Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk must be a sucker for punishment if he’s putting himself up for the job of deputy United Nations climate chief (Van Schalkwyk has SA nod for UN job, March 9).
That’s because the UN’s flagship climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has become a laughing stock as revelations pile up about dodgy science, erroneous forecasts and outright manipulation of data. Not for nothing is it known in sceptic circles as the International Panel of Climate Crooks.
Meanwhile, newer published studies around climate science, more accurate temperature records from satellites, and freezing snow and blizzards in much of the northern hemisphere continue to undermine the thesis of man-made global warming.
The tide is turning.
The smart money is on global warming going the same way as bird flu, swine flu, Y2K, the ozone layer, the population explosion, the food crisis, the energy crisis, global cooling and the litany of Armageddon-type predictions of the past 30 years that never came to pass.
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It’s an “exceptionally inconvenient truth”, the UK’s Guardian newspaper wrote this week (March 8), that people are drifting into a “lethal sleep” on climate change. Even Al Gore, in an appearance this week on the Norwegian talk show Skavlan, to promote his recent book, Our Choice, has admitted: “I have thus far failed, and our world has thus far failed to respond adequately to this crisis.”
That’s because there is no crisis, and the man in the street is finally getting it. To quote Abraham Lincoln: you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
One can only wish Mr Van Schalkwyk luck if he should be unfortunate enough to get the job.
He would need it.
Robert Gentle
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