Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Despite decades of militia atrocities, religious lunacy, terrorism, kidnapping of aid workers, attacking schools, kidnap and murder of educated people, and export of terror attacks against the West, Salon thinks the current food crisis in dangerous parts of Africa and Arabia is our fault because climate.
Climate change as genocide: But the international response is essentially a shrug of indifference
Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk of disease and starvation than at this very moment
MICHAEL T. KLARE, TOMDISPATCH.CO
Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk from disease and starvation than at this very moment. On March 10th, Stephen O’Brien, under secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs, informed the Security Council that 20 million people in three African countries — Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan — as well as in Yemen were likely to die if not provided with emergency food and medical aid. “We are at a critical point in history,” he declared. “Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the U.N.” Without coordinated international action, he added, “people will simply starve to death [or] suffer and die from disease.”
Major famines have, of course, occurred before, but never in memory on such a scale in four places simultaneously. According to O’Brien, 7.3 million people are at risk in Yemen, 5.1 million in the Lake Chad area of northeastern Nigeria, 5 million in South Sudan, and 2.9 million in Somalia. In each of these countries, some lethal combination of war, persistent drought, and political instability is causing drastic cuts in essential food and water supplies. Of those 20 million people at risk of death, an estimated 1.4 million are young children.
Despite the potential severity of the crisis, U.N. officials remain confident that many of those at risk can be saved if sufficient food and medical assistance is provided in time and the warring parties allow humanitarian aid workers to reach those in the greatest need. “We have strategic, coordinated, and prioritized plans in every country,” O’Brien said. “With sufficient and timely financial support, humanitarians can still help to prevent the worst-case scenario.”
All in all, the cost of such an intervention is not great: an estimated $4.4 billion to implement that U.N. action plan and save most of those 20 million lives.
The international response? Essentially, a giant shrug of indifference.
…
First, though, let’s consider whether the famines of 2017 are even a valid indicator of what a climate-changed planet might look like. After all, severe famines accompanied by widespread starvation have occurred throughout human history. In addition, the brutal armed conflicts now underway in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen are at least in part responsible for the spreading famines. In all four countries, there are forces — Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, assorted militias and the government in South Sudan, and Saudi-backed forces in Yemen — interfering with the delivery of aid supplies. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that pervasive water scarcity and prolonged drought (expected consequences of global warming) are contributing significantly to the disastrous conditions in most of them. The likelihood that droughts this severe would be occurring simultaneously in the absence of climate change is vanishingly small.
…
The suggestion that global warming could be contributing to drought in those regions is nonsense. Nothing we are doing in terms of releasing anthropogenic CO2 is contributing to this nightmare.
During the Warm Holocene Optimum, the Arabian Peninsula and Africa experienced what is known as the African Humid Period. During this period, what is now the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula was much wetter – the entire region was regularly drenched with reliable monsoon rains.
Any global warming we have created, any anthropogenic push towards Holocene Optimum conditions, is likely a forcing for increased rainfall in the countries identified by the Salon article.
The direct effect of anthropogenic CO2 on plant growth is also beneficial to arid regions.
Even NASA admits that CO2 is demonstrably greening the Earth. CO2 has also been demonstrated to increase drought tolerance, which of itself must be making arid regions more arable.
The cause of the troubles in North Eastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen is religious lunacy and war. Wars kill people, smash infrastructure and discourage enterprise and effort. People in a war zone don’t build new water reservoirs or improve their farms – doing so just makes them a target for the next band of looters.
What we should do is stop trying to police the world, we should stop blundering in like the European colonialists of old. We are not responsible when other people mess up their lives.
Let Africa sort out their own problems.
Update (EW): h/t Clyde – Fixed a typo in the first sentence
“Salon thinks the current food crisis in dangerous parts of Africa and Arabia is our fault because climate.”
Of course. They’re on the receiving end of ‘climate reparations’.
Missing Venezuela, probably parts of Myanmar, certainly Kenya’s pastoralist VS. agriculturalist VS. Tourist dollar seeker.
Probably – or certainly – other more-or-less localised conflicts that can be blamed on the rise of unleaded petrol/democracy/Islam/GACC/fall in use of freshly laundered handkerchiefs, etc.
Auto.
NO – not at all /SARC.
These are real problems.
