PrintDecember 3, 2008
Bill Clinton Puts Global Warming Threat Ahead of Terrorism
Just days after 10 terrorists -- likely Islamic extremists -- butchered more than 170 people -- including 6 Americans -- in Mumbai, Bill Clinton listed terrorism second to last in a list of challenges the world faces. Speaking at Tuesday's opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative Summit in Hong Kong [video], the former president named global warming, disease, scarcity of food, and the increasing scarcity of water before mentioning "the stark reminder we had in the last few days in India of the exposure to terrorism we all share." And, despite the genuine miseries they've caused and the still greater they yet portend, "the global troubles in the financial markets" ranked dead last on his list.
Further emphasizing modern realities, the conference convened the very same day a pending bipartisan task force report warning of an imminent nuclear or biological attack on a major US City in the next 5 years was leaked. Yet, after grossly understating terrorism's threat in his introduction, Clinton kept his speakers and audience, which included "11 former and current heads of state," focused on climate change and green economics. Consequently, at the same moment CNN was discussing the WMD panel's conclusion that "America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing," Clinton's panel was making similar statements about the ravages of greenhouse gases and the immorality of mankind's continuing contribution.
Forgive me, as it's broken record time again -- but the warming experienced in the latter quarter of the 20th century ended in 1998. Furthermore, as of October's RSS satellite data, the 12 month global average temperature trend was cooler than last year and continuing its fall since 2005. And when the data for 2008 are released next month, it seems likely this year will confirm a mean annual decline over last.
The former Commander-in-chief's former Veep didn't exactly help his own already tenuous credibility when he called global warming, not terrorism, the "most serious threat we have ever faced" during a July speech. But Al Gore's buffoonish analysis wasn't rendered on the heels of a bloody and barbarous terrorist event. Besides, we've come to expect what David Whitehouse so marvelously refers to as "data denial" from the Goracle. It's unlikely even the ironic cancellation of next Saturday's Live Earth India global warming awareness concert due to the Mumbai massacre will temper his fanatic priorities.
But consider this graph, charting both NASA's Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) satellite and Britain's Hadley Climate Research Unit's ground station temperature data against atmospheric CO2 levels as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii between 1998 and 2008. Its IPCC greenhouse orthodoxy-shredding depiction of steadily rising CO2 relative to flat or dipping temperatures after 1998 should, at the very least, stop the rabid attacks upon AGW apostates and open the debates that never really started despite alarmists' insistence already ended.
But nearly 10 years of actual measurements contradicting IPCC doctrine should also give those lending a decade-dead non-problem priority over the unthinkable threat of nuclear or germ terrorism pause.
Alarmists shout loudly of a hypothetical CO2 level of 450 ppm representing a tipping point - supposedly triggering irreversible and cataclysmic global warming. But that the all too real catastrophic tipping point a nuclear capable al-Qaeda would represent poses the greater danger should be glaringly obvious.
Even to ex-presidents with a history of missing terrorism's warnings and ignoring repeated opportunities to capture or kill its most infamous and deadly architect.
