The other shoe always drops. Always.
Just a few weeks before the overhyped World Climate Summit in Copenhagen, person or persons unknown released reams of data from the world’s largest repository of climate data in England.
Along with e-mails that point out a great deal of petty rivalry, there are also those that point towards fraudulent use taxpayer funds. Also released into the public domain were keys to various climate model programs, most of which have been demonstrated to be deeply flawed and deliberately skewed towards a predetermined conclusion.
At Copenhagen, the assembled bureaucracy and talking heads were unable to reach any meaningful agreement. Some of this was due to the daily revelations spilling forth into the public domain regarding the UN’s IPCC models and predictions as a result of the Hadley CRU data leak.
For the duration of the climate change debate, global warming alarmists have consistently and loudly proclaimed that global warming sceptics are simply shills for the carbon-spewing energy industries such as “big oil” or “big coal.”
No such connection has ever been seen to exist.
In the meantime, we on the sceptical side have long warned that there are inherent dangers in giving the ever more corrupt UN even more power and money.
You see, much of the opposition to global warming alarmism comes from people who took the time to see how well the UN Oil For Food programs didn’t work in Iraq.
We paid attention to how billions of aid dollars got funnelled into the pockets and Swiss bank accounts of UN insiders (and confidantes and associates of the father of the global warming movement- Maurice Strong).
Among those who would just as soon shoot the tires off the global warming movement bandwagon are actually individuals who are quite firm in their belief that man-made global warming is occurring.
They also believe that the UN is the last organization that should be empowered to do anything about it.
The big flaw in the UN model is that despots, tyrants and kleptocrats are elevated to the same level as proper governments and leaders of functioning nations.
Throw in the natural tendency of socialism to trend towards corruption, and the result is the UN is as rife with corruption as Red Deer is with dandelions in June.
As I said earlier, the other shoe always drops.
Just this past week we’ve learned that an alarming prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide much of India’s water, would be completely gone in just 25 years was a complete falsehood based upon random conjecture.
We have also learned that a prominent and influential British scientist has admitted to falsifying his research not just for political reasons, but for financial gain as well.
The cornerstone of, and the source of much objection to, the global warming movement has largely been the consistent demands to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from rich to poor in the name of “climate justice.”
Global warmists have long admonished that we should “follow the money” when it comes to global warming sceptics, because they’d like us to believe that only those who are oil company stooges would dare to oppose global warming dogma.
In spite of that, it is the clear thinking common citizen who has been at the forefront of the fight against the global warming movement.
It’s the common citizen that has heard the call for billions of dollars in new foreign aid spending, in the name of “climate justice,” and noticed an odd corollary.
There’s a fairly lengthy list of people who line up for billions of dollars in humanitarian aid, and turn it into warehouses full of machine guns, palaces the size Prince Edward Island, and offshore bank accounts bulging with cash measured by the tonne.
At the same time, the people for whom the aid is meant languish in poverty and squalor, bereft of the benefits of proper civil government. Very often, these people live in nations whose resource wealth is siphoned away by the very leaders who use the UN to rail at the Western exploitation their countrymen.
The list above looks startlingly similar to the list of people who have signed up for “climate justice” money, and the list of researchers banging the climate change drum strangely leads to manufacturing and energy companies in China and India.
One of the other shoes has dropped. It’s fallen from the top shelf of Imelda Marcos’ closet.
Bill Greenwood is a local freelance columnist.