Forrest had been busy.

One of the calls on Forrest's time was a carbon sequestration project for which he was a consultant. Forrest wasn't convinced that atmospheric carbon dioxide really was all that much of a problem, but it was nice being on the bleeding edge of planetary engineering innovation, even if one couldn't talk too freely about it. So much of its technical detail was classified as 'commercial in confidence', which everyone now knows trumps just about any other information security classification that may be imposed. Far higher than mere old 'top secret'.

Upon the return to his high-rise lifestyle after his stint in the field, Forrest noted that daggett had been getting a bit of a rough trot on OLO at the hands (or was it the bad mouths?) of the forumscoffers lately. That was unfortunate. One thing that everyone other than the forumscoffers had to admit was that daggett was good at links. Forumscoffers were hardly ever guilty of posting a link, and more and more contributors were noticing that fact. The best the forumscoffers could offer in return was some mealy-mouthed attempt at suggesting some sort of relationship between a contributor and a missing link!

dagget worried too much about population here in Oz, Forrest thought.

Forrest had been taking a novel approach to population. He had been reading Hugo; Graeme, that is, not Victor.

Professor Graeme Hugo, (who had gained his PhD in demography in 1975), had written an article for inclusion in Year Book Australia 2001 titled 'A Century of Population Change in Australia'. It started on page 169. He made in it the critical observation that the average number of children born to women in Australia by 2001 was only 1.7 in the first seven words on page 170.

That's below replacement rate!

That means that the only population pressure in Oz is now one being put upon itself by migration.

Forrest thought an afterthought: "Ludwig needs to know that".

It was good being girt by sea. Ozzians should prepare to take full advantage of that.

FG,

I appreciate the support for me here and on the 9/11 Truth forum at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=0 What makes my situation worse is that I gain the distinct impression that even Graham Young himself has taken the side of the forumscoffers against myself. Certainly, I have received no sympathy when I have pointed out to him the harm that was being done to that and many other forums by people who have openly stated that they have no intention of discussing the issue seriously.

As a result of one complaint, the moderator suspended both my account and the account of the person I was complaining against (although curiously the suspension of the other account was not applied until I complained of that fact). He apparently deemed my alleged use of a second account to occasionally get around the restrictions of OLO as every bit as bad as persistent personal abuse and persistent refusal of others to seriously discuss the topic at hand.

I somehow don't think that most other OLO users would agree.

In any case, anyone who wishes to argue fairly and with logic and evidence is at a distinct disadvantage to someone who is there (I believe) with the intention of preventing others from gaining a clear understanding of the issue with obfuscation, non-sequiturs, straw men, personal abuse and various other debating ploys. Almost every sentence of the latter type of contribution seems to require at the very least a sizable paragraph to counter.

As the extremely unsophisticated OLO rules often don't allow for people placed in such a situation to respond in a timely fashion to all of the specious arguments, it should be no surprise that some serious OLO contributors have placed themselves in situations where they can be accused by the trolls of having made use of a second account.

One would expect a reasonable and fair moderator to be understanding in these circumstances, but this has not been the case.

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Whilst we should all appreciate having a free service set up in this way, if the administrators are going to have the mindset that thoughtful, honest and well-meaning contributors, if accused of having broken a rule, have no right to complain about clearly destructive and harmful behaviour of others, and, furthermore, if the administrators make no proactive efforts to curb these abuses then I question the value of OLO.

As I said on the other forum, this is one reason why a number of people I know just don't bother with OLO.

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Whilst this may also be going off topic, geosequestration seems insane to me. There will necessarily be a huge additional energy cost and material to transport, store and bury the CO2 underground. It defies the imagination to think that there are any safe means to store massive quantities of CO2 underground that it is assured to prevent it from violently and catastrophically erupting and finding its way back to the surface in the coming decades, centuries and millenia.

There would be huge obvious incentives to find ways to cut corners to cheat altogether, particularly in a privatised free market. The amount of bureaucracy needed if there were to be any hope of making this system work would be astronomical. If it were to be maintained over anywhere near the necessary timescale, the costs would be prohibitive. Barbara Friese discusses this on pp255-257 of "Coal - a human history" (2003).

The obvious solution is to scale down as from today our wasteful consumption of natural resources including fossil fuels. If we could find ways to live worthwhile existences without such profligate uses of our natural resources in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then I am sure that we could do so again if we cast off the straightjacket of economic 'rationalist' ideology and took back from our wealthy elites what they have stolen from the rest of us in recent decades through the subversion (and often outright destruction) of our democratic institutions as Naomi Klein has chronicled so well in "The Shock Doctrine" (2007).

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Clearly we also need, as a matter of urgency, to limit human numbers so that we stand some hope of reducing our excessive impact on the natural environment can be reduced to what is sustainable.

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FG, even if the birthrate is less than the replacement rate, births still exceed deaths at the moment, because of longer life expectancies, so it is still a problem, but, of course, not nearly as much as high immigration as you pointed out.

I see that the barking dogs on the "9/11 Truth" forum have fallen silent for the time being.

That is a good thing but they have still succeeded in doing a great deal of harm in the meantime.

“Forrest thought an afterthought: "Ludwig needs to know that".”

Thanks for thinking of li’’le ol’ Luddie, Forrest.

I’ve addressed this point a number of times on this forum, but do you think I can find one of my relevant posts that I could refer you to? A bloody hour or more spent looking and nope…buggrit! [Ludwig has just written so much crap that he can’t find any of the good stuff on his user list!! ( :>| ]

So I’ll repeat it here…

We still have a very considerable rate of population growth due to births. Even if immigration was reduced to net zero, we would still have a fair old rate of growth. If you look at the birthrate – which was about 1.76 before the disgusting baby bonus was pushed and boosted by Howard and Costello, and is now considerably higher, but still not up to 2, you’d wonder how this could be.

The answer is that this fertility rate is the personal fertility rate, not the national fertility rate. There are far more breeding people in our population than there would be in a stable or ‘natural’ population distribution. So even though the average number of babies per couple is below 2, the disproportionately high number of breeding people means that the national birthrate is considerably higher than the death rate.

So it certainly ain’t a case of immigration exerting the only population pressure in this country.

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Agreed Daggett: sequestration seems to be absurd.

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You and Forrest might be interested in my comments here http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8077#126208