"Time passes, but they're always five to seven years from the bomb." -- Shlomo Brom, Israel's deputy national security adviser under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak
As Israeli politicians continue to beat the war-drums over what they (now alone) claim to be an imminent threat from a nuclear-capable Iran, very similar hysterical rhetoric is being used in the attempt to convince us of a very different if equally catastrophic threat to life on earth - "climate change". The doomsayers tell us we have ten years, at most, to reverse the inevitable destruction or face the dire consequences of cities under water, earthquakes, tsunamis and the dreaded, if not racist, tropical diseases moving north. While researching this article I came across a blog that made a very salient point:
Quite apart from the science, one thing I find suspicious about climate catastrophism is how there's supposed to be this massive and terribly deleterious change ahead of us, and yet (by what strikes me as an amazing coincidence) we are always said to still be capable of stopping it but only -- and here the speaker invariably assumes the urgent air of an infomercial voice-over -- if we act right this very minute. This is strange, given that we're dealing with what (on the catastrophist account) seems to be a slippery-slope doomsday scenario that has been building up since the Industrial Revolution. Given the long time-frame and massive uncertainties involved, you'd think that predictions of the exact timing of the "point of no return" must involve a fairly significant margin of error. In light of that, it's odd that there doesn't seem to be even one climate-change affirmer out there who's saying "Rats! I hate to tell you this guys, but it's one or two (or ten or fifty) years too late and there's basically nothing we can do now." Perhaps adding: "So we might as well just go out in style -- let's everyone head out to the SUV dealership!" Or "Let's get 10,000 of our best friends together and jet over to Bali for a big wingding!"And that's it: We're always a few years away from the point of no return, whether it's Iran, climate, or some other "catastrophic" event we must act now before it is too late. What if Iran already has the bomb? What if we're already past the point of no return? What will you do, what will They do then?
On the other hand, there are thousands of them who seem to think we're just a few years away from this point of no return...
Which brings me to this curious article:
One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can't be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world's richest man from being the largest shareholder in Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.The subheading of the above article summarizes: "Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don't." Indeed.
In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest 'transparent' private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates' foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations' World Health Organization.
So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.
No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world's most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).
On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the 'doomsday seed bank.' Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.
Now is it simply philosophical sloppiness? What leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to at one and the same time back proliferation of patented and soon-to-be Terminator patented seeds across Africa, a process which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the plant seed varieties as monoculture industrialized agribusiness is introduced, and at the same time invest tens of millions of dollars to preserve every seed variety known in a bomb-proof doomsday vault near the remote Arctic Circle 'so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future' to restate their official release?
As the Bali Climate talks face imminent collapse and the EU threatens to boycott U.S.-led climate talks next month unless Washington accepts negotiating deep reductions of global-warming emissions, we're reminded again that we're just 10 years away from the "tipping point". If one actually takes the time to look at the various scenarios that the IPCC report studied you'll see that even under the most drastic cuts all models still predict accelerated warming. Even if emissions were to halt by 2100 the warming would be here to stay and if cuts were agreed to it would only delay the warming until some future time beyond 2100. Just who are they trying to save the earth for? Just their grand kids? Let's face it, it's all or nothing. Either we cut emissions to zero now or we kiss our collective asses good-bye, because why bother going through all the hoopla if, in the end, it's not going to make one bit of difference. Besides, according to a new study, 'Global Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence':
Climate scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia report that observed patterns of temperature changes ('fingerprints') over the last thirty years are not in accord with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability. Therefore, climate change is 'unstoppable' and cannot be affected or modified by controlling the emission of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, as is proposed in current legislation.Or maybe there's an ulterior motive:
These results are in conflict with the conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and also with some recent research publications based on essentially the same data. However, they are supported by the results of the US-sponsored Climate Change Science Program (CCSP).
