Global Warming May Mean Refugee Crisis

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton warned Australians that global warming could cause some small Pacific countries to disappear beneath the ocean, creating a refugee crisis far worse than the one Australia has faced in the last two weeks.

At a hospital fundraising dinner in Sydney on Saturday, Clinton said hundreds of thousands of people around the world would become refugees if climate change isn't addressed.

''The science is unassailable. If the world keeps growing for the next 50 years warmer as it has for the last decade, you're going to see some of the small nations in the Pacific actually flooded,'' he said.

''If you're worried about 400 people, you just let the world keep warming up like this for the next 50 years and your grandchildren will be worried about 400,000 people,'' he added.

Early last week, the Australian government sparked international criticism by barring a Norwegian ship carrying 433 asylum seekers from docking in Australia.

Prime Minister John Howard said he wants to stem a tide of would-be immigrants who arrive each year by the thousands hoping to be given refugee status.

Climate change has been a topic of contention between the United States and other countries. Earlier this year, the current U.S. administration, headed by President George W. Bush, abandoned the Kyoto climate treaty aimed at stopping global warming, saying it would harm the U.S. economy.

Bush has said he would instead rely on voluntary actions by industry and development of new technologies to capture carbon releases and reduce energy use.

Earlier Saturday, Australia's navy intercepted another boat carrying about 200 suspected illegal immigrants to Australia.

The asylum seekers were being taken to Papua New Guinea before flying to New Zealand and the Pacific island of Nauru for processing of their asylum applications.

Clinton's speech at the fundraising dinner for Sydney's Westmead Children's Hospital is his only public appearance during a three-day visit to Australia.

Global Warming is a Hoax!

The same clowns that are warning us of over-heating, were warning us of all manner of calamities in the 1960s and 1970s. It isn't science. It's power politics masquerading as science.

STARVATION

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." --Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968

I think it's safe to conclude that this prediction was wrong. Yet this prophet of doom continues to achieve notoriety and maintain credibility today. This speaks volume of the credulity of the general public and its propensity to gravitate towards alarmists and their crusades.

OVER-POPULATION

"There may be much disagreement with the statement that population and capital growth must stop soon. But virtually no one will argue that material growth on this planet can go on forever." --Paul Ehrlich

"...stopping population growth in 1975 and industrial capital growth in 1985...a world forum where statesmen, policy-makers and scientists...concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent...a rational and enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures...A decision to do nothing is a decision to increase the risk of collapse" --Club of Rome

"...famine and ecocatastrophe...take immediate action...population control...hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail." --Paul Ehrlich, Prophet of Doom, Myopic Visionary

This is the stuff of totalitarianism - create a crisis of a magnitude requiring immediate and drastic measures. Place one's self at the controls to apply the measures. If people fail to cooperate, "re-educate" them. And if that doesn't work, force them to cooperate. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, et al. would be proud of Ehrlich's scheming.

OIL RESERVES DEPLETION

"The era of growth is over and the era of limits is upon us." --Economist Robert Lekachman

"In oil, the United States is clearly approaching depletion. At today's rate of consumption -- not tomorrow's -- the United States has proved reserves of oil sufficient to meet the nation's needs for thirteen years." --Vance Packard, The Waste Makers, 1960

Yes, "clearly." This is obvious to all thinking people! When people like Packard use sweeping language to sound an alarm, beware. They just don't know what the hell they're talking about. If we listened to these clowns every time they predicted the end of the world, we would be in a state of paralysis. Incidentally, in 1973, thirteen years after Vance "Waste Maker" Packard made his prediction, oil reserves were 36 billion barrels. In 1960, reserves were 32 billion barrels. Oops!

GASOLINE SHORTAGE

The Prophets of Doom in Defense of State Intervention, 1970s:

"...obvious that gasoline could reach at least $2 a gallon after decontrol." --John Dingell
"...gas will cost $2 per gallon within a few years and $3 per gallon during the vehicle's lifetime." --Lester Brown, Worldwatch Institute
"...gasoline will soon go to $3 a gallon." --Senator Dale Bumpers, Defender of Liar-in-Chief Bill Clinton
"Ronald Reagan brushed aside energy issues during the campaign, insisting that shortages could be overcome by unleashing private enterprise. But not even his most fervent supporters in the energy business share that optimism. Virtually all private forecasts predict declining domestic oil production and liquid fuel shortages during the next decade." --New York Times
"There is a dwindling supply of energy sources. The prices are going to rise in the future no matter who is President, no matter what party occupies the administration in Washington, no matter what we do." --Jimmy "No Way No How" Carter, Master of Malaise
"We must adopt a system of gasoline rationing without delay...that demands a fair sacrifice from all Americans." --Senator Edward "Never Too Left" Kennedy

So what happened? Well, as was his style, Ronald Reagan ignored all the gloom-and-doom "Brain Trusters." In the first month of his administration (1981), he issued an Executive Order ending oil price controls. Within four months, the average price of unleaded gasoline fell from $1.41 to 86¢. Refineries' average cost of buying crude oil fell from more than $30 a barrel in 1981 to less than half of that by March 1986. And by the end of the 1980s, crude oil reserves were 41 percent higher than they were at the beginning of the decade.

"Americans are growing numb to the constant cries of wolf. Back in the 1960s, environmentalists told us the population explosion would cause civilizational collapse by 1990. It never happened, and even Third World people are living longer, better-fed lives than ever before. In the 1970s, environmentalists told us that we would run out of oil and most other valuable resources by the turn of the century, plunging us into a new Dark Age. It never happened, and resources are cheaper today (that is to say, more abundant) than ever before. Later in the 1970s, the environmentalists told us that a new Ice Age was upon us unless we took drastic action to reduce pollution (which, we were told, clouded the skies, blocking the sun). Now we're told that it's warming, not cooling, that's the threat and that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are about to descend upon us. Yet during all this warming, crop yields are at record levels, the economy is humming along quite nicely, and human welfare has never been better." --Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor

(FROM: http://www.ConservativeBeacon.com/essays/Liberalism/in_their_own_words.html)

"I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years." - President Lyndon B. Johnson, Inside the White House by Ronald Kessler

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