Just as Ban Ki-moon is warming up to climate change as “the defining challenge of our age,” with the UN describing as absolute and unequivocal the “dire report” of the UN’s IPCC (picked for the Nobel prize courtesy of the Norwegian parliament, whose wisdom, we must infer, is similarly absolute), along comes the news that — whoops! — the UN in its earlier apocalyptic warnings about another issue has, in the words of the Washington Post, “long over-estimated both the size and course” — in that case of the AIDS epidemic.
According to today’s Washington Post, while AIDS remains a devastating crisis in the worst-affected parts of sub-Saharan Africa, UN top AIDS scientists are now having to admit that they went wildly overboard in their assertions that AIDS was an ever-expanding global epidemic. Contrary to years of dire reports from the UN, some as recent as last year, it now seems the spread of AIDS has been slowing for nearly a decade. The global total of people infected, estimated last year by the UN at nearly 40 million and climbing, is about to be revised down to 33 million. Reports the Post, “The far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.”
The Post quotes an AIDS expert, Helen Epstein, saying “There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda.”
Could there possibly be a certain parallel here between past UN alarmism over a wildfire global AIDS pandemic, and Ban Ki-moon’s latest pronouncement that to stop the imminent, irreversible, dire, apocalyptic, overwhelming, total, unquestionable and abruptly looming climate catastrophe (he went and saw a melting glacier for himself — who are we to question what that means?), there must now be a titanic planet-wide wealth transfer, with the UN as fee-collecting broker and middleman? At the imminent UN climate conference next month by the warm beaches of Bali, where UN staffers will collect their per diems while UN eminences plan ways to chill our economy, will anyone dare to bring that up?
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5 Comments
1. LSD:Dead-on as usual, Claudia!
If there is anything more fightening than the specter of global warming, it might just be what people try to do about it. If science, as a discipline, is going to serve mankind, then scientists need to resist the tug of politics.
Nov 20, 2007 - 12:44 pm 2. R. S. Ellis:Considering that the UN is led by a majority representing the very worst forms of government (tyrannies, cleptocracies, terrorist regimes, etc), is there any wonder that the UN has the credibility of an atheist the day after the rapture?
Nov 20, 2007 - 7:16 pm 3. bourne2y:Let the record show (and by golly, it does show) that no one has chosen to sit by the beach in one of those. . . chairs . . . or has dropped by to partake of luncheon-by-the-sea.
That’s because, I suppose, the delegates are busily working in their famous 20-hour a day sessions that have no agenda. No public agenda, that is.
Nov 20, 2007 - 11:35 pm 4. Henri Alleg:It’s a wonder that you can write crap like this, have a link on your page to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” and be oblivious to the irony.
Nov 21, 2007 - 3:11 am 5. spynverzyon:Note that Mr. Alleg does not actually say where Ms. Rosett’s post uses language that Orwell would criticize; he simply dismisses it as “crap” and invokes some unspecified “irony” on the presumption that anyone who disagrees with him is “oblivious.”
But of course, this is the standard liberal trope, now fully deployed in the Global Warming Campaign: invoke an unsubstantiated presumption (”scientific consensus”) and vilify anyone who disagrees (”climate deniers”). Orwellian irony, indeed.
As for holding UN operatives to the standards of accountability and probity that apply to most ordinary folk, that would seem to be out of bounds. Perhaps these great champions of egalitarian justice and moral relativism are simply “more equal” than the rest of us.
Nov 22, 2007 - 1:39 pm