The report is published in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society [DOI: 10.1002/joc.1651]. The authors are Prof. David H. Douglass (Univ. of Rochester), Prof. John R. Christy (Univ. of Alabama), Benjamin D. Pearson (graduate student), and Prof. S. Fred Singer (Univ. of Virginia).
Co-author S. Fred Singer said: "The current warming trend is simply part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that has been seen in ice cores, deep-sea sediments, stalagmites, etc., and published in hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals. The mechanism for producing such cyclical climate changes is still under discussion; but they are most likely caused by variations in the solar wind and associated magnetic fields that affect the flux of cosmic rays incident on the earth's atmosphere. In turn, such cosmic rays are believed to influence cloudiness and thereby control the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface - and thus the climate." Our research demonstrates that the ongoing rise of atmospheric CO2 has only a minor influence on climate change. We must conclude, therefore, that attempts to control CO2 emissions are ineffective and pointless. - but very costly.
The fate of the Earth hangs in the balance in Bali, but the issue is not whether humanity will succumb to a "climate crisis," or how the international community might craft a successor to the tattered Kyoto Accord (Let's call it KyoTwo). The real theme of this United Nations gabfest -- like that of its 12 predecessors, and of the hundreds, if not thousands, of related meetings --is whether globalization and trade liberalization will be allowed to continue, with a corresponding increase in wealth, health and welfare, or whether the authoritarian enemies of freedom (who rarely if ever recognize themselves as such) will succeed in using environmental hysteria to undermine capitalism and increase their Majesterium. Any successor to Kyoto will be rooted in hobbling rich economies, increasing the poor world's resentment, unleashing environmental trade warfare, and blanketing the globe with rules and regulations that benefit only rulers and regulators. Bali is not about climate; it symbolizes the continued assault on freedom by those who seek -- or pander to -- political power under the guise of concern for humanity.Well, one can argue over whether trade "liberalization" brings wealth, health and welfare. Enslaving those who were once subsistence farmers into sweatshops doesn't bring wealth, health and welfare any more than cows redeem the benefits of factory farming. But the writer has a point: "Bali is not about climate; it symbolizes the continued assault on freedom by those who seek -- or pander to -- political power under the guise of concern for humanity." And just like the invasion of Iraq was at first billed as saving us from Weapons of Mass Destruction and then morphed into saving Iraqis from a brutal tyrant to now saving Iraqis from themselves, so wii a climate "saving" scenario morph into ever shifting reasons for saving ourselves from some "catastrophe":
Unlike most apparently intractable problems, which have a tendency to go away when examined closely and analytically, the climate change predicament just seems to get bigger and scarier the more we learn about it.Now here's the kicker. How does global warming trigger volcanic eruptions?
Now we discover that not only are the oceans and the atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms, floods and ever-climbing sea levels, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too.
Looking back to other periods in our planet's history when the climate was swinging about wildly, most notably during the last ice age, it appears that far more than the weather was affected. The solid earth also became restless, with an increase in volcanic activity, earthquakes, giant submarine landslides and tsunamis. At the rate climate change is accelerating, there is every prospect that we will see a similar response from the planet, heralding not just a warmer future but also a fiery one.
Several times in the past couple of million years the ice left its polar fastnesses and headed towards the equator, covering much of the world's continents in ice sheets over a kilometre thick, and sucking water from the oceans in order to do so. As a consequence, at times when the ice was most dominant, global sea levels were as much as 130m lower than they are today; sufficient to expose land bridges between the UK and the continent and Alaska and Russia.
Each time the ice retreated, sea levels shot up again, sometimes at rates as high as several metres a century. In the mid 1990s, as part of a study funded by the European Union, we discovered that in the Mediterranean region there was a close correlation between how quickly sea levels went up and down during the last ice age and the level of explosive activity at volcanoes in Italy and Greece.
The answer lies in the enormous mass of the water pouring into the ocean basins from the retreating ice sheets. The addition of over a hundred metres depth of water to the continental margins and marine island chains, where over 60% of the world's active volcanoes reside, seems to be sufficient to load and bend the underlying crust.Well, you can read the rest of the article which pretty much spells out our doom - unless we act now! All this sounds pretty scary in comparison to the previous evils of coal fired power plants and cow farts.