Send Grant billions, and I will report.
Billions of dollars or pounds, or – even – Euros. At a pinch.
Not NorK won (won light – lighter than Fat Boy Kim, for sure.
Are they actually convertible for a n y t h I n g ??).
Auto,
Well aware that the Fat Boy probably knows where I live.
The colonialists of old wanted to exploit the resources and develop markets. Today there is a problem where the West rushes in aid and then never leaves. The population becomes dependent on handouts and can no longer function. What is worse is the sense of entitlement that some have. Throw in corruption and religious lunacy, and no wonder there is constant strife.
The article does a good job exposing Salon’s poor analysis.
Neocolonialism.
“NeoBleedingHeartCretinism.”
that was exposed years ago.
“current food crisis in dangerous parts of Africa and Arabia is our fault because climate.
Climate change as genocide: But the international response is essentially a shrug of indifference.
Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk of disease and starvation than at this very moment”
while the same moment
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21679781-fertility-rates-falling-more-slowly-anywhere-else-africa-faces-population
What is always ignored in discussions on Africa is the absolute size of the continent. Whilst it is home to about 8% of the world’s population currently, it is big enough to contain China, most of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the United States. India and Japan with space left over for a bunch of smaller countries.
http://kai.sub.blue/en/africa.html
Yes. Most Africa is very sparsely populated and there are not many Tokio’s around there.
People think it is drastically overpopulated. It is just poor in most parts of it. Western countries are not totally to blame. Really. Africa will develop when it absorbs Western or ‘democratic’ values. One of them is that men should look after their children, not just their mother.
@Hugs
Actually the population of Lagos Nigeria (~16M) is now bigger than Tokyo (~13.5M) and it is growing a lot faster. Tokyo still has a larger metro area – for now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population
Hugs said; “…men should look after their children, not just their mother.”
Men all over the world have that common lack of concern for their progeny. They are most accurately referred to as sperm donors. What is lacking is the indoctrination of social morays, or perhaps instinct is stronger than conscience in some genetic lines.
Not all men, just degenerates. And those have been among us throughout human history.
Yep, no mention of its rising population. When our nightly TV news was covered in films of the starvation, death & suffering in Ethiopia that lead to Live Aid, in 1985; the population of Ethiopia was 43 million, now it’s 104 million.
YUP, as long as you keep feeding them …… they will continue to multiply un-checked. Like “feeding” a few stray house cats ……. and pretty soon your house and property is overrun with cats of all colors and deformities.
And iffen you convince and/or assist tens-of-thousands of Africaneers into immigrating to western Europe, North America or the Far East, …….. those remaining in their home country will QUICKLY reproduce greater numbers than what immigrated …….. and the cycle repeats itself.
The famines cannot have anything to do with crazed Salafist Muslims, as that would place Salon in the position of agreeing with the current US government.
Again, this just reaffirms Climate Change is just about Social Justice, no more, no less. I feel for these people who’ve been born into poor geography, disgraceful governance and energy poverty. Just ask Saudi Arabia with all that sand what is paying the bills, thus keeping the country stable.
Agree completely. And it fits in perfectly with the international far left view that no matter what happens, it is ALWAYS the fault of white Europeans! (and their descendants in America) This probably began with the old anti-colonial movement, but it got indescribably weird when the academics in the US and Europe adopted these positions as their own.
The obvious corollary to this position is that no indigenous people can ever be blamed for anything bad that may happen in their countries, one must ALWAYS find the evil white influence behind the scenes that REALLY caused all the trouble. Climate Change is PERFECT for this – you see, it isn’t the fault of the Tutsis and the Hutus for murdering each other so viciously in Rwanda, it was really the fault of those rich white countries that caused climate change! It isn’t Venezuela’s fault they have a socialist dictatorship that is sending out death squads to hold onto control, it’s the fault of those rich white countries that caused climate change! This is an easy, easy game to play, because no matter what happens, and no matter who you may THINK is causing, no, the “real” answer is always the same.
The CIA supported an invasion and civil war in Rwanda. It was after a few years of warring and the murder of the president of Rwanda that the genocide happened. Paul Kagame, the US backed leader of the insurgents and now president, was advised of the genocide, which his people were the vicitms, and said he couldn’t do anything because he had a war to win. Kagame is now the president of Rwanda and has been committing genocide for years but is ignored as he is the US”s guy and has attended many a Whitehouse dinner.
