Global Catastrophe Imminent!
Poor to Drown in Global Drought!
It's All Bush's Fault!!!

ust when you thought cooler heads had prevailed, and all this global warming stuff had been finally dismissed as politically-motivated hysteria, someone releases another report to the media with even more fantastic predictions about how we're all going to die because of too much carbon dioxide.

Only now, it's official. The IPCC has finally admitted that their earlier dire warnings about global warming were nothing more than a bunch of hand-waving. "For the first time, we are not just arm-waving with models," says Martin Parry, co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group II on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. But now it's different. Now they're sure the oceans are going to rise by several feet, millions of people will die from lack of water, and billions of polar bears and baby seals will drown from too much water. And it's not from models. Apparently those boffins have found some new miraculous way of directly measuring what's going to happen in the future. They can now directly measure, for example, that bigger hurricanes will strike and that between 75 and 250 million people will go thirsty. And what's more, they can measure that it's All America's Fault™.

The IPCC is an organization whose job is to "provide an assessment of the state of knowledge on climate change" at the behest of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Every few years, the IPCC releases a report detailing the "consensus" of the 2000 or so scientists who have been selected to provide their consensus. The latest IPCC report that discloses these miraculous technologies for measuring temperatures in the future is not out yet. It remains to be seen whether the dire warnings that we keep hearing about in the press really are predicted by the IPCC, and exactly how the IPCC is able to measure things that haven't happened yet, and in fact may never happen. Talk about useful technology. I can't wait to read it!

It's just a coincidence, of course, that the United Nations is the institution in which activist groups like Greenpeace have all their hopes pinned on someday becoming a "world government." Luckily for the world, they're not one yet. In order to govern, an organization needs power, which means the right to tell other people what to do with their resources. And, most likely, taxing those resources. Since the UN has lost much of its credibility after that inconvenient series of genocides that it failed to stop, and that unfortunate truth about obscene profiteering in the scandal (which was largely ignored by the press) over the oil for food program, it's fighting an uphill battle.

The other thing a government needs is legitimacy. Legitimacy comes from representing the people--i.e., democracy. Contrary to what you may have heard, putting 200 dictators in a room and letting them vote on the best way to bash Israel doesn't make you a democracy.

The UN's new agenda, as Greenpeace and other non-governmental organizations see it, is to redistribute wealth from rich nations (i.e. the United States) to poor nations (i.e., almost everyone else). Amazingly enough, the poor nations are all in favor of this, while the rich nation is mostly opposed (although the Democrats, who want everyone to be poor, love it, because it's a chance to create a It would be necessary to cripple industrial society to reduce CO2 emissions enough to make a dent in global warming. This uncomfortable fact is hardly ever mentioned by the warmularians. "global warming tax". Nothing warms the Democrats' hearts more than an opportunity to create a new tax). And no one is quite sure what the Bush Administration's policy is (perhaps not even President Bush himself).

Of course, a global warming tax isn't without problems. If you tax the corporations, they lose money and start laying people off. No problem. Just make it illegal to lay people off! Unfortunately, as some European countries have discovered, this causes the corporations to stop hiring. Tax the rich people? Somehow, when you tax the "rich", it's always the middle class that ends up paying and the lower class that loses their jobs as a result.

And yet, in a roundabout way, America is responsible for global warming. America played a key role in creating the United Nations back in 1945. Although the UN may not have created global warming, it contributes to it in a significant way.

Lies, damn lies, and climate predictions

The original IPCC report was built to a large extent around a centerpiece known as the "hockey stick graph." The hockey stick was created by climatologist Michael Mann [1], who created a temperature chart whose shape resembled a hockey stick. The graph has been reproduced extensively in the press, including policy discussion journals like Foreign Affairs. Unfortunately, it turned out that Mann et al. had been using specially-written software whose only function seems to have been to create hockey stick graphs. Feed it data on the incidence of multiple sclerosis in white rhinoceros, and out will come a hockey stick graph. In science, it's okay to sometimes be wrong; but you're expected to be honest about it. Instead, the authors just called the criticisms "political". No one was ever prosecuted for the hockey stick, but the IPCC quietly dropped the hockey stick graph from subsequent reports.

