Greg Boyles

That is already happening due to famine, war, genocide and disease in over populated third world countries, e.g. Somalia. Making all possible efforts to reduce fertility in the third world will alleviate this. Apart from the fact that no one, including the third world, has any intentions of reducing their consumption....... Consumption is not the underlying problem and focusing efforts on this will do nothing to solve our problems in the long term. Therefore fertility control will be the only means by which we will successfully alleviate their suffering of the vast majority of them in the long term. And such figures should be treated with a great deal of skepticism - they represent the triumph of optimism or delusion over common sense. I could provide abundant evidence of populations already suffering severe water shortages and nations already in simmering conflict with each other over access to water. The problem is that people like you fixate on the superficial politics that underlying water (and other resources) shortages tend to get wrapped up in. As with the resources themselves, improvements in efficiency are finite. People require at least 2 litres of water per day to remain alive. You can't use water any more efficiently than that without people dieing. And if population increase continues to 9 billion many people, mainly in the third world, will start dieing despite the fact that they are using water more 'efficiently' than 2L per day. Well I agree with you Jess. But the difference between you and I is that you are using improvement in an efficiency and reduction in consumption as an excuse to do nothing about reducing fertility beyond current trends. The fact is we need to do both simultaneously. And on what evidence do you base you claim that improvement of efficiency and reduction of consumption can acheive results in a signficantly shorter time frame than actively reducing our fertility.

There is a fundamental truth in all biological systems, including our economies. Monotonic growth of anything at any level is ultimately unsustainable. Threrefore the assumption that the ETS can reduce CO2 emissions indefinitely while continuing population and economic growth is also fundamentally false. The above is not opinion but irrefutable fact. Only economists who are divorced from biology, and science in general, believe otherwise. The only biological system that defies this is cancer. But a cancerous tumour eventually kills the host and its growth ceases and it is erased from existence.

Your government may turn around on a dime but your trillions of dollars worth of debt will not. And China etc will not be able to continue accepting your government IOYs and propping up your economy indefinitely. So I think US decline is more likely in the long term than a dramatic turn around in your government and economy. I suspect that the US will take China down with it when a billion or so Chinese are flung off the US gravy train (exports to the US) and call their authoritrian government to account. No doubt there will be an enormous amount of brutal blood letting before the chinese government falls.

We are talking about recent history and subprime mortgages here. We are not discussing the total history of the USA. But I have little doubt that there were similar booms and busts through US history, contributed to by population growth (immigration or fertility). And recent population growth in the US has been driven overwhelmingly by immigration from Mexico. Immigration from Europe would amount a tiny blip on the graph. And latino immigration faciliated it. If were no hordes of naive latino immigrants over the past decade or so then the instutions would not have had so many victims to exploit and there would not have been a global financial crisis. Again this is not about who is to blame and who is not to blame. This is a simple matter of cause and effect. The supply a large numbers of naive immigrants gave opportunity to unscrupulous business people to exploit them through their (immigrants) pursuit of the american dream. Those unscrupulous americans were then given opportunity to bring down the amercian and the global economy.

Thankyou swansont. I read this as a reasonable questioning of my interpretaton without dismissing it entirely. Of course I acknowledge that a signficant proportion of subprime mortgages will have gone to african americans who have been amercians for generations. The label of immigrant is not important in this however. What is important here is population growth, that has been driven largely by espanic immigration, that has then driven demand for subprime mortgages. Espanic and other immigrants are probably largely low income earners that seek such loans so you would expect them to be signficantly represented in subprime mortgages along with african americans. I will attempt to find some data to support this. My link Conclusions. The lack of a significant relationship is contrary to past research, perhaps explained by the explosive growth of the subprime mortgage market in the United States; the increasing recognition by financial institutions of Latino immigrants as a largely untapped, yet emerging, market in the mortgage industry; the availability of alternative forms of identification; and the institutionalization of unauthorized immigration in Los Angeles My link At the same time, blacks and Latinos remain far more likely than whites to borrow in the subprime market where loans are usually higher priced. 2 In 2007, 27.6% of home purchase loans to Hispanics and 33.5% to blacks were higherpriced loans, compared with just 10.5% of home purchase loans to whites that year. http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/070505_nd.htm ">My link">My link“Homeownership rates among immigrants surged in the first half of the decade, making their prosperity an economic success story. Now it is becoming apparent that many people managed to buy homes in an inflated real estate market by turning to unusual new mortgages only now receiving scrutiny from regulators and legislators. Many of these loans start with attractive low ‘teaser’ rates but feature payments that can increase suddenly. “Unfamiliar with the U.S. mortgage market, unable to speak or read English well and vulnerable to the blandishments of real estate professionals who told them property values always rise, many immigrants are struggling to deal with high mortgage payments as their homes sag in value, making it harder to escape the loans by selling.” [Wave sinking immigrants first By Kirstin Downey, The Washington Post, March 30, 2007]

