Today sees the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest findings on the state of “global warming” and the news isn’t good.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Giant malarial mosquitoes the size of crane flies may descend en masse and drain us of our blood so quickly with their powerful razor sharp probosces that we won’t even have time to be infected – we’ll be dead before we hit the floor;
- Bangladesh, Tuvalu, The Maldives and Florida will all be submerged;
- Four horsemen with skulls for faces, glowing red eyes and huge scythes will gallop across the blighted land on skeletal horses spreading fire, pestilence, famine, and disease. Men will pray for the quick release of death. Children will clutch their parents and say: “Why didn’t we listen?”;
- The populations of horrid things like cockroaches and scorpions will quintuple, while all the cute animals – wrens, robins, meerkats, baby polar bears, kittens, sea otters – will vanish as if they had never been;
- Men will say openly that Christ and His saints slept;
- There will be war, war and more war.
We know this because the Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg is on the case. She has got in her climate doom predictions early and though she based her report on a leaked sneak preview rather than the finished document, she has undoubtedly captured the general tone, which is this: things are even worse than we thought!
And are things really even worse than we thought?
Not exactly, no. The real take-home story of the new report we already learned last week: that the latest estimates of the economic costs of “climate change” are considerably lower than previous projections; so much lower, in fact, that the costs could be offset by just a month’s global economic growth.
It’s to obscure this inconvenient truth that the Big Green Propaganda Machine will now be cranking into overdrive. Over the next few days – watch and listen: they’ll be all over the MSM like a suppurating pox rash – “expert” after “expert” will be dragged out of the woodwork to testify that, no, this time it’s serious and as a measure of the serious seriousness of it all it’s really about time we silenced those Big-Oil-funded climate deniers for good. Throw them in jail, at any rate.
Over the weekend we saw none other than the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, the bearded wizard Rowan Williams, sticking his crozier in:
Rich, industrialised countries, including our own, have unquestionablycontributed most to atmospheric pollution; the development of profitableheavy industry relied on what we now think of as “dirty” energy sources, andinvolved environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale. Both ourpresent lifestyle in the developed world and the history of how we createdsuch possibilities for ourselves have to bear the responsibility for pushingthe environment in which we live towards crisis.
This coincided with a report Taken By Storm by the charity he heads – Christian Aid – demanding “decisive action” to combat climate change.
The WWF is making similar demands:
Samantha Smith, leader of the WWF Global Climate & Energy Initiative says the report highlights, for the first time, the dramatic difference of impacts between a world where we act now to cut emissions, which now come mostly from using fossil fuels; and a world where we fail to act quickly and at scale.
“This report tells us that we have two clear choices: cut emissions now and invest in adaption – and have a world that has challenging and just barely manageable risks; or do nothing and face a world of devastating and unmanageable risks and impacts.”
Even the US Defense Department – to its eternal shame – has been co-opted into the green propaganda war. Last month it published its Quadrennial Defense Review, claiming that “climate change” could be a “threat multiplier.”
Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United Statesand the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sealevels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, andsevere weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled withother global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluentpopulations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil,and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure.Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increasesin food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influenceresource competition while placing additional burdens on economies,societies, and governance institutions around the world. These effectsare threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such aspoverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and socialtensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other formsof violence.
This is about as close to meaningless nonsense as makes no difference – as, no doubt, a good many in the US military are more than aware. But it is the inevitable consequence of the way the climate change worm has infected almost every major institution from the scientific academies and the universities to the various departments of government.
Unfortunately, it has given the IPCC just the excuse it needed to shoehorn war into its long list of things that might be caused some time in the future by global warming. As Seth Borenstein – AP’s answer to Suzanne Goldenberg – reports it in his usual breathless fashion:
In an authoritative report due out Monday a United Nations climatepanel for the first time is connecting hotter global temperatures tohotter global tempers. Top scientists are saying that climate changewill complicate and worsen existing global security problems, such ascivil wars, strife between nations and refugees.They’re notsaying it will cause violence, but will be an added factor making thingseven more dangerous. Fights over resources, like water and energy,hunger and extreme weather will all go into the mix to destabilize theworld a bit more, says the report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winningIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Yeah, Seth, whatever. But you didn’t get the stuff about the giant mosquitoes, did you? Or the four horsemen? Or the scorpions eating all the baby polar bears?