Thursday, June 7, 2012

Doomsday Environmental Fearmongers Will Not Go Away

These "scientists" and the United Nations make a living from instilling fear in people, coercing them to pay higher taxes giving them more control.  The late, lamented Michael Crichton was "spot on" with his book "State of Fear".  Nature will pretty much take its course, no matter what us "insignificant" humans do.  Giving money to these self-serving "scientists" and the United Nations is a total waste.

Do a search for Michael Crichton on this blog for much more information on his expose' of environmental fear tactics.

Peter

Environmental collapse now a serious threat: scientists

Climate change, population growth and environmental destruction could cause a collapse of the ecosystem just a few generations from now, scientists warned on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The paper by 22 top researchers said a "tipping point" by which the biosphere goes into swift and irreversible change, with potentially cataclysmic impacts for humans, could occur as early as this century.

The warning contrasts with a mainstream view among scientists that environmental collapse would be gradual and take centuries.

The study appears ahead of the June 20-22 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, the 20-year followup to the Earth Summit that set down priorities for protecting the environment.
The Nature paper, written by biologists, ecologists, geologists and palaeontologists from three continents, compared the biological impact of past episodes of global change with what is happening today.

The factors in today's equation include a world population that is set to rise from seven billion to around 9.3 billion by mid-century and global warming that will outstrip the UN target of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The team determined that once 50-90 percent of small-scale ecosystems become altered, the entire eco-web tips over into a new state, characterised especially by species extinctions.
Once the shift happens, it cannot be reversed.

To support today's population, about 43 percent of Earth's ice-free land surface is being used for farming or habitation, according to the study.

On current trends, the 50 percent mark will be reached by 2025, a point the scientists said is worryingly close to the tipping point.

If that happened, collapse would entail a shocking disruption for the world's food supply, with bread-basket regions curtailed in their ability to grow corn, wheat, rice, fodder and other essential crops.
"It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point," said lead author Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California in Berkeley.

"The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations."

The authors stressed it was unclear when this feared tipover would happen, given blanks in knowledge about the phenomenon.

And they said there were plenty of solutions -- such as ending unsustainable patterns of growth and resource waste -- that mean it is not inevitable.

"In a nutshell, humans have not done anything really important to stave off the worst because the social structures for doing something just aren't there," said Arne Mooers, a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University in Canada's British Columbia.

"My colleagues who study climate-induced changes through the Earth's history are more than pretty worried," he said in a press release. "In fact, some are terrified."  (Yes, they're terrified they're going to lose their funding and government pensions.)

Past shifts examined in the study included the end of the last Ice Age, between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago, and five species mass extinctions which occurred around 443 million, 359 million, 251 million, 200 million and 65 million years ago.

Earth today is vulnerable to fast change because of the growing connectedness between ecosystems, voracious use of resources and an unprecedented surge in greenhouse gases, the authors concluded.
In a report on Wednesday issued ahead of the "Rio+20" summit, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warned that burgeoning populations and unsustainable patterns of growth were driving Earth towards "unprecedented" eco-damage.

Environmentalists Screw It Up Down Under

It is not just in the U.S.A. that "environmentalists" and their liberal elitist enablers screw things up in their ignorance of science and basic economics.  I won't even mention their lack of knowledge about human nature.  The utterly absurd and unfounded belief in the myth of man-caused global warming has led and is leading to disasters such as this in Australia, and is being repeated around the world.

Let your politicians know enough is enough.  End the nonsense!
Peter

Upstream on the Mitchell River near the juncti...
Upstream on the Mitchell Rive (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
FLOODS? On Gippsland's Mitchell River? Again? What a surprise to anyone stupid enough to trust the warmist politicians who recently ran this sorry state.
Remember how the Bracks and Brumby governments refused to build a cheap dam on the Mitchell River for a quarter of the price of their $5.7 billion desalination plant?

Remember how Labor even turned the dam reservation on the Mitchell into a national park to stop anyone else from building a dam on Victoria's fastest-flowing river - a dam to harvest cheap water for booming Melbourne and minimise the flooding you're now seeing downstream?

Remember premier John Brumby insisting global warming was drying up our rains, so a new dam would be useless since "we don't lack for storage, we lack for rain"?
Remember Melbourne Water parroting the same warming creed, arguing against a dam on the Mitchell because a "rainfall-dependent water source in the face of rapidly changing climate patterns is very risky"?

Yeah, right.
Now let's remember what came next.

Let's remember how the undammed Mitchell flooded in 2007, sending a year's worth of drinking water for Melbourne down to the sea.

Let's remember how pigheaded Labor nevertheless ploughed ahead with its desalination plant, now hopelessly behind schedule and over budget.
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