This in turn squeezes out any magma that happens to be hanging around waiting for an excuse to erupt. It may well be that a much smaller rise can trigger an eruption if a volcano is critically poised and ready to blow.
As sea levels climb higher so a response from the world's volcanoes becomes ever more likely, and perhaps not just from volcanoes. Loading of the continental margins could activate faults, triggering increased numbers of earthquakes, which in turn could spawn giant submarine landslides. Such a scenario is believed to account for the gigantic Storegga Slide, which sloughed off the Norwegian coast around 8,000 years ago, sending a tsunami more than 20 metres (66ft) high in places across the Shetland Isles and onto the east coast of Scotland. Should Greenland be released from its icy carapace, the underlying crust will start to bob back up, causing earthquakes well capable of shaking off the huge piles of glacial sediment that have accumulated around its margins and sending tsunamis across the North Atlantic.
Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something. It really would be worth listening before it is too late.
But don't worry! Catastrophe can be avoided:
Epic Flood Triggered Ancient "Big Chill," Study SaysAnd of course all you have to do is cut back on emissions. Our rulers and regulators will decide what's best for us.
An epic gush of fresh water into the North Atlantic slowed a deep ocean current and triggered a century-long chill in Europe and North America some 8,200 years ago, according to a new study.
The finding confirms scenarios suggested by previous models of the ancient climate and should raise confidence in predictions made about how the oceans will respond to Greenland's rapidly melting glaciers, an outside expert said.
The researchers identified a section of the core that corresponds to a hundred-year period around 8,200 years ago. The chemistry of the sediment there is unlike that from any other time over the past 10,000 years, Kleiven said.
The new findings suggest that the changes in the ocean circulation pattern and cooling of the ocean surface happened over the course of a few decades at most, Kleiven noted.
"The response we see in these deep-ocean changes [is that] they occur on timescales which are rapid enough [that] they could impact human societies," she said.
While no immediate freshwater supply the size of lake Agassiz exists today, Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheets could potentially slow the deepwater current and affect global weather patterns.
A slowing could thrust large portions of Europe and North America into a mini ice age and weaken the monsoon rains in Africa and Asia.
"That's the rain that a couple billion people rely on for crops," Alley said.
To study the possibility of future freshwater-induced disasters, scientists build computer models based on their understanding of past events like the cooling 8,200 years ago.
The new sediment core findings, Alley noted, suggest that these climate models are accurate.
And this, he added, is good news. When scientists plug the melting rates of Greenland's ice sheets into these models, they indicate catastrophe will most likely be avoided.
Now, I refer back to the previous catastrophe article in which it's mentioned that the Storegga Slide occurred about 8,000 years ago. Compare this to the above 8,200 year event and one immediately concludes they refer to the same time period. So did the draining of Lake Agassiz cause a monumental slide in the deep ocean off of Norway? Perhaps. But is it likely? From Wikipedia:!
The three Storegga Slides count among the largest recorded landslides in history. They occurred under water, at the edge of Norway's continental shelf (Storegga is Norwegian for "the Great Edge"), in the Norwegian Sea, 100 km (62 mi) north-west of the Møre coast. An area the size of Iceland slid, causing a very large tsunami in the North Atlantic Ocean. This collapse involved a 290 km (180 mi) stretch of coastal shelf, with a total volume of 3,500 km³ (840 mi³) of deposited debris. Based on carbon dating of plant material recovered from sediment deposited by the tsunami, the latest incident occurred around 6100 BC.
This brings me to the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant.
A Jain version of the story says that six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body.Is there a wise man in the room? Referring back to Engdahl's article, do Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don't? Let's assume they do. If they knew something was going to happen that was so catastrophic that they'd need to keep a seed vault, why wouldn't they tell the rest of humanity? Perhaps, just perhaps they don't have our best interests in mind:
The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.
