My friend Joe Loconte has a great column up at the Weekly Standard today on the U.N.’s complicity in the Burmese regime’s contribution to the disaster following the cyclone there. He concludes:
The cyclone that has laid waste to much of Burma, then, is not only a natural disaster. It is a calamity partly of human design–the result of deliberate moral ambiguity and quiet complicity with terror. Such problems will linger long after the relief organizations have completed their work.
Sadly, thanks to the disgusting opportunism of that blowhard Al Gore, people will think that the human design in this tragedy was mankind’s contribution to global warming. He was weaselly enough to admit that we can’t blame any one storm on global warming, but still the impression he left — and presumably meant to give — was that 100,000 people would be alive now if we didn’t use fossil fuels. The fact is (and I will post the full list on Planet Gore), of the 20 deadliest cyclones ever seen in the Indian Ocean, 19 of them happened before the purported onset of anthropogenic global warming.
On a related point, I recommend Roger Pielke Jr’s recent posts on how everything seems to be “consistent with” global warming predictions. This is sophistry, and it needs to be called out.