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Issue no. 46, 20 May 2008

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In this issue:

The Financial Crisis

The housing bubble and the financial crisis

Dean Baker ............ ......... ......... . download pdf ............ ......... ............ 73

Global finance in crisis
Jacques Sapir ............ ......... .. .. download pdf ............ ......... ......... .... 82

End-of-the-world trade

Donald MacKenzie... ......... ........ download pdf ............ ............ ........102

An overview of climate change
Neva Goodwin ............ ......... ......... ...... download pdf ............ ......... ......... ...110

The unhappy thing about happiness economics
Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod ....... download pdf ............ ......... ......... ...139

Economics, conflict and war
Fanny Coulomb and J. Paul Dunne .. download pdf ............ ......... ......... ...147

Opinion

Milton Friedman and Trofim Lysenko
David A. Bainbridge ............ ......... ......... ... download pdf ............ ......... ......... ...158

The IMF's historic transition: Is less better?
Mark Weisbrot ............ ......... ......... ......... . download pdf ............ ......... ......... ...160

The great unravelling
Jayati Ghosh ............ ......... ......... ......... ... download pdf ............ ......... ......... ...162

Submissions, etc. ............ ......... ......... ......... ......... ......... ......... ......... ......... .....164

Ted Turner on overpopulation

Ted Turner Calls for Population Control, Wants Limit of Two Children Per Family

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
April 3, 2008

Atlanta, GA (LifeNews.com) -- Ted Turner, the eccentric pro-abortion billionaire and founder of CNN, wants more global population control. He believes the world's population is getting out of hand and that it will result in environmental problems -- and his solution is to ask people to voluntarily limit themselves to two children.

His comments came during an interview with PBS's Charlie Rose that aired Tuesday.

"We're too many people; that's why we have global warming," he said. "Too many people are using too much stuff."

Turner suggested that "on a voluntary basis, everybody in the world's got to pledge to themselves that one or two children is it."

Should the world not cave in to his demands, he worries global catastrophe will ensue.

"Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals," said Turner. "Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state -- like Somalia or Sudan -- and living conditions will be intolerable."

Turner's call for a limit on the number of children reminds many of the one-child family planning policy in China that has resulted in serious human rights abuses for violators.

Those who run afoul of the population control policy have been killed, assaulted, imprisoned and become victims of forced abortions and sterilizations occurring as late as days before birth.

Despite Turner's claims, research shows many areas of the world, including Europe, Japan and nations like Canada and the United States, suffer from underpopulation.

European nations are seeing births at below replacement rate, abortion has decimated the population of Russia and nations like Japan may be unable to support an aging population.

Several organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, World Congress of Families, and the Latin American Alliance for the Family have unveiled a new film called "Demographic Winter" that profiles the underpopulation problems.

"Worldwide, birthrates have declined by 50% in the past half-century," the groups say. "There are now 59 nations, with 44% of the world's population, with below replacement birthrates."

A birthrate of 2.1 is needed to replace current population, but the European Union has a birthrate of just 1.3. By 2030, the group's estimate, Europe is expected to have a shortfall of 20 million workers.

Meanwhile, in Russia, where abortion has been used for decades as a method of birth control, the nation is expected to lose one-third of its current population by 2050.

"In nations with declining populations, who will operate the factories and farms?" the groups said. "Who will guard the frontiers? With a graying population (a declining birthrate combined with growing longevity), who will support pension systems and otherwise care for the elderly?"

Related web sites:
Demographic Winter - http://www.demographicwinter.com

Bilderberger Ted Turner Repeats Call For Population Curb
Says diminishing farmland will lead to food riots, despite being behind corn-based ethanol push

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=924_1209392846&p=1

Global Gorby

STATE OF THE WORLD FORUM 1996

[Conference for Global Governance]

New World Order

A Clear Look by by William F. Jasper

(Comments by Jim Searcy)

(This is the New World Order crowd, the people behind Bill Clinton and Hillary.... Can you understand that world depopulation to 10-25 % of what it is now, (kill 75-90%) is part of the Globalist agenda? In Heaven's name, please realize what we are up against! Why does Clinton still have an approval rating of the voters?? Or does he?