The US has been trying to overthrow the government of Venezuela since Chavez was first elected including a blatant support of a coup in 2002. Due to mismanagement and low oil prices Venezuela is suffering and the response of the Obama administration was to put drastic sanctions on the country and declare them “a danger to US security.” Look it up. Currently they are piling more sanctions on the country as Venezuela struggles and the murder rate rises. There was a coup in Honduras in 2009 with most of the world and the UN calling for the elected government to be reinstated. Not a peep out of Obama and Hillary and no sanctions on the coup leaders. Now Venezuela and Honduras are the murder capitals of the world
Plenty of blather about how Socialism doesn’t work yet the US overthrows the government of every 3rd world country that ELECTS a socialist government. The US over the years has overthrown governments south of it’s borders in all but 2 countries many of which ELECTED socialist governments and were replaced by US friendly dictators. Guatemala in 1953 and Chile in 1972 being the most blatant. The US created Al Qaeda to overthrow the elected socialist government of Afghanistan in 1979. Chile suffered a brutal 25 year military dictatorship, Guatemala permanent unrest and a succession of brutal governments killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and we all know how Afghanistan is working out. Read Medal of Honor winner General Smedly Butlers “War is a Racket”.
Just as most people are ignorant on climate change they are also totally ignorant of the fact that the US is NOT the worlds policeman. It is the worlds biggest bully and the biggest supporter of terrorism on the planet. The US is also considered the biggest danger to world peace. But you ignorant people will shout me down and turn on CNN where their world news is just as fake as their climate science reporting. Bill Clinton negotiated with North Korea to give up their nukes in exchange for food and help with other things. Korea complied and Clinton and then Bush backed out of the deals. Now NK has nukes in retaliation. There were no massacres or genocides in Yugoslavia or Libya yet we bombed them for regime change and Libya is a failed state full of Al Qaeda and ISIS where a prosperous terrorist free nation once stood. The US has admitted supporting rebels in Syria for regime change and so far over 400,000 people are dead. Assad is not a dictator or a butcher and would win any honest election contrary to the propaganda. The world is up in arms over a supposed gas attack in Syria that killed children, real experts claim it’s fake or was perpetrated by the rebels and not the government, but the media is strangely silent on the over 100 people recently killed, most of whom were children, in Syria by a terrorist car bomb as they waited to be bused to safety. The media shows supposed dead Syrian kids due to gas and the world is aghast yet no one cares that thousands of innocent people have been killed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen using weapons supplied by the US with many children dead, cities intentionally destroyed, and thousands more starving and on the brink of death as Yemen, according to aid agencies and the UN, is a huge humanitarian disaster. Where are the headlines for these people especially now that the US is bombing Yemen too.
You can educate yourself, which is why you come here, or keep your head in the sand and believe that false narrative of the US being the worlds policeman or the US is the one exceptional nation. The truth is out there if you want to look unless you fall for the ever increasing propaganda that everything but the mainstream media is “fake news.” If that is really true then why do you come here as the establishment would consider this site fake news because it doesn’t toe the government line.
Thus proving wws’s point.
LOL – I almost thought that reply was a parody out of the Onion, but sadly I think arkus actually believes it! Sad really. With someone so totally enmeshed in a fantasy world, there’s no talking or reasoning. It’d be like trying to explain multiplication tables to a cat.
Snedly, the only one here that needs educating, is you.
Try reading some real history for a change, not just the propaganda you have been fed.
I’ve long expressed what I see as a simple truism:
If you modify the word “JUSTICE” with any other word, you may as well write the word “INJUSTICE”.
Social Justice = INJUSTICE,
Racial Justice = INJUSTICE.
Fill In The Blank Justice = INJUSTICE.
The only word I have found that does not yield this result is the word “BLIND”. Blind Justice does not care about the affluence of the litigants or their social standing or the history of their people, it only cares about the facts supporting the cases of the sides. Though if justice becomes blind to the facts, it is also injustice.
Unfortunately we have not had blind justice for a long time. It was disappearing when I was born in the 60’s and it disappeared by the 70’s. It had been on its deathbed since the founding of the country with the grave injustice of the slave laws, but most rulings at least were based on the law as it was badly written. Now taking a case to court is a pure crap shoot with judges ruling on how they feel about the law rather than the actual written texts.
