Giving it to bin Laden

[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.]

On November 13, terrorists killed 130 people in a series of coordinated attacks in Paris and its northern suburb, Saint-Denis. The terrorists were from the Islamic State (ISIS), a spinoff of Al Qaeda.

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, at which officials were to finalize an international agreement on Global Warming, was scheduled to begin in Paris 17 days later. Some suggested that the meeting be postponed, but President Obama would have none of that: “What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be,” he said, “when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”

The conference went forward as planned, and, as its final product, produced a world climate reparations program of the sort that had been demanded by Al Qaeda’s late founder, Osama bin Laden.

A powerful rebuke to the terrorists, indeed!

—-

Global Warming, you may have heard, causes terrorism such as the Paris attacks.

ISIS supporters have a different view, of course. They believe they’re fighting for God, as Muslims see Him. They believe that, as a prelude to the ultimate battle between Christians and Muslims, they have reestablished the caliphate (a government to which all Muslims owe allegiance, ruled by a successor to, and descendant of, Muhammad), in the region that includes Dabiq—the Islamic counterpart to Armageddon—where a Muslim victory over the Christians will mark the beginning of the end of the world. (This is a central idea to ISISites, the reason they named their online magazine Dabiq.)

But, hey, what do ISIS supporters know about their own beliefs? After all, they may think they’re Muslims, but they’re not, as our President and a certain prospective president keep pointing out. (President Obama: “Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL [ISIS] is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state.” And Secretary Clinton declared, “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”)

No, the ISIS folks are obviously confused about their identity. They just think they’re fulfilling ancient writings and conquering the planet.

Unconfused is Prince Charles who, a few days after the Paris attacks, addressed the issue, as reported by Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-summit-charles-idUSKBN0TC0NO20151123 ):

Britain’s Prince Charles has pointed to the world’s failure to tackle climate change as a root cause of the civil war in Syria, terrorism and the consequent refugee crisis engulfing Europe. The heir to the British throne is due to give a keynote speech at the opening of a global climate summit in Paris next week where 118 leaders will gather to try to nail down a deal to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions. . . .

Asked in the interview, which Sky [News] said was filmed three weeks ago, whether there was direct link between climate change, conflict and terrorism, Charles said: “Absolutely.”

“We never deal with the underlying root cause which regrettably is what we’re doing to our natural environment,” he said, noting that far greater problems lay ahead if climate change was not addressed immediately.

Also unconfused is Senator Bernie Sanders, who brought it up in the debates. From “PolitiFact” (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/16/bernie-s/fact-checking-bernie-sanders-comments-climate-chan/ ):

The Democratic debate in Iowa began with a moment of silence for the victims of the Paris terror attacks before pivoting to a discussion on how to address terrorism.

Bernie Sanders, who vowed to “rid our planet” of ISIS in his opening statement, also said at a previous debate that the greatest threat to national security is climate change. A day after the terrorist attacks, did he, asked moderator John Dickerson, still believe that?

“Absolutely. In fact, climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism,” Sanders said on Nov. 14. “If we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re gonna see countries all over the world — this is what the CIA says — they’re going to be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops, and you’re going to see all kinds of international conflict.”

A day later on CBS’ Face the Nation, Sanders doubled down on his statement, elaborating, “When people migrate into cities and they don’t have jobs, there’s going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment, and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that al-Qaida and ISIS are using right now.”

Then there’s one of the Left’s favorite scientists, Bill Nye, who is a scientist by virtue of having played “The Science Guy” on a children’s program. (Got questions about dinosaurs? I’m sure Barney is available to answer them.) Here’s a report from the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-nye-climate-change-paris-terrorism_565ccdebe4b079b2818b810b ):

President Obama made headlines Monday when he said during his remarks at COP21 that the climate change conference taking place in Paris is an “act of defiance” against terrorists who attacked the city earlier this month. Later on the same day, Bill Nye took that link a step further, explaining to HuffPost Live that the brutality in Paris was “a result of climate change.”

