Sunday, February 11, 2007

Sydney Residents Wake To Laughingstock   [Mark Steyn]

The great Australian wag, Tim Blair, posts this front page from The Sydney Morning Herald a week ago:

World Wakes To Calamity

Er, what calamity was that? Did I sleep in and miss it? No, it was the UN IPCC summary on "climate change." The scariest scenarios aren't due to show up till 2100, but evidently you can never set your alarm clock too early. The "calamity" is illustrated by a huge picture of an LBJ daisy-like young girl innocently plashing in the seas, unaware that in a century's time the beach will be a thousand miles inland and she'll be 500 feet under.

I see from my comparatively sleepier local paper in New Hampshire that Kevin Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and one of the IPCC bigwigs, predicts that, unless we act on climate change, "one million people" will die by 2100 - from droughts, hurricanes, wildfires and the like. Which works out about 10,000 people a year. Or about 50 people in each country.

On the other hand, over two million people die of diarrhea each year, mainly in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. If you clobber the global economy and slow down Third World development, they'll continue to die — 2.2 to 5 million per year, or a minimum of 204 million by the year 2100. And yet The Sydney Morning Herald is entirely indifferent to the huge global diarrhea tsunami engulfing the planet. When will they have the guts to wake up their readers to that?

02/11 05:36 PMShare