Sunday, August 08, 2010

A perverse set of priorities


Recent landslides in China, triggered by prolonged rainfall, have - according to diverse reports killed at least 127 people. Furthermore, the death toll in the massive landslide in northwest China's Gansu province is expected to rise rapidly as over 2,000 people are missing.

"It's very hard to locate the people washed away by floods. It's hard to say what their chances of survival are," He Youxin, an officer of People's Armed Police Force, said. Rescuers had to use spades and bare hands because heavy machinery and excavators could not reach the site covered with sludge, some as thick as six feet.

On top of the Pakistani floods – which have, incidentally, also been affecting the Indian-held sectors Jammu and Kashmir – we have also seen extreme weather events in Korea, Korea Japan and elsewhere.

This, of course, is just weather, but still the warmists pursue their dire creed, on which Booker today passes comment. Interestingly, it was back in June that we got the most honest comment about extreme weather events in a certain locality, the candour matched only by the complete lack of interest in the Western media.

By the same token, we get plenty of coverage about the Russian heatwave, but got very little about the coldest winter in 130 years ... in Russia. Thus, the whole subject is wide open to cherry-picking, which distorts even accurate reports of isolated events. Without an appreciation of the whole picture, and a longer-term perspective, there is nothing that can be properly inferred from these events.

The real news, therefore, is not of climate, but of human tragedy and suffering. That we can do something about, and a fraction of the billions spent on "climate change" would go a long way to reducing the impact.

But as long as we are in the grip of the climate zealots, those being killed by the weather now are less important that the lucrative funding opportunities arising from predicting future disasters. How perverse it is that potential deaths in the future get more money than real deaths now – a sad reflection on human priorities.

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