Climate change has saved hundreds of thousands of Africans from extreme poverty, starvation and premature death, a study from Arizona State University has confirmed. The study shows that the West African Sahel – part of the semiarid strip just south of the Sahara desert, which spans the African continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – has been steadily “regreening” since the severe droughts of the 1970s and 1980s which killed more than 100,000 people. Among the reasons for the “regreening” are increased rainfall, the beneficial effects of increased atmospheric CO2 on plant growth and the ingenuity of farmers (“community-led conservation efforts) in this harsh, marginal region. Skeptics have long been aware of these beneficial side effects of “global warming” – see, for example, this report from 2011 by the Global Warming Policy Foundation called The Sahel Is Greening. But alarmists have fiercely resisted this good news because
Author: James Delingpole
‘Climate Change Deniers Are As Bad As Hitler’. Yale History Professor Goes Full Godwin
If you don’t believe in climate change you’re as bad as Hitler. There. I’ve just precised a long article which appeared in the New York Times over the weekend with the title The Next Genocide. Rather worryingly it was the work not of some fruitcake environmental activist but of someone who really ought to know better – a professor of history, at Yale no less, called Timothy Snyder. It starts dramatically with an Einsatzgruppe commander lifting a Jewish child in the air and saying: “You must die so that we can live.” This is a classic move from the liberal-left playbook. Sock ‘em with an emotive image which lays out the terms of your argument, viz: every time you say you don’t believe in climate change another baby dies. And, oh, by the way, did I also mention it makes you a Nazi? Well, I suppose Professor Snyder has got
For The Last Time, No, The Syrian Crisis Was Not Caused By Climate Change
Is there nothing green ideologues won’t do to try to breathe pseudo-scientific life into their bankrupt climate change thesis? Not by the looks of this desperate newspaper story, which attempts – as so many have before – to make hay out of the ragingly fashionable crisis in Syria by linking it to man-made global warming. The report quotes Professor Richard Seager of Columbia University, New York, who says: “Syria was destabilised by 1.5 million migrants from rural communities fleeing a three-year drought that was made more intense and persistent by human-driven climate change, which is steadily making the whole eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region even more arid.” Seager is careful to note that this drought affected several countries besides Syria. “Syria is not the only country affected by this drying. Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and Iran are too. However the various social, religious and ethnic wars play out, in
The 5 Awkward Questions They Won’t Answer About The Drowned Boy, Syria And Our ‘Moral Duty’
1. What’s the truth behind the story of the drowned boy Aylan Kurdi? There’s just so much that doesn’t add up. Starting with the fact that the boy’s name is actually Alan Shenu. His father Abdullah claims he and his family were fleeing the fighting in his ‘home town’ Kobani. Yet according to the Guardian they have been living in Turkey for three years – long before the fighting in Kobani started or indeed ISIS really existed – and before that in Damascus. In Turkey, their rent appears to have been paid for by a sister in Canada and they had over $4,400 in cash so they were in no immediate danger. Abdullah’s accounts of his motives, of his intentions and what actually happened are wildly inconsistent. In some versions he was heading for Sweden. In others he was off to Canada (which had already once denied his asylum application), where his
Compassion Signalling About A Sad Photograph Won’t Solve Syria’s Refugee Problem
It’s a pretty low-down trick, you might have thought, to use a harrowing photograph of a dead child to advance your political agenda and signal the depths of your compassion. But almost everyone has been at it over the last couple of days – from the Tory MP for Plymouth to Labour’s temporary Opposition leader Harriet Harman, from the Chief Rabbi on the BBC Radio 4 Today this morning to pretty much all the people you know on Facebook and Twitter. Fairly typical is these inevitable contributions from Jack Monroe, a political activist. The 3 year old boy was called Aylan Kurdi. Children are dying. For gods sake this world is for all of us. How dare we not help each other? — Jack Monroe (@DrJackMonroe) September 3, 2015 and CHILDREN ARE DROWNING. Some of you still want to draw imaginary lines round ‘your’ country because of ‘their’ birthplace. Fuck
