Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Man-Made Global Warming: the Myth that Refuses to Die


by Claude Cartaginese

Now that the issue of man-made global warming has been exposed as so much bunk, you would think that the environmentalist radicals on the left would abandon their scare tactics, withdraw the pending “cap-and-trade” legislation, and apologize to the American people for having wasted so much time and money. Don’t hold your breath. What they are doing is coming out with even more scare tactics!

From Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! comes an absolutely preposterous report of a study claiming that climate change will result in more civil wars in Africa!

The study, published by Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, claims that rising temperatures will lead to more civil wars in the next 20 years. David Lobell, an assistant professor at the Woods Institute, tells Goodman’s audience that the study purports to “provide the first quantitative evidence linking climate change and the risk of civil conflict”:

David Lobell, assistant professor at the Woods Institute at Stanford: “What we found was, surprisingly, is that there is not only a clear effect but a very strong effect in the incidents of civil war and the state of the climate system. Looking forward from that we can say for a degree increase, which is something we expect over the next few decades, you could expect a roughly 50 percent increase in the occurrence of civil war in Africa. Sort of a rough calculation is that about 400,000 people, additional, would die because of the climate change increase in civil war conflict.

The idea here is that since a large percentage of Africans are poor and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods, changes in temperatures caused by the West’s carbon emissions will have a devastating effect on their crops. And since environmental scientists assume that mankind is inherently evil, the study concludes that:

When temperatures rise, the livelihoods of many in Africa suffer greatly, and the disadvantaged become more likely to take up arms.

In fact, the researchers have predicted that the incidence of African civil wars “could increase 55 percent by 2030, resulting in an additional 390,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent ones.”

Looking at rainfall and temperature records across Africa and correlating them with historical data on civil wars, the study purports to show that between 1980 and 2002 civil wars were “significantly more likely in warmer-than-average years.”

In fact, after reviewing their data, the Stanford researchers have the confidence to posit that:

A 1°C increase in temperature above normal increases the incidence of conflict by almost 50%.

At this point, dear reader, you are probably shrugging your shoulders and muttering “so what? I don’t live in Africa.”

Don’t worry, in this era of Al Gore and world government, the United Nations has already come up with a theory of its own designed to cover the rest of the world.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) came out with its own study two years ago, which painted an even bleaker picture of what was going to happen should we foolishly continue to ignore the damage we are causing by our unrelenting carbon emissions.

UNEP warns that:

If global warming is not confined, fragile, vulnerable states-which have already now fairly bad governance might implode under the pressure of global warming and then send shock waves to other countries so that you will have spill-over effects. If warming rose by five degrees Celsius, we might have something like a global civil war (emphasis added).

In order to prevent these global upheavals, both studies, unsurprisingly, concluded with inevitable appeal for money.

In the Stanford study, Lobell’s colleagues at the Woods Institute hope that their findings can prove useful to policy makers at the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations in December in coming up with a monetary figure which can be paid by the West to be used on Africa’s behalf in order to avoid a future calamity.

How much money? Well it appears that there is a formula to calculate that too.

$67 billion dollars per year would be a nice start.

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