Supreme Court is not a modifier in this case, it’s a title.
As Ive said many times on this site, AGW has nothing to do with climate and all to do with control of society and the transfer of wealth from those who produce it to those who don’t.You can bend, fold or mutilate any problem the world has but it comes down to a real simple theme.
What utter nonsense. No matter what the cause of any “climate change” in the past, oh, let’s say 100 years, it’s trivial. No one can even perceive an average temperature increase of about 1 degree. As for other “extreme” weather changes, totally debunked – here and elsewhere. Geez!
And the tropics are not warming at all. Even IPCC says the polar regions account for most of the warming.
It is a religion.
…..(send money, $$$$, green stuff….)
Repent and be saved Sinner!
…..(send money, $$$$, green stuff….)
YOU must religiously believe!
…..(send money, $$$$, green stuff….)
Just ask’em, (but you have to pay them first).
“We should stop blundering in like the European colonists of old.” Let’s see; can one imagine the current condition of the inhabitants of the other five continents without the European “blundering” that occurred from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries? I suggest that many of the current problems afflicting Africa, the Middle East and South Asia arise from the exit of the “blundering European colonists” starting around the mid-twentieth century.
That is so true. And isn’t it amazing that what the West did through trade amounted to the ultimate in “cultural appropriation!” Isn’t this what Adam Smith’s ‘comparative advantage’ was all about. Each side in the equation provides value to the other based on their relative strengths. That is what made the West so superior is that they became eclectics and absorbed the strengths that others had and made it their own.
If the West had not “interfered” in these other cultures they would still be languishing in stone age conditions. Their current impoverishment results from them not inculcating the virtues of individual freedom and true capitalism. They maintained their tribal instincts and suppressed the vitality of individual effort that could have brought their cultures forward into much greater prosperity. Climate changes have very little to do with it as if they had allowed individual ingenuity to come about they could’ve adapted to the changes in nature.
Bingo! Or +1, whatever the current lingo.
And when a genuinely liberal South African politician (Helen Zille) tweeted just that after a visit to post-colonial Singapore, she was pilloried by the ANC Government AND by the leader of her party!
I agree European contact brought some advantages, but it wasn’t all a bed of roses.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3516965.stm
When referencing BBC articles it is worth remembering and factoring in that the BBC is essentially left-wing socialist-marxist.
In BBC speak the British Empire caused untold misery and we, the Brits, should be ashamed of slavery – even though we essentially stopped the slave trade – which doesn’t seem to suit the BBC narrative.
In terms of ‘European contact’ the Belgians’ treatment of the Congo was appalling under King Leopold; but in cotrast to that the British Empire has left an incredible legacy in most of the nations that once made it up.
Given the huge amounts of money that have been raised in past decades to fight starvation and the well-known failures in approach and delivery which have led to its consistent recurrence it does lead me sometimes to wonder if international aid agencies are stupid or perhaps more concerned that an eradication of starvation would bring an end to them ……..
During the colonial era, If a future colony could have chosen by whom it was to be colonized, I would have to say England would have been their best choice. At least the British set up local governments, educated the locals and trained them in how to run the bureaucracies before they left.. In general the British colonies seem to be the most stable of the lot while the Spanish, Portuguese and Belgians seem to have left disasters in their wake.
Nobody said it was a bed of roses.
The argument is whether, as a whole, was colonization good or bad. Not was it perfect or all evil.
Climates don’t start wars, people do. That’s what the evidence shows.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/climates-dont-start-wars-people-do
Will the poor people in rich countries please continue to send money to assist rich people in poor countries?
Thankyou very much for your kind donation.
Thankyou very, very, very much.
Nail on head!
Let Africa
and Stephen O’Brien, under secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs,
sort out their own problems.
I was in Northen Nigeria in the mid 1960s when the civil war known by western press as the Biafran war (for an ignorant reason) broke out. Some 3million died of starvation. There was no shortage of water with the Niger River and tributaries, including the large Benue R. and ground water in this subtropical reason. I was with the Geological Survey of Nigeria and among other geological tasks was development of water supply wells and I know first hand there was no shortage. People fled their farms and businesses and had no means of support.
