Global Warming ‘Greatest Scam in History’

[Tonington]

Then why does Skuzuki keep saying that the science is settled, as he did when interviewed on the John Oakley show on 640 AM radio in Toronto?

Straw Man. I don't consider the opinion of Suzuki to be any more informed than that of Fred Singer when it comes to climate science. Do you actually trust the media to get informed answers? That might explain alot...

The letters that appear after someone's name does not make them an authority on all things. The sooner people understand that, the better.

 

[jimmoyer]

I like your analysis, Tonington.

I'm sitting in the wings listening to all objections and beliefs.

Last night 60 Minutes on CBS concentrated on two items. The 2 polar caps are definitely changing, but what does that mean ? And, the Bush White House stifling some paid scientists' language in their reports to Congress.

What I don't believe in is how absolutely sure both sides believe their own positions.

 

[Walter]

Put up a sticker and you've done your bit

James Allan | January 22, 2008

I HAVE this visceral dislike of bumper-sticker moralisers. These are people who go out of their way to advertise what they take to be their own exalted moral sensibilities, but do so at no cost to themselves and without the messy business of having to weigh costs and benefits or to choose between stark alternatives where none is particularly pleasant or easy. It's all form and no substance for these people, and there's no shortage of them around.
Take those who plaster "Save the Whales" stickers on the back of their cars but miss the irony that it's an upmarket Toyota to which they're attaching the thing. Saving the whales is great in principle, but not if it involves forgoing an expensive new Lexus. Far better to bring a lawsuit that has no chance of being enforced.
Or what about many of those who announce that we should "Save Darfur"? Nowhere do they tell us how this is supposed to be accomplished. Through the UN, perhaps? But that organisation is famously hostage to the vetoes of the five Security Council members.
It is an organisation that is congenitally unable to stop anything, be it slaughter in Darfur, Bosnia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burma or ... well, you get the idea.
Indeed the only remotely plausible way to stop massacres in Darfur, and indeed just about anywhere else on the planet, is for the US to do something militarily, as it did in Bosnia and Serbia under Bill Clinton (when the Yanks bombed and bombed and bombed some more, all without the imprimatur of the UN, for the information of those who punctiliously assert that only UN-authorised actions are acceptable). But, of course, most people who put "Save Darfur" stickers on their cars would be horrified at the prospect of US military action.
What they mean is that saving Darfur, in the abstract, as a general notion, as some warm, fuzzy abstraction, is a jolly fine idea. So count them in. But if it were to require making unpalatable choices - killing people, propping up the least bad alternatives and so on - well, then stop right there. This is about feeling good about oneself and showing that one cares.
Signing or ratifying the Kyoto Protocol strikes me as comparable. For many it's all about feeling good about themselves, not about looking to see what works, what is possible, how to balance economic growth and people's adaptability against achieving worldwide reductions.
My criticism is much deeper than the well-known fact that Al Gore's Tennessee mansion wolfs down 20 times more electricity than the average American household. Sure, hypocrisy is never all that hard to find. But the more important criticism has to do with whether Kyoto has the slightest prospect of being successful.
A study on the website American Thinker claims that in the seven years between the signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2004, carbon emissions from countries that signed the treaty rose 21per cent, while among non-signers they rose 10per cent. And Australia, until recently a non-signatory, had a slower increase than Canada, a loud, vocal and proselytising signatory. If that's correct, then what exactly is the benefit of Kyoto?
I mean that question seriously, not rhetorically. What good has come from Australia signing up to the thing? (I'm assuming we didn't do it in order to allow ourselves to pump out even more carbon with the other signatories.)
Has anyone else noticed that as soon as the Rudd Government ratified Kyoto and advertised its good intentions, all the heat (if you'll pardon the expression) went out of the issue. It's as though one has only somehow to signal one's on the side of the angels - or at least willing to talk the talk - and that's that. But even a moment's thought is enough to make it clear that whatever the extent of the global warming problem, it is most definitely that: global. And China and India have made their positions clear. (I would say they are defensible positions, too.) They want economic growth. They want to alleviate poverty. If that means 2C or 3C more by the year 2100, so be it.
And both those giant developing countries well know that the West became rich because of cheap energy. Now it's their turn. The gap between their view of what will amount to a fair sharing of the burden of cutting greenhouse gases and the view of the European Union, to say nothing of the US, is so wide, it takes someone wholly divorced from reality to see any prospect of the divide being bridged. As one well-known commentator remarked, "The Kyoto approach is dead and buried." The same person also pointed out the practical flaws in carbon emissions trading schemes.
If you are serious about cutting carbon dioxide emissions, you need to make them more expensive. So you can tax them or you can create a system to ration such emissions. Alas, rationing schemes not only discriminate against new entrants and provide rent-seeking opportunities to those operating the system, they don't really work. We don't set up a complicated alcohol or tobacco rationing system with tradable rights to drink or smoke. We tax these products. The EU carbon trading scheme hasn't worked and won't work. It's more of the form-over-substance charade.
You see, if you approached the problem in terms of taxing carbon dioxide, it would become too obvious just how high the costs would be of achieving a 70 per cent reduction (or even half of that). One can't help noticing that despite endless rock concerts, declarations and meetings of the great and the good, very little in practice has been done and global emissions continue to rise.
Meanwhile, the one obvious, clearly beneficial policy that we could adopt in Australia, namely to build nuclear power stations, dare not speak its name in polite Labor circles. This Government won't even sell uranium to India, even though nuclear power is the only remotely plausible way that enormous country will slow the increase of its emissions.
You see, it doesn't matter that India is a democracy, a huge and successful democracy. It hasn't signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, old boy. And rather than weigh the costs and benefits of what to do and then make a hard call, we're going with the bumper-sticker brigade on this one.
James Allan is professor of law at the University of Queensland.