Strange that the "State of the World Form" gets so little attention and media coverage. The Conference for Global Governance is a very big deal. It lets us know what the little gods of this world are planning. It really is the news that the talking heads heads, who fabicate what is called news, work so hard to keep the sheeple from knowing. It also has very grave consequences. It got so little coverage it is good for us to look at the notes once in a while.

Amazing how the one true God told us about these pale horse riders who like to play god. They worship lucifer and/or mother earth.

The notes let us "not authentically humans," or "defective seeds," understand the antichrist war on the saints. Saints fear God, and beleive the Holy Bible, and profess the name of Jesus or Yeshua, and regard the 10 commandments. Saints know what we are dealing with from Lucifer's New World Order.

These fools, who say in their heart that there is no God, proclaim themselves to be wise. Most worship lucifer, all love money, and lust for power and control. These muckey mucks are greedy dogs, one and all.)

"The State of the World Forum," is a planetary confabulation sponsored by the Gorbachev Foundation. Held atop the city's famed Nob Hill at the luxurious Fairmont Hotel, the forum brought together a glittering constellation of global notables representing the epitome of worldly power, prestige, fame, wealth, and influence: presidents, princes, potentates, philanthropists, poets, philosophers, and poohbahs. (They met again in --1998, and will meet again in 2000 /btw)

Who's Who:

"The weighty seriousness and ambitious reach of the conference indicated by the title of the event -- "Toward a New Civilization: Launching a Global Initiative" -- were underscored by the list of attendees, a veritable Who's Who of Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Club of Rome, the Bilderbergers, the Politburo, the Commission on Global Governance, the World Future Society, and other Insider bastions of power.

Among the 400-plus eminent personages from 50 countries who flocked to the five-day affair (September 27th-October 1st) were former Secretaries of State James Baker and George Shultz (both co-chairs of the forum), former President George Bush, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Askar Akaev of Kyrgystan, former President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey, Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and South African Vice President Thabo Mbeki.

Additional participants included: Worldwatch President Lester Brown; New Age gurus Fritjof Capra, Jeremy Rifkin, Willis Harman, Deepak Chopra, Robert Muller, and Matthew Fox; Marxist poetess Rigoberta Menchu; Earth Council president and billionaire eco-warrior Maurice Strong; Microsoft wizard Bill Gates; media mogul Rupert Murdoch; futurists Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt; Senator George Mitchell; Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas; computer tycoon David Packard; Esalen founder Michael Murphy; motivation superstar Tony Robbins; Men's Wearhouse CEO George Zimmer; chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall -- not to mention Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carl Sagan, John Denver, Shirley MacLaine, Dennis Weaver, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, Theodore Hesburgh, Timothy Wirth, Max Kampleman, Milton Friedman, Randall Forsberg, Saul Mendlovitz, and Alan Cranston.

Overseeing the entirety of this summit of the anointed was, of course, Mikhail Gorbachev himself. The purpose of the convocation, he proclaimed, was to "launch a multi-year process, culminating in the year 2000, to articulate the fundamental [world] priorities, values,and actions necessary to constructively shape our common future."

And who better to kick off an ostentatious extravaganza of that sort than global media titan and former "Humanist of the Year" Ted Turner. Identifying himself as a "great student of history" and a long-time friend of Gorbachev, Turner praised the "ex-Communist" and former dictator for ending the Cold War, which he acclaimed as "the greatest accomplishment in the history of humanity." "Now, with the Cold War behind us," said Ted, "this forum's job is to help chart the way for humanity."

. . .But drastic measures are needed, says Gorby. The traditional political structures "no longer respond to the needs of an interdependent world. The political culture that we inherited from the past stands in the way of efforts to unite mankind's resources in the face of global challenges." Mere transformation of political structures, however, is far from adequate. "We are in dire need of redefining the parameters of our society's economic, social, political, and spiritual development," the Soviet seer told his worshipful votaries. "Indeed, we have to reinvent the paradigm of our existence, to build a new civilization." It was a rehearkening to other familiar themes Gorbachev has sung: "developing a global consciousness," "embracing the task of spiritual renewal," launching "the next phase of human development." An awesome undertaking, to be sure. Fortunately for us, he is graciously willing to enlighten and minister to our darkened souls as well as our sick body politic. How does he propose to do this? Comrade Gorbachev proposes to "set up a kind of United Nations Council of Elders."

