Fear Mongering at Its Worst
Recently there was a major story on the top of the main Yahoo! page.
“” (an Associated Press article deemed scientific enough for the front page of Yahoo!)
Yeah, the dreaded “climate change” is killing all of those poor people and not from overpopulation, over consumption, corrupt local governments, horrendous living conditions, or lack of medical care to fight common diseases. It’s climate change’s fault!
Okay, raise your hand if you’re surprised that the theory of man-made climate change sneaking up and killing all of those people (probably in their sleep or something like that) is from the Global Humanitarian Forum and former U.N. leader Kofi Annan.
And what’s equally amazing is that an estimated 325 million people are “seriously affected” by this dreaded climate change.
Seriously!
And according to the Global Humanitarian Forum and their infinite sources of knowledge and access to research material, this figure will most likely double by the year 2030!
That should bump it up a few notches to being “most seriously affected” or the mind boggling “super double extremely seriously affected.”
What’s next, ManBearPig?
As far as that magical report and climate change killing all of the people, you know that the report may be a little bit biased when it claims that 99% of those climate change deaths happened in developing countries, even though those poor, helpless countries only contributed less than one whole percent of the greenhouse gases that are baking the planet and trying to kill all life forms, including the trees.
I noticed that the Yahoo! page with the article also had a picture from Bangladesh and a small family trying to cross a flooded area.
That isn’t exactly the best area of the planet to showcase when it comes to making an argument that people are suffering from changing global climate.
Bangladesh is a small coastal nation absolutely packed with people in its low-lying areas. Around 500,000 people were killed in that area from a cyclone back in 1970, 138,000 were killed in a storm in 1991, and the recent 2007 Cyclone Sidr killed around 3,500 people (some organizations still believe the storm really killed nearly 10,000 people). Big storms hit the country every ten or so years, and even with advance warnings the death tolls were still very high.
As far as other developing countries seeing fluctuations in rainfall, well, that’s just part of nature.
The el Nino and la Nina oceanic events in the Pacific Ocean will wreck havoc with our weather in the U.S. and even southeastern part of the country. Right now here in metro Atlanta we’re seeing about five or six inches more of rainfall for the year than we were last year, but only about two inches above normal.
And of course, we humans have been dealing with and adapting to the constantly changing weather conditions since our existence. Ice core samples and paleoclimatology have proven than the Earth’s climate has changed frequently and fluctuated in the past, and that pattern will continue into the future.
