Water Is Replacing Climate As The Next UN Environmental Resource Scare

Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

– H.L.Mencken

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to prove human CO2 is causing global warming as evidenced by their incorrect projections. Their hypothesis said global temperature would rise as CO2 levels increased. It hasn’t for 15+ years. It doesn’t matter where the heat went, their hypothesis that human CO2 is driving temperature and climate is disproved. The null hypothesis that it isn’t CO2, which they ignore, is proved.

CO2 was the premeditated IPCC target because it was the exhaust of industrialized developed nations. Maurice Strong said those nations were the problem for the planet and it’s our responsibility to get rid of them? Show their exhaust is causing runaway warming and you achieve the goal. The IPCC failure means CO2 and climate lost their potential as the vehicle for political change. What’s next?

Exploitation of fear about environmental problems kept shifting from ozone depletion, acid rain, desertification, rainforest destruction, global warming, sea level rise, climate change, and climate crisis, among others. In Farad Manjoo’s^[1] post-fact society, water, like all previous environmental issues is used to push an ideology or political agenda with experts providing the ‘facts’. A synopsis of his book wonders,

“Why has punditry lately overtaken news? Why do lies seem to linger so long in the cultural subconscious even after they’ve been thoroughly discredited? And why, when more people than ever before are documenting the truth with laptops and digital cameras, does fact-free spin and propaganda seem to work so well?”

Once the problem is falsely established, control is not far behind. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) needs a replacement. It must be a natural global resource, little understood by most so they can easily mislead transcend national boundaries and quickly raise passions and concerns. The target, water, is already in play.

Figure 1

UNEP, the agency that brought you Agenda 21 and the IPCC established The International Decade for Action ‘WATER FOR LIFE’ 2005-2015. On the 20th anniversary of World Water Day UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said, “Water holds the key to sustainable development,” “We must work together to protect and carefully manage this fragile finite resource.” The UN established a base of declining water quality, not of quantity, as shown in Figure 1. The focus is quality because there are no water shortages. There are regions of deficit and surplus, which change over time.

Environment Canada (EC) produced the map information, but their credibility is close to zero because of involvement in the IPCC from the start. (Notice “Insufficient data” is the largest region.) EC Assistant Deputy Minister Gordon McBean chaired the founding meeting of the IPCC in Villach, Austria in 1985. He was also instrumental in creation of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) that provided most of the IPCC 2007 Report on that region. It is a very inadequate Report.

Recently Gregory showed on Watts Up With That how EC’s climate model is the worst of any used by the IPCC. EC display their failures on their web page. Figure 2 shows their 12 month precipitation forecast on the top half and a map of the accuracy of previous forecasts on the bottom. Notice it is ”Not significantly better than chance” for over 90 percent of the map. Publishing these results shows either an incomprehensible level of arrogance or knowledge they won’t be held accountable.

Figure 2

As a climatologist I learned early that droughts are the most devastating climate events. One list of the top 20 world weather disasters of the 20^th century illustrates the point. Two extremes dominated, first drought and second flooding. This led to teaching a Water Resources course at university for 20+ years. I served on the Manitoba Water Commission for 17 years resolving water conflicts. I was appointed Chair of the Assiniboine River Management Advisory Board charged with developing a management strategy for an entire drainage basin. The need was triggered by the severe drought of 1988/89 that produced the lowest flow on the river in 90+ years of record. Fortuitously, the river’s highest flow occurred just six years later, providing the basis for planning for natural extremes.

Figure 3

Water is not lost, only taken out of the Water Cycle (Figure 3) in one place and returned elsewhere. Like with the Carbon Cycle, we have virtually no measures of any segment. I discussed the limitations of precipitation data previously. They are worse for river flows, lake volumes or any other water data.

At the 2011 Heartland Institute Sixth International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC somebody asked about the next major environmental scare. I said, overpopulation would continue as the underlying theme, as it has from Malthus to the Club of Rome (COR) to Agenda 21, but water was the next target.