It was in this "Elder" capacity that Gorbachev offered the next part of his lecture. "Civilization will shift and new values and new ways of life will be needed to find real solutions to the problems of our environment, a way out of the ecological crisis," the sage of Moscow told his San Francisco gathering.

Then came the punch line:

"Gradually we will have to achieve a change of emphasis in the archetypal dilemma: to have or to be; to change the nature of consumption." "Perhaps it is a little risky in this country to speak about that," he beamed to a titter of audience chuckles. "We have to change the nature of consumption. And I have much to say about that here."

Compassion Con

He certainly did have much to say on the topic, as did many of the other participants during the course of the forum. What was most amazing was that no one gagged or guffawed at the brazen effrontery and hypocrisy of the sainted one's sermonizing on conspicuous consumption while his rapt audience feasted on a sumptuous array of epicurean comestibles fit for royalty: smoked trout salad, filet of beef in shashlik marinade, and a dessert of panna cotta with autumn fruit. . . Getting to the crux of the matter, Gorbachev pontificated: "We have to, I believe, gear consumption more to people's cultural and spiritual needs. Also, through culture and education and within the framework of laws we shall have to address the problem of controlling the world's population." And control, of course, as always, is the key word and concept here. Control. Power. . . . .

But according to these cognoscenti, there are too many people on this "one planet." Willis Harman's [of Tavistock Institute at Stanford, where mind control is taught to intelligence agencies--btw] essay grapples with the "dilemma.": "In the economy-dominated world, as the outspoken anthropologist Margaret Mead once put it bluntly, 'The unadorned truth is that we do not need now, and will not need later, much of the marginal labor -- the very young, the very old, the very uneducated, and the very stupid.'"

(Is this genocide, aborticide, and agicide, or what?---btw )

"This dilemma is perhaps the most basic one we face," said Harman. Society can't afford "from an environmental standpoint, or from the standpoint of tearing apart of the social fabric -- the economic growth that would be necessary to provide jobs for all in the conventional sense, and the inequities which have come to accompany that growth. This dilemma, more than any other aspect of our current situation, indicates how fundamental a system change is now required."

In the closing plenary session of the forum, philosopher/author Sam Keen summarized the consensus of the learned ones. Among the conference participants, said Keen, "there was very strong agreement that religious institutions have to take primary responsibility for the population explosion. We must speak far more clearly about sexuality, about contraception, about abortion, about the values that control the population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the [world's] population by 90 percent and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage."

(Understand the goal of the New World Order is to exterminate or kill 75 to 90% of the lower class humans. If you happen to be a bible believing, commandment observant, Christian, you are the most "not authentically human" "defective seeds" and extermination target #1).

How do we "cut" the planet's population by 90 percent? Even genocidal mass murderers Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao combined did not come close to attaining such a "lofty" goal. As always, the devil is in the details. Forum participant Barbara Marx Hubbard may already have provided some of the devilish answer.

In The Book of Co-Creation she writes: "Out of the full spectrum of human personality, one-fourth is electing to transcend .... One-fourth is destructive [and] they are defective seeds. In the past they were permitted to die a 'natural death.' ... Now as we approach the quantum shift from the creature-human to the co-creative human -- the human who is an inheritor of god-like powers -- the destructive one-fourth must be eliminated from the social body .... Fortunately, you are not responsible for this act (of course like Jesus says in John 16:2 these fools think they are doing God service by killing the "defective seed," "not authentically humans.") We are. We are in charge of God's selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death."

Lord help us all if this de facto "Brain Trust" of diabolical misfits, murderers, megalomaniacs, terrorists, and tyrants succeed in establishing their "new world order," their "new global civilization." It should become evident that behind all the seemingly logical and "caring" words of Bill and Hillary Clinton, there may be a dreadful purpose…

Quoted from "THE NEW AMERICAN" by Wm. Jasper 1996

Psalm 2

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,

Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.

Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.

Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth.

Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.

Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

http://www.dccsa.com/greatjoy/Illumin7.htm

One on global warming .. from 2003 books of note

Go ahead, guys! Believe the soft fasicst Al Gore who stands to make billions off your gulliblity, I don't believe a WORD he says. Yes, greenhouse gases are BAD, but what's HE doing about it?