“You can make a very reasonable argument that climate change is not that indirectly related to terrorism,” said Nye, who discusses global warming at length in his new book Unstoppable. “This is just the start of things. The more we let [climate change] go on, the more trouble there’s going to be.”

Nye’s reasoning hinges on a water shortage in Syria, which researchers have blamed on climate change. As Nye explained, the shortage has stunted farming and pushed young people to look for work in more densely populated areas.

“Young people have gone to big cities looking for work. There’s not enough work for everybody, so the disaffected youths, as we say—the young people who don’t believe in the system, believe the system has failed, don’t believe in the economy—are more easily engaged and more easily recruited by terrorist organizations, and then they end up part way around the world in Paris shooting people,” Nye said.

For the record, even many Warmers admit that the change in earth’s temperatures since the Little Ice Age (which ended in the first half of the 19^th Century) has been too small to cause major disruptions, and that it is impossible to link any current weather patterns to human activity rather than to naturally occurring patterns.

Man-made “climate change” doesn’t cause terrorism. But the idea of catastrophic, man-made climate change gives the terrorists ammunition for their campaign against the relatively free countries of the West.

—-

Warmism (my term for anti-science “climate change” ideology) is one of the bases for the resentment that fuels anti-American extremism. The idea is that the Western countries, the U.S. in particular, have gotten rich by unfairly exploiting the poor countries; that that exploitation has changed the climate to the poor countries’ detriment; and that the “developing world” is owed reparations by the “developed world.”

That’s why Warmism is part of the school curriculum in countries like the Dominican Republic, South Africa, Vietnam, Kenya, and Mauritius, as well as in self-hating Western countries like France and Germany.  From a piece by Warmist writer Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/taking-climate-change-seriously-in-school-in-germany/2015/06/08/bb43fb4c-0e00-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html ):

Take Emmy-Noether-Schule, an 800-student secondary school in east Berlin I visited recently. Educators there consider climate change so pressing that they integrate it into just about every class you can think of (including, when the instructor is so inclined, Latin). About a quarter of the content in the 10th-grade English textbook, for example, is about threats to planet Earth. That means when kids learn to use the conditional mood in English, their grammar exercises rely on sentences like this: “If we don’t do something about global warming, more polar ice will start to melt.” Likewise, in an 11th-grade geography class dedicated entirely to sustainability, students write poetry about klimawandel (climate change). My favorite couplet, from an ode by student Hannah Carsted: “The water level rises/ The fish are in a crisis.”

The worldwide propaganda campaign by the Warmers has been astonishingly successful. It gives governments in poor countries a ready-made excuse for failing to improve their peoples’ living standards, and justifies their demands for money and other resources from wealthier countries.

Last July, the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences tied the issue directly to religion (http://islamicommentary.org/2015/07/muslim-scholars-name-climate-change-as-dire-threat/ ):

Human beings could cause the ending of life on the planet, says a group of Islamic scholars − and countries round the world, particularly the rich ones, must face up to their responsibilities. Climate change, they say, is induced by human beings: “As we are woven into the fabric of the natural world, its gifts are for us to savour – but we have abused these gifts to the extent that climate change is upon us.” The views of the scholars – some of the strongest yet expressed on climate from within the Muslim community – are contained in a draft declaration on climate change to be launched officially at a major Islamic symposium in Istanbul in mid-August. Allah, says the declaration, created the world in mizan (balance), but through fasad (corruption), human beings have caused climate change, together with a range of negative effects on the environment that include deforestation, the destruction of biodiversity, and pollution of the oceans and of water systems.

Demands for reparations are to be fulfilled through the Green Climate Fund, to which you, as a taxpayer, will “contribute.” Here’s how the fund was described by three environmentalist professors in the Washington newspaper The Hill (http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/243974-the-case-for-the-green-climate-fund ):

This fund will help developing countries build resilience to climate-related disasters and reduce the carbon pollution that drives climate change. Our contribution to the Green Climate Fund is an investment, and the return is stability for vulnerable countries facing a changing climate.

