Posted on 01/28/2011 7:10:57 AM PST by SeekAndFind
We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn't enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil. But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion ... there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon.
According to a new study, however, war is indeed good for something -- the environment. ...
The study appears to reaffirm cold-blooded Malthusian common sense: there will be more of something (trees) when there are less of the parasites (people) cutting that something down.
So, can we safely assume that to save the planet we just need to wipe each other out in a series of protracted wars? Even that, according to Pongratz's study, may not be enough to overcome the negative effects of deforestation-induced climate change.
"It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era," says Pongratz, lead author of the study in a press release. "Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth‘s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture."
The answer to how this happened can be told in one word: reforestation. When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
... the Mongol invasion cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
So how did Genghis Khan, one of history's cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today's environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire - with a high body count.
Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.
I don’t even know where to begin. For the moment I am speechless.
But I’ll be back.
No wonder the nazis and soviets are their heroes. Heck, Hitler even invented a little enviro-friendly car and Mussolini made the trains run on time. What were we thinking opposing these people back then? < /sarc >
This has to be satire. I am being serious...is this satire?
Sick, sick, sick. Now let’s get some real scientists with no agenda other than truth to put these death mongerers in their place.
RE: This has to be satire. I am being serious...is this satire?
Does this news release look like satire to you ?
See here :
http://carnegiescience.edu/news/war_plague_no_match_deforestation_driving_co2_buildup
Sometimes, fact is stranger than fiction.
“People are the cause of all the problems; we have too many of them; we need to get rid of some of them, and this (ban of DDT) is as good a way as any.” Charles Wurster, Environmental Defense Fund.
“The world has a cancer, and that cancer is man”. Alan Gregg, former longtime official of the Rockerfeller Foundation
“Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.” ~ John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” ~ Dave Foreman, Earth First! and Sierra Club director (1995-1997)
MORE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2395062/posts
The Eco-kooks are in fact, kooks.
There are some who would beat their plowshares back into swords and seek a reckoning.
To the LEFT, MAN is an animal which is bereft of soul, dignity, and moral standing. MAN, to the left, is the problem that must be solved by the elites. This has been tried before by Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, and Fidel Castro.
So does abortion.
Retards.
This is where people like me who have trouble believing in God continue to pay lip-service to God. Without a religion, man is lost, lost, lost...
From Climate Control to Population Control: Troubling Background on the ‘Evangelical Climate Initiative’
http://www.acton.org/old/fcctpc.php
<>
Evangelicals Push Back Against Global Warming Doom
http://www.christianpost.com/comments/ebeisner
Dec 04, 2009
In a May 2006 speech to the World Bank, Richard Cizik, Vice President for Governmental Affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, reportedly told the audience, “I’d like to take on the population issue, but in my community global warming is the third rail issue. I’ve touched the third rail . . . but still have a job. And I’ll still have a job after my talk here today. But population is a much more dangerous issue to touch. . . We need to confront population control and we canwe’re not Roman Catholics after allbut it’s too hot to handle now.” Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, was there that day, recorded the statement, and later transcribed it. * Source: http://www.acton.org/files/fcctpc.pdf.
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“...But it gets even more sinister. Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, “Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing.” [snip] Junk Science of the Century: The DDT ban http://www.junkscience.com/jan00/century.htm
See where Mao, Linen, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Tito. Tojo, Mussiloni, Napolean etc. failed, they didn’t kill enough people. Really very clear ain’t it??
If they were truly serious about saving "mother earth" they would have to commit suicide !
Michael Crichton:
“...what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false. This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. “
I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigious science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependent on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good.
On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
“...environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. ....
When people use “crisis-mongering” words like, “to prevent irreversible environmental damage” , it reminds me of people like Carl Sagan who in 1991 predicted on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter effect, causing a “year without a summer,” and endangering crops around the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that “it should affect the war plans.” None of it happened.
“Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.
Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm.
