So Close, But Yet So Far

Al Gore finally got to visit a place where, but for the intelligence of a couple hundred Floridians, he would be living. That place is the White House, where he talked about global warming with President Bush. The two men refused to talk about details of their conversation, so they could have just been talking about if Bret Farve is going to set anymore records this season. But Bush is preparing for a global conference next week in Bali, Indonesia, and I'dlike to think he isn't still swallowing Gore's lies about Global Warming and Greenhouse Gas Emmisions.
"It was a private conversation," Gore said after the meeting. "Of course we talked about global warming . . . the whole time."
As liberal wackos everywhere fawn over, Gore was instrumental as vice president in negotiating the 1997 Kyoto Accord. But President Clinton never submitted the treaty to Congress, and Bush has steadfastly opposed costly green mandates in favor of voluntary caps on CO2 emissions.
So was Bush just being polite to his one-time political rival? Again, we hope so. But who can be sure in an atmosphere where the nonstop propaganda on global warming has become almost intolerable.
Just listen to the United Nations, which released a granola-fest Human Development Report just one week before the Bali meeting. "Unless the international community agrees to cut carbon emissions by half over the next generation," the report says (according to Reuters), "climate change is likely to cause large-scale human and economic setbacks and irreversible catastrophes."
If that sounds terrifying, it's meant to. But there isn't a shred of science to back it up — only spurious "models" based on an incomplete picture of how nature and the climate work.
If you don't believe us, just ask any of the politically hand-picked U.N. scientists who concocted these models if they can tell you, within one degree, what the temperature in your town will be one week from today — or one month. The answer will be no.
Yet we're expected to believe they can predict a rise in temperature of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — or higher — over the next century, unless we take immediate and dramatic action to halt it. By the way, over the last century, the world's climate warmed just 1.3 degrees.
Undeterred by the crumbling of the much-touted "scientific consensus," the U.N. is charging ahead, claiming the world has just 10 years to "fix" the climate — or face doomsday.
The claims are getting extreme, and bizarrely specific. The headline on one story about the report — "Poor In Need of Help From Global Warming" — because anything bad needs to hurt the poor, that way the mibos in Hollywood like Leonardo DiCaprio can try and save the poor from the evil of Global Warming.
But it's no joke. And why would the U.N. say all this, if it isn't true?
In a word, money. The U.N. has bungled virtually every job it's been given — from peacekeeping in Africa to monitoring sanctions on Iraq. As an organization, it's rife with corruption and overpaid bureaucratic time-servers. They need a new mission, which always means American taxpayers will have to reach for their wallets.
Which explains why the "Development Report" can claim that floods, droughts and other climate-related disasters "could stall and then reverse human development," robbing millions of food, schools and even shelter — unless, that is, rich nations pony up $86 billion by 2015 to help the poor adapt to global warming.
Oh, and by the way, the U.N. says $40 billion of that will have to come from the U.S. Of course, the U.N. will oversee that money.
The U.N.'s shrill warnings have reached a hysteric pitch — the equivalent of shrieking "fire" in a packed theater on the theory there might be one in the future.
But what's really taking place is a massive shakedown in which our sympathies for the poor are being played while our pockets are being picked. The United Nations should be ashamed of itself.