Both Republicans and Democrats have long recognized the value of climate-related assistance to poor countries. Former President George H.W. Bush negotiated the original United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and created the Global Environment Facility, the first international fund to support climate change assistance to developing countries. Former President George W. Bush, along with other Group of Eight leaders, created the Climate Investment Funds in 2008. The Climate Investment Funds were explicitly intended as the pilot for a larger, future fund, and they are slated to sunset as the Green Climate Fund becomes operational.

Why would there be such widespread, bipartisan support for funding climate-related assistance overseas? Because it is in our national interest. When poor, vulnerable countries pursue climate-resilient growth, they are better able to cope with extreme weather events and experience fewer disasters. And when emerging economies build out more clean energy infrastructure, we all avoid the worst of climate change in the first place. The result is a more secure and stable world, benefiting our nation and all countries.

Prior to the Paris “climate change” summit, the Washington Times editorialized (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/16/editorial-fun-with-the-green-climate-fund/ ):

In December, nearly 200 nations will meet in Paris to complete details of the globalists’ holy grail: the Green Climate Fund, which they expect to collect $100 billion a year from developed nations by 2020 to help wean the worldwide victims of unrestrained development of fossil fuels. This will be the most successful robbery since the Jesse James gang made life miserable for the railroads of Missouri.

. . . [T]he schemes to punish the purveyors of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel are fraught with fraud. Russia and Ukraine are suspected of selling bogus credits for 600 million tons worth of carbon-dioxide emissions on the European Union Emissions Trading System, according to the Stockholm Environment Institute. Europe’s cap-and-trade system obligates electric utilities to either reduce their emissions or purchase credits from other producers. Verification of reductions has been lax, enabling companies to falsely claim clean-energy progress and sell their credits. Fraudsters have hacked the EU’s online emissions marketplace, and in 2011 collected $41 million in undeserved credits.

If Europe’s dodgy carbon taxing scheme provides a juicy target for chicanery, the U.N.’s $100 billion Green Climate Fund is likely to attract more treasure hunters than seekers of the crown jewels of England. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has a hard time keeping a straight face dispensing high-minded nonsense to hector nations to chip in.

Foreign aid, they say, is taking from poor people in rich countries and giving to rich people in poor countries.

CNS News reported on the fund (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/obama-3b-un-climate-fund-smart-investment-us-make ):

The GCF is the core of a 2009 agreement by Obama and other leaders to raise – from 2020 onwards – $100 billion each year from public and private sources to help developing countries deal with climate change. As of early November, 38 countries have pledged a total of $10.2 billion for the GCF, with Obama’s pledge of $3 billion accounting for 29 percent of the total. The next biggest pledges have come from Japan ($1.5 bn), Britain ($1.2 bn) and Germany ($1.003 bn). Broader climate finance mobilized from public and private sources so far has been estimated at $62 billion, according to a recent OECD study. The U.N. Environmental Program has argued that $100 billion a year will not be nearly enough to help the world to adapt to global warming.

At least we can count on those tight-fisted Republicans to block the fund, right? Oh, I guess not. (http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/263447-spending-bill-wont-stop-funds-for-obama-climate-deal )

In a victory for the Obama administration, the spending package released by congressional leaders on Wednesday [December 16, 2015] won’t block American financial contributions to an international climate fund for poorer nations.

The bill, greens and Democrats say, doesn’t explicitly appropriate funding for President Obama’s pledged contribution to the Green Climate Fund (GCF). But since the legislation doesn’t formally block money for the GCF either, Obama is expected to be able to use current discretionary funding streams to send American money to it. “Based on what we have reviewed so far, there are no restrictions on our ability to make good on the president’s pledge to contribute to the Green Climate Fund,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said on Wednesday.