Immigrants don't come to the USA and Australia to spend their rest of their lives as virtual slave labour to the locals and to remain in those over crowded dog boxes. They all aspire to have their own house and slice of the wealth pie. I believe the subprime mortgage scheme was in part encouraged by the Clinton administration to provide social housing to a large proportion of former espanic immigrants.....with the precitable result. I actually said that unsustainable immigration into the USA was a significant cause, but not the only one, the economic collapse. If there wasn't the number of immigrants flooding into the USA then there would not have been the fuel to drive the expansion of sub-prime mortgages. And thefefore Fabulous Fab (or what ever title that cretin gave himself) would not have packaged them up as dud investments and spread them all over the US and the globe. So it is undeniable that unsustainable immigration played a signficant role in the US and global economic crisis. Without exception.......all booms eventually bust. There is one fundamental truth within all biological systems......and that is that monotonic growth of anything at any level is ultimately unsustainable. That includes the human population and our economies.

All immigrants expect a nice house like the locals. This lead to pressure on governments to provide social housing programs. This lead to the subprime mortgage crisis, the collapse of the housing market and the USA's current ecconomic problems that lead to high demand on social programs. Thererfore it is reasonable to conclude that the USA's huge immigrataion intake is in part resposible for the downfall the USA's economy. The issue of unsustainable population growth is above the immigrant blame game. The same economic crisis would have resulted if the USA's population growth was caused by increased local fertility.

I don't feel the need to justify my statements to you JohnB, because I do not agree with the premise of your criticisms. You are not asking me for explanations as to why the lynx - hare graph does not precisely match what you would expect if their relationship was perfectly coupled. What you are doing is trying to convince me that the whole theory of predator prey coupling is invalid based on this single study and based on a phrase in the supporting link I posted. Right back at you JohnB.......is that really the best you can do? I despise the Greens actually. They became the 'refugee party' over a decade ago but didn't change their party name. They are 'trading' falsely on their original name. What I came to this forum to do is to converse with people with a formal scientific background and who are familiar with the scientific process, because I am tired of conversing with QandA forum types with whom rational discussion is impossible. Here is another scientific paper for JohnB - found through Google Scholar. My link It is discussing the anomolies of predator-prey coupling based on absolute numbers of predator and prey species and how, as I understand it, examining the relationships in terms of ratio of predator to prey solves many of the commonly observed anomolies that you folks have been pointing out in the hare-lynx data. Exactly what I was trying to point out to you about ratios rather than absolute numbers as it turns out. My link Another study looking at musk rat and mink iinteraction in different parts of the musk rat range. Availability of other prey species for the mink in part of the musk rat's range results in imperfect predator and prey coupling. My link In this paper it appears that it is the mathematical models used to define predator - prey coupling that is being called in to question rather than the fact of predator prey coupling itself. Are we happy yet JohnB?

Partly because of the USA'a grossly unsustainable immigration intake (legal and illegal). All those additional poor espanics increase demand on government social programs which therefore requires increased government spending. Also due to the USA's military interventions around the globe. The US is equivalent to the Roman Empire and it is only a matter of time before it implodse resulting in a new dark ages in many parts of the world.

The ETS is based on the false assumption that you can reduce CO2 emmissions and provide enough energy through renewable energy sources while continuing to pursue economic and population growth. The only sure way to reduce CO2 emissions, and environmental degradation in general, is to reduce the number of people that are doing the cosuming to a scientifically varified sustainable limit and then pursuing a policy of zero net population and economic growth.