A wise man explains to them
All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned.
"Asteroids which pass close to the Earth have been fully recognized by mankind for only about 20 years. Previously, the idea that substantial unobserved objects might be close enough to be a potential hazard to the Earth was treated with as much derision as the unobserved aether. Scientists of course are in the business to establish broad principles (eg relativity) and the Earth's supposedly uneventful, uniformitarian environment was already very much in place. The result was that scientists who paid more than lip service to objects close enough to encounter the Earth did so in an atmosphere of barely disguised contempt. Even now, it is difficult for laymen to appreciate the enormity of the intellectual blow with which most of the Body Scientific has recently been struck and from which it is now seeking to recover.Now, if the elite wanted to both prepare for a worldwide catastrophe while at the same time prevent the public from panicking, how do you think they would go about the task? They wouldn't want to keep everything secret because secrets have a nasty habit of leaking out and breeding 'dangerous' (that is 'realistic') conspiracy theories. They would probably choose to be up front about what they were doing while making sure to obscure and distort their reason for doing it. They would, for example, spread disinformation by promoting 'crazy' (that is 'unrealistic') conspiracy theories. They would also be most desirous of ensuring that the public believe that something can be done to prevent disaster, thereby suppressing panic and even benefiting from public accolades at their unsurpassed leadership abilities in securing our future. All the while they would be preparing for a very different catastrophe, one in which the mass of humanity will likely be destroyed, but which will spare the elites with their seed vaults and underground bases? Far fetched? Maybe. But then just what happened to those missing Pentagon trillions? And the billions disappearing yearly into the black budget?
"Confronted on many occasions in the past by the prospect of world-end, national elites have often found themselves having to suppress public panic -- only to discover, too late, that usual means of control commonly fail. Thus an institutionalized science is expected to withhold knowledge of the threat; a self-regulated press is expected to make light of any disaster; while an institutionalized religion is expected to oppose predestination and to secure such general belief in a fundamentally benevolent deity as can be mustered."
Letter written by Dr. S V M Clube dated June 4, 1996 from the office of Dr. P. A. Charles, former Head of Astrophysics of the University of Oxford, to Ms. Victoria Cox, then Chief, Physics and BMD Coordinator of the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development.
But getting back to 8,200 years ago. What really happened to cause the climate to shift, mega-tsunamis to wash over the continents, and the gigantic Storegga slide?
If cosmogenically generated tsunami are so rare, certainly within the timespan of human civilisation, then a paradox exists because evidence for such events certainly appears often in the geological record and in human legends. Traditionally, the difficulty in discriminating between fact and fiction, between echoes of the real past and dreams, has discouraged historians and scientists from making inferences about catastrophic events from myths or deciphered records. Yet, common threads appear in many ancient tales. Stories told by the Washo Indians of California and by the Aborigines of South Australia portray falling stars, fire from the sky, and cataclysmic floods unlike any modern event. Similar portrayals appear in the Gilgamesh myth from the Middle East, in Peruvian legends, and in the Revelations of Saint John and the Noachian flood story in the Bible. Victor Clube of Oxford University and William Napier of the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh have pieced together consistent patterns in ancient writings, which they interpret as representing meteoritic showers 3,000-6,000 years ago.These scientists aren't the only ones to suggest such catastrophes.
One of the more disturbing accounts has been compiled from these legends by Edith and Alexander Tollmann of the University of Vienna, who believe that a comet circling the sun fragmented into seven large bodies that crashed into the world's oceans 8,200 ± 200 years ago. This age is based on radiocarbon dates from Vietnam, Australia and Europe. The impacts generated an atmospheric fireball that globally affected society. This was followed by a nuclear winter characterised by global cooling. More significantly, enormous tsunami swept across coastal plains and, if the legends are to be believed, overwashed the centre of continents. The latter phenomenon, if true, most likely was associated with the splash from the impacts rather than with conventional tsunami run-up. Massive floods then occurred across continents.