 

[Walter]

Greatest Scam on Earth, Great Global Warming Charade

Media campaign to silence global warming skeptics failing

By Bill McIntyre Friday, January 18, 2008


Step right up folks and get your tickets to the greatest scam on Earth as we pay homage to those much-maligned scientists, geologists, climate researchers and marginalized Global Warming Skeptics the world over who refuse to be silenced by the skeptiphobics who would still the voices of reason.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys observe the spectacle with amazement and see how mainstream television and newspapers have put P. T. Barnum and James Anthony Bailey, two of the world’s greatest circus hucksters, to shame with their involvement in promoting the Great Global Warming Charade.
Undoubtedly even the Ringling Brothers in their wildest imaginings could not have envisioned how the Clown Princes of media, eco-zealotry, self-interested politicians and nose-in-the-ozone academia have created the shameful alliance we have seen develop across the world today.
And while they enjoyed early successes in silencing the voices of those who did not buy into their campaign of voodoo science, half truths and outrageous scare tactics, the voices of the skeptics are finally emerging from banishment to be heard loud and clear.
Challenging the skeptiphobics are those who have been ridiculed by their peers in scientific circles, intimidated by their associates in the tarnished halls of learning and hounded by the screaming hordes of eco-bullies generously funded by cowardly governments and family foundations that salve the consciences of the wealthy that have ravaged the Earth for profit.
All the while, cheering them on has been media at all levels of the food chain by freely publicizing unchallenged their frightening claims, supporting their causes through pious editorials while constantly proclaiming the global warming debate to be over.
In an act to fulfill their own prophecy, most of the media then took the next step to ban the other side from their pages and programs. After all, the global warming debate is over. It is a fact. Irrefutable. There can be no other side.
This led to the skeptiphobics proclaiming at one point that global warming skeptics should be arrested and warehoused in concentration camps. Oddly enough, the skeptics were labelled “Deniers” by the kindly environmental folks, thereby linking them to the hated Holocaust Deniers. What a clever linkage. Even more clever is how the mainstream media rushed out and publicized all of this.
But two things have come back to haunt them. The first is based on the old adage that states that a lie can only be supported by another lie. Global warming skeptics never denied weather patterns were in a period of change. They merely challenged the notion that the change has been precipitated by the activities of man.
That notion led the skeptiphobics to reason, and I use the term loosely, that if changes in our weather are caused by man, (anthropogenic), then man can reverse the effects. All mankind has to do is to give the skeptiphobic organizations enough money and they will lead us to a land flowing with milk and honey.
The second problem their carnival-barkers have with their collective sales pitch is they have never defined what normal weather is and how long it will take to get to their non-existent standards? So I would plead here and now for someone to tell us all what is normal weather?
While the skeptiphobics have been celebrating their excesses, the skeptics have managed to bypass mainstream media and find their voices in a patchwork of new media venues created through the Internet and on other platforms.
Thumbing their collective noses at mainstream media, they have successfully turned to the ballooning mass of blogsites. Increasingly the bloggers are eclipsing the old media and beating them at their own game with more accurate and trusted content than ever before.
In fairness I must mention that a few major metropolitan newspapers in Canada have called for the skeptics to be heard. These include the The National Post and both the Edmonton and Winnipeg Sun newspapers. Others may have done the same, but I am not aware of any.
Nevertheless, the skeptics are also turning to e-newspapers like CFP, e-zines and even e-books. Their voices are being heard in chat rooms, postings on Utube and similar sites and through e-mail lists of friends and business or other affinity groups.
What I find interesting, is that by cheerleading for the skeptiphobics, the mainstream media are helping destroy the very credibility they crave and offend the subscribers and viewers they so desperately need to stay alive. My, that’s quite a business plan they have.
It will be interesting to see what happens when people wake up to realize they’ve been had. What will the old media say when they discover their little plan didn’t work? What will the politicians do to hide their gullibility? And who will take ownership of the mess left behind?
There is a price to be paid for duplicitous conduct whether practiced by mindless media, fear mongering skeptiphobics or buffoons in the political circus. That price is the eventual loss of power, prestige and profit.
What I find gratifying, is that we have a ringside seat to the greatest show on Earth.

 

[Tonington]

The Real Climate Censorship

Posted April 10, 2007
It’s happening, it’s systematic, and it is precisely the opposite story to the one the papers are telling.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 10th April 2007.

The drafting of reports by the world’s pre-eminent group of climate scientists is an odd process. For many months scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel’s reports are extremely conservative - even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.

Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything which threatens their interests. While the US government has traditionally been the scientists’ chief opponent, this time the assault was led by Saudi Arabia, supported by China and Russia(1,2).

The scientists fight back, but they always have to make some concessions. The report released on Friday, for example, was shorn of the warning that “North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events”(3). David Wasdell, an accredited reviewer for the panel, claims that the summary of the science the IPCC published in February was purged of most of its references to “positive feedbacks”: climate change accelerating itself(4).

This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the right-wing press: that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is conspiring to exaggerate the science. No one explains why governments should seek to amplify their own failures. In the wacky world of the climate conspiracists, no explanations are required. The world’s most conservative scientific body has somehow been transformed into a cabal of screaming demagogues.

This is just one aspect of a story which is endlessly told the wrong way around. In the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail, in columns by Dominic Lawson, Tom Utley and Janet Daley the allegation is constantly repeated that climate scientists and environmentalists are trying to “shut down debate”. Those who say that manmade global warming is not taking place, they claim, are being censored.

Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid example. The closest any of them have been able to get is two letters sent - by the Royal Society and by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe - to that delicate flower ExxonMobil, asking that it cease funding lobbyists who deliberately distort climate science(5,6). These correspondents had no power to enforce their wishes. They were merely urging Exxon to change its practices. If everyone who urges is a censor, then the comment pages of the newspapers must be closed in the name of free speech.

