For the past two weeks in Glasgow, Scotland, world leaders have gathered at COP 26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, to listen to the same message: Disaster is just around the corner.
“The world has to step up, and it has to step up now,” former President Barack Obama said. “When it comes to climate, time really is running out.”
Professional yeller Greta Thunberg demanded the United Nations declare a “systemwide climate emergency,” and force countries to take action.
Press accounts were similarly Chicken Little-esque. If developed nations don’t phase out oil and gas and give $100 billion in “climate financing,” Paul Behrens, professor in environmental change, told Politico that “the only fact about the future I can declare with certainty is that the world as we know it is coming to an end.”
If it all sounds slightly familiar, consider this news story from 1972:“We have ten years to stop the catastrophe,” said the UN’s environmental protection boss. That’s one of the headlines collected by Bjorn Lomberg, author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”
Lomberg notes that, for more than 50 years, the United Nations and the media have regularly predicted we’re on the verge of calamity. And they always seem to forget about the last warning.
In 1982, after the catastrophe failed to materialize, the New York Times covered the second UN conference on the environment, which opened “amid gloom”:The piece quotes Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United Nations environmental program, as saying that if things aren’t fixed by the turn of the century — the year 2000 — the world would face “an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.’’
In 1989, a senior UN environmental official shaved a year off that dire prediction, saying that if we didn’t fix climate change by 1999, we would have “Global disaster, nations wiped off the face of the earth, crop failures”: ...
There is much more.
The main consistency is that they always give us 10 years to save the planet going on for 50 years and running. The Chicken Little climate crowd never really explain why their previous predictions of gloom and doom were wrong. It is like a preacher who keeps predicting the end times if the congregation does not change its ways. Even the "fact-checkers" are in on the scam defending Al Gores claim that the poles would be ice-free by now and that there would be coastal flooding because of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. They engage in pretzel arguments to explain the failure to get it right.
Here it is 50 years later and the climate is pleasant still and the poles are still cold..
Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now. It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
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