Once again I have to agree with David ..

The Joe-cell defies the laws of physic .. uh huh.

The skeptic in me just screams out for an explanation, which in the various pages is not forthcoming.

For a while people get sucked in by the conjurers tricks, but eventually people realize.

Hoping and wishing something is true, does not make it so.

The desire to find renewable or "free" energy sources is always going to bring out charlatans.

(I only read the post because of David's comments, and it reinforced what I thought some time ago about these posts of oug. I knew guys when I was young who got into interesting substances, who sounded like and raved in a like manner.)

The good oil on Easter Island: “archaeological evidence clearly points to that the main cause of the demise of the island’s tree cover as rats”
Quite so, humans were incidental to the presence of rats - just as the Anopheles mosquito is incidental to the presence of the Plasmodium parasite which is the malarial infection.
And so it is with oils - the number of humans depending upon cheap oil for energy and fertiliser is just incidental to the development of a shortage of readily-exploited oil reserves.

colinsett
yes, I can agree to that. People brought the rats so they must take some of the blame for the eventual distruction of Easter Island's tree cover - just so Diamond's stuff vanishes into the history of nutty theories..

It is strange that a nutter like Diamond manages to get published in Science, probably one of the two most respected peer-reviewed science journals in the world. I (and almost certainly Diamond) don't dispute that there are errors in "Collapse", as there would be in any book of similar length. Here is what Diamond has to say to his critics on Eater Island

"Thus, major changes unfolded on Easter Island before European arrival. Those changes included deforestation; the loss of palm sap as a food and water source; switching from wood to grasses and sedges as fuel; establishing stone mulching; ceasing to carve statues, because deforestation meant no more big logs and fiber rope for transport; abandoning upland plantations, probably used to feed workers transporting statues; and (as described in oral traditions) increases in warfare, statue destruction by rival clans, and use of refuge caves. However, alternative views have been proposed.

One view is a version of Rousseau's noble savage myth: the claim that bad things began happening on Easter only after European arrival (13-15). Undoubtedly, Europeans on Easter, as elsewhere in the Pacific, did serious harm through slave raids, worsened erosion, and introduced diseases, grazing animals, and plants. But this view ignores or dismisses the abundant evidence, summarized above, for pre-European impacts.

Another view recognizes pre-European deforestation but blames it on hypothesized droughts (2). However, there is no direct information about climate change on Easter between A.D. 1000 and 1700. Easter's forests had already survived tens of thousands of years of climate fluctuations (1), and it seems unlikely that a drought in the 1600s (if there was one) destroyed the forests just coincidently soon after human arrival."

Cont'd

Cont'd

Rest of quote from Diamond:

"According to a third view, deforestation was caused by introduced rats, as suggested by rat gnaw marks on many nuts of the extinct palm (15). This hypothesis does not account for all those palm stumps cut off at the ground and burned, nor for the larger number of palm nuts burned rather than gnawed, nor for the disappearance of the long-lived palm trees themselves (with an estimated life span of up to 2000 years) (16). If rats were responsible, they were unusual ones, equipped with fire and hatchets. Thousands of other Pacific islands overrun by introduced rats were not deforested, and many other tree species that survived on other rat-infested islands disappeared on Easter (16)."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5845/1692

diamond is absolutely correct

collapse is always caused by a combination of events

overpopulation however is the common thread

" If, for whatever reason, humans fail to stop population growth and growth in the rates of consumption of resources, Nature will stop these growths."

ie Easter Island and the viking settlements on Greenland

western europe delayed collapse by exporting surplus people to north america, australia, india etc