In an interview four weeks ago, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4’s film The Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed that he was subject to “invisible censorship”(7). He appears to have forgotten that he had just been given 90 minutes of prime time television to expound his theory that climate change is a great green conspiracy. So what did this censorship amount to? Complaints about one of his programmes had been upheld by the Independent Television Commission. It found that “the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing” and that they had been “misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.”(8) This, apparently, makes him a martyr.

If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show you what has been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists whose research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have been repeatedly threatened and silenced and their findings edited or suppressed.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its survey reported that they had experienced one of the following constraints. 1. “Pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’, or other similar terms” from their communications. 2. Editing of scientific reports by their superiors which “changed the meaning of scientific findings”. 3. Statements by officials at their agencies which misrepresented their findings. 4. “The disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate”. 5. “New or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate-related work”. 6. “Situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings.” They reported 435 incidents of political interference over the past five years(9).

In 2003, the White House gutted the climate change section of a report by the Environmental Protection Agency(10). It deleted references to studies showing that global warming is caused by manmade emissions. It added a reference to a study partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, which suggested that temperatures are not rising. Eventually the agency decided to drop the section altogether.
After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising emissions with more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his superiors from speaking to the media. He agreed to one request to appear on MSNBC, but a public affairs officer at NOAA rang the station to tell the programme that Knutson was “too tired” to conduct the interview. The official explained to him that the “White House said no”. All media inquiries were to be routed instead to a scientist who believed there was no connection between global warming and hurricanes(11).

Last year the top climate scientist at NASA, James Hansen, reported that his bosses were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web postings. He was told by public relations officials at the agency that there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases(12).
Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US Fish and Wildlife Service told its scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must understand “the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues.”(13)

At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a former aide to White House who was previously working at the American Petroleum Institute, admitted he had made hundreds of changes to government reports about climate change on behalf of the Bush administration(14). Though he is not a scientist, he had struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about global warming(15).

The guardians of free speech in Britain aren’t above attempting a little suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received several letters from the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton, threatening us with libel proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate science(16,17,18,19). On two of these occasions he has demanded that articles are removed from the internet. Monckton is the man who wrote to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, claiming that their letter to ExxonMobil offends the corporation’s “right of free speech”(20).

After Martin Durkin’s film was broadcast, one of the scientists it featured, Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate change had been misrepresented. Wunsch says he has now received a legal letter from Durkin’s production company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for defamation unless he agrees to make a public statement that he was neither misrepresented nor misled(21).
Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when those who deny that climate change is happening complain of censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking place?
www.monbiot.com

References:
1. Catherine Brahic, 6th April 2007. Climate change is here now, says major report. NewScientist.com
2. David Adam, 7th April 2007. Scientists’ stark warning on reality of warmer world. The Guardian.
3. Roger Harrabin, 6th April 2007. The Today Programme, Radio 4.
4. David Wasdell, February 2007. Political Corruption of the IPCC Report? http://www.meridian.org.uk/Resources/Global Dynamics/IPCC/contents.htm
5. Bob Ward, the Royal Society, 4th September 2006. Letter to Nick Thomas, Esso Ltd. You can see the letter here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2006/09/19/LettertoNick.pdf
6. John D. Rockefeller IV and Olympia Snowe, 27th October 2006. Letter to Rex W. Tillerson, ExxonMobil. http://snowe.senate.gov/public/inde...ecord_id=9acba744-802a-23ad-47be-2683985c724e
7. Martin Durkin, 9th March 2007. Interview with Brendan O’Neill. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/2948/
8. Independent Television Commission, 1st April 1998. Channel Four to Apologise to Four Interviewees in “Against Nature” Series. Press Release.
9. Union of Concerned Scientists and Government Accountability Project, February 2007. Atmosphere of Pressure: Political Interference in Federal Climate Science. http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/Atmosphere-of-Pressure.pdf
10. Andrew Revkin and Katharine Seelye, 19th June 2003. Report by the E.P.A. Leaves Out Data on Climate Change. The New York Times.
11. Union of Concerned Scientists and Government Accountability Project, ibid.
12. Andrew Revkin, 29th January 2006. Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him. The New York Times.
13. Andrew Revkin, 8th March 2007. Memos Tell Officials How to Discuss Climate. The New York Times.
14. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, 19th March 2007. Committee Examines Political Interference with Climate Science. http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1214
15. Andrew Revkin, 8th June 2005. Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming. The New York Times.
16. Viscount Monckton, 14th November 2006. Email to the Guardian.
17. Viscount Monckton, 23rd November 2006. Letter to the Guardian.
18. Viscount Monckton, 23rd November 2006. Letter to George Monbiot
19. Viscount Monckton, 24th November 2006. Email to George Monbiot.
20. Viscount Monckton, 11th December 2006. Uphold Free Speech About Climate Change or Resign. Open letter to Senators Snowe and Rockefeller. http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20061212_monckton.pdf
21. Carl Wunsch, pers comm.

