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
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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 $#@ur momisugly! 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.