The UN released another big report on global warming this past week. It was about what you might expect from the UN. The quality was high, the science was reasonable and well-supported, and the conclusions were cautiously and diplomatically stated. The bottom line was that the problem is real, but with enough international cooperation, the nations can get together and keep this thing from becoming a mega-catastrophe. <\/p>\n
Yea, that\u2019s the old-tyme UN religion at work. It\u2019s nice to see that the UN still dreams the dream. But the reality is that this dream has gone nowhere over the past half-century. Perhaps the UN is a century or two ahead of its time. The nations of the world basically DO NOT want to cooperate on a world-wide basis. They\u2019ll cut deals with each other to meet immediate problems or objectives, but as to \u201cone-worldism\u201d . . forget about it. <\/p>\n
I agree with the UN that it would be a really good time for one-worldism to get started, given the big mess that global warming might very well create in another 50 or 60 years. But there\u2019s a quaint little American song from the days of World War 1 that describes the international politics of global warming: \u201cHow Ya Gonna Keep Em Down On The Farm, After They\u2019ve Seen Paree\u201d. How is America going to convince the developing nations in Asia and elsewhere that they\u2019ve got to shoot for a standard of living lower than what Americans have (and won’t give up), because the world can\u2019t afford for their citizens to create as much greenhouse gas as the average American does? It\u2019s too late for that; the whole world knows about American prosperity, and wants its share as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
Even if American technology manages to cut the average American\u2019s \u201ccarbon footprint\u201d by 20%, the world is cooked once Asians and Africans en mass reach even a \u201creduced\u201d western level. There\u2019s eventually going to be starvation and desperation over wide tracts of territory; that sort of thing usually leads to war. And war usually leads to more war, along with economic decline. With enough war and poverty, even the big nations (including the USA) are going to be in trouble. We\u2019re not talking here about extinction of the human race, but we may well be in for a reversal of civilization, something akin to the Dark Ages. <\/p>\n
I\u2019m sorry to be so pessimistic, but I think that people need to grasp just how big the implications of this global warming thing are. It\u2019s not going to be solved technically and painlessly like the other air pollution problems were (e.g. CFC\u2019s). It\u2019s going to require soul-searching about just how high-on-the-hog any one nation can live. It may truly mean that the standards of material wealth in America will have to go down; to prevent absolute chaos, this would somehow have to be done in a fair way, one that hurts the rich more than the poor. <\/p>\n
One way or another, there are going to be big changes from global warming — worldwide changes. Perhaps this is the crisis that will finally let the UN and \u201cone-world thinking\u201d have its day. The rich nations don’t like one-world thinking, but once they see that their wealth and power can’t survive a world catastrophe, maybe that will change. At the very least, the maligned and disrespected UN will finally be able to say \u201ctold you so\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The UN released another big report on global warming this past week. It was about what you might expect from the UN. The quality was high, the science was reasonable and well-supported, and the conclusions were cautiously and diplomatically stated. The bottom line was that the problem is real, but with enough international cooperation, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,23,33],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5519,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/5519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}