Nothing. Nothing at all. But the TRUTH will out eventually.

Same goes for the nasty Thomas Friedman. Trying to profit off your stooopidity.

Veeger.

Wipeout

New Scientist vol 178 issue 2392 -

26 April 2003, page 38

A major catastrophe 251 million years ago left life teetering on the brink of oblivion. Now for the first time we have a clear picture of what caused it, says leading palaeontologist Michael Benton

251 MILLION years ago, at the end of the Permian period, life on Earth was almost completely wiped out by an environmental catastrophe of a magnitude never seen before or since. All over the world complex ecosystems were destroyed. In the sea, coral reefs, fishes, shellfish, trilobites, plankton, and many other groups disappeared. On land, the sabre-toothed gorgonopsian reptiles and their rhinoceros-sized prey, the dinocephalians and pareiasaurs, were wiped out forever. Only 5 per cent of species survived the catastrophe, and for the next 500,000 years life itself teetered on the brink of oblivion. What terrible event could have wrought such havoc?

Two theories have been proposed - the impact of a huge meteorite or comet over 10 kilometres in diameter, or a massive and prolonged volcanic eruption. Up to now the evidence has been equivocal. But the data has been accumulating over the past 10 years, and the picture is now clear enough to say with some certainty what happened.

An impact might seem a tempting model. A massive catastrophe demands an extraordinary explanation - something unexpected, something from outer space. And we know that impacts can cause mass extinctions. It seems that the dinosaurs and many other groups of animals and plants were wiped out 65 million years ago by the impact of a huge meteorite in modern day Mexico. The crater has been found, there is good evidence for the shock wave, and for the fallout rocks and dust all round the world.

In February 2001, a team of scientists claimed they had found clear evidence that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian was also caused by a meteorite impact. Luanne Becker of the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues from NASA and other institutions announced in a paper in Science (vol 291, p 1530) that they had found extraterrestrial helium and argon in rocks from the Permo-Triassic boundary in China and Japan.

The gases were trapped inside the fullerenes or buckyballs that are often associated with impact debris. When Becker and her team looked closely at the helium and argon they found isotope ratios like nothing else on Earth, but similar to those found in meteorites. On this basis they argued that the fullerenes - and their entrapped gases - must have come from an impact.

The claim was splashed all over the press. On 23 February 2001, The New York Times reported "Meteor crash led to extinctions in era before dinosaurs". The Times said, "Asteroid collision left the world almost lifeless".

But later in 2001, several learned journals published critiques in which other geochemists tried and failed to replicate Becker's results. Other samples from the same boundary bed in China apparently contained no buckyballs, argon or helium, and a Japanese geologist, Yukio Isozaki of the University of Tokyo, pointed out that the Japanese sample came from a rock formation that didn't even include the Permian-Triassic boundary.

But Becker and her team still stand by their results. They repeated their analyses from the Chinese samples, and confirmed the helium result. They also have support from an independent source. In September 2001, Kunio Kaiho of Tohoku University in Japan reported that sediment grains from Permo-Triassic boundary sections in China show evidence of compression by impact, as well as geochemical shifts indicative of a huge impact - though his data is far from conclusive.

All in all, the evidence for an impact at the Permo-Triassic boundary is limited when compared with the mass of evidence for an asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous: the iridium anomaly (a worldwide spike in the abundance of iridium, an element derived from meteorite impacts); shocked quartz (grains showing evidence of high-pressure modification); glassy spherules (melt particles derived from sedimentary rocks); and above all an enormous crater of the correct age. The discovery of a Permian equivalent of any of these could confirm the impact theory at any moment. But for now, most geologists do not accept the impact model for the crisis at the end of the Permian.

Instead, their attention has focused on Earth-bound processes. The idea is that massive volcanic eruptions, sustained over half-a-million years or more, caused catastrophic environmental deterioration - poison gas, global warming, stripping of soils and plants from the landscape, eruption of gases from their frozen locations deep in the oceans, and mass deoxygenation. The evidence for this version of events is compelling compared with the impact hypothesis.

First and foremost, the end of the Permian was indeed characterised by huge volcanic eruptions. The remains of these are preserved in the Siberian Traps, a vast accumulation of basalt lavas some 3 million cubic kilometres in volume and covering 3.9 million square kilometres of what is now eastern Russia. Precise dating of the Siberian Traps shows that they span the boundary between the Permian and the Triassic, with the eruptions beginning perhaps 500,000 years before.

