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 THE vultures are circling over Burma's dead. Hey, isn't that fat one Al Gore?
Sure
is. And - flap, flap, plop - there he lands, the first to go picking
over carcasses for scraps to feed his great global warming scare
campaign.
What the world should be learning from this terrible loss of at
least 60,000 people in the cyclone that hit Burma last week is that
tyrannies kill more surely than any freak of weather.
But Al Gore, who won a Nobel "Peace" Prize for terrifying people
with his error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth, wants you to blame
instead his pet bogeyman. Tremble, sinners, before the wrath of a hot
planet!
In an interview on America's NPR on Tuesday, Gore claimed Cyclone Nargis was actually part of a pattern.
"Last year a catastrophic storm . . . hit Bangladesh. The year
before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China, and
we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be
associated with continued global warming."
This cyclone that hit Burma is a "consequence" of global warming?
Gore should die of shame to peddle such self-serving deceptions.
Fact: The world has not warmed in a decade, says the Hadley Centre
and two of the three other institutions that measure its temperature.
Fact: Any link between hurricanes and warming is highly disputed by
scientists, with "evidence both for and against", says the American
Meteorological Society.
Fact: The data is "insufficiently reliable to detect trends on the
frequency of extreme cyclones", says a recent paper in Science by world
authority Chris Landsea.
Fact: The cyclone that hit Burma was just a category three storm -
not a category five - and less deadly than worse cyclones that struck
Bangladesh in 1970 and 1991. What's more, Gore concedes the record
breaker was 50 years ago, before the world got this gassy.
So there's no recent warming, no agreed link with cyclones, no trend
of worse cyclones, and nothing unusually strong about the one that hit
Burma.
Yet there goes Gore - caw, caw, caw - flogging the warming scare
that has made him so fantastically rich. The great Profit of Doom.
Par for his course, I know, given a British judge last year ruled
that Gore had likewise exaggerated the link between global warming and
the category three Hurricane Katrina that helped to breach the
crumbling levees of New Orleans.
But what's worse this time is that Gore's blundering attempts to
blame global warming for Burma's agony distracts attention from the
real causes of this catastrophe - despicable causes we may at least
hope to do something about.
If Cyclone Nargis had struck not Rangoon, but Melbourne or Tokyo, it
is unlikely more than a few dozen people, if that, would have died. And
that's because we are free, and rich - as free people tend to be with
capitalism. Even Bangkok would have survived this far, far easier.
But in Burma as many as 100,000 are now feared dead - victims not of
global warming, but of a tyranny that has left them poor and
defenceless.
Burma, a former British colony, was once the rice-bowl of South-East
Asia, but in 1962 a bunch of generals took over with a misty-eyed plan
to impose on their 50 million people the "Burmese Way to Socialism".
Their brand of politics was of the kind still distressingly popular
at RMIT and Victoria University, and produced exactly the misery it's
inflicted from Cuba to Russia.
The economy collapsed, and Burma went from bread-basket to
basket-case. No wonder so many people today still live in shacks and
shanties that were no protection against last Friday's high winds and
storm surge.
Whenever the Burmese people tried to protest against this junta-made
poverty, and to demand democracy, they were shot - so often and in such
numbers that China is now about the only ally the junta has left. In
this way does resource-ravenous China, Olympics host, export its
tyranny to the world.
Now consider how this junta - so brutal, unaccountable, incompetent,
tyrannical and isolated -- has handled this latest disaster.
Two days before Cyclone Nargis hit, India's Meteorological Department warned the junta's minions it was coming, and where.
But Burma's state-owned media, one of the crudest propaganda outfits
I've seen, issued no mass alerts. Indeed, illegal Voice of America
broadcasts probably did more to warn Burma's civilians to take shelter
than did Burma's own radio station.
At first, the full scale of the disaster was kept from the world.
Perhaps
even the junta itself may not have known it, given there are no
journalists free in that country to report what they see, and no
untapped phone lines or internet to tell the world the truth.
Even now, the junta is killing people with its paranoia. Disaster
assessment teams and helicopters from the United States have been
blocked from coming in to prepare a huge rescue, and foreign aid teams
not already in-country had their applications for visas stalled and aid
shipments stopped.
Foreign journalists, whose reports would help raise appeal money, have been banned.
The UN is now "intensely" negotiating with the junta to let in aid
workers and ease customs regulations on aid - literally begging the
junta to let the world save its people.
So slow has the junta been to let in help, that French Foreign
Minister Bernard Kouchner, founder of aid group Medicins Sans
Frontieres, suggested the UN Security Council adopt a resolution
allowing aid to be flown into the country by force. China, naturally,
is against such interference in the affairs of its "friend".
True, the junta has let in some shipments of aid, and is
particularly keen on being given cash rather than kind - which even the
patsies of the European Union, not being completely insane, resist.
Why hand cash to thieves? I've seen for myself, on one of my trips
to Burma, military heavies in shades openly demand bribes from
Australian aid workers who were giving blankets to disaster victims.
In
Mandalay, I saw a Red Cross ambulance, given by Japan, refitted for use
as a taxi for military officials. The junta even today charges import
duty on foreign donations.
With such tyrants in charge, the toll from Friday's cyclone - already horrific - can only keep rising.
Let us not be sidetracked. These are people killed not by Gore's
global warming, or even by Friday's Cyclone Nargis - but by a filthy
band of rapacious dictators who have left their people beggared and
blinded, at the mercy of even the wind and waves. Source
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