The GFC is a pot of public and private money designed to help poorer nations prepare for climate change. Obama pledged last year to spend $3 billion on the fund by 2020, and he asked Congress to appropriate up to $500 million for it in 2016.

—-

What, you may ask, does this have to do with Osama bin Laden?

Such a reparations program was a major goal of the Al Qaeda founder, as he stated clearly and repeatedly in the months before his death.

For example, in January 2010, bin Laden declared (https://azelin.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/usamah-bin-laden-the-way-to-save-the-earth.pdf ):

This is a message to the whole world about those who cause climate change and its dangers – intentionally or unintentionally – and what we must do.

Talk of climate change isn’t extravagant speculation: it is a tangible fact which is not diminished by its being muddled by some greedy heads of major corporations. The effects of global warming have spread to all continents of the world. Drought, desertification and sands are advancing on one front, while on another front, torrential floods and huge storms the likes of which only used to be seen once every few decades now reoccur every few years. That’s in addition to the islands which are quietly and calmly sinking under the waters of the oceans. And the pattern is accelerating, and reports by organizations dealing with the affairs of displaced people estimate the displacement of as many as a billion humans during the next four decades as a result of this.

I am not about to talk here about partial solutions which merely lessen the harmful effects of global warming. Rather, I am going to talk about looking for a solution to the crisis at its roots. In front of the world are the records which show the huge numbers of victims of climate change, some of whom died of hunger and others of whom died of drowning.

In the same year in which [James E.] Hansen, NASA’s senior expert, confirmed the seriousness of global warming, 140,000 died and 24 million were displaced in floods in Bangladesh alone; and the caravan of victims of climate change hasn’t stopped since, so those behind it must be identified and a way of dealing with them specified. All industrialized countries, especially the major ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis, except that most of them have called on each other to commit to the Kyoto Protocol and have agreed to reduce emissions of harmful gases. However, Bush Junior – and prior to him, Congress – rejected this agreement in order to please the major corporations. . . .

Hansen spoke out and warned Americans about the seriousness of global warming in 1988, but they didn’t respond to him. As for conferences, the Kyoto conference [on climate change] took place at the end of the last century, but they didn’t respond to it. And as for demonstrations, not even the largest of them – much less the smaller ones – were able to deter them from their greed and tyranny.

. . .  The policies of the world today are not being steered with the power of superior intellects to serve the interest of the people; but rather, with the power of the motivation and greed of oil-robbers and warmongers, the beasts of predatory capitalism. Noam Chomsky was right when he pointed to a similarity between American policies and the policies of Mafia gangs. So they are the real terrorists, and drastic and decisive solutions are required to restrain and subdue them: restrain them from their sin and subdue their savagery . . .

Bin Laden followed up nine months later with a tape in which he complained about food shortages, particular in Muslim countries, caused by Global Warming. Noting that there were now more victims of climate change than of war, he called for a “huge transformation” in the delivery of relief. CNN reported on bin Laden’s remarks that he “said the effects of climate change need to be studied in populated areas near rivers and valleys in Muslim nations, and cited what happened recently when flooding hit the Saudi city of Jeddah. He mentioned the need for other projects to tackle famine, poverty, and disaster relief.”

In response to bin Laden’s remarks, the Washington Times editorialized (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/1/bin-laden-goes-green/ ):

[Bin Laden said,] “All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global-warming crisis.” That line easily could have been written by Al Gore.

In 2007, bin Laden warned that “all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations,” and that this was causing “the death and displacement of millions of human beings because of that, especially in Africa.” As early as 2002, in a letter to the American people, bin Laden explained that one of the reasons he was waging war on the United States was that Americans “have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history.” In other words, the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers were brought down because America lacked adequate carbon emission controls.