The Siberian Traps were not formed by explosive eruptions from classic cone-shaped volcanoes. More commonly, basalt is erupted through fissures, long cracks in the ground, as happens on Iceland today. Such eruptions last for a long time, and the lava bubbles up in huge volumes, spreading sideways from the fissure. They are accompanied by prodigious outpourings of gases, mostly carbon dioxide.

The effect of these gases was devastating. The full story of the havoc they wrought is written in the sedimentary rocks that span the Permo-Triassic boundary. Until the 1990s, geologists had to rely on incomplete or hard-to-date sections in northern Italy, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Reputedly excellent sections in southern China were not available to overseas geologists, mainly for political reasons.

Nothing daunted, British geologists Tony Hallam of the University of Birmingham and Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds obtained a modest travel grant from the Royal Society, and went to China in 1991. What they found amazed them: the rock record was complete, and it told the story of the crisis millimetre-by-millimetre as they worked their way through the rocks from bottom to top.

Hallam and Wignall focused on sections around the Meishan township. Working up through the succession, the last rocks deposited in the Permian were limestones containing diverse and abundant fossils, such as foraminiferans (microscopic shelled protozoans), brachiopods (lamp shells), and conodonts (jaw elements from primitive fish-like vertebrates). Rarer fossils include cephalopods (coiled molluscs that are distant relatives of the modern squid and octopus), sea urchins, starfish and small crustaceans called ostracods, all typical of warm, shallow seas. Near the top, there is extensive burrowing in the limestones, indicating conditions of full oxygenation. Clearly, life at this time was diverse and abundant.

Then, suddenly, everything changes. The thick, burrowed limestones disappear, and with them the abundant fossils. The limestone is capped by a mineral-rich layer containing lots of pyrite - a classic marker of very low atmospheric oxygen. On top of this are three layers of limestone, mudstone and clay, encompassing about half a million years. These layers, numbered as beds 25, 26 and 27 in the Chinese system, tell how the crisis unfolded, so let's look at them in more detail.

The oldest layer, bed 25, is a thin band of pale-coloured clay 5 centimetres thick in which fossils are very rare, just a few foraminiferans and conodonts. Under the microscope, this clay contains small iron-rich pellets and decayed pieces of quartz that indicate it was formed from an acidic "tuff", an amalgam of volcanic fragments and ash from an explosive volcanic eruption - presumably the Siberian Traps.

The next bed up, number 26, consists of 7 centimetres of dark, organic-rich limey mudstone in which fossils are slightly more abundant - there are brachiopods, clams and cephalopods. Based on the relatively diverse fossils, and on geochemical evidence, oxygen levels during deposition of bed 26 were low but not anoxic.

Together, beds 25 and 26 form a distinctive dark-on-light marker band that has been detected elsewhere in China, which is useful for geologists who wish to make correlations from location to location. This "ash band" has been detected so far in 12 provinces throughout China, covering at least a million square kilometres. Whatever created it was extremely far-reaching.

Bed 27 indicates some degree of environmental recovery. The 17-centimetre-thick layer of limestone is full of burrows, so bottom conditions were not especially low in oxygen. The lower part of the bed contains occasional Permian brachiopod fossils near the base. Near the top, the conodont Hindeodus parvus appears for the first time: this is the globally accepted marker for the beginning of the Triassic period. (Geological boundaries are marked by the appearance of fossils, not their disappearance. The major event happened at the base of bed 25, but no significant new species appeared until the middle of bed 27.)

What does it all mean? One of the stories the Meishan section tells is of a dramatic extinction event. In the late 1990s, Jin Yugan and his colleagues from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, and Doug Erwin from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, undertook a huge sampling programme. They found that at the base of bed 25, 116 marine species suddenly disappeared, representing 94 per cent of the total. Then, in the following 500,000 years stretching to the top of bed 27, new species appear then disappear with alarming speed. Overall a further 45 species dropped out, one at a time. Clearly something terrible happened at the base of bed 25 and its ramifications continued for half a million years.