 

[Walter]

Why 'Global Warming' is Not a Global Crisis
Special to the Hawaii Reporter
By Christopher Monckton, 1/22/2008 8:06:23 AM

I earned my Nobel Peace Prize by making the United Nations fix a deliberate error in its latest climate assessment. After the scientists had finalized the draft, UN bureaucrats inserted a new table, but with four decimal points right-shifted. The bureaucrats had multiplied tenfold the true contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise. Were they trying to support Al Gore’s fantasy that these two ice-sheets would imminently cause sea level to rise 20ft, displacing tens of millions worldwide?
How do we know the UN’s error was deliberate? The table, as it first appeared, said the units for sea-level rise were being changed. But the table was new. There was nothing to change from. I wrote to the UN that this misconduct was unacceptable. Two days later, the bureaucracy corrected, relabeled and moved the table, and quietly posted the new version on its Web site. The two ice sheets will contribute, between them, over 100 years, just two and a half inches to sea-level rise. Gore had exaggerated a hundredfold; the UN tenfold. Hawaii is not about to disappear beneath the waves.
The High Court in London recently ordered the British Government to correct nine of the 36 serious errors in Al Gore’s climate movie before innocent pupils were exposed to it. It was Gore who, in 1994, announced that Mars was covered in canals full of water. This notion had been disproved before his birth. It was Gore who recently spent $4 million of the profits from his sci-fi comedy horror movie on a luxury condo just feet from the supposedly rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco. No surprise that he and the mad scientists with whom he has close financial and political links are under investigation for racketeering -- peddling a false prospectus to investors in his “green” investment corporation by distorting climate science even after the UK judge’s ruling.
It is not so well known that the UN’s climate reports are also error-packed and misleading.
To begin with, the UN denies that global temperatures were warmer than today in the medieval warm period. It overlooks the dozens of peer-reviewed papers that establish this fact, and continues to rely on the bogus and now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph by which its previous assessment in 2001 had tried to rewrite history.
It was also warmer than today in Roman times, and in the Minoan warm period or Holocene climate optimum, when temperatures were warmer than today for 2000 years in the Bronze Age, firing the emergence of great civilizations worldwide. In each of the four previous interglacial periods, temperatures were 10F warmer than today’s. For most of the past half billion years, temperatures were nearly always 12.5F warmer than the present. So the warming that has now stopped (there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998) was well within the natural variability of the climate.
The only chapters in the UN’s 1,600-page ramblings that are worth close analysis are those which consider “climate sensitivity” -- how big is the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature? The scientific debate centers not, as the Greens try to suggest, on whether adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause warmer weather (it will), but instead on how much warmer the weather will be. So the only variable that truly matters in this debate is lambda -- the “climate sensitivity parameter.” Here are just some of the UN’s errors and exaggerations in calculating lambda.
First and foremost, the UN’s crafty definition of lambda allows it to overlook the fact that the oceans -- 1,100 times denser than the atmosphere at the surface, and many times denser still at depth -- soak up a good proportion of any additional radiant energy in the atmosphere (see papers by Lyman et al., 2006; Schwartz, 2007). The oceans cancel a great deal of “global warming,” because the next Ice Age will arrive long before the oceans lose their capacity to take up heat from the atmosphere.
Next, the UN has unwisely repealed the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, the fundamental astrophysical law that relates changes in radiant energy to changes in temperature. The entire debate is about exactly that matter. Yet in 1,600 pages the UN does not mention this crucial equation once. Result: the UN’s “no-feedbacks” value of lambda is way too high. As an eminent physics professor pointed out to me recently, if the UN were correct, global surface temperature would now be 20F higher than it is. It gets worse. The UN’s computer models predict that in the tropics the rate of increase in temperature five miles above the surface will be three times the rate of increase down here. But 50 years of atmospheric measurement, first by balloon-borne radiosondes and then by satellites, show that the air above the tropics is not merely failing to warm at three times the surface rate: for 25 years it has been cooling. The absence of the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot” indicates that the computer models -- expensive guesswork -- on which the UN’s rickety case is founded are, in a fundamental way, misunderstanding the way the atmosphere behaves (Douglass & Knox, 2004; Douglass et al., 2007).

Complete article: http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?9c8600a9-6750-45cb-b7ee-c8ca6b6d3a75

 

[Walter]

 

[Walter]

The new CEO of Sharia Green

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Ladies and gentleman, this is Lorrie Goldstein reporting live for Sun TV. Today it's my pleasure to introduce you to a global warming expert who's taking the world by storm -- Osama bin Kyoto, founder and CEO of the environmental organization, Sharia Green.
"Mr. Osama bin Kyoto, welcome to our show."
"Thank you, infidel."
"May I call you Mr. Kyoto?"
"Of course, infidel."
"Thank you. Mr. Kyoto, what is your reaction to the latest roller coaster ride of the world's stock markets and hysterical media reports of impending global economic collapse?"
"This is wonderful news, infidel. We applaud global economic collapse because it's the only conceivable way major industrialized nations can achieve their greenhouse gas reduction targets under the Kyoto accord. How do you think Russia and all those other former Soviet satellites got to be world leaders in reducing GHG emissions and now have billions of dollars of hot air credits to sell to suckers ... uh, I mean to countries like yours? Energy-efficient light bulbs? Wind farms? Solar panels? Stop, you're killing me! No, they achieved it through total economic meltdown. Why do you think we chose 1990 as the base year for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, just as the Soviet Union was imploding?"
"Uh ... to screw the United States?"
"Exactly!"
"But Mr. Kyoto, surely you're not suggesting global economic collapse and the resulting human carnage, social deprivation and widespread suffering that would result would be a good thing?"
"Of course it would be good, infidel! Economic collapse means you will have less money to buy stuff and the less stuff you buy, the fewer greenhouse gas emissions there will be. Our computer models show that for every 2,000-point drop in the Dow, not only will your retirement date be pushed back five years, but 56.7 polar bears in the Arctic will be saved from drowning."
"But Mr. bin Kyoto, you folks can't even agree on whether last year was the second, fifth or seventh warmest in the past century or so. How can you have a computer model that relates drops in the Dow to my retirement date and polar bear drownings?"
"It's the same one that allows us to predict the precise impact of a carbon tax on the cost of living 50 years from now. Next question."
"Mr. bin Kyoto, suppose China stops using coal to power energy plants. Suppose the developing world abandons the use and development of fossil fuels. Won't millions of people in the poorest countries die as a result? Why do you only talk about shortened life spans people might suffer due to climate change, never about the certain deaths we know will occur if the developing world never ... uh ... develops."
"Why, infidel? Because that's complex thinking and we prefer mindless simplicity. So what if a few billion people die? People are a major source of man-made global warming -- except for me, of course."
"But Mr. bin Kyoto, your position is just knee-jerk anti-growth, anti-development, anti-capitalist, anti-Western and especially anti-American. It shuns complex thinking in favour of simplistic and false moral imperatives its adherents accept on blind faith and which ultimately hold human life to be cheap. Mr. bin Kyoto, you and Sharia Green sound a lot like Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
"Your point, infidel?"

