Blaming the Third World for the Weather

Here’s how the TV weather forecasts will sound if Al Gore has his way: “California is bracing itself for torrential rains in coming months due to the irresponsible reproductive habits of poor people in Latin America and Africa. We can also trace the violent storms soon to cause widespread damage to the flatulent water buffalo and kindred bovines associated with irresponsible Third World breeding practices. The methane emissions from rice paddies required to feed burgeoning Third World populations have prompted delayed monsoons, increasingly severe storms, changing currents and drought.”

On Oct. 1, Gore addressed a roomful of TV weather reporters, mustered for a White House-orchestrated campaign to support Clinton’s nebulous proposals for the Kyoto conference in December on greenhouse gas emission levels. The designated role of the weatherpeople is to heighten public awareness of global warming, and if they accept the vice president’s theories of its causes, demography will be playing a high-profile role in their chipper bulletins.

According to press reports, Gore wowed the weather folk with his appeal that they become the shock troops of global warming/population control agitprop. As White House spokesman Mike McCurry put it, the weatherpeople “appreciated being treated as something other than airheads.”

Gore treated his audience to some of the most preposterous flights of fancy in the history of meteorological analysis. He suggested that global warming is linked to more weather-related deaths (presumably because of increased intensity of storms), plane crashes and unusual outbreaks of malaria. And increased warming, in Gore’s interpretation, stems at least in part from overpopulation that causes the peasant pyromaniacs to slash and burn virgin forest. Meanwhile, the fecund rice farmer has to double- and triple-crop his rice paddy to feed those tiny mouths.

There are some problems here. Most air crashes are not caused by poor weather. Take for example, the Valujet crash in the Everglades, on a perfectly clear day. The plane most likely went down because of deregulation. A simple protective device is available in the event of cockpit fires, but was nixed by none other than Al Gore in his role as czar of air safety.

A rise in malaria is seen by Gore as a consequence of warmer weather, which overlooks the increased resistance of the mosquito to pesticides as a function of the global campaign of eradication that has drenched Third World countries, houses and fields with DDT and other toxins, to the profit enhancement of the agro-chemical industries of Europe and the U.S. Gore overlooks evolution, which has selected more resistant bugs.

As for the smoke that may have blinded that pilot who crashed in Indonesia, the fires across Southeast Asia were triggered not by peasant breeders but by corporations, many of which had bribed Indonesian dictator Suharto for the privilege of logging native forests, burning the slash and establishing pulp plantations.

Gore knows how to make his foolish but deeply sinister recipes palatable to the neoliberals. There’s fuzzy talk about “culturally appropriate and acceptable techniques” of birth control, along with the empowerment of women, socially, politically and in the context of family.

Then there’s his brusque statement to the weatherpeople that it is time to set aside controversy over family planning and simply halt out-of-control population growth. Velvet glove and iron fist. The iron fist, in Third World countries, can take the form of clinics backed by the U.S. Agency for International Development and foundations underwritten by Rockefeller, where Third World women are not empowered but simply sterilized. No doubt we’ll soon see aid to developing countries tied to population control.

Gore’s hysteria, scripted for him by enviro-Malthusians from the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club and kindred outfits, is the more ludicrous since the rate of increase in the world’s population is declining. As for global warming: Predictions pretending to any degree of certainty are without scientific foundation. The cause of any recent rise in the world’s temperature can reflect long-term change across a millennium or recently discovered phenomena such as a surge in solar energy.

So a goal of the White House meeting was to marshal weatherpeople to the Malthusian cause. Having failed to control any other powerful institution, maybe the White House has fastened its hopes on the National Weather Service. But true to their cautious nature, having seen many predictions fail, the weather folk, though flattered, remained skeptical.