But what exactly happened? Fortunately, the Meishan rock section, and other sections elsewhere, contain a record of environmental changes through the Permo-Triassic crisis, in the form of isotopes of oxygen and carbon. Both elements have two stable, naturally occurring isotopes whose ratios fluctuate depending on environmental conditions. The isotope ratios are locked into the skeletons of organisms during their lifetimes, so careful recordings from the shells of bivalves or foraminiferans, for example, can give a detailed picture of atmospheric and oceanic conditions through time.

Oxygen isotopes are used as a palaeothermometer. Oxygen occurs in two forms, oxygen-16 and oxygen-18. These are incorporated into the calcite skeletons of marine creatures at different rates depending on the water temperature, more oxygen-18 at low temperatures, and more oxygen-16 at high. At the base of bed 25, the main mass extinction level, there was a sudden shift in the oxygen isotope ratios indicating a worldwide rise in temperature of 6 °C. This may not sound much, but it would have a profound effect on the world's ecology. Climatologists have been getting very excited recently about a half-a-degree rise in global temperatures.

The carbon isotopes suggest what might have caused the temperature increase. They show a massive shift towards the light isotope, carbon-12, exactly at the time of the big extinction. Pulses of carbon-12 in the geological record are usually indicative of a volcanic eruption or a large die-off (plants, animals and bacteria concentrate carbon-12 in their bodies and release it when they die). Both certainly happened at the end of the Permian. But the carbon-12 pulse is far too big to be explained by these mechanisms alone. Calculations of global carbon budgets have suggested that, even if every plant, animal, and microbe died and was buried, altogether they would only account for about one-fifth of the observed carbon shift. The Siberian Traps would have added another fifth. Where did the remaining three-fifths come from?

The extra carbon-12 was probably buried, frozen deep under the oceans in the form of gas hydrates. These are extraordinary accumulations of carbon-12-rich methane locked up in cages of ice at very high pressure. If the atmosphere and oceans warm up sufficiently, these gas reserves can suddenly melt and release their contents in a catastrophic way. The explosion of gas through the surface of the oceans has been termed a "methane burp". A very large methane burp at the end of the Permian could have produced enough carbon-12 to make up the deficit.

The cause of the burp was probably global warming triggered by huge releases of CO₂ from the Siberian Traps. Methane is a greenhouse gas too, so a big burp raises global temperatures even further. Normally, long-term global processes act to bring greenhouse gas levels down. This kind of negative feedback keeps the Earth in equilibrium. But what happens if the release of methane is so huge and fast that normal feedback processes are overwhelmed? Then you have a "runaway greenhouse". This is a positive feedback system: excess carbon in the atmosphere causes warming, the warming triggers the release of more methane from gas hydrates, this in turn causes yet more warming, which leads to the release of more methane and so on. As temperatures rise, species start to go extinct. Plants and plankton die off and oxygen levels plummet. This is what seems to have happened 251 million years ago.

The effects were profound and long-lasting. In the Meishan section, the Permo-Triassic boundary in bed 27 is followed by a succession of dark limestones and shales containing sparse fossils. This seems to represent a post-apocalyptic world, in which CO₂ levels were still very high and the oceans and atmosphere were starved of oxygen. The 6 per cent of species that survived the initial onslaught were struggling. Normal recovery processes had not yet kicked in. When oxygen levels fall, plants and photosynthesising plankton in the sea normally replenish it by absorbing excess CO₂ and generating oxygen. After the crash at the end of the Permian, perhaps oxygen levels had been driven so low, and so much of plant life had been killed, that this was impossible.

The surviving species were a very poor sample of what had lived before: thin-shelled molluscs that required very little food and swam languidly over the black, deoxygenated muds, and the "living fossil" Lingula in its shallow burrows. Near the end of the Permian period, each region of the world had its own fauna and flora. Afterwards, the survivors became cosmopolitan. It took 20 or 30 million years for coral reefs to re-establish themselves, and for the forests to regrow. In some settings, it took 50 million years or more for full ecosystem complexity to recover. Geologists and palaeontologists are only just beginning to get to grips with this most profound of crises.