 

[normbc9]

All a good salesperson has to do is stir an interest in the product they are selling. I see a lot of good salemanship at work with this topic right now. When the historic records are checked I'll bet what is being observed climatically now has been duplicated in the past. I do think we as a world community need to improve our managment of discharging residues and wastes. Much of the damage to the waterways is due to uncontrolled discharge of waste products. Just look at the discharge of bilge accumulations by vesssels on the high seas and adjacent to the ports. Also the discharge of materials through the smoke stacks. Who knows truly what material are in those waste discharges?

 

[Walter]

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 2:22 AM ESTWarming 'proved' by consensus


Tired of having to defend their dubious theory of anthropic climate change, warmists unilaterally declared victory in 2005, thereby setting a new scientific standard of proof: consensus. No longer must they test their hypothesis rigorously and repeatedly as the scientific method demands. Henceforth, anything they feel is proof shall be deemed proof. All information contrary to the teachings of St. Internet Al shall be declared heresy and suppressed, and all heretics — "deniers" — shall be vilified lest others take their arguments seriously.

Just as evil comes in many forms, so do deniers. Dick Cheney deniers shill for Haliburton and Big Oil. Big Tobacco deniers lie about warming's potential effect on public health. Enola Gay deniers wield the "WMDs of climate change." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad deniers gainsay the holocaust of warming. Madeline Murray O'Hare deniers won't pray at the altar of climate change. Josef Stalin deniers promote climatological genocide. Josef Goebbels deniers spread lies. Asteroid deniers abet mankind's extinction. Deniers also are guilty of raping the environment; let's call them Bill Clinton deniers.

That warmists would trivialize the Holocaust, genocide, rape and so forth while ascribing nefarious motives to people whose intuition leads them to honest, legitimate doubts about a theory that conveniently conforms to left-wing ideology says more about the warmists than about the messengers they seek to slay.

Warmists recently introduced Ku Klux Klan deniers. Philosophy professor Mark Davidson of the University of Amsterdam likened the deniers' positions to arguments supporting slavery before the Civil War; thus, deniers are racists. Two centuries hence, he said, their comments will seem as absurd as those of Southern slave owners. If so, would they seem more or less absurd than the scientific consensus of the 1970s about global cooling?

Newer still are Lyndon Johnson deniers, who question the value of a movement that has an "urgency — and a sense of irreverence — reminiscent of the anti-war movement of the 1960s." On Jan. 31, Focus the Nation, which seeks to bring at least 1 million high school and college students "into a nonpartisan discussion on global warming" (emphasis ours), will culminate with "teach-ins" at more than 1,000 schools, including at least 40 in Connecticut. Deniers are not invited. But wasn't the anti-war movement about young people questioning authority? These "propaganda-ins" will be about brainwashing, about young people blindly believing people older than 30 and unconditionally trusting the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Timothy Leary would be proud.

 

[Walter]

Limbaugh, Geraghty & Global Warming [Roy Spencer]

At the risk of losing my tongue-in-cheek position as Rush Limbaugh’s “Official EIB Climatologist,” I’m going to weigh in on his argument against Jim Geraghty’s view that the Republicans’ chances in the next presidential election are being hurt by those of us not willing to give in to the scientific “consensus” on global warming.

First, the science. After many years in this line of work, I’ve come to the firm conclusion that global warming is one of those research areas where scientists think they know much more than they really do. In many ways, putting a man on the Moon was far easier than understanding the climate system. Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas — a minor one. And, yes, humans burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide: one molecule of CO2 for every 100,000 molecules of atmosphere, every five years.

But is this a recipe for a global warming Armageddon? I’m betting my reputation on: “No.” Recent research has made me more convinced of this than ever.

So, why would a minority of scientists like me dare to disagree with a 56-percent majority? (That is how many of the 530 climate scientists polled agreed that global warming is mostly caused by humans,)

While there are several answers to this question, here I’ll mention only one. Compared to the carbon dioxide that humans produce, Mother Nature routinely transfers 40 times as much CO2, and 24,000 times as much water vapor (Earth’s primary greenhouse gas), back and forth between the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, every day.

Scientists have simply assumed that these natural processes have been in balance for centuries. But, what if there have always been some small — but natural — imbalances in those large up-and-down flows that slowly change over time? In that case, our measured increases in greenhouse gases and global temperatures might well turn out to be more natural than manmade, lost in the noise of natural variability.

Can I prove any of this? No — not yet, anyway. But neither have any scientists produced one single scientific paper showing that Mother Nature isn’t the dominant source of what we are seeing. Mankind is one possible explanation, and our measurements of natural variability in the climate system on time scales of decades to centuries are simply not good enough to find out how many natural sources of variability are also out there.

On the political side, all of this talk of a supposed scientific consensus puts politicians between a rock and a hard place. Long-range scientific predictions of environmental gloom and doom have had a terrible track record, historically, and yet for some reason we are always willing to accept the next one that comes along. Maybe it’s their entertainment value.

So, what is a politician to do? Go with the currently popular flow, or ignore what most of the experts, pundits, and media are saying and just stick with their gut instincts? Certainly, politicians who want a better chance of winning an election should go for the popularity contest.

But in the case of global warming, Rush Limbaugh has decided to go with his gut instinct. Scientists can be (and have been) spectacularly wrong when pontificating on natural systems as complex as the Earth’s climate — or the human body. This instinct has served Rush well over the years, and in the case of global warming, I agree with him.

