by Ruthie Blum
Every time it seems
American foreign policy couldn't get any worse, Secretary of State John
Kerry comes along to set the record straight. The weekend was no
exception.
In Indonesia on Sunday,
during the last leg of an Asia tour that included South Korea and
China, Kerry took the opportunity to talk about the dangers of climate
change. The speech he delivered in Jakarta at the U.S. Embassy-run
American Center took place a day after a second round of "peace talks"
in Geneva between representatives of Syrian President Bashar Assad's
government and members of the opposition ended at an impasse.
(Ironically, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem also raised the
issue of climate, but he wasn't referring to global temperatures.
Rather, he was blaming the U.S. for "creating a very negative climate
for dialogue in Geneva.")
Kerry's address to a
packed audience of Indonesian students, community leaders and government
officials also came two days ahead of a resumption of nuclear
negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 powers (the U.S., Russia, China,
the United Kingdom, France and Germany) in Vienna.
None of this was what
the U.S. secretary of state wanted to discuss while visiting the country
with the largest Muslim population in the world, however. Instead, he
was there to warn the Indonesians about greenhouse gas emissions and
"big companies" that are ostensibly wreaking havoc on the planet in
general, and specifically causing typhoons, floods and Friday's eruption
of a volcano on the island of Java.
"This city, this
country, this region, is really on the front lines of climate change,"
he said. "It's not an exaggeration to say that your entire way of life
here is at risk. In a sense, climate change can now be considered the
world's largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world's
most fearsome weapon of mass destruction."
To add arrogance to
insult and injury, Kerry attacked anyone daring to doubt the veracity of
the claim that carbon monoxide is the culprit behind recent spates of
bad weather.
"We simply don't have
time to let a few loud interest groups hijack the climate conversation,"
he admonished. And then he went for the jugular. "We should not allow a
tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues
to compete with scientific facts. … The science is unequivocal, and
those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the
sand. We don't have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth
Society."
Due to a serious lack
of reportage, it is unclear how Kerry's gaseous emissions were received.
But one thing is certain: The secretary of state is as clueless and
agenda-driven about climatology as he is about the Middle East.
Nor does he ever let evidence interfere with his ignorance.
For Kerry's
information, among the "shoddy scientists" whom he considers to be part
of the "Flat Earth Society" are serious academics who spent years, and
tons of grant money, studying "global warming" (a term that had to be
adjusted to accommodate increasingly freezing winters) to prove both its
existence and that it was caused by mankind. That their conclusion did
not jibe with their original hypothesis is a testament to their
professional integrity, not a reason to ridicule their research.
The following are a few
truths Kerry would do well to take into account, even if The New York
Times and Washington Post do not deem them newsworthy:
Earth has gone through
cycles of climate change throughout history, well before the Industrial
Revolution. Fluctuations between extreme cold, as in the Ice Ages, and
extreme heat have always existed. Currently, for example, the sun is
hotter than it has been in a century. According to NASA, this is because
of solar flares.
Meanwhile, global warming is causing ice to melt on Mars, a planet without factories and cars -- and interest groups.
But the most convincing
piece of proof that human beings and modernization are innocent of the
charges against them lies in two clauses of an extensive report on the
subject, released last September by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, established by the United Nations and the World
Meteorological Organization in 1988.
The only trouble is
that the clauses were removed from the final draft of the published
document. The first says, "None of the studies cited above has shown
clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to
increases in greenhouse gases."
According to the second, "No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man-made causes."
No study is needed to
conclude that terrorism and genuine weapons of mass destruction can be
attributed to "man-made causes." It is these that the U.S. should be
combating with all its might. Instead, the American administration is
waging war on the weather.
Ruthie Blum is the author of "To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.'"
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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