Inconvenient facts, dude

I RECENTLY mentioned to a co-worker that the West's punitive threats/actions against African nations that would dare to use DDT to eradicate mosquitoes left millions of people defenseless against malaria and ultimately dead. The response? Pretty much, "Tough shit, let 'em eat cake--and use better mosquito nets."
    While environmentalism may seem like nothing more than an annoying cult, it is not. Rachel Carson and "Silent Spring" have killed millions and counting.
    Now that tubby Al Gore is about to be anointed high priest of the cult at the Oscars, the Left's annual kook-clatch, a couple of quotes in defense of reason seem in order. Taken from this week's Patriot Post:
    Gore insists that the increased incidence of hurricanes, tornadoes, drought and other weather phenomena is the direct result of global warming.
    Renowned meteorologist Dr. William Gray takes exception: “The degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes,” he says, “is inversely proportional to your knowledge about these storms.”
    In a recent issue of Discover Magazine, Gray, described by Discover’s editors as one of “the world’s most famous hurricane experts,” wrote, “This human-induced global-warming thing... is grossly exaggerated... I’m not disputing there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and ‘40s, and then there was global cooling in the middle ‘40s to the early ‘70s. Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical... about this global-warming thing. But no one asks us.”
    Gore preaches about the two percent of Antarctica that is warming without noting that temperature readings over the rest of Antarctica indicate the continent has cooled over the previous 35 years, or that the UN’s climate panel estimates net snow mass increases in Antarctica this century. Gore notes the increasing temperatures and shrinking ice caps in the Northern Hemisphere but does not note the decreasing temperatures and increased sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere.
    Richard S. Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, writes, “A general characteristic of Mr. Gore’s approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”