Malthus argued population would outgrow food supply. The COR argued it would outgrow all resources accelerated by industry, hence the demonizing of CO2 to achieve Maurice Strong’s goal. Paul Ehrlich linked food and water in his completely flawed book The Population Bomb. The COR listed water third after pollution and global warming as its target in the 1991 publication The First Global Revolution.

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

In UN’s Agenda 21 it’s a separate category in Chapter 18 – The Water Page.

18.3. The widespread scarcity, gradual destruction and aggravated pollution of freshwater resources in many world regions, along with the progressive encroachment of incompatible activities, demand integrated water resources planning and management.

It’s a false claim, like most assumptions made when environment and science are used for a political agenda. However, if the science doesn’t work there’s the standard fall back of the precautionary principle covered in Agenda 21, Principle 15.

In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

They define “lack of full scientific certainty” and it becomes a conflict between genuine uncertainty and what is required to promote the political agenda.

All the terminology familiar to the CO2 issue is now in use for water. The Water Footprint of a product is the volume of freshwater appropriated to produce the product, taking into account the volumes of water consumed and polluted in the different steps of the supply chain. Like the Carbon Footprint it is a totally contrived and meaningless measure, but allows environmental guilt finger pointing.

Peak Oil was created to imply we were running out of the resource – as the COR Limits to Growth predicted. The term Peak Water has been put forward as a concept to help understand growing constraints on the availability, quality, and use of freshwater resources. Neither “Peak” is valid.

World Water Day was established at Rio 1992 but implemented first on 22 March 1993. On Water Day June 2012 in conjunction with Rio +20 they identified the following objectives as they already knew climate change was not unfolding as they predicted.

• Demonstrate to the broad range of stakeholders, particularly decision makers, that some of the major challenges facing humanity today relate to water management; this will be based on findings of the major UN-Water reports.

• Identify major water issues that connect with the themes of the Rio+20 Conference, particularly its link with the notion of green economy.

• Focus on the means of implementation, especially the action areas where UN organizations and agencies can act together through UN-Water.

These are similar global policy directions and takeovers promoted by the IPCC through the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

In the US recently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began the process of control over water similar to the one they followed for CO2. One commentator says this is ongoing.

A full scale attack by EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to take control of all water from any source whatsoever is under way. What these agencies are attempting is an end run around water and land rights. These agencies are constructing regulations and fictional jurisdictional control.

Calling it carbon then defining it as a pollutant created deliberate confusion over CO2. The Canadian government listed it as a toxic substance – the terminology changes to suit the legal definitions in place. The EPA defined it as a “harmful substance” and arranged for the US Supreme Court to agree on that term thereby giving them control. The focus with water is quality under existing laws.

According to senior EPA officials, the rule, crafted by both the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, will provide greater clarity about which waters are subject to Clean Water Act (CWA) jurisdiction and greater certainty about which activities require CWA permits.

Environmentalism was a necessary new paradigm hijacked by a few for a political agenda. The goal was political control with subjugation of individuals and their rights to a world government through the UN. Elaine Dewar, author of The Cloak of Green explained,

“Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.”

Neil Hrab wrote,

“What’s truly alarming about Maurice Strong is his actual record. Strong’s persistent calls for an international mobilization to combat environmental calamities, even when they are exaggerated (population growth) or scientifically unproven (global warming), have set the world’s environmental agenda.”

Strong appeared to achieve his goal with CO2 through the UN, particularly the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that gave the IPCC effective control of national weather agencies and therefore national policy. Global warming seemed like an easy control agenda until nature took over. Instead of acknowledging their science was wrong the UNEP, IPCC and national environment agencies simply moved the goalposts to climate change and more recently to climate crisis. Now that is failing a move to a new goalpost, water, is underway to pursue the real objective – total control. As always it is cloaked in righteousness (green). Who could oppose a desire for clean air or water?

^[1] Manjoo, F., 2008, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-fact Society.