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Global Warming, the Food Shortage, and Political Correctness
by Carlos
Are political fads influencing the way a global food shortage is being reported?
The New York Post and Canada's National Post both happen to be against the hysteria on global warming. They are also among the few news sources giving serious coverage to the food shortage that is affecting much of the world due to the diversion of crops into the production of biofuels like ethanol: The fact is, food riots resulting partly from the United States' alternative energy policies have arrived at our front door. Crowds of hungry demonstrators swarmed the presidential palace in Haiti last week to protest skyrocketing food prices.
In recent years, we've heard that climate change could be catastrophic for nature and humanity. But it's becoming increasingly evident that over the next few decades, climate-change policies could prove even more catastrophic. And according to very extensive reporting in the National Post it's not happening only in Haiti but in India and Africa as well. But you'd hardly know it from reading the New York Times, which today in a long article blames world food shortages on global warming, giving only a brief and passing reference to concerns about shortages caused by anti-global warming biofuel policies. Yet even the Times article admits that
It is difficult to definitely link short-term changes in weather to long-term climate change, but the unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency. It is not, however, difficult to link skyrocketing food prices and food riots to the diversion of crops into the production of "green" energy sources.
I recently heard a lecture on geology that demonstrated a theory that nearly all the mass extinctions of species that have occurred on earth, long before the human use of "greenhouse chemicals," have been due to global warming. The logical conclusion is that global warming occurs in natural cycles that human beings can do little to influence. Discarding logic, the politically correct professor concluded his lecture with an admonition that the next mass extinction will be caused by "human waste and human greed."
There is evidence that global warming really is occurring, though how rapid the pace and how catastrophic the outcome are still open questions. Nevertheless, it is unconscionable both that we allow people to starve through misguided food policies, and that we fail to report it accurately because global warming has become the latest article of faith in the Church of Political Correctness.
But we're not starving in this country, so why should we care?
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