Michael Benton Michael Benton is head of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. His book on the end-Permian crisis, When Life Nearly Died, has just been published by Thames & Hudson, price £16.95

Environmentalist PR Firms In Green Propaganda Offensive

The corporate CEO's and investors profiting from global warming fear

Steve Watson Infowars.net Monday, April 21, 2008

PR firms headed up by corporate investors, CEO's and Directors of huge multinational companies are aggressively pushing global warming propaganda as they have come to realize that the green agenda is forging the next big commodities market.

Nowhere is this more evident than on Yahoo.com where pages and pages of articles devoid of any actual scientific reality have been collated into one giant green offshoot website.

Any visitor to Yahoo.com will today notice that the tech giant has "gone green" in recognition of Earth Day, a long running observance intended to inspire environmental awareness.

However, a closer look at the information provided on the website along with the people pushing it signals that the move represents nothing more than a huge profit making PR exercise.

Upon attempting to access my Yahoo email I was intrigued by the green Yahoo logo. Little did I know that when clicking on it I would be instantly bombarded with reactionary propaganda in it's crudest form.

Take Yahoo's "Global Warming Myths and Facts" page for example.

The agenda here is simple, they tell you what the FACTS are about global warming and remind you that any scurrilous rumours you may have heard to the contrary are MYTHS. The problem is, there is no actual evidence, just statements:

Fact: There is no debate among scientists about the basic facts of global warming.

That's strange, because last time I checked there was a raging debate with vast amounts of scientists questioning the UN backed IPCC "consensus" of just a handful of scientists and a boatload of politicians.

Fact: Any beneficial effects [of increased CO2 levels] will be far outweighed by damage and disruption.

And this is according to who? Some scientists , including the man dubbed "the father of the greenhouse effect" have postulated that the temperature increases predicted by climate models will benefit the planet, without causing any significant damage. What makes their projections MYTHS?

Fact: The global warming we are experiencing is not natural. People are causing it.

It is widely understood that CO2 constitutes a mere 0.038 percent of the atmosphere. Human CO2 production accounts for a mere 3 percent of the total CO2. The remaining 97 percent is produced naturally. Volcanic eruptions, CO2 releases from the oceans and even flatulence from cows cause more CO2 emissions than humans. Furthermore, data from all four major global temperature tracking outlets shows that the Earth is no longer getting warmer and that we are now actually in a post-warming period of global cooling.

Fact: Putting the word "fact" in front of a sentence does not make it an actual fact.

The Yahoo green onslaught is jam packed with paragraphs of such unsubstantiated claims. Highlights include:

"The only debate in the science community about global warming is about how much and how fast warming will continue."

"a mandatory cap on emissions could spur technological innovation that could create jobs and wealth. "

"The best way to lower temperature and thus reduce water vapor levels is to reduce CO2 emissions."

The only information that even mentions alternative scientific explanations for global warming trends serves to shoot them all down as dissent by focusing on lesser known fringe theories. The article linked here was written by Lime.com, a website that makes a living from peddling all manner of green accessories. Very scientific and absolutely no bias there then.

Why don't these self appointed experts try refuting the now widely accepted evidence that there has been no warming since 1998?

Why don't they write about the fact that carbon emissions have never driven climate change because as ice core samples clearly show, carbon dioxide is a consequence of temperature increase and not a cause of it, sometimes lagging behind by as much as 800 years?

Why don't they address the fact that during the most recent period of warming on Earth, there has been warming throughout the solar system due to increased sun activity?

Instead of raging about temperature rises in the Arctic, why don't they provide an opposing viewpoint to counter the scientific evidence that proves Antarctica has actually cooled since 1979?

Of course, they wouldn't dare draw attention to the more prominent dissenting views on the so called global warming "consensus".

Another featured article, Can Mutant Plants End Climate Change? suggests that some scientists believe genetically altering plants to take in more CO2 is a possible solution to the certain death we all face. Perhaps the vast swathes of cash that Monsanto, Aventis and the other biotechnology companies have pumped into "friendly" scientific studies is paying off for them.

The enviro takeover of Yahoo also calls for handy hints on how to shoot down "climate denialists," and "poor fools whose heads are in the sand".

A cursory check into the sponsors of and contributors to a large chunk of the Yahoo pages, the Environmental Defense Fund, reveals that its board of trustees is infested with corporate investors, CEO's and big business representatives.

