The Wrath of Summanus

The people of the industrialized world are level-headed, logical, and cogitative in nature. They are seldom prone to being hoodwinked by hokum, and rarely give in to media fear-mongering. Just kidding; they’re largely mouth breathing lemmings that will believe anything the dear leader or the boob tube proffers as truth.

The lead story this morning on CNN.com consisted of the following headline: Climate Killing 300,000 a year. It goes on to clarify that 99% of the innocent victims of Al Gore’s cataclysmic juggernaut live (or used to live) in developing (previously called ‘Third World’) countries; where the climate is killing people through malnutrition, diarrhea, and malaria. To quote ‘The Simpsons’, “That’s some fine police work there Lou.”

Faulty logic:

Apes descended from primitive primates. Man descended from primitive primates. Ergo, Man is an ape.

All the citizens of Piraeus are Greek. All the citizens of Athens are Greek. Therefore, all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.

A rise in global temperatures could kill people. People in third world countries are dying. Ergo, Global Warming is killing them.

People in ‘developing’ nations have been dying from the aforementioned maladies since Moses starting flinging frogs and grasshoppers around like his personal WMDs. This is nothing new. When was there NOT a famine in Africa, malaria in South America, or dysentery in, well, pretty much everywhere people bathe, pee, and drink from the same 30x60 pond used by exotic herd beasts for the same purposes?

Didn’t you hear? Global Warming causes basically everything. It caused Hurricane Katrina. Without climate change, there is no way that a sub-par storm, common to the region, would have been able to flood a city built below sea-level and spooning with one of the most active hurricane lanes on the planet. GW is responsible for the record freezing winter in North Dakota, Black bears wondering the streets of New Jersey, and drift of the Earth’s magnetic pole. You could probably make an argument that GW caused the Hubble Telescope to break down.

The people in third world countries are dying because they have had the misfortune of being born within cultures that teach them the fundamentals of not doing anything whatsoever to better their condition. We call them ‘developing’ countries. That word implies a certain degree of progress. If they are developing, and have been for all this time, when are they going to be developed? If I am ‘building’ a sand castle, eventually, in some form, it will graduate to ‘built’. These countries aren’t developing. They’re languishing away, intent on going nowhere. The laundry list of 'why' and 'who's to blame' is longer than, well, a very long thing, but Global Warming isn't on it.

That sad thing is that as more and more people buy-in to the smoke and mirrors of this sort of misguided displacement of causality, fewer and fewer will devote resources and efforts to avert the real underlying ailments of the third world. Reducing greenhouse gas output in California is not going to impede the spread of HIV. Driving a hybrid car isn’t going to teach contemporary farming techniques to the over-populated masses. Carbon offsets are not going stop a war-lord in in the Congo from devouring his nation like Saturn, gobbling up his children. It's easier to blame the public enemy.

If this were the late 50's, we'd be blaming the whole thing on the spread of communism. Check this out; from the article, I'll replace references to Global Warming with 'communism'.

The first comprehensive report into the human cost of communisim warns that
the world is in the throes of a "silent crisis" that is killing 300,000 people each year

More than 300 million people are already seriously affected by the gradual spread of communism and that number is set to double by 2030, the report from the Global
humanitarian Forum warns.

"This is one of the reasons why I've described communism as all encompassing," he told CNN. "This threat to our health, this threat to food production, this threat to security. It raises political tensions, it will have people on the move -- and they are on the move -- and many more which will bring tensions."

So, grab your torches and pitchforks! There's nothing so wrong in the world that can't be cured by a panic stricken mob that will listen to anything that is presented to it. By the time we're done slaying this dragon to save the children of Zaire, we will have effectively sealed their fate. We will regulate out all types of industry that patronize production from the developing nations. We won't buy goods from this country or that one because of new import restrictions against countries that don't mandate X limits on greenhouse gasses. You think they're starving now? Wait until EVERY paltry industry they have is no longer marketable in the west because of our crusade against carbon.

But, don't worry. If there's anyone left after ten years that climate change hasn't murder death killed, we'll be blaming something else; probably the decaying orbit of the Moon.

©Raymond Smith- 2009