The plethora of ignorant appriori reporting on places they’d never heard of before to suit a lost cause agenda tells me that the world in the 1960s was more advanced intellectually than it is today. Whatever is to be done to rescue this dumb-downed, designer brained cultural wasteland. Ironically, we desperately need Trumps to pop up in the rest of the world to get a grip on survival of the real specie at risk – our own selves. The empty headed morons protesting every day who haven’t been given education enough to form a coherent thought or sentence, spout slogans and force fed ideas like talking toys. Maybe a little starvation and desperation to deal with real issues would be a helpful therapy. Progressives! Stealing English words that mean something else doesn’t work very well. The Deutschisch Demokratisch Republik was neither democratic or a Republic and it had the same protesteth too much misuse of language that the “progressives” had.
Gary,
Well said sir, well said.
“The empty headed morons protesting every day who haven’t been given education enough to form a coherent thought or sentence, spout slogans and force fed ideas like talking toys.”
I don’t know how much of that dumbing down can be blamed on cell phone/smartphone addiction but I did see a spark of light on the news this morning. It appears that at least someone has finally noticed the ill effects of those devices and decided to do something about it. Liberty University has opened a ‘digital detox center’ and ‘digital free zones’ on campus to help students slowly withdraw from “nomophobia” (i.e., fear of being without your mobile device).
I don’t have a fear of being without a mobile device, I actually hate the telephone to begin with. Now I have to carry one with me all the time! (typing this comment on my wifi connected laptop at the bar!)
You’d think that the UN could find $4.4B somewhere to provide the relief. Maybe redirect from renewable energy projects or something. Of course, any aid sent would be most likely taken by the militias, fanatics and corrupt governments in these failed states. There will undoubtedly be a huge loss of innocent lives, but it will be the result of the total collapse of any form of civilized governance in these countries, not our burning coal.
Wish I had thought of that when I was writing the post.
Venezuela
There must be drought in Venezuela.
I wonder when the UN will notice that country has a problem, or two, or 3, ….
Shouldn’t the first sentence be, “Despite decades OF militia…”?
Fixed, thanks.
Lots of drought in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. What’s even more amazing is that the answer to all of this is more tax dollars.
Leftists sincerely believe ‘drought’ is a sign on inequal share of money, which taxes can fix. Well, no amount of easy money can fix moral problems.
Right wing believes taxes shouldn’t exist since only corporations are able to use money efficiently. Well, I don’t want law-making and justice just as a private bought service.
The truth is somewhere.
Hugs, the right wing believes, with some justification, that the public sector is grossly inefficient, and that consequently vast amounts of our tax money are wasted. The reason for this inefficiency is simply that the public sector has no requirement to be efficient or to be careful with other people’s money, because there are no adverse consequences to the them if they are grossly inefficient.
Another problem is that politicians in a democracy need have only one skill, which is that of attracting votes, yet the rest of us have this quaint idea that this somehow qualifies them to sort out all the manifold problems of a complex economy. The sad truth is that most politicians make things worse, not better. Obamacare, anyone? Donald Trump, for all his bombast, at least knows how the economy works from a practical viewpoint.
The best way to run an economy is to have the public sector do as little as possible – policing, defence, foreign affairs – and have the private sector do the rest under free market principles. Education springs to mind as definitely best left to the private sector. This is anathema to the left wing, of course, because underlying all their philosophy is the concept of control: human beings must be controlled for their own good. Naturally, all those who earnestly strive to bring about a socialist workers’ paradise see themselves as one of the controllers, not the controlled.
Hugs, it doesn’t help when you tell lies about the position of one side.
It’s not that the right wing doesn’t believe taxes shouldn’t exist, it’s that the right wing believes that government should be limited to a few core functions and that taxes are permitted to pay for these services.
Right wingers are not anarchists.
Environmentalists, progressives, leftists often uses tragedy, death, and destruction to fuel fears to push their agenda. Don’t let it go to waste as a famous democrat said
Leftists merrily dance on the bodies of dead children and women and old people every day.
I’m trying to remember who the left winger was who once said, “I love humanity, it’s people I despise.”
The left only likes people when they are congregated in groups. Individuals, the left has no use them.
