Robert Fisk: Fear climate change, not our enemies

[Briar]

Robert Fisk: Fear climate change, not our enemies

From this wreckage was bound to come the insurgencies and the hatred

...I think was it Andrew Marr, when editor of The Independent, who first made me think about what was happening. It was a stiflingly hot summer and I had just arrived in London from Beirut and commented that there wasn't much difference in temperature. And Andrew turned round and pointed across the city. "Something's gone wrong with the bloody weather!" he roared. And of course, he was right.

Now I acknowledge it silently: the great storms that sweep across Europe, the weird turbulence that my passenger jet pilots experience high over the Atlantic. Because I have never travelled so far or so frequently, I notice that at year's end it's 15 degrees in Toronto and Montreal - a "springtime Christmas", the Canadian papers announce in a land famous for its tundra. In Denver, the airport is blocked by snowfalls. I return to Lebanon to find so little snow has fallen that much of Mount Sannine above my home is the colour of grey rock, just a dressing of white on the top. The snow is deep in Jerusalem. There is a water shortage in Beirut...

...I curl down deep in my bed, because the nights are strangely damp and read by the bedside light, Hans von Sponeck's gripping, painful account of his years as the UN's Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, A Different Kind of War, an analysis of the vicious, criminal sanctions regime levelled against the Iraqi people between 1990 and 2003. Here, for example, is what Sergei Lavrov, the Russian ambassador to the UN wrote in March 2000: "...the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq is inexorably leading to the disintegration of the very fabric of civil society." It was "a situation where an entire generation of Iraqis has been physically and morally crippled". The French ambassador to the UN, Alain Dejammet, spoke similarly of "the very serious humanitarian crisis in Iraq", a crime that would eventually persuade von Sponeck to resign.

Another warning. I remember how von Sponeck said the very same words to me in Baghdad. So did Denis Halliday, his predecessor. But when Peter Hain - now so desperately anxious to distance himself from US policies in Iraq - was asked to comment, he said that von Sponeck and Halliday were "obviously not the right men for the job". James Rubin, then earning his keep as Madeleine Albright's spokesman, said that von Sponeck "is paid to work, not to speak"...


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2169192.ece

(Edited to add link)

[aquart]

1. Terrorism never destroyed a city. Terrorism is a flea bite to this.

Global warming will change everything in our lives. Potentially, it may kill us in the millions. And we still don't take it seriously.

No snow in the mountains means no runoff in spring=drought.

The wheat belt moves northward...where maps place it in Canada before the end of the century=famine.

Melting polar ice raises the ocean levels which swamp our coasts causing refugees by the hundreds of thousands, millions=Katrina cubed.

We have made no preparations for any of it.

[lligrd]

2. This Could Be A Gift And Our Last Hope

If we as humans can't band together to combat the destruction of the planet then there is no hope for us.