• Chairman N J Nicholas Jr, is a renowned investor, director of Boston Scientific Corporation and Xerox Corporation, as well as having held many positions with Time Warner.
• Vice Chair Robert W. Wilson, another Wall Street investor, made his fortune in hedge funds.
• Kirsten J. Feldman is an Advisory Director for Morgan Stanley.
• Robert E. Grady is a Managing Director of The Carlyle Group.
• John H. T. Wilson is an Advisory Director for Morgan Stanley
• Roger Enrico is a former Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, Inc.
• E. John Rosenwald, Jr. was the Vice Chairman of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. (oh dear).

Another Contributor to the Yahoo green binge is the Natural Resources Defense Council, and it's a similar story with their board of trustees.

We have previously reported on warnings about the big money behind global warming propaganda.

For example, last month Howard C. Hayden, emeritus professor of physics from the University of Connecticut, was prompted to speak out after a visit to New York where he learned that scaremongering billboards about the long-term effects of global warming were being purchased at a cost of $700,000 a month.

We have also carried reports that detail how many of the world's richest and most powerful banks are pushing hard for the introduction of a 'no caps' world trading market for carbon.

So called "Carbon traders" have predicted that emissions permits could become the world’s largest commodities market.

Morgan Stanley announced last October that it “plans to invest in approximately $3 billion of carbon/emission credits, projects and other initiatives related to greenhouse gas emissions over the next five years.”

Another big winner may be Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs, part owner of the European Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Exchange – the exclusive marketplaces for trading carbon credits.

Big businesses are now buying up smaller firms which saw the coming boom in the green movement years ago.

As the London Guardian's Nick Davies has pointed out, there is a very inconvenient truth about the carbon offset industry, greenhouse gas credits do little or nothing to combat any actual global warming.

We are witnessing the emergence of carbon cartels and the rise of a phantom industry.

Warming disciples routinely accuse skeptics of kowtowing to energy giants and mega global corporations, yet the very delusion they labour under, that humans are destroying the earth, is being pushed by those they believe they are fighting against. The globalists love global warming.

This aggressive profit making propaganda offensive is a perfect example of how the environmental movement has been completely hijacked by big business and corporate investors who know when a good cash cow is ripe for milking.

Fearmongering about an imminent climate doomsday hogs news coverage and important environmental issues like GM food, mad scientist chimera cloning, deforestation, toxic waste dumping, and the usurpation and abuse of corporations like Monsanto are flying under the radar.

Just as globalist politicians, power brokers and big government have co-opted the environment movement to do what they do - secure greater draconian control measures on society and centralize power - big business has co-opted it to do what it does - make huge sums of money at the expense of the little man.

The ruling class GREENING of America (under false pretenses) gets HUGE Push!!

From the Center for American Progress.

If you are a regular reader, you have a good guess at my reaction to this.

A dumbed down population is going to have a real good time dealing with the new 'sainted' Al Gore and his profit making $chemes, is what I am going to say to THIS.

For shame, Al Gore!! For shame!! Some of us know what you are up to.

Take your dynasty and go off to Latin America with the REST of the ripoff America WAR CRIMINALS taking your private jet with you. I know what you did to Kosova; I know what you did to the victims of the war on drugs. I have watched you rip off good women's energy many many many times in the past two decades - and, sir, you do not fool me now either.

And I must say - the inclusion of Nancy Pelosi in all this is just ducky.

Nice how you shared that Nobel Prize with the inuit, Al. REAL niiiiiiice.

YUCK.

GORE LAUNCHES $300 MILLION CLIMATE CHANGE CAMPAIGN: Today, former Vice President Al Gore and his organization, the Alliance for Climate Protection, launch a bipartisan, $300 million, three-year campaign to push for climate change legislation. A press release heralded the campaign as "unprecedented in scale for a public policy issue," and the Washington Post reports that the group "aims to enlist 10 million volunteers through a combination of network and cable commercials, display ads...and online social networks." Gore said he and his wife Tipper had donated all the profits from his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, to this new campaign -- called the "We" campaign -- along with his Nobel Peace Prize money. The campaign will launch TV ads later this week that "will team up offbeat celebrity couples who may not have much in common but share a belief that it is important to address climate change." The first such ad features Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and former Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich, and others will pair up Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson, and the Dixie Chicks and Toby Keith. Sign up for the campaign here, and watch its debut ad here.