It isn’t just ‘Salon’……
Bill Maher: We’re ‘Gassing’ Syrians Too ‘With CO2’ – ‘Syrian Problem Started With Climate Change’
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/04/21/maher-were-gassing-syrians-too-with-co2-syrian-problem-started-with-climate-change/
Proof that marijuana rots the brain, at least in Bill Maher! He is no longer even fun to watch anymore, with his stupidity about global warming getting worse every year.
I was putting up some fence panels yesterday when I hit my thumb with a hammer.
Damm You, Climate Change!!
I beg to differ. That is merely the spark that fires it.
The pressure is too many people and too little wealth and too few jobs. These wars are caused as much by Western Medicine as anything else, lowering infant mortality rates.
Add in the fact that global communications gets there before civilisation does, and there is a huge pressure after you have seen civilisation, to go out and grab someone else’s. The traditional way. With whatever weaponry you can find.
The so-called civilised West has built its self a play-safe zone for its emasculated citizens, and into this kindergarten of Liberal sensitivities are rushing the rough boys from the wrong side of the tracks.
There may be trouble, ahead…
Could hardly say it better myself. Its what (western) missionaries have done since there ever was western missionaries, in no special order dispensing religion, guilt, guns, alcohol, STD, influenza.
Then they get a bit of bad weather so we deliver the ultimate slow motion coupe-de-grace (we call it ‘Food Aid’) = sugar in the form of wheat, corn, rice etc to produce a dull minded and lazy population who will use all the tools the missionaries gave them.
The real clanker is that sugar is addictive – tell me there’s no similarity to ‘Africa’ and what we might learn of in western drug culture(s)
Africa may improve if it got some good quality (fresh) dirt, maybe an epic ice sheet to sweep it clean, similarly huge volcano or continental drift moves it to where ice sheets normally exist.
But of course, those clever ingenious humans with all their technology (and goats) will just use the new dirt to grow sugar and the net result will just be more starving people in a desert of tired, worn out & weathered soil.
Clear headed honest folks will admit that and may talk about it. Think we know what happens when they do, nasty emails, death threats etc etc.
Doesn’t mean they know the answer or are volunteering for the euthanasia hospital.
Those who won’t talk about it are the true d3niers.
your last two paragraphs are prescient – ‘it’s emasculated citizens” is a spot on observation. add in the corrosive long term effect of entitlements favored by the left, and you lay the foundation for a brittle society which becomes ever more dependent on government. not a “sustainable” path to longevity.
I don’t doubt that there are some serious problems, but I also wonder how accurate that “20 million” number is. I have read claims by multiple (usually former) aid workers that humanitarian crises are often exaggerated by governments and NGOs in order to bring in more aid…which then gets parceled out to various cronies and siphoned off by corrupt officials. For example, let’s say a famine has the potential to affect 1 million people in an area the size of Maine. The powers that be announce that the famine is affecting 5 million people in an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma. Aid gets sent (cash and in kind), the head officials take their cut, the aid goes to the next level, they take their cut, the aid gets sent to the area that really is affected, and all the little local groups take their cut as the convoy passes, including the militias causing half the problems. By the time the aid gets to where it is needed, there may or may not be enough for the group who is actually suffering.
You know, $4.4 billion really isn’t that much (as long as it is not yours). The AGW crowd could easily cough up the funds. If we directed half of what is annually blown on AGW crap towards creating and improving access to clean water and affordable, reliable energy in developing countries, we probably would have a lot fewer problems. So I suppose the reporter is right. AGW actually IS destroying the world. Or rather, the AGW movement is.
The weather/climate and CO2 levels on this greening planet over the past 4 decades have been the best for most life(including humans) and the biosphere in over 1,000 years.
Some humans, however, have decided to set the ideal level of CO2 and ideal global temperature at whatever those values were when humans started to burn fossil fuels. Problem is that they ignored the past response as well as the response since then by life on this greening planet. Life is telling us that it prefers temperatures that are still a bit warmer than this and strongly prefers CO2 levels higher than this.
A warmer world is a wetter world overall and excessive rains in some places are a negative consequence…….far outweighed by the benefits.
Gilt coprolites, with sprinkles.
Great picture, though.
