The sky is falling . . . oh wait, no it's not

Well, it happened again. Someone has pointed out a new problem with all the hysteria surrounding climate change. I delight in these revelations because we need to base our actions on reality, not hypothetical, alarmist scenarios dreamed up by Al Gore and his ilk. Here’s the latest case in which climate change folks are shown to be extremists and, dare I say, liars. By the way, I took this from The Wall Street Journal, a publication I highly recommend due to its reputation and careful analysis of many topics ranging from politics to science.

In 2005, the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) published a color-coded map under the headline "Fifty million climate refugees by 2010." The primary source for the prediction was a 2005 paper by environmental scientist Norman Myers.

Let’s see . . . how has this prediction turned out? Six years later, this flood of refugees is nowhere to be found, global average temperatures are about where they were when the prediction was made. Here’s the most interesting thing of all--the U.N. has attempted to distance itself from this embarrassment by wiping the inconvenient map from its servers.

The map, which can still be found elsewhere on the Web (I’ve seen it), disappeared from the program's site sometime after April 11, when Gavin Atkins asked on AsianCorrespondent.com: "What happened to the climate refugees?" It's now 2011 and, as Mr. Atkins points out, many of the locales that the map identified as likely sources of climate refugees are "not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world." Oops!

Of course, the people responsible for the map have an answer, but I’ll leave it up to you whether you find it convincing. The program's spokesman says the map vanished because "it's not a UNEP prediction. . . . that graphic did not represent UNEP views and was an oversimplification of UNEP views." He added that the program would like to publish a clarification except that the staffers able to do so are "all on holiday for Easter." So, do you buy this?

The climate-refugee prediction isn't the first global warming-related claim that has turned out to be laughable. The Journal says it is more concerned that people responsible for earlier predictions then have the nerve to claim these mistakes weren’t really their fault.

I agree. Once again, to me the main issue is not climate change itself. Instead, it’s the way so-called authorities can scream hysterically, be taken seriously by a mainstream press that never investigates the issues, and then pretend they never made the statements which have later been proved to be false. Let’s keep a sharp eye out for those who want to move us emotionally with weak arguments, especially when their goal is to weaken our economy in some utopian dream.