According to documents recovered from his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan where he was killed, bin Laden remained interested in the issue until his last days, admonishing a deputy to pay more attention to how climate change might affect Somalia. One message included this: “Attached is a report about climate change, especially the floods in Pakistan. Please send to Al-Jazeera.” That’s the left-wing, Qatar-backed news service.

Commenting on bin Laden’s position on the climate change issue, Foreign Affairs magazine managed to work in insults at both Global Warming skeptics and so-called fundamentalists (a term that leftists use as a general insult directed at religious people without regard to the actual definition of the term): “It may seem surprising that one of the most extreme fundamentalist groups in the world is more open minded about science than some in the United States, but it is not actually all that shocking, considering that for centuries, the Islamic world was a wellspring of scientific and technological achievement.” (Well, no, not really. See https://books.google.com/books?id=wqwMAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT189&lpg=PT189&dq=rodney+stark+muslim+science+and+architecture&source=bl&ots=wFXY0r6UiN&sig=egoogSQKhIBl3_nlBmSx2ZWVe3E&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwicyYbwl5HKAhVGJiYKHTiBAOgQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&q=rodney%20stark%20muslim%20science%20and%20architecture&f=false )

In a similar vein to the comments in Foreign Affairs, blogger Scott Sutton posted last May that bin Laden’s comments “sound like progressive lines of thought on climate change—or at least in line with scientific consensus. One might think that those [be] positions held by, say, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee,” who was then Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma). “Could it be that a murderous terrorist clinging to fundamentalist religious ideals was more progressive when it came to climate change than the U.S. senator that heads the Environment and Public Works Committee?”

Another blogger, Chris Graham: “Your average Republican will tell you climate change is bunk. Osama bin Laden, otherwise stuck in the sixth century, conceded the 21^st century reality. . . . [B]in Laden wasn’t trying to win election in Fox News America.”

In one document discovered after bin Laden’s death, a letter marking Ramadan, he referred to “climate changes” as judgment from Allah. “The [Western] secularists maintain that these are natural disasters we must confront. In other words, they are saying, we are able to stand up to Allah and confront His judgment . . . ”

Bin Laden spoke of the obligation of the West and of Muslim countries to come to the aid of the poor harmed by the changes, among which he included groundwater depletion. Countries could divert funds from their defense budgets to climate change disaster relief, he mused. And he suggested the creation of “a distinct relief organization,” an arm of Al Qaeda to distribute aid.

Indeed, as noted by Vice News (https://news.vice.com/article/it-turns-out-bin-laden-was-worried-about-climate-change ):

Bin Laden’s concern with climate change in the “Islamic World” tracks a stark reality: Many of the nations that are most vulnerable to a warming world are also home to huge Muslim populations, according to the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index (ND-GAIN). The index not only looks at nations’ risk of natural disaster, but also their “readiness to actually take on new investments and [their] readiness to adapt” to climate change, says Joyce Coffee, a managing director at ND-GAIN.

“The index points out relative risk, as well as opportunity,” Joyce told VICE News. She added that the degree of climate exposure for each nation is based on their economic, social, and governmental stability, in addition to their geography. Flood-prone, majority Muslim nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh are nearer to the bottom of the ND-GAIN. Bin Laden’s references to flooding in Pakistan were a response to destructive monsoons in 2010, which the World Meteorological Organization attributed to higher temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean. . . .  Bin Laden wrote that his hypothetical relief organization should study how flood-prone Muslim communities could adapt.

Yemen, Sudan, and Chad, three nations at the bottom of the ND-GAIN’s list — with Chad dead last among countries where data was available — were also explicitly mentioned by bin Laden. All three currently face some potent mix of cataclysmic drought, water shortages, famine, population increase, and civil societies under collapse from war and faltering economies.

The implication is that any worldwide “climate change relief” effort would benefit Muslim nations disproportionately. Luckily, we U.S. taxpayers will be on the hook for that Green Climate Fund, so that’s taken care of.

You’re welcome, Osama.