No can do. I don't seem to have edit access to that post of mine for some reason.

As previously stated JohnB, I simply don't accept you interpretation of the wording of the study or nor the conclusioons you draw from it. The fact that the author used the phrase "appears to be stable" is not proof that the appearance of stability is nothing more than illusion. And the fact that this single study found that lynx and hare are not perfectly coupled in a predator prey relationship does not amount to proof that there is no coupling in other predator - prey relationships. The fact that you would jump to such a sweeping conclusion based on a single paper (lynx vs hare) makes it quite clear to me that you have little or no formal science education! You appear to be responding to the lynx vs hare paper as many people do to opinion pieces by social commentators. But a scientific consensus is not arrived at based on a single scientific paper that possibly casts some doubt on a prevailing theory.

Not saying that gravity is specifically the cause of all those red shifts, merely that is another cause of red shift in general.

A strong gravitational field causes red shift of any radiation attempting to leave it. A black hole causes so much red shift to the point that the wavelength becomes infinitely long and the photons loose all their energy.

Partly because of your grossly unsustainable immigration intake (legal and illegal). All those additional poor espanics increase demand on government social programs which therefore requires increased government spending. Also due to your military interventions around the globe. The US is equivalent to the Roman Empire and it is only a matter of time before you implode resulting in a new dark ages in many parts of the world.

The substance that causes the burning sensation is oil soluble, hence oil will make it worse. Yoghurt or milk are supposed to be best at disipating the substance that burns due to their high protein content that absorbs it.

I don't deny this, but the simple fact is that the reduction in our fecundity is simply not fast enough to avoid a population crash at some point in the near future. And while third world fecundity is slowly reducing, large segments of the third world are rapidly increasing their consuption to western levels - China, India,..... Seeking to reduce global fecundity further is not at all redundant becuase it is not declining fast enough with current strategies. Your statement might have some validity if we lived in a world where citizens remained for life in their own countries and consumed only those resources they could obtain from their own territories. But that is clearly not the case is it Jess? Acquisition of resources outside their territories allows populations of countries to expand beyong the long term ecological carrying capacity of their territories. Particularly in the west and our mining acivities and our provision of emergency aid to third world countries undergoing famines etc. You can also reduce the cost of each programs by reducing the population and therefore the demand for each of them. Then you don't have to cut any of them. As Kelvin Thompson says about Australia's CO2 emissions......"It is hard to reduce your carbon foot print while you are continually adding more feet". There is only so far that you can go in increasing efficiency and decreasing individual consumption. Let's take water consumption. A person need a minimum of about 2L of water per day to survive. You cannot decrease water consumption any further than that. But if population growth continues then at some point you will STILL run out of fresh water and people will start dieing regardles of how 'efficiently' we are consuming it. While increasing in efficiency and decreasing personal consumption is essential in the short term, it is not an excuse to continue avoiding the morally difficult issue of how are we to reduce our population as rapidly and as humanely as possible. Well I disagree with your interpretation and I don't think there is any profit in debating this any further.

An areas of science that are well established and widly accepted this becomes just silly. The onus is not on me to provide proof but on you to do the background reading and therefore ask sensible and worth while questions. There is clearly some interaction between the two populations given that their numbers closely mirror each other at least some of the time. As previously stated the hares are unlikely to be the lynxs' only food source, especially if the study was conducted over too large an area. Rubbish! The study also states that such closed and contrived laboratory conditions lack the stability of real world systems due to the lack of complexity. But until they do collapse it clearly demonstrates the coupling between predator and prey numbers. Look JohnB I prefer to accept what the vast majority of the biological community says about predator-prey relationships rather than accept your personal opinion and interpretations on the subject. You sound far to like Andrew Bolt on the subject of climate change for me to consider you as credible. The theory of evolution is also a model that is used to describe ecological interactions, but it does not account for random genetic drift within a population. The predator-prey cycle is applied to one relationship between one predator species and one prey species where the latter is the main food source of the former. And it is as good at making predictions about both as is evolution. But in the real world, where things are substantionally more complex and where the predator can eat other prey species some of the time there can never be perfect correlation within the predator-prey cycle. Never the less the predator-prey cycle is as much biological fact as is evolution.

