Crank up the guilt machine Line up the yellow pads

Almost every ancient civilization had rulers and mystics who claimed a direct link to deities ruling heaven and earth. But when droughts, floods, pestilence and other calamities came along, they blamed underlings for angering the weather gods, which then had to be appeased with grisly sacrifices and bizarre offerings. Times haven’t changed much. Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers recently told starving citizens that their faithlessness had caused one of the worst droughts in the nation’s history. And environmental activists are blaming wealthy nations — namely Canada and the United States — for weather-related disasters in developing countries.

According to Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, environmental activists are exploring the possibility of filing lawsuits against developed countries on behalf of Third World nations “ravaged by climate change.” One law professor says Mozambique has a solid case for suing the United States and other western governments for “contributing” to floods that left hundreds dead and many thousands homeless. And several low-lying island states in the Southern Hemisphere have served notice that they intend to seek damages from developed nations if their land is swallowed up by rising seas caused by global warming.

While this may sound far-fetched, activists are already calling for an “international tort climate court” to prosecute what they believe are environmental crimes against humanity. They say the need for court action is overwhelming, particularly in light of North America’s reluctance to embrace the ostensible remedy for global warming, the United Nations-inspired Kyoto Protocol. And if events in North America are any indication, the judiciary won’t hesitate to take on the role of global environmental watchdog.

The activists maintain that public opinion is on their side. They cite a recent poll showing that most Canadians want their government to do more to “reduce pollution that causes climate change” and to join with Europe to implement a treaty to stop climate change, “rather than agree with George Bush and the American government.”

No surprise there, even if the poll was commissioned by Greenpeace Canada and the World Wildlife Fund, who know better than to ask a question that isn’t engineered to produce the right answer. No one wants pollution of any sort, even though it cools, rather than warms, the atmosphere (carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases are alleged to be the main warming culprits). As for U.S.-bashing, it’s a blood sport all over the world, even in Canada, where citizens love to think they are nicer, smarter and funnier than Americans. Especially nicer.

Most respondents don’t have a clue what the Kyoto Protocol says, other than what they’ve been told by its architects and proponents. Most have no idea that they (and their descendents) will have to open their wallets wide if Canada fails to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions below the 1990 mark by 2010. And it will fail — the architects of the Kyoto guilt machine made sure of that — because we’re already 15% above 1990 emission levels. That’s why government officials are scrambling for forest-management credits and other loopholes, even if it means butting heads with Kyoto-loving Europeans.

While American stone-walling and Canadian foot-dragging are being blamed for the Kyoto Protocol’s near-demise, the reality is that no developed nation has ratified it. And given the litigious rumblings coming from environmental activists, it would be political and economic suicide for any nation to do so.

As we pointed out before, Kyoto is riddled with nebulous financial obligations that go well beyond slowing down economies to reduce GHG emissions. Richer nations must make technology transfers to, and develop capacity in, poorer nations, in addition to paying “adaptation” and “mitigation” costs associated with climate change. Critics call it a transfer of wealth disguised as environmental protection. It’s also a Pandora’s box of litigation, particularly for Canada and the U.S., which have been cast as global-warming villains because they emit more GHGs per capita than developing nations. Little or no attention is being paid to India (1 billion people), China (1.3 billion) and the rest of the third world, which are all exempt from Kyoto’s provisions.

Kyoto is a document capable of deepening the existing divide between have and have-not nations. It gives poor and mostly southern nations too many incentives to seek compensation for weather-related disasters from their northern neighbours. The United Nations is fuelling the fire with all sorts of dire predictions about the coming apocalypse, having recently predicted that sub-Saharan Africa, India, Brazil and Bangladesh could all experience major reductions in their food supply because of global warming. Never mind that these doomsday scenarios fail to jibe with the United Nations’ own reports, produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shows that the Southern Hemisphere has cooled, not warmed, in the past 20 years. The modest increases in surface temperatures recorded in the past century (in the range of 0.6 to 0.2 degrees Celsius) have been confined to northern regions, and occurred mostly at night.

The IPCC’s latest report also shows that there was no significant increase in storm activity during the 20th century, nor any systematic changes in the frequency of tornadoes, thunder days or hail events. Even so, citizens continue to be bombarded by endless warnings of a frying, dying planet, often from people who don’t even know that Earth had no permanent ice for most of the past 1 billion years. Recent media reports often cite a National Academy of Sciences study, which they say “represents a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wriggle room.”

We’re still wriggling, and not because we don’t believe that more needs to be done to clean up this planet’s air, water and soil, and to improve the habitat of all creatures, including humans. So, for that matter, are some of the report’s authors, including one scientist who reminded the media that the panel did none of its own research and was “not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide, or to forecast what the climate will be in the future.” The uncertainty was attributed to the fact that the climate is always changing.

So, it seems, is public opinion. Two decades ago, global cooling was a bigger threat than nuclear war. Now warming is a bigger worry. However, special-interest groups are still on the side of angels, and still demanding more power to save the earth from human-induced destruction.

We’re being told not to sweat the details, or the science, and to bow to something called “the precautionary principle.” If we do so, it will become the law of the land, just as it was in ancient times, when humans were sacrificed to prevent crop failures and witches were burned to make communities a safer place to live in fear.