Posted on 06/16/2007 5:08:02 PM PDT by John Jorsett
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday.
"The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.
UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.
"This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming," the South Korean diplomat wrote.
"It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought," Ban said in the Washington daily.
When Darfur's land was rich, he said, black farmers welcomed Arab herders and shared their water, he said.
With the drought, however, farmers fenced in their land to prevent overgrazing.
"For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out," he said.
A UN peacekeeping force may stop the fighting, he said, and more than two million people may return to rebuilt homes in safe villages.
"But what to do about the essential dilemma: the fact that there's no longer enough good land to go around?"
"Any real solution to Darfur's troubles involves sustained economic development," perhaps using new technologies, genetically modified grains or irrigation, while bettering health, education and sanitation, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Good lord, what a fool this man is. I long for the days when Kofi ran things, and we only had to worry about corruption.
I think Paris Hilton got a DUI because of the heat caused by Global Warming.
Well it’s not responsible or in any way connected to warming throughout the rest of the solar system.
Long, hot summers...
She’s been in heat since she was 13.
My speeding is due to "global warming."
My...
Its all Gore´s fault.
Its all Gore´s fault.
I just got back from the 4:30 showing of Fantastic Four. In the fake news broadcast at the beginning of the film, various odd weather occurrences were given, and then we’re told “Global warming has been ruled out as a cause”. In light of certain other lines in the fake broadcast, I thought there was a decided satiric ring to that remark-maybe a sign that global warming fears have been so overwrought that now people are laughing at the doomsayers? Maybe-The Day After Tomorrow got laughed at. (That was the movie that was supposed to make Americans clamor for the USA to sign on to Kyoto /eyeroll.) Any how, while I was watching the movie I had the impression that global warming alarmists were being mocked-YMMV.
...I thought the Darfur genocide was because the US refused to legalize gay marriage....
Was Global Warming responsible for the “Dust Bowl” that moved all those Okies to California in the 30’s?
Dry weather and droughts have been occurring for thousands of years without anyone calling them global Warming.
Where to start...
I’m not horribly familiar with the rainfall patterns in the Republic of the Sudan, a genocidal Islamofascist terrorist dictatorship, but its endless series of ruinous civil wars long predate the purported commencement of the present drought. The Sudan moreover shares its name with a region of Africa extending eastward from the Ethiopian Highlands. Some climatologists believe that mesoscale convective systems develop in that elevated terrain, track across the Sudan, and produce tropical waves seminal to the development of Atlantic hurricanes. We now know of multidecadal oscillations in the formation of Atlantic hurricanes roughly proportional to the precipitation across West Africa.
I do not trust precipitation records from such regimes as the terror state in the Sudan, and the convective nature of the precipitation at such low latitudes requires a dense network of reliable precipitation sensors to ensure the representativeness of monitoring values. Africa unfortunately lacks such sensors, and some climatologists examining satellite data theorize that dictatorial governments intentionally manipulate data from their already sparse and poorly maintained rainfall networks to bolster their cases for receiving foreign aid to remedy the famines that their ruinous economic policies cause.
Because convective precipitation far from the oceans often falls from locally evaporated soil moisture, any land-use changes that modulate soil moisture can affect the precipitation patterns. Intensive overgrazing moreover creates excessive dust that can inhibit the formation and growth of raindrops even in the presence of moisture. Excessive burning likewise produces smoke that can provide cloud condensation nuclei too numerous to initiate the collision-coalescence process and thereby inhibiting rainfall. Ruinous warfare often forces survivors to adopt unsustainable land-use practices in their desperate bid to eat for the next year.
So we have plenty of anthropogenic and natural causes for the drought unrelated to global warming, doubt regarding the existence of said drought, warfare not uncharacteristic of the genocidal barbarians who inhabit and rule the Republic of the Sudan, and a Moral Authority of the United Nations apparently woefully unfamiliar with the diversity of global affairs.
Can we find a place where there is less violence than there was 40 years ago and blame THAT on global warming?
It reminds me of Sam Kinnison: “You live in a desert! You see this? This is sand, you know what it’s going to be in a hundred years? Sand! We have deserts in America, we just don’t live in ‘em a$$hole!”
The US refused to legalize gay marriage because of global warming. Clear cause and effect.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.