Then there's that sci-fi masterpiece, a movie called An Inconvenient Truth by failed Presidential candidate Al Gore. I have to admit, that movie was frightening: this guy was almost President of the United States. Its predecessor, a disaster movie called The Day After Tomorrow, was an unintentionally hilarious flick that depicted 100-foot tsunamis caused by global warming smashing into skyscrapers in New York City and causing the city to freeze instantly into a giant -100°C popsicle. (It was almost as funny as that movie where the military kept insisting that they needed to nuke St. Louis, Missouri, for some inadequately explained reason). To add to the improbability, the movie features a U.S. President that bears an uncanny resemblance to Al Gore. Despite the MASH-like overacting and the corny pseudoscience, The Day After Tomorrow is so, for want of a better word, 'yesterday'. Says one character, "We've hit a critical desalination point ... I think we're on the verge of a major climate shift! .. If we don't act now, it's going to be too late!" No drowning polar bears here. But now, freezing is out; we're back to being incinerated again.

As authors such as Patrick J. Michaels have pointed out, many of the other statistics purporting to show a warming trend have been selected with starting and ending dates conveniently selected to show an exaggerated increase, or an increase that just happens to coincide with the warming half of the El Nino cycle.

But that was then. Ignore all that early stuff. That was all arm-waving. Now, they've measured it and whaddya know, they were right all along!

To be fair, the IPCC also mentioned that global warming, to the extent that it occurs, will have many benefits. The average person can be forgiven for not knowing this, as the news media typically Their propensity of the global warmularians to call those who disagree with them "Nazis" and "deniers" may more harm to their cause than all their exaggerations and fake data put together. puts those stories on Section F2, page 36, column 12, which is the space in 8 point type designated for those rare occasions when something happens that's not a sign of dire catastrophe, for correcting all the mistakes made on page one on the previous day, or for printing news reports that confirm something that was said by a Republican.

Not only will the baby seals drown, but now we've just realized that millions of "climate refugees" will be forced to evacuate because of that temperature increase (which actual measurements have so far placed at approximately one degree Fahenheit per century). According to Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), "the numbers are likely to rise considerably, possibly as high as 50 million by 2010." Hmm, just as was prophesied in The Day After Tomorrow. But of course, this is not guesswork, modeling, or wild hysteria, it's a solid fact, backed up by hard (but rapidly-melting) evidence from the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which unfortunately went on record as saying that 25 million people left their homes in 2000 because of "environmental stress" (crops dying, running out of water, etc). Tragic as that is, Myers said that this number will double "once global warming kicks in" in 2010. I can vouch for this from personal experience. Yesterday, it was one degree warmer than the previous week and I was forced to migrate to Frederick County, Maryland to escape being burned alive.

Wait a minute ... didn't they say earlier that global warming had kicked in already?

Name-calling

The ugliest part of the global warming debate is the name-calling by the pro-global warming side. It's possible that their propensity to call those who disagree with them "Nazis" and "deniers" will do more harm to the global warmularian's cause than all their exaggerations and fake data put together. If anyone mentions a contradiction, a flat-out lie, or exaggeration put out by the global warming activists, he or she is immediately attacked as a "global warming denier" or worse. But it's only another example of the philosophy that anything is justified, from exaggeration to outright fear-mongering, if it supports their cause. For those who smell power almost coming within their grasp, the temptation to do whatever it takes to get over that last hump of resistance must be overwhelming.

The fact that name-calling and personal attack is such a dominant paradigm among the global warmularians suggests that their beliefs are based more on emotion and herd mentality than on evidence.

If the global warming activists were really concerned about global warming, they would be clamoring for more research into alternative energy sources, more nuclear power, and so forth. But that's not happening. In fact, even windmills far offshore, where there are no birds to get sliced, diced, and (that's not all) meringued, have now become passé. Apparently, it messes up the view of those rich liberals who live on Martha's Vineyard. Global warming may be an incipient catastrophe, but let's not get carried away.

Yes, nuclear waste is a potential problem. But all we have to do is bury the nuclear waste in Arizona. In 25 years, if our politicians get their way, Arizona will be part of Mexico, and it will be someone else's problem.