Friday, August 16, 2002

Asian Brown Cloud Over Johannesburg!
Patrick Michaels in the National Post (Canada) notes the amazing way bogus environmental "crises" and United Nations environmental clambakes go hand in hand:
Nightmarish reports ... have a way of appearing right before big UN environmental conferences -- and being proven wrong not long thereafter. In 1995, a Geneva meeting, which gave rise to the infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming, was prefaced with a breathless pronouncement that we now had climate models that matched the real atmosphere, lending credibility to gloom-and-doom forecasts of climate change. Months later, Nature magazine was compelled to publish a paper showing that the data which the UN cited was incomplete, and when all the numbers were put in, the correspondence vanished.

The UN's most recent world environment confab occurred last fall in Marrakesh. Days before that one, we learned that the poor islanders of Tuvalu were being drowned by sea-level rises caused by global warming. Within days, an article appeared in Science magazine showing that sea level around Tuvalu has been falling, not rising, for most of the last 50 years.
This makes him rather suspicious of the UN report which describes the Asian Brown Cloud (ABC), and claims that it could kill millions:
Lest anyone think the UN has learned anything about its environmental misrepresentations, let's examine the Brown Cloud story.

Summarizing the UN's report, CNN said that the ABC is so awful that it has "scientists warning that it could kill millions of people in the area, and pose a global threat." Further, the cloud "could cut rainfall over northwest Pakistan, Afghanistan, western China and west Central Asia by up to 40%."

Sleazy air exiting Asia is nothing new to climatologists. Reid Bryson, the eminent scientist who many believe is the progenitor of the modern notion of human-induced climate change, wrote about it in the 1950s. Since then, climate scientists have searched and searched through Indian monsoon data to try to find any systematic changes, and there have been none.

Don't take my word for it. Look at page 144 of the 2001 compendium on climate change published by the selfsame United Nations, and you won't find any systematic changes in South Asian rainfall.

The UN's pre-Johannesburg hype prompted CNN to write that the ABC "has led to some erratic weather, including flooding in Bangladesh, Nepal, and northeastern India, [and] drought in Pakistan, and northwestern India." The fact is that there isn't a single shred of scientific evidence to back up those claims. In fact, in its 2001 report, the UN noted that there's no evidence for any systematic changes in extreme weather around the planet.

...


When we get near these worldwide gatherings, there isn't a piece of UN science that isn't political. That's because what these meetings are about is blaming the West for environmental degradation, and holding us up for money.
Silly me! I thought the Brown Cloud was an unfortunate byproduct of all the fancy meals the junketeers ate at prior UN gatherings. And why are we paying for the UN to do "science" in the first place?