This position is also consistent with Rush’s recent emphasis on conservative principles over specific politicians. He frequently reminds listeners that America’s success has not come from its politicians, but from its people. Not from soaring (yet ambiguous) speeches, but from enduring ideals, creativity, hard work, and most of all — freedom.

But what if sticking to one’s guns on such an issue is just enough for the Republicans to lose the White House? Well, what is more important for the future of America: the party affiliation of the next president, or the decision to let government control how much energy people and business can use from now on?

Once the government gains control over energy decisions, do we really think they will relinquish it after manmade global warming is realized to be a false alarm? It has been said that whoever controls energy, controls life. Right now, the free market (which means you) controls those decisions.

Do we need to remind ourselves how well things went in the former Soviet Union when the bureaucrats made the economic decisions, rather than letting the collective will of the people, expressed though a free market, govern the economy?

I can certainly appreciate Jim Geraghty’s concern over the short-term political risks of doubting the paradigm of manmade global warming. But the long-terms risks of giving in to it are far greater.

How much easier this would all be if it was only as simple as buying hybrid cars, compact fluorescent light bulbs, and building more energy efficient homes. But the public needs to know that all of these meager efforts will have no measurable effect on global temperatures, no matter how much warming you think there will be in the future.

This is the one subject for which I believe “hoax” is an entirely appropriate label when it comes to people’s motives for advancing such solutions. Either “hoax,” or “stunning stupidity.” Rush is right — mankind depends mostly on petroleum and coal for its energy, and nothing is going to change that until human creativity, fueled by the extra wealth created by free markets, leads to new energy technology breakthroughs.

Are we “addicted to oil”? Sure, just like we are addicted to food. Try quitting.

What will people do when they realize that going along with the 56-percent scientific majority has resulted in them giving up much of their personal freedom in the process? I wouldn’t trade that freedom for any presidential candidate.


01/24 07:24 AM

 

[Walter]

Bono confesses sins to ‘father’ Al Gore

Having climate campaigner Al Gore round to your house is to open yourself to a self-flagellating guilt trip, Irish rock star Bono confessed Thursday.
Sharing a stage with the former US vice president at the annual gathering of world movers and shakers in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, the U2 frontman joked that their friendship was a source of pressure on the domestic front.
“He’s been round my house and it’s like… here’s the recycler Al, you know… I’ve got a posh car, but it runs on ethanol Al,” Bono said.
Acknowledging that a career in rock music was not always conducive to a green lifestyle, Bono compared a conversation with Gore to an act of religious contrition. (AFP)

 

[Tonington]

But is this a recipe for a global warming Armageddon? I’m betting my reputation on: “No.” Recent research has made me more convinced of this than ever.
...
Can I prove any of this? No — not yet, anyway.
...
This is the one subject for which I believe “hoax” is an entirely appropriate label when it comes to people’s motives for advancing such solutions. Either “hoax,” or “stunning stupidity.”

It would be nice if Spencer brought up the recent research that makes him think otherwise. But then he criticizes scientists for not being able to show that Mother Nature isn't to blame. Guess he hasn't looked, because it certainly isn't the sun driving the warmth. That has been addressed, many times over.

And he can't prove it, but believes it to be a hoax. Maybe the satellites he uses are frying his brain, bring out the tinfoil!

Maybe the scientists could use his satellite data that showed there was no warming. Oh, that's right. His study was full of arithmetic errors. Well, back to the drawing board.

 

[Extrafire]

First off, theres a difference between tropospheric sulfates and stratospheric sulfates, not chemically, but in how they interact. Areas producing sulfates now, are not reaching the stratosphere, and not large enough to produce a significant forcing that would mask the positive forcing trend. Cite the study where this was debunked, as this is standard knowledge.

What's most hilarious about this Extra, is that the Rasool study I mentioned, which was from 1971, was dealing expressly with aerosols. He hypothesized from his results that if we put more of these aerosols into the atmosphere, we could cool it. Well before the IPCC. :lol:

Can't cite any study, just commenting on info I've come across in articles. Your suggestion that sulfates easily reached the stratosphere for 30 years but can't now seems lame. I do know that the idea was part of the first 2 IPCC reports, but no mention in the 3rd at all. If, as you suggest, the sulfates are no longer able to counter the CO2, one would think they would mention that, but no, they just ignore it altogether. What I find hilarious about this is that both you and I have stated in the past that the global cooling panic was based on "bad science". And then the IPCC, and now you, are borrowing from that bad science to support AGW theory!:roll:

Well, seeing as how abruptly 450 kyr ago, the climate patterns shifted from repeating ice ages every 40 kyr to 100 kyr, it would be appropriate that simply saying it happened in the past will not suffice. It could get longer, it could get shorter, but without evidence, simply saying it will repeat on the same period it has for the last 450 kyr is not scientific. You're ignoring the fundamental physics of the system. Things happen that can change patterns. A forcing is a forcing, as far as the climate is concerned.

I'm aware that the interval switched from 40k to 100k, but such things don't happen without a cause. I'm no expert on the cause of ice ages, but I believe it's as a result of changes to the earth's orbit becoming more elliptical. A modicum of an increase in the distance from the sun makes a huge difference here. Something external must have intervened in the past to make that change (close pass by a huge comet or something) and unless there is a similar event, the likelihood of change from the current 100k cycle is essentially nil. The absolute best indicator of future events is the evidence of past, naturally reccuring events. Without evidence of a possible cause, there is absolutely no reason to doubt the pattern will be repeated.

I wasn't talking about geologic time scales, I don't live in geologic time scales. Maybe after we're gone it will change to a cooling trend, but it's not changing anytime soon.

