Let's Get Something Straight

Global warming is starting to upset me just a little bit. I guess I shouldn't blame global warming, just the people who created it. Carbon emissions and smog and a dirty environment are completely valid problems that we as human beings need to address and find a way to reduce. I've been to some really dirty places on this planet; really gross places that make me happy to live in the U.S.A. So I understand that we have caused a great deal of environmental strain. But the extent to which our governmental leaders are exploiting "global warming" is causing me a little strain as well. I just read an article about the new secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, in which he claims that the killings in Darfur are a result of global warming and climate change. He says that the drought, brought on by climate change, began the conflict and therefore is partially responsible for the mass killings that the country has endured. I'll go with him on the "partially responsible" insofar as to say that a drought was a main factor in giving certain people power over other people, therefore allowing them to control food rations and the water supply. But no drought could ever cause murder on a genocidal scale. It's sad that Ban Ki-moon has been so irresponsible as to reduce the horrible deaths of over 200,000 people to political statement and a completely ambiguous phrase- "climate change." What is climate change? Is it when the earth goes around the sun and makes it snow in Utah while it's sunny in New Zealand? Is it climate change when a parking lot in the San Fernando Valley is 105 degrees at 4:00 p.m. and 64 degrees at 10:00 p.m? Ban Ki-moon called the droughts in Darfur a result of climate change. Well, one thing's for certain: the climate did change enough to cause a drought in Darfur, but I can almost guarantee you that this isn't the first drought that the African continent has experienced. The Farmer's Almanac might have a few things to say about droughts, but that's an American invention. And besides, what do we know about droughts? Nothing. Except for all those people growing corn and beans and beets and wheat throughout Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas, just to name a few.

Let's not reduce a horrendous tragedy to a popular post-modern talking point. If Sheryl Crow had said the same as Ban Ki-moon, then I would have written it off as some out of touch music person flapping her gums. But instead it is the secretary general of the United Nations. Instead of marching in there and stopping these genocidal events and protecting the millions of innocent people who are being threatened on a daily basis, the U.N. and it's secretary have decided to talk environmental morality and blame a tyrant that can't talk back, once again proving to the world that the U.N. is a purposeless and obsolete organization.