Scare Tactics: One day after the United Nations issued a doomsday report on global warming, it admits it has grossly exaggerated the seriousness of the AIDS problem. The cycle of fear-mongering at the U.N. continues.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the U.N.'s "top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement." We're still waiting for an expression of remorse for dragging the world through a swamp of anxiety.
Remember the 1980s, when we were told that AIDS was a nondiscriminatory disease destined to wipe out large segments of the population and bring untold ruin to humanity?
When Life magazine declared on its cover in 1985 that "Now No One Is Safe From AIDS"? When the new Black Plague, worse than the first, was upon us? Who could forget Oprah Winfrey's dire warning that a fifth of heterosexuals would be dead by 1990?
Recall more recent days when alarmists said that global warming due to human activity was turning Earth into an unlivable inferno of mass species extinctions and churning seas overflowing onto land? Think of those times when man was charged with being the author of his own miserable destruction because he exploited Gaia.
Oh, wait, those days are still with us. Al Gore has not stopped jetting around the world to condemn the burning of fossil fuels nor have environmentalists quit showing up at climate change rallies in SUVs to hector Americans about their energy use.
But their day is getting dark. Global warming fear-mongering is likely to fall by the wayside in the next decade or so when it becomes obvious that the charlatans have been wrong. That won't be the end, however; global warming will be replaced by a wild exaggeration that sounds even more threatening.
Though columnist H.L. Mencken made his wry observations more than a half century ago, he understood then the machinations that fuel the scare tactics of any day.
"The whole aim of practical politics," he wrote, " is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
What's stunning is that the global warming true believers have confessed to being guilty of sending out hobgoblins -- and gotten away with it.
"I believe it appropriate to have an overstatement of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate to opening up the audience to listen," Gore told the environmentalist magazine Grist in 2006.
In the early days of the warming scare, when Gore was just a Tennessee senator who had mere presidential, not world-saving, aspirations on his mind, Stanford University environmentalist Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine in 1989 that "we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination."
"That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have."
Guilty as well is James Hansen, the climate change godfather, who said in 2003 that "emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue."
We're sure he no longer believes they are appropriate because he knows they aren't needed. He and others have effectively bamboozled the world into believing that climate disaster is imminent.
Like the AIDS frenzy, the global warming hysteria has been politically driven. So will the next "crisis." The competition for taxpayers' dollars handed out by government, say for AIDS research, is fierce, the instinct among some to command others' lives, using the cudgel of panic-generated public policy, is insatiable.
Don't think this fear-mongering has no costs, that it's merely a harmless distraction.
The fury over AIDS caused scarce financial resources to be misallocated and generated a climate of dread.
Embellishments about the impact of man's energy use have brought undue fear, unnecessarily pitted people against each other and will inflict widespread economic pain if the alarmists' costly solutions are applied.
The real threat is not from a gas-guzzler but those who create an entangling web of hype.
Source: Investor's Business Daily
