Agence France Presse: 50 Million People to Lose Homes to Global Warming

Agence France Presse has published a whopper about Global Warming, titled "Climate refugees -- the growing army without a name", in which we get the claims of a UN Climate Committee that "50 million" will be homeless because of Global Warming "by 2010". But the report is so filled with could be's, might be's and the ever popular "some experts say" that it is hard to take the claims seriously. It is, in fact, downright impossible to believe a word in the report unless you suspend all faculties of disbelief and merely accept as a matter of faith that they "could be" right. Of course, that is the nub of the Globaloney debate in the first place; the willing suspension of disbelief.

The first paragraph of this report sets a dichotomy that the rest of the report tries hard to refute with their "expert" testimony.

Global warming could create tens of millions of climate refugees, although numbers are hard to predict with accuracy and the definition itself is open to debate, experts say.

"Experts say", do they? Yet, even as the claims that our mean 'ol Globaloney could create all these refugees the report admits it is "hard to predict with accuracy". Then how do we take them seriously? Could our "experts" be any more disingenuous?

Just about every paragraph is so filled with qualifiers that it is hard to know where facts begin and fantasy reigns. The next two paragraphs don't work to solidify real facts any better than the self-contradictory first one.

"According to some estimates, there are already almost as many environmentally displaced people on the planet as traditional refugees," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

"As the impacts of climate change strike home, the numbers are likely to rise considerably, possibly as high as 50 million by 2010," de Boer said on Friday on the sidelines of a meeting in Brussels of the UN's top climate panel.

In our first three short paragraphs alone we find one "could", one "some" and one "likely", not to mention one "hard to predict with accuracy" and one "according to some estimates", qualifying the claims as not grounded in provable fact.

We are presented with not one salient fact in a piece that abounds with fearmongering and arm waving. Of course the UN wants ever more power and money to "solve" the problem that they cannot even quantify, naturally.

The most ridiculous part of the article uses Hurricane Katrina to justify their absurd refugee claims.

By some yardstick, it could also apply to the tens of thousands who fled New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, they say.

Some scientists, though, say there is no long-term evidence yet for declaring Katrina to have been a storm intensified by global warming, rather than a natural, extremely violent event.

"By some yardstick"... now that was a howler.

Another amusing quote was by one Thomas Downing, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute at Oxford, who said "Not all will be permanent refugees..." What, exactly is a "permanent refugee", anyway? At some point aren't they just called immigrants? How can you be a "permanent refugee"? When someone leaves their home as a refugee for what ever reason do they forever more just wander the Earth never to settle again?

What tosh.

Even our renowned "experts" cannot seem to agree what the term "environmental refugee" means. As the report nears its end a disagreement is extent.

...A major report on the impact of global warming released by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the Brussels meeting avoided the term "refugee" entirely, referring instead to "environmental migrants."

..."Estimates of the number of people who may become environmental migrants are at best guesswork," the report said, citing several uncertainties: migrations that are often temporary or seasonal, while motivations are complex and can include the desire to escape from poverty.

..."The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) doesn't want people to talk about climate refugees," UNFCCC spokesman John Hay said. "They would prefer that the term 'refugee' apply to politics only."

In other words, they got nuthin' but a political agenda. In this case, they don''t even have Al Gore's vaunted "consensus"!

What they do have, however, is what my neighborhood pals when I was a child used to call "shoulda', coulda' woulda's". Nothing but a bunch of claims, but not a single concrete fact is to be had.

But like all Globaloney zealots, fear is all they need to wring out of their flock of true believers more money for ever more "studies" and increasing support to legitimize the UN panels and committees that will result in ever more political power for the those who claim to be the "experts". Truly a self-perpetuating scheme they have there.

And, obviously, they can count on the AFP to lend them a hand.