Just as Ban Ki-moon is warming up to climate change as “the defining challenge of our age,” with the UN describing as absolute and unequivocal the “dire report” of the UN’s IPCC (picked for the Nobel prize courtesy of the Norwegian parliament, whose wisdom, we must infer, is similarly absolute), along comes the news that — whoops! — the UN in its earlier apocalyptic warnings about another issue has, in the words of the Washington Post, “long over-estimated both the size and course” — in that case of the AIDS epidemic.
According to today’s Washington Post, while AIDS remains a devastating crisis in the worst-affected parts of sub-Saharan Africa, UN top AIDS scientists are now having to admit that they went wildly overboard in their assertions that AIDS was an ever-expanding global epidemic. Contrary to years of dire reports from the UN, some as recent as last year, it now seems the spread of AIDS has been slowing for nearly a decade. The global total of people infected, estimated last year by the UN at nearly 40 million and climbing, is about to be revised down to 33 million. Reports the Post, “The far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.”
The Post quotes an AIDS expert, Helen Epstein, saying “There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda.”
Could there possibly be a certain parallel here between past UN alarmism over a wildfire global AIDS pandemic, and Ban Ki-moon’s latest pronouncement that to stop the imminent, irreversible, dire, apocalyptic, overwhelming, total, unquestionable and abruptly looming climate catastrophe (he went and saw a melting glacier for himself — who are we to question what that means?), there must now be a titanic planet-wide wealth transfer, with the UN as fee-collecting broker and middleman? At the imminent UN climate conference next month by the warm beaches of Bali, where UN staffers will collect their per diems while UN eminences plan ways to chill our economy, will anyone dare to bring that up?
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