Well every once in a while, the human and geological time scales coincide, and according to past patterns, that point is upon us. In geological time scales it is very imminent. In human time scales, it soon will be.

 

[Extrafire]

But then that raises another point.

The warmer the oceans are, the more hurricanes we have, and the more stronger they become due to the warmer waters which fuel them. They also cool things down in general.... so instead of global warming to be concerned about, shouldn't we be more concerned over the massive hurricanes which will be coming out way to counter any warming of the climates?

There's this to consider; Weather events such as hurricanes are formed by the contrast of warm and cold air/water coming into contact. The greater the difference in temperature, the greater the chance of hurricanes and severity of same. But with global warming, the equatorial areas tend to remain the same while polar areas warm, thus the contrast between warm and cold becomes less, resulting in fewer and milder storms.

Global Warming isn't a for sure thing, and neither is climate change, as we're all debating these things, but one thing that is constant for each is the level of hurricanes which will follow.

GW is a sure thing, we're in a generalized warming trend which will continue for a couple centuries at least before the next generalized cooling begins, as long as the ice age cycle holds off. And climate change is a constant, it's always warming or cooling, so it's most definitely a sure thing.

So if the temps warm and perhaps some ice caps do melt.... including glaciers, then those would in turn fuel more hurricanes, which would hince cool the waters and atmosphere, therefore counter balancing whatever effects we may have on the planet and then recreate more freezing the following year. If anything we're setting ourselves up for an ice age.

It's been very much warmer throughout most of the present interglacial, including during some historical times, so the idea that warming would harm us in any way is without merit. As for an ice age, that's a completely independent cycle, and there's absolutely nothing we can do to either cause one or prevent one.

That is unless we figure out a way to stop hurricanes.... and if that occured, then yeah... I wouldn't dispute the Global Warming theory, and also I would come to the conclusion we're royally screwed.
[...]

But either way, Humanity isn't anywhere close to being in danger of climate change or global warming at a level of extinction. At the worst we'll have a couple of million die, big whoop.... humans are like cockroaches... we're hard to kill and we spawn like mad.

[...]

If ever we set our minds on it, we're easy to kill. Just let a few "loose cannons" start lobbing some of the worlds massive supplies of WMD's around and we'll die by the billions. But the cockroaches will do fine.

 

[Tonington]

Can't cite any study, just commenting on info I've come across in articles.

Then try an academic search. The articles you've read must have picked the information up from somewhere, unless it's swift boating crap.

Your suggestion that sulfates easily reached the stratosphere for 30 years but can't now seems lame.

Is that what I said? No. What I said is that the current sulfate emissions are not explosive enough to reach the the upper atmosphere. When was the last explosive volcano eruption? The active volcanoes are mild. That's not lame, that's a fact.

I do know that the idea was part of the first 2 IPCC reports, but no mention in the 3rd at all. If, as you suggest, the sulfates are no longer able to counter the CO2, one would think they would mention that, but no, they just ignore it altogether.

That's BS. I wonder if you've even read the reports. The third report had an entire section on aerosols(as do all of the reports), and a dedicated section to volcanic forcings. It's section 5.2.2.8. It's been in every single report, as it is an important factor in the radiative balance.

What I find hilarious about this is that both you and I have stated in the past that the global cooling panic was based on "bad science". And then the IPCC, and now you, are borrowing from that bad science to support AGW theory!:roll:

What bad science are you referring to here? The past global cooling 'panic' was based on very little science. You've yet to prove how pervasive that really was in the scientific literature.

The IPCC is not bad science, it is conservative science. Each country has to agree to every single word in the reports. It's not a majority matter at all. Only one country has to object to the wording of anything, and it won't be included.

I'm aware that the interval switched from 40k to 100k, but such things don't happen without a cause. I'm no expert on the cause of ice ages, but I believe it's as a result of changes to the earth's orbit becoming more elliptical.

Correct. You are restating the obvious. Like I said, a forcing is a forcing.

A modicum of an increase in the distance from the sun makes a huge difference here. Something external must have intervened in the past to make that change (close pass by a huge comet or something) and unless there is a similar event, the likelihood of change from the current 100k cycle is essentially nil.

No causality I've ever seen from comets. Milankovitch cycles, yes. There are regular shifts in the angle of our axis, the wobble, and the elliptical. But there's no evidence of those cycles lining up right now. It inevitably will happen, but the strength of the forcing to our climate depends on which of the cycles, and if it/they are in tandem with another cycle.

The absolute best indicator of future events is the evidence of past, naturally reccuring events. Without evidence of a possible cause, there is absolutely no reason to doubt the pattern will be repeated.

Right, but quantified. Like I said, I never said the pattern wouldn't repeat. I said there is no evidence that it is upon us. Why rehash the same thing over and over again?

Well every once in a while, the human and geological time scales coincide, and according to past patterns, that point is upon us. In geological time scales it is very imminent. In human time scales, it soon will be.

So, pray tell, where do you see that it soon will be upon humans? We don't live in a geologic time scale. That's why minerals for all intents and purposes are none-renewable resources.

 

[Walter]

Isn’t all this talk of an apocalypse getting a bit boring?