A modest degree of Law & Order, coupled with individual security (including basic food, water, shelter) and security of property rights does it nicely, every time. Some literacy and numeracy helps it along. Even Communist China has discovered this, and is lifting a large fraction of the world’s population out of grinding poverty this way. The successful implementation will vary from one culture to another but, slow, sure, and dull, it works better than anything ever dreamed up at Salon. And no mandatory windmills needed. No need for silly claims about the weather, which humans have always adapted to anyway.
But that doesn’t make for good headlines or clickbait at Salon.
CO2, the life-giving gas, not “Carbon Pollution”. A Limerick – and explanation.
What then is this “Carbon Pollution”?
A sinister, evil collusion?
CO2, it is clean,
Makes for growth, makes it green,
A transfer of wealth, a solution. https://lenbilen.com/2014/02/22/co2-the-life-giving-gas-not-carbon-pollution-a-limerick-and-explanation/
Yet another tenuous chain of assumptions and begged questions that are good enough to convince True Believers and provide cover via the media for all sorts of shenanigans with other people’s money.
Any lie will do when saving the world…again. The great utility of Climate Change to political causes of all types is the seceret of it’s success. Success in funding scientists to provide a sliver of flawed rational for preconceived ideological agendas that temporarily lost their mojo with the collapse of socialism. Success in gaining political control over large segments of the economy. Success in creating vast rent seeking opportunities for an elite class of plutocrats, political activists, and favored voting blocks.
To an earlier commenter seeing the USA under every bed and behind every shrub. Keep banging on Jackwad. We are not listening. In the actual existing America ordinary people and their flawed representatives would rather stay out of the arm pits of the planet. We buy oil from Venezuela. They have to sell it to somebody to get the money Chavistas steal. That is it. We buy bananas from Honduras. Period. Again trade but when we don’t buy like in Cuba I guess you blame us for that as well.
Now if somebody wants to use us politically as a bogeyman what can we do about. Keep it local and it’s your problem. Start spreading it around with cash and arms then it becomes our problem. You may have noticed that we are not a punching bag for long. This bag lives in the house of the world and it punches back.
All that to say Go $#@! Yourself. And you ain’t gonna do nothing about it.
Of course a link to climate change is nonsense.
What is NOT nonsense is the link to warfare and civil disorder, hence the convenient and highly misleading qualification of “since World War Two”.
Mass starvation is virtually always the immediate result, among many, of existential warfare. In Word War Two mass starvation was endemic to all the nations that were the immediate battlegrounds of the war – in the Soviet Union, Germany, The Netherlands, China, Indochina, Japan, etc. Sometimes the starvation is incidental to warfare, and sometimes it is a deliberate weapon of war.
What feeds humans and thus prevents starvation is organized functioning agricultural and distribution systems. When those systems get disrupted, food production and distribution plummets and people starve. It has zilch to do with climate, everything to do with what we call “civilization”.
Richmond said ” Today there is a problem where the West rushes in aid and then never leaves. The population becomes dependent on handouts and can no longer function. What is worse is the sense of entitlement that some have. ”
Does this sound like our welfare crowd here in the US? (Or much of Europe?)
20 million dead would just about cover the high end estimates of those that starved to death during Mao’s collectivazation induced famine in China. Not to quibble with my betters but that occured in the 1950’s.
The UN needs to relocate to Somalia where they can really get their face into the problem. Added bonus that thier NYC expense account eating out butts will get smaller and healthier.
“Wars kill people, smash infrastructure and discourage enterprise and effort. People in a war zone don’t build new water reservoirs or improve their farms – doing so just makes them a target for the next band of looters.”
Well said.
There’s a lot of references to things not being this bad in “Bob’s” memory or whomever. Memory is a very, very poor substitute for documented facts. I suspect many news people have memories of under 30 seconds, if that long. Lack of memory is one of the biggest reasons why global warming sells so well. You can always fool people who can’t remember what happened yesterday.
Notice how these leftists never, ever blame the people doing evil sh*t.
In many cases the people doing “evil sh*t” are either fellow leftists, or certain minority groups that can’t be criticized.
