Majesterium and the Tipping Point

Majesterium and the Tipping Point 

RH

Sott.net

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:17 EST

"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

Angel by William Blake

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!"

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...

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?

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.

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?

The subheading of the above article summarizes: "Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don't." Indeed.

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.

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.

Or maybe there's an ulterior motive:

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 will 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 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.

Now here's the kicker. How does global warming trigger volcanic eruptions?

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.

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.

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.

But don't worry! Catastrophe can be avoided:

Epic Flood Triggered Ancient "Big Chill," Study Says


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.

And of course all you have to do is cut back on emissions. Our rulers and regulators will decide what's best for us.

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.

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.

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:

"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.

"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.

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?

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.

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)

©Kristan-Tollmann	Fig. 8.9

These scientists aren't the only ones to suggest such catastrophes.

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.

...

[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.

Recently Nature featured an article on Mammoth tusks:

Bullet-like pieces of what is thought to be an ancient meteorite
shower have been found embedded in mammoth tusks and bison bone.

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."

And there's also the Holocene Impact Working Group:

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.

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.

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.

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.