Last Saturday I lambasted our "woke" Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, for inviting the United Nations Human Rights Commission – with totalitarian member nations like China, Russia and Venezuela – to investigate human rights in the United States. That's inviting the fox into the henhouse. No thanks!
I wrote that the United States pays about 25 percent of the UN's bloated budget, permitting free-spending international bureaucrats to live the good life in very expensive cities like Geneva, New York and Paris. And just last week we learned that these same fat cat bureaucrats have spent millions of American taxpayer dollars on an apocalyptic report that calls climate change "code red for humanity" and predicts that global warming will soon destroy our planet.
But wait a minute. Isn't that what former Vice President Al Gore told us 25 years ago? Yet most of us are still here more or less alive despite all of those gloom and doom predictions. Here's how the Wall Street Journal summarized the most recent UN report: "The climate Apocalypse is nigh, humanity is to blame, and unless the world remakes the global economy, havoc and death are inevitable." And Chicken Little still thinks the sky is falling.
"No one denies that the climate has been warming, and no one serious argues that humans play no role," the Journal continued, noting that the new report links global warming to "catastrophic weather events such as hurricanes, severe heat waves or rain events, drought, and so on." However, the newspaper adds, these dire connections and predictions are based on "new methodology" (computer models), "but we know climate models are far from perfect."
So instead of eagerly embracing the scariest scenarios, perhaps climate scientists should take a fresh look at controversial computer models instead of jumping to frightening conclusions. Writing in the Journal, Steven Koonin, a climate change adviser to former President Obama, cited "many muddled (computer) models" and called climate science "unsettled." "Despite constant warnings of catastrophe, things aren't anywhere near as dire as the media say," he wrote.
Former Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker recently criticized mainstream media coverage of climate change. "'Is this the end of summer as we know it?' a New York Times headline asked the other day," Baker wrote. "Extreme weather events did not arrive in the few short years since the saintly Greta Thunberg" discovered climate change.
"Reporters used to be hard-bitten skeptics," Baker added, "but now they aspire to be part of the authoritative expert class. … (today's) editors and reporters simply cull from the innumerable events around them those that fit the prevailing narrative." That's an accurate description of 21st century journalism, not the skeptical, questioning journalism I learned at the University of Washington J School many years ago. I admire Old School journalism, not today's politically correct version of a once proud profession.
Baker says today's journalists are happiest when wagging their elitist fingers at "selfish fools who continue to doubt climate extremism." Just call me a selfish fool for questioning the latest UN climate change report.
"No!" to Pot Lounges
Kudos to Mayor Lori Bagwell and three of our four city supervisors for voting to ban "pot lounges" in Nevada's capital city. I saw some of those sleazy lounges in Amsterdam a few years ago and believe me, they're nothing to be proud of. Let Gov. Sisolak's campaign contributors have their pot lounges in Las Vegas. We don't need or want them here in our town. In fact, we don't need two pot shops here either because Carson voted against the legalization of so-called "recreational" marijuana five years ago.
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal's senior political columnist.
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