Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Banky believes

The debate over whether the current global warming trend is anthropocentric rages on, but UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is a believer:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday.

"The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

"This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming," the South Korean diplomat wrote.

"It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought," Ban said in the Washington daily.

It's not until the fourth paragraph, above, that we see the phrase "man-made global warming." There might be a causal connection between climatic change and violence (in fact, such a connection makes a great deal of sense of me), but I'd have to know more about Ban's opinion before I agree that man-made climatic changes have sparked the conflict. The article doesn't convince me that the causal link has been established, or has even been properly argued for.


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