned? It is a major component of acid rain, it's a component of both tailpipe and smokestack pollutants, it can cause severe burns, it can be harmful or fatal if accidentally inhaled, and is is found in every cancer tumor. What is these terrilbe chemical? Water!