You will just get a precipitate containing a mixture of CuCO3 (green) and Cu(OH)2 (light blue). As far as I am aware tatrate ion is not a ligand for Cu so reagent A will not eventually dissolve the precipate that forms innitially.

JohnB I am making statements about widely accepted ecological theory. Your questioning the basic theory of predator prey coupling is as foolish as some one questioning the theory of evolution. While precise details of both are still to be filled in and finalised, the frame works of the theories are now beyond questioning. All you are saying to me is that you have studied little or no biology and have a poor undersanding about the ecological concepts I am enunciating. Predator-prey coupling Here is one link! Satisfied? I am sure that I could come up with a few tens of thousands of other reputable sources telling you the exact same thing! Both on the web and in university libraries. Big deal. We are not talking about a precise mathematical relationship here. We are talking about a complex biological system with many links and therefore about curves of best mathematical fit. Although hare are the main prey of lynx, did you consider that lynx are capble of preying on animals other than hares when they are plentiful enough. E.G. From a movie I once saw about a biologist living in the Alaskan wilderness to study wolves .......... wolves normally prey on medium to large herbivores, but when in Alaskan tundra in spring they feed on voles which undergo a seasonal population explosion and are therefore far easier to catch. Did you consider that the lynx are doing something similar and that this might account for the increase in lynx numbers predating the increase in hare numbers? So perhaps if the graph included the numbers of all prey species, not just hares, then the anomoly in relation to the hare numbers you have pointed out would be accounted for. But as with climate change, short term minor variations do not disprove the overwhelming pattern.

Ok then predator and prey populations that clearly not geographically separated such as the African savannas and any other similar habitats. Surely we are not going to engage in a debate about the validity of proven demonstrable tenant of ecological theory (and basic common sense) based on one study whose data may or may not represent non-interacting or partially interacting populations of predator and prey. Look I am not going to give you lessen on basic ecology (predator prey relationships) on this forum. Go and do you own background reading and then come back here and question my posts - it is basic scientific fact that you learn at secondary school biology.

What ever the precise year by year details of the relationship are, the undeniable fact is that you can never have a lynx population that is equal or larger to than the hare population. Universally true for all predator prey relationships. Similarly you can never have a hare population so large that it consumes vegetation faster than it can grow. So we are arguing about the nature of the equilibrium not that equilibrium exists. You are arguing that there is little or no equilibrium in the absolute numbers of hares and lynx because they fluctuate quite widely. But I am arguing that there MUST be equilibrium in terms of the proportions of each animal. Without equilibrium both species would go extinct in a short space of time. All animal population tend towards proportional equilibrium - it is an evolutionary inevitability. Those animals that don't remain in proportional equilibrium with their food sources become extinct. As will we if we don't start collectively using that grey matter we pride ourselves on. On that graph, if you divided the number of hares by the number of lynx at each corresponding peak and trough you would propbably find that the resulting fraction remains within a fairly narrow band.

Laying down of memories does involve formation of new synapses however. Loss of short term and memories certainly does involve the loss of temporarily formed synapses. No matter how hard you try you would never recall, in detail, an incident where you were trying to remember where you parked your car upon exiting the shopping centre 2 years ago for example. Inability to recall a longer term memory probably possibly does involve loss of some synapses in the pathways that allow you to access a stored memory, but not necessarily loss of synapses associated directly with the memory. The CNS is quite dynamic and unused pathways are alomost certainly 'pruned' to some extent. When you do attempt to re-call a rarely accessed memory, whose pathways have been pruned, presumably you end up accessing the memory via an indirect patway and therefore require greater effort in recalling it.

Those dendrites and nerve collections associated with long term memories are permanent I guess, otherwise you would loose your memories. But those associated with short term memory, such as where did I park my car 20 minutes ago, are lost. There are 3 types of memory I believe - short term (where are my keys), medium term (a dance routine for a concert next month) and long term (my name and birthday). Indicating how long the denedrites and synapses last.

Ahhh, but within galaxies and galaxy clusters presumably gravity has won out locally over expansion. In which case expansion of the universe is indeed uneven due to the presence of large concentrations of matter.