Liberals are getting pretty desperate on the global warming/climate change debate.
But you have to give them high marks for creativity. As one of our contributors Marita Noon mentioned the other day, enviros are switching to supposed health risks associated with fossil fuels since politicians and the general public don’t buy the carbon-hates-us argument anymore.
And lacking little evidence that many of the natural disasters that were predicted by the global warming “model” that the high priests of their religion constructed years ago, one economist has come up with a new disaster, this one wholly civil. And the media are climbing aboard the bandwagon like a high speed rail car powered by solar energy.
Citing wars in Burundi, Chad, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Peru, the Comoros, Congo, Eritrea, Niger and Rwanda, economist Solomon Hsiang of Columbia University argues, according to Scientific American, that they all have one thing in common: They all happened when “global climate was enduring El Nino” according to research the economist published in Nature, a sister publication to Scientific American.
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Enduring El Nino. Got it. A new buzz phrase. Kind of like Enduring O’Bama another predictable burst of hot, moist gas.
Hsiang will probably get a government grant on the strength of the paper if he didn’t already have one. Or maybe a Nobel prize.
In the interest of full disclosure I worked for Nature Biotechnology covering the finance side of the biotech industry. Nature, Nature Biotechnology and Scientific American are all owned by Macmillan.
"Since 1950, one out of five civil conflicts have been influenced by El Niño," says Hsiang. "This represents the first major evidence that global climate is a major factor in organized patterns of violence."
Wow that’s pretty major. And also wrong.
Chad’s been at war since it gained independence from France in 1960. The Congo has been in a civil war for fifteen years. Rwanda has been at war internally off- and mostly on- since 1959; Eritrea has had wars, civil wars, border disputes, revolution and secession since the 1950s.
Wars in Burundi, Chad, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Peru, the Comoros, Congo, Eritrea, Niger and Rwanda are so numerous that I could probably make a statistical argument that 1 in 5 wars are due to the AFC winning the Super Bowl. Plus civil wars as defined in the survey by organized patterns of violence are where 25 or more people die.
That could happen at a Niners-Raiders game.
But at least we are agreed that 4 out of 5 wars at a minimum have nothing at all to do with anything other than the political climate. Or the Super Bowl.
In fairness to the Hsiang and to Nature, the economist’s report is full of ifs, ands and buts. Nature also includes a dissenting view.
"I don't dismiss that a correlation exists, but it is a correlation we so far don't understand," says Halvard Buhaug, a conflict researcher with the Peace Research Institute Oslo according to Nature. "I remain skeptical about any potential causal connection."
But that hasn’t stopped the media from touting the results as more proof of the dangers of “climate change.”
Does El Nino—and Climate Change—Really Cause Civil Wars?, asks Time. Yes, you know the answer.
Huffington Post says: Does Climate Drive Warfare? A New Study Suggests There's No Question. Except perhaps the questions other research scientists are posing about the results of the study.
In fact, Google News counts 273 news items with essentially the same headline message: “Global Warming Responsible for Civil War; Real Wrath of God Type Stuff; Dogs and Cats Living Together; Mass Hysteria.”
The mass hysteria part is already here.
Activists are getting arrested this week–and for the foreseeable future- in front of the White House as a protest trying to force Obama into vetoing the Keystone pipeline designed to carry Canadian oil from Alberta to refineries in the Gulf Coast of the US. The project will create 20,000 American jobs in construction and 340,000 ancillary jobs.
In short, progressive activists have declared a kind of civil war against Obama, jobs, energy and the national security of the country, all to stop the terrible effects of global warming that are simply not visible to the naked eye.
Already Canada ships about 1 million barrels of oil per day of the 18-20 million barrels America uses. By 2025 that number could triple if projects like the Keystone pipeline go forward.
Libya, pre-rebellion, topped out at production of 100,000 barrels per day and that went to Europe, not the US. Obama started a US shooting war of choice over the oil in Libya.
“Keystone has become the bete noir of the eco-friendly liberal, artsy set and the environmentalists are determined to force U.S. President Barack Obama to kill the project,” reports the Medicine Hat News.
“Without additional capacity, further development of these fields is pointless,” continues the MHN. “The protesters know that much. Stop the pipeline and you choke off development. The problem is that without the development of North American sources of crude oil, the United States will continue to be dependent on Middle Eastern crude oil. And that, as we've all seen, gets everyone involved in shooting wars.”
And 5 out of 5 of those wars have nothing to do with global warming.
You want to stop wars? You care about global combat change? Come on. Give peace a chance. Let North America develop its own energy resources.
You can quote me as the author of that study.