You Can't Be Serious...

I'm naturally pretty skeptical of the United Nations and UN Diplomats. They generally come from more Leftist backgrounds and rarely understand markets and economics. But I think I will forever be a complete cynic regarding such diplomats after reading an AFP article this morning headlined "Climate Change Behind Darfur killing: UN's Ban." Ban of course is the successor to Kofi Annan, and hails from South Korea. According to Ban, "The Darfur crisis began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change." He claims that drought conditions that plague the Sudan began as a result of a shift in monsoon seasons over the last twenty years. I literally laughed out loud when I saw this.

The hysteria that now surrounds all discussions about climate change completely eliminates the possibility of rational discussion between opposing sides. Global Warming is now being blamed for everything from the ethnic conflict in the Sudan to Hurricane Katrina. It challenges credulity in every sense. Ban and scores of other UN folks have a single focus in mind: unifying political power in international governance bodies. The issue of Climate Change, in their view, is the way to scare people into supporting economically disastrous treaties like the Kyoto Protocol that would not only cripple economic growth in developed countries (while unfairly subsidizing pollution in nations like China and others in the developing world), but would also hand over substantive portions of U.S. sovereignty to the omnipotent moral busybodies (My thanks to C.S. Lewis for that phrase) of the United Nations.

There are really three camps when it comes to the issue of climate change. There are the demagogues who have some nefarious political or economic agenda and who are using climate change as a vehicle to advance those ends (people like Ban, Al Gore, European Politicians, scientists applying for grant money, etc.), there are the dupes who have subscribed to this new religion (Leonardo DiCaprio, the rest of Hollywood, and Rank-and-File Democrat activists), and of course the rest of us who are "agnostic" with respect to Man-caused Global Warming. [An interesting aside. Notice the rhetoric of the Climate Change Crowd. A normally very Politically Correct bunch, they always use the phrase "man-caused" or "man-made" Global Warming, never "human-caused." I guess that's because the evil Male gender is singularly responsible for Global Warming; women have had nothing to do with it.]

This issue is beginning to reach fever pitch. We are on the precipice of making some really horrible decisions for future generations of Americans if we hand over our sovereignty to people like Ban and the UN while completely eliminating our ability to compete in the global economy. Global Warming cannot be viewed as a scapegoat for every ill that plagues humanity.

I'm pretty certain ethnic conflict has been around for a few years (read: centuries). So have hurricanes. So have droughts. So have famines. The earth has been through four major ice ages in its history. By definition, emergence from an ice age necessitates "global warming." In addition to global ice ages, there have been countless periods of glaciation and de-glaciation, and of inter-glacial periods. The geologic record is replete with evidence that these differences in global climate over the course of the earth's 2+ Billion year history have been caused by things such as solar activity, vulcanism, plate tectonic shifts, the position of the continents, the advent of certain mountain ranges (especially the recent emergence of the Himalayas), and so on.

The Left has really figured it out, though. In spite of all of the countervailing scientific evidence, alternate causes, etc., they have realized something that Social Conservatives have understood for centuries: when facts and reason aren't on your side, revert to a dogma and pound your fist while screaming. Through the promise of millions in grant money, Leftist politicians have made the scientists who agree with them into a new Priesthood, an omniscient group of people known as The Scientific Community and issuing Edicts called "The consensus in the Scientific Community." If you dare argue with them, you are ignorant and unintelligent or else in the back pockets of Big Oil. Let me give you a parallel. If you support equal rights for homosexuals, then you are either ignorant of what the Bible teaches or else you are an evil agent of Satan. The same kind of fervor that characterizes dogmatically conservative religious people (who try to impose their values on the rest of us by demagoguing political issues) is now mirrored by the Leftists who similarly want to impose their divinely-inspired policies on everybody else "for our own good." Perhaps tomorrow I will further develop the comparison between the Religious Right and the Neo-Religious Left.

As a conservationist who really enjoys clean air and clean water, I happen to be quite in favor of measures to reduce emissions from motor vehicles, power plants, and other human activities that make our air and water toxic. But I favor approaching this problem through market-oriented means and the development of new technology, not through top-down politically-imposed (and worse, internationally-imposed) policies that do not account for the complex reverberations of massive and immediate interventions in the multi-trillion dollar global economy due to a staged frenzy instigated by a cast of base political opportunists.

I plead with all reasonable people: be environmentally friendly, but don't buy into to this hallucination.