A Free-Market Energy Blog

Terrorism, not Climate Change (please, Mr. President)

By Sterling Burnett -- November 19, 2015

“The world’s leaders can’t control their borders, yet they think they can change the weather. The sheer hubris is amazing.”

President Barack Obama may have the worst understanding of the true threats to the U.S.’s other nations’ national security and domestic tranquility of any President in our country’s history.

In 2014, President Obama was proclaiming through his proxies, including Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, climate change was the most important threat facing our nation’s national security. Then in his 2015 State of the Union address Obama stated, “No challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” a claim he reiterated at his commencement address to the Coast Guard Academy in May, stating, “no challenge poses a greater threat to our future and future generations than a change in climate.”

I don’t know about future generations – and neither does anyone else – but I do know about now and climate change is well down the list of threats to peoples’ lives today!

By contrast, concerning the Islamist terrorist group ISIS, the President compared them to a “jayvee” team just as they were overrunning most of Iraq, and on Thursday of last week, just a day before more than 100 were killed and three hundred injured in separate, coordinated attacks in Paris by ISIS followers, Obama took to the airwaves to proclaiming we had contained ISIS.

Let’s have a pop quiz. Who was responsible for the deaths of more than 2,000 people in America on September 11, 2001, climate change or radical Islamic terrorists?

Who was responsible for multiple bombings of popular tourist locations and hotels in Bali in 2002 and 2005 and Jakarta in 2009 claiming the lives of more than 200 people, climate change or radical Islamic terrorists?

Who is responsible for multiple kidnappings of school girls and the systematic rape, torture and forced marriages of young girls in North Africa and across the Middle East during the last decade, climate change or radical Islamic terrorists?

Who is responsible for beheading or summarily executing hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians, humanitarian aid workers, journalists and military personnel who had surrendered (often recording the horrific acts) over the past decade, climate change or radical Islamic terrorists?

Who is responsible for multiple, coordinated bombings of public busses in London in 2005 killing 52 and injuring more than 700, climate change or radical Islamic terrorists?

Who is responsible for the assassination of filmmakers, artists, cartoonists, magazine publishers and editors, politicians, and civilians, and the attempted or threatened murder of others, in multiple shootings around the world since 2001, climate change or radical Islamic terrorists?

Who responsible for the chaos that reigns in multiple North African and Middle Eastern countries, for instance, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, Mali and Sudan, where governments are unable to control large swaths of their territory and some are on the verge of collapse, climate change or radical Islamic terrorists?

Most recently, on the verge of another of the nearly innumerable international conferences to fight climate change to be held in Paris from November 30 through December 11, who is responsible for killing more than 120 people and injuring more than 300 people, through a series coordinated attacks including bombings and shootings of more in Paris on Friday, November 13, 2015, climate change or radical Islamic terrorists?

Anyone who answered climate change to any of the questions above is an idiot and deserves nothing but scorn!

While climate change hovers and looms like the big shadow in the South Park episode mocking climate alarmism, causing harm to no one but terrorizing the media and world leaders, radical Islamic terrorists are killing real people here and now.

There is no evidence climate change is making droughts or hurricanes worse, is causing seas to rise at faster rate than has been historically the case, is causing crop production to collapse, or resulting in the spread of tropical diseases to previously unheard of places. Indeed, deaths due to climate related events continue to fall, and crop yields continue to set records.

Yet hundreds of billions of dollars are being squandered each year in the false hope we can prevent a relatively insignificant rise in global temperature of about 2 degrees. The world’s leaders can’t control their borders, yet they think they can change the weather. The sheer hubris is amazing.

President Obama’s and other world leaders’ continued insistence climate change is an ominous threat that must be tackled now – despite no real world data supporting their claims — while their countries’ streets remain unsafe due to the ever-present, real (as in we actually see it on our television screens daily), threat of radical Islamic terrorists, is lunacy bordering on criminal neglect of their duties to uphold and defend the citizens of the countries they have been elected to serve.

It’s time to end this madness, if not at the Paris Climate Summit, then during the next elections. It’s time to take terrorism more seriously than climate change. It’s not that governments can’t do two things at once, but fighting climate change is a fool’s errand with the policies proposed to do so likely to cost far more lives than they will save, while fighting terrorism will save lives now, will save lives tomorrow and will secure a better future for generations to come.

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Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. (hsburnett3923@gmail.org) is an energy and the environment public policy analyst writing from Dallas, Texas.

 

2 Comments


  1. CRS  

    Absolutely true and obvious to anyone that will look at the real facts and anyone that does not seek to gain money or power from climate alarmism.

    This should be read by all that can read so we can focus on the real problems and challenges to the economy and cecurity of America and the world.

    Reply

  2. Ray  

    Drs Spencer and Christy have been monitoring the atmospheric temperature by satellite and see no reason to be alarmed by the temperature trends. There isn’t any threat to national security.

    Reply

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