Bear’s And Barack’s Great Arctic Distraction
President Obama has been joking from the White House’s Instagram account about his encounter in the Alaskan wilderness with survivalist Bear Grylls. You’ll never guess what he said. “Glad this was the only Bear I met in the park.” Yes. It’s for spur-of-the-moment quips like this that the President so often hears himself mentioned in phrases like “funnier than the bastard lovechild of Richard Pryor and Chris Rock…on crack!!!” (Until he wakes up, at any rate). I’m afraid I find myself similarly sceptical of claims that POTUS may have gone on some kind of “crash survival course” for his appearance on the NBC show Running Wild with Bear Grylls. Yeah. That would have happened. The most powerful leader in the world really would have spent time alone in the wilderness with just Bear Grylls and a skeleton camera crew, scavenging for edible insects and drinking his own urine, without the
Ian Fleming Never Mentioned James Bond’s Ethnicity. But He did Offer a Few Clues…
The next James Bond definitely has to be black and he definitely has to be played by Idris Elba (The Wire; Luther) Anyone who thinks to diverge even slightly from this now officially accepted view, to be held by everyone everywhere in the world on pain of excommunication, is a racist. We know this because of the recent experiences of children’s author Anthony Horowitz, who briefly committed heresy over the weekend when he dared to suggest that Elba was perhaps too “street” to play a suave, Eton-educated, Senior-Service-trained, half-Swiss, half-Scots secret agent. Horowitz – who clearly hasn’t read Allum Bokhari’s excellent piece on the vital importance of not surrendering to Social Justice Warriors – subsequently issued an abject apology. “Clumsily, I chose the word ‘street’ as Elba’s gritty portrayal of DCI John Luther was in my mind but I admit it was a poor choice of word. I am mortified
Chrissie Hynde: Scantily-Clad 21-Year-Old Girls High on Drugs Really Shouldn’t Mix With Biker Gangs…
Rock singer Chrissie Hynde has got herself into trouble with women’s groups for suggesting that when a pretty young girl goes to hang with a biker gang while wearing next to nothing and out of her face on drugs she is kind of asking to be raped. Luckily, on BBC Radio 4 this morning, a woman called Laura Bates, British-Empire-Medal-winning founder of the “everydaysexism” project, was on hand to explain why Hynde’s antediluvian views are wrong, wrong, wrong! They are, young Laura told us – with all the benefit of her 29 years in such hellholes as a Somerset private school, St John’s College, Cambridge and the BBC studio where Woman’s Hour is recorded – a classic case of “victim-blaming.” When a woman gets raped, Laura explained, it is never in any way her fault and has nothing whatsoever to do with how provocatively or otherwise she is dressed. That’s
How Obama’s Environmental Policies Are Undermining the US Military and National Security
When President Obama declared earlier this year that “climate change” represents “an immediate risk to our national security” he was absolutely right: his administration’s crazed faith that renewable energy represents a solution to “climate change” is…
Enron Environmentalism: The Carbon Credits Scam Pumps Millions of Tonnes More Greenhouse Gases Into The Atmosphere
A UN-endorsed carbon offset scheme designed to reduce emissions has actually increased them massively, a study by a green think tank has found. As well as pumping much as 600 million tonnes more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the carbon credits scheme has been abused by countries like Russia and the Ukraine which have used them as a money making scam. Vladyslav Zhezherin, one of the co-authors of the study by the Stockholm Environment Institute says: “This was like printing money.” Another co-author Anja Kollmuss has told BBC News. “We were surprised ourselves by the extent [of the fraud], we didn’t expect such a large number.” “What went on was that these countries could approve these projects by themselves there was no international oversight, in particular Russia and the Ukraine didn’t have any incentive to guarantee the quality of these credits.” To which the two obvious questions are: Have any