THIS year is the 40th anniversary of Paul Ehrlich’s influential The Population Bomb, a book that predicted an apocalyptic overpopulation crisis in the 1970s and ’80s.
Ehrlich’s book provides a lesson we still haven’t learnt. His prophecy that the starvation of millions of people in the developed world was imminent was spectacularly wrong — humanity survived without any of the forced sterilisation that Ehrlich believed was necessary.
It’s easy to predict environmental collapse, but it never actually seems to happen.
The anniversary of The Population Bomb should put contemporary apocalyptic predictions in their proper context. If anything, our world — and the environment — just keeps getting better.
Ehrlich was at the forefront of a wave of pessimistic doomsayers in the late 1960s and early ’70s. And these doomsayers weren’t just cranks — or, if they were cranks, they were cranks with university tenure.
Despite what should be a humiliating failure for his theory of overpopulation, Ehrlich is still employed as a professor of population studies by Stanford University. Similarly, when George Wald predicted in a 1970 speech that civilisation was likely to end within 15 or 30 years, his audience was reminded that he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. (Chris Berg, The Age)

 

[Walter]

​

I am an intellectual blasphemer

When Alexander Cockburn, author of the forthcoming book A Short History of Fear, dared to question the climate change consensus, he was punished by a tsunami of self-righteous fury. It is time for a free and open ‘battle of ideas’, he says.
While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.
In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors - to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the medieval warming period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now.
Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as being man-made, and many have made it into the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.
This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.
This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. Last year, for example, the American nuclear regulatory commission speeded up its process of licensing; there is an imminent wave of nuclear plant building. Many in the nuclear industry see in the story about CO2 causing climate change an opportunity to recover from the adverse publicity of Chernobyl.
More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the powers of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade mechanisms, to penalise Third World countries. For example, the Indians have just produced an extremely cheap car called the Tata Nano, which will enable poorer Indians to get about more easily without having to load their entire family on to a bicycle. Greens have already attacked the car, and it won’t take long for the WTO and the advanced powers to start punishing India with a lot of missionary-style nonsense about its carbon emissions and so on. (Alexander Cockburn, sp!ked review of books)

 

[Walter]

The Polar Bear Express
January 28, 2008; Page A14

Global warming is becoming a new unified field theory for environmentalists, a crisis so urgent and profound that it even justifies leaping the democratic process. Consider the political campaign to prod the Bush Administration to list the polar bear as an endangered species -- even though many proponents admit it isn't endangered at all.
This game began with a 2005 lawsuit against the Interior Department from pressure groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council. Their demand was that the polar bear be designated as "threatened" -- that is, at risk for extinction in the foreseeable future -- under the 1973 Endangered Species Act.
No one disputes that higher temperatures in the bear's Arctic habitat have disrupted the sea ice that bears use to catch food and breed. The problem is that polar bear populations have been rising over the last four decades, and may now be at an historic high. This is the result of conservation management, including international agreements on trophy hunting and federal safeguards like the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
The warmists say current numbers count for little because climate-change models anticipate even more Arctic melting. These projections are speculative, however, and tend to underestimate the dynamism of the environment. Animals adapt to changing conditions, which might mean a shift in population patterns to areas where pack ice is more robust year-round. And the reduction in ice cover may be the result of cyclical wind circulation patterns and natural variability, not exclusively warming trends.
The scientific questions are complex -- and that ought to rule out premature, simplistic answers. Naturally, it's having the opposite effect, which suggests that this is really about the politics of global warming. The more honest activists basically concede that a listing is a P.R. ploy to "raise awareness," or achieve other ends, or something.
Even if the Interior Department does rule in favor (a decision is expected in the next few weeks), it's not clear how the Endangered Species Act could help. Usually its remedies involve "critical habitat," which means prohibiting the development or even use of much private land to protect a species, like the spotted owl. But there's no way to designate the same for disappearing sea ice; and besides, all the existing protections of polar bear habitat would still apply, and couldn't be extended much further anyway.
The logical -- and dangerous -- leap here is that the greens are attempting to rewrite the Endangered Species Act without actual legislation. If the "iconic" polar bear is classified as threatened, and the harm is formally attributed to warming caused by humans, then their gambit could lead to all sorts of regulatory mischief. Never mind that even drastic world-wide reductions in carbon emissions over the next decade or so wouldn't have the slightest affect on ice melt.
Another political goal is to use an "endangered" bear listing to tie up in the courts a modest sale of oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea 25 to 200 miles off the coast of Alaska, scheduled for February 6. One of the more promising energy frontiers of the Outer Continental Shelf, the acreage is estimated to contain 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The leases come with painstaking stipulations to mitigate any possible environmental harm to species like the polar bear.
But it's hard to imagine any precautions that would satisfy the greens, short of a total ban on offshore drilling. No doubt that will be confirmed when all this ends up in court, but the least the Bush Administration can do now is avoid handing additional ammunition to the litigants.

 

[Zzarchov]

Isn’t all this talk of an apocalypse getting a bit boring?

THIS year is the 40th anniversary of Paul Ehrlich’s influential The Population Bomb, a book that predicted an apocalyptic overpopulation crisis in the 1970s and ’80s.
Ehrlich’s book provides a lesson we still haven’t learnt. His prophecy that the starvation of millions of people in the developed world was imminent was spectacularly wrong — humanity survived without any of the forced sterilisation that Ehrlich believed was necessary.
It’s easy to predict environmental collapse, but it never actually seems to happen.
The anniversary of The Population Bomb should put contemporary apocalyptic predictions in their proper context. If anything, our world — and the environment — just keeps getting better.
Ehrlich was at the forefront of a wave of pessimistic doomsayers in the late 1960s and early ’70s. And these doomsayers weren’t just cranks — or, if they were cranks, they were cranks with university tenure.
Despite what should be a humiliating failure for his theory of overpopulation, Ehrlich is still employed as a professor of population studies by Stanford University. Similarly, when George Wald predicted in a 1970 speech that civilisation was likely to end within 15 or 30 years, his audience was reminded that he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. (Chris Berg, The Age)

Actually he was pretty accurate. And he wasn't "new" he was just going over what Malthus said (which is why Economics is the Dismal science).

We had the green revolution to explode food supplies, but instead of ending starvation the population exploded. (known as a population cycle in all species of nature). The green revolution also put terrible chemical strain on the environment (contributing to the problems in this thread)

And at some point, starvation will kick in. Thats science, that THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD SCIENCE. Seriously, ask any hunter about a population cycle , ask any hunter in any civilization from stone age to modern.