I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all-—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day.
At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
“...But let’s return to religion. ..... what about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it’s interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there-—though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they’re human. So what. Unfortunately, it’s not just one prediction. It’s a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing.
I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigious science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependent on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good.
On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. ....
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed.
Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.
Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover.
We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm.
I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all-—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past.
So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that. ..” ~ Michael Crichton “Environmentalism as Religion” - September 15, 2003
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches.html
It is no coincidence that population control and environmentalism have always been inextricably entwined in the grand scheme of liberal ideology demanding an annual sacrifice of roughly two million, four hundred and thirty thousand infants, pending mothers and their untallied unborn? This is not ecology. This is not conservation. This is genocide.
A Green Eco-Imperialist Legacy of Death
http://www.junkscience.com/malaria_clock.html
bttt
bttt
Good intentions cause most of the world’s great evils.
When Good People Do Bad Things (If you want good to prevail, the key is wisdom, not the heart)
National Review ^ | 06/14/2010 | Dennis Prager
http://article.nationalreview.com/436333/when-good-people-do-bad-things/dennis-prager
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Secular Progressives (liberal leftists) hold a worldview about man’s existence different from those who hold to the Judeo-Christian worldview. It goes in this order…
Judeo-Christian worldview: (Man is the pinnacle of God’s creation and is supposed to rule the earth and all that comes with it. Not rule over other men but the resources of the earth to improve existence in a benevolent manner.)
Man
Animals
Birds
Fish
Plants
Earth
Of course we want to take care of the earth – we need it and we do take care of it. The biggest proof that our environment is actually always improving is human life expectancy and quality of health less than 200 years ago life expectancy was less than 30 years. How can we live to 80 and beyond today if we have poisoned our planet? It just doesn’t add up.
It’s IMPORTANT that you read this when you have time: http://web.archive.org/web/20060402205422/http://nwi.org/
Now look at the Secular Progressives…this is how they look at our existence…
Earth
Animals
Birds
Fish
Plants
Man
Man is at the bottom. We must all serve the earth. We must always inconvenience man at the benefit of the others. It makes absolutely no sense and that is exactly why today – you will go to jail for destroying an eagle’s egg but not go to jail for getting rid of human beings before they are born.
More IMPORTANT reading here: The Almighty, Liberals [Regressives calling themselves “Progressives”] and Liberty - By Dennis Prager 10/12/2010 http://jewishworldreview.com/1010/prager101210.php3
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Biodiversity: Replaces Climate Change As The Weapon For Political Control
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/29005
Thursday, October 21, 2010
“..Among the many prominent converts to the Julian Simon world view on population and environmental issues were Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Despite howls of protest from the international population control lobby, in 1984 the Reagan administration adopted Simon’s positionthat the world is not overpopulated and that people are resource creators, not resource destroyersat the United Nations Population Conference in Mexico City. The Reaganites called it “supply-side demographics.” Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, Simon traveled by invitation to the Vatican to explain his theories on population growth. A year later Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter urged nations to treat their people “as productive assets. ..”
Julian Simon Remembered: It’s A Wonderful Life by Stephen Moore
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n2-1.html
“I saw the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Couldn’t believe how anti-human, anti-progress, paranoid environmentalist it was. And stupid. Then that Canadian newspaper editorial called for mandatory one child policies to reduce human population, and recited some of the same insanity about mankind destroying the Earth. In the movie, these brilliant aliens who somehow progressed enough to travel the universe, decide we have to be exterminated along with everything we’ve created. Because WE are harming other species! The moviemakers didn’t see the insanity in that? Then we are given a reprieve but ALL energy is eliminated from our lives. That’s the price we have to pay for being allowed to exist. These kooks believe exactly what was portrayed in that movie.” # 20
Rich nations to offset emissions with birth control
Guradian, UK ^ | 3 December 2009 | John Vidal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/03/carbon-offset-projects-climate-change
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