I know this will upset so many people when they read this but I honestly feel that by helping these people previously had had the wrong result. Yes there are a lot more people starving but it is because the have been encouraged tohave more children and helped every time there has been a slight problem. You now have continental Africa trying to support a population that is 5 times to great than it can cope with. there are no droughts as there used to be just too many people trying to access a resourse that will never be able to cope. For some this might be too provocative andI know that I will also be accused of being a racist by the comments but we have allowed this to happen. Part of the wars are about the overstretched resourses that the west has helped to create.
I have been belabored for making the same point for years, you can not continue to grow your population while your food production continues to fall and you have insufficient potable water sources. I have finally just gotten to the point of asking a simple question which usually ends the exchange. How many times do you have to tell people to boil their drinking water?
The inflicted human suffering by one group upon another has existed ever since homo sapiens formed themselves into tribes. Today we see tribal warfare on a larger scale and with modern armaments perpetuated upon larger groups of people.The danger for these people is leaving the protection of their tribal identity and community. Whether sending children to school, refugees fleeing deprivation, or a simple journey to fetch charcoal, the danger exists. Even crossing tribal boundaries today carries with it an explicit submission to the local tribes codes of conduct.
Religion, evident today with Islam is an over arching code of conduct in part to blur the existing tribal boundaries. The schisms within a religion has the consequences of intersectional fighting.
To ascribe climate change, particularly current climate changes to the plight of million’s of people ignores the human condition prior to any awareness of our world other than that God was intervening in peoples lives, choosing favorites of some people over others.
Climate change didn’t cause this, period. The western response to the bogey man of climate change may we’ll have made it much worse however. What if they had easy and affordable access to the 40% of US corn we now use to make our automobiles drunk? What if they had access to reliable cheap electricity, what if hey had access to all the technology and infriastructure the western world enjoys for water storage, treatment and distribution, industrial agriculture and food preservation through refirgeration – all of which depend on access to cheap energy largely from fossil fuels. The Salon folk have got this entirely ass backwards.
Drought conditions in the Sahel and other ‘Dry Sub-tropical’ places? Seen it before, seeing it again in this cooling c.32yr half of the six decadal weather cycle. Possibly a lagged effect of solar input via the oceans, maybe orbitally-caused on a solar system scale. Maybe something else. The first thing to do is understand reality. Rainfall is reality, political ranting is not.
Climate change has been going on for eons. The climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind has no control. So if someone is to blame for climate change, Mother Nature is the one to blame. Lots of luck on trying to collect on a judgement against Mother Nature. If we could somehow stop the climate from changing, we would still have extreme weather events because they are part of our current climate. A lot of the problems they are suffering from are in part a result of Mankind’s out of control population that forces too many people to live in marginal areas with insufficient resources.
The connections deduced by “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” are not about Kevin Bacon at all. Conceptually, the statement, “Kevin Bacon is the Center of the Universe,” and the statement, “Climate Change Causes Every Disaster.” are identical.
This is a cruel deflection of facts and factors.
Do they really think that if the weather was always “made-to-order” that wars would cease? What sort of children would assume something like this?
Children educated by leftists.
Genocide is the primary objective of the Green Doctrine.
According to the Globalists at the UN, 500 million people is the sustainable number our planet can support.
So they still have 7 billion people to go.
They ruin our energy infra structure, they ban the use of coa and oil by 2050, the use of gasoline and diesel cars by 2030.
Fine dust regulations will make any human activity impossible,
This includes farming.
Hell, the EU (read UN) even has set regulation for the dust content of bedding for stables and chicken farms.
Banking crises and mass immigration give us the rest.
If we don’t manage to stop the sociopaths behind the Green Madness in their tracks they will cull us like Turkey’s for the Christmas dinner.
Our freedom and prosperity is at stake and eventually our lives.
Start hording rope, tar and feathers because that is the only way to stop them.
Because Jihad is really about saving the Planet. NOT
I thought that the people in Yemen were being decimated by Saudi Arabia. With Africa, while some countries and towns look like any Western city(but sunnier), huge swathes of Africa are practically desert. For some reason these countries have not evolved in the same way the Europe has. It do not think that droughts are the only reason. It is the same with countries like India – while catapulting itself into the nuclear age, many of its people she revere rats and build temples for them.
The climate in Europe may not be great but we have adapted to it. Hence Europe is the showcase of the planet. And everybody wants to come here to share our good luck? And appeasing people is like saying ‘we have been guilty, we owe you’. No wonder they keep coming.