The event may well have an element of truth. Figure 8.9 plots the location of the seven impact sites derived from geological evidence and legends. Two of these sites, in the Tasman and North Seas, have been identified as having mega-tsunami events around this time. The North Sea impact centre corresponds with the location of the Storegga slides described in Chapter 6. Here, the main tsunami took place 7,950 ±190 years ago. One of the better dates comes from wood lying above tektites in a sand dune along the South Coast of Victoria, Australia.
The tektites are associated with the Tasman Sea impact and date at 8,200 ±250 years before present. These dates place the Deluge Comet impact event--a term used by the Tollmanns--around 6200 BC.
This event does not stand alone during the Holocene. It has been repeated in recent times--a fact supported by Maori and Aborigine legends from New Zealand and Australia.
--Edward A. Byrant, from "More Recent Evidence from Legends and Myths", a review of Deluge Comet Impact Event 8,200 ± 200 years ago (Kristan-Tollmann and Tollmann, 1992)
They're called catastrophists, a group of British scientists who question many of the aspects of Darwinian evolution and argue that life on Earth and the geology of the planet have been constantly reshaped by asteroid strikes and other external shocks.Recently Nature featured an article on Mammoth tusks:
[A] leading catastrophist is Mike Baillie, an expert in early climate change, at Queen's University in Belfast. Mr. Baillie starts from scientific grounds, such as the measurement of tree rings and the examination of ice core samples, and then delves into mythology to find out if legends can throw light on the extraordinary, perhaps catastrophic climatic events revealed by the records. In a book, "Exodus to Arthur," Mr. Baillie asks whether the simultaneous emergence of legends about dragons in China and angels in Western mythology were common reactions to the appearance of a comet.
Mr. Baillie points out that contemporary accounts at the time of the Black Death, which killed one third of Europe's population in the 14th century, mentioned droughts, floods, masses of dead fish, earthquakes, sheets of fire, stinking smoke, huge hailstones and blasts of hot wind - all possible descriptions, he said, of a close encounter with an asteroid or comet.
One record spoke of a large bright star over Paris, and another said that the sky looked yellow and the air red because of burning vapors. Tree ring studies reveal evidence of massive climate disturbance at the same time, Mr. Baillie added.
Bullet-like pieces of what is thought to be an ancient meteorite shower have been found embedded in mammoth tusks and bison bone.And there's also the Holocene Impact Working Group:
The discovery of the 2 - 5 millimetre holes left by meteorites opens a window into a impact event thought to have happened over Alaska and Russia tens of thousands of years ago. And it could provide a whole new way to chart impacts from space.
The fragments, found in seven mammoth tusks and the skull and horns of a Siberian bison, match the geochemical composition of iron meteorites. "We think that the micrometeorites came from an air-burst of a meteor 30,000 to 34,000 years ago," says Richard Firestone, co-author of the study and a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "We think a wave of meteoric material sprayed the region."
Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the past 10,000 years. But the self-described "band of misfits" that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence.But notice the dates: 30,000 to 34,000 years ago. And we also have 8,200 years ago. Is there a connection? Yes, all three numbers 30,000, 34,000, 8,200, and even 4,800 fit into an approximate 4,200 year cycle (within error) coinciding with time periods going back from the present.
Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the past 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to 1 million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers more than 100 square kilometers with sediment hundreds of meters deep.
On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep-ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction - toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 29 kilometers, or 18 miles, in diameter, lies 3,800 meters, or 12,500 feet, below the surface.
The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world's population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 183 meters thigh, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.
So, do Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don't? All of the evidence, cross-referenced with a psychological analysis of political and corporate leaders, argues very strongly that they do. So the difficult question with which we are faced is not: 'When are we going to do something about climate change?' but rather: 'When are we going to wake up to the fact that our political and corporate leaders have never acted in our best interests, and to trust them on "climate change" not only risks our own future but that of countless generations to come.