Baltimore Sun Destroys Its Own Credibility

Today's Calvert Street Fish Wrapper provides proof positive of why the Baltimore Sun -- and the rest of the Tribune Company -- is failing miserably as a new organization.  The reprinted a McClatchey-Tribune report on how climate change is pushing countries beyond the brink of war.  Titled Changing climate may push more countries past the brink of war, the article should be taught in every rhetoric class as the perfect example of the fallacy of the Latin phrase Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The un-bylined article was obviously written by a complete and total moron who lacks a fundamental understanding of what is driving key third world conflicts.  

The Genocide in Darfur is not being driven by climate change, and the "crop scarcity" (read: famine) there is not related to climate change, either.  It is a Genocide by Muslim government forces and militias in the north against the Christian and Animist peoples in the south.  The "crop scarcity" is caused by a man-made scorched earth policy on the part of the Muslim government.  This is 100% about religion, not the temperature.

The "thugs of Myanmar" were in power -- and oppressing their people -- long before the climate change scare began, and its was not climate change that prevented the saving -- or rescuing -- of vast numbers of people.  It was tyranny, despotism, xenophobia and hate. Whether a cyclone or a meteorite hit Myanmar is beyond the point; the tragedy there was caused by hate-filled despots and kleptocrats with little regard for their people or their responsibilities.

The tragedy in New Orleans was not the result of climate change.  It was the result of years of assinine and stupid decision making on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers, the stupidity of building a city below sea level, the incompetence of local, state, and federal officials (in that order) to provide real leadership to their citizens (including using thousands of school buses to effect an evacatuation), and an unwillingness of insurance companies and government zoning bodies to stop building in areas susceptible to storm damage.

The vast majority of crop failures around the world are not the result of widespread global climate change, but the result of overfarming of land, poor use of land management techniques, and the unwillingness of local cultures to utilize modern skills and knowledge like crop rotation, cover crop usage, and no-till plowing.

Scarcity of resources is hardly caused by climate change -- yet.  In nearly every incidence, it is caused by the massive misallocation of those resources by market distortions and inneffective government policies.

And trying to blame the pursuit of atomic ambitions on the revival of safe nuclear power on climate change is the coup-de-grace.  Iran is pursuing nuclear power to build nuclear weapons.  Not because it lacks energy resources.  It lacks the ability to exploit those resources because it is -- and should be -- an international pariah for its hateful ideology, mysogyny, and violence.  Iran isn't ticked threatened by climate change. They are threatened by a Western culture that rejects their 8th century hatred of freedom.

This has to be the singular dumbest article to ever appear in the Baltimore Sun.  It is compounded by the fact that the Sun's editorial staff and publisher chose to run it.  It is shoddy journalism at best, and propagandizing at worst.  If there was ever a reason why the Baltimore Sun should suffer the indignity of failure, this article points that up.