Enviro Activists Exploit Tsunami Disaster

Junkscience.com’s Steven Milloy explains that environmental activists have shown no depths to which they won’t stoop to exploit the tsunami disaster for their own anti-global warming/anti-development purposes. He notes some prominent examples and adds:

“Efforts to invoke supposed global warming as the culprit for this week’s death and destruction are patently absurd as the multiple tsunamis were not a “weather event” in the slightest.

Earthquakes aren’t caused by the weather or greenhouse gas emissions; they’re caused by tectonics Ã¢â?¬â?? that is naturally moving geological faults. While tectonics may cause climate changes, the reverse is not true.

. . . .

Moreover, the environmentalists are in feverish denial about the two factors that will, in the end, contribute most to the horrendous death toll from the tsunamis Ã¢â?¬â?? the lack of an early warning system and lack of adequate post-disaster sanitation, both of which are tragic by-products of the region’s severe economic under-development. Given that fact, how deceptive and calculating of the environmentalists to blame “development” as the deadly cause!

Here’s another perspective from British MP Boris Johnson on the “blame man” argument:

“In this largely godless age, we have a more subtle interpretation of the relation between human excess and natural disaster. Our new high priests are the environmentalists and, when the icebergs calve early or the swallows fly the wrong way, it is they who cry woe and say that it is a judgment on us all, and our wicked ways; and that is why, in the case of a colossal undersea earthquake, you can sense the silent frustration of the told-you-so scientists.

Whatever you say about the slipping of tectonic plates on the sea-bed off Sumatra, it had nothing to do with global warming. It was not caused by decadent use of Right Guard, or George W Bush, or the flouting of the Kyoto Protocol, or inadequate enforcement of the Windows and Doors Regulation of April 2002.”

The Wall Street Journal also weighs in:

“It is preposterous to blame the inexorable forces of nature on the development of industry and infrastructures of modern society. The more sensible response to natural disasters is to improve forecasting, put in place efficient communications and evacuation procedures and, should the worst arrive, conduct relief efforts and rebuild what nature has destroyed. Those cautionary measures, as is now clear, cost money. The national income necessary to afford them is made possible only by economic growth of the sort too many of environmentalists retard with their policy extremism.”