Reference: Inconvenient truth in Bali, Bangkok Post, December 23, 2007

The "soul searching" column in the Bangkok Post says that "hurricanes, cyclones, snowstorms, and floods" are "killing people largely as a result of the war on nature waged by humanity in pursuit of economic development" (Inconvenient truth in Bali, Bangkok Post, December 23, 2007). The reference is to alleged causal relationships between carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and global warming and between global warming and the frequency and severity of extreme weather phenomena. Kindly note that extreme weather and weather related calamities are not new nor have they become more frequent or more severe. As far back in time one cares to look in either weather records or geological data, one finds calamities caused by extreme weather. In the drought of 1877 in China parents sold their daughters into sex-slavery for the equivalent of $5 each and in the famine of 1790 in India parents killed their children and ate them. The devastation caused by the cyclone of 1737 in the Bay of Bengal is yet to be outdone by any weather phenomenon. In 1933 there were 21 hurricanes in the Caribbean and extreme hurricanes there have been recorded prior to the current phenomenon of rising atmospheric CO2 in 1856, 1910, 1922, 1926, 1930, 1938, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1979, and 1988. The allegations that extreme weather is a new phenomenon and that it is caused by human activity have been repeated so many times that they have become truth by default. The Karl Rove Principle holds that if you repeat a lie enough times it will take on all the properties of truth.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand