News Flash: Future Now Unpredictable

From the United Nations, source of so many wonders, we now have word that “The past is no longer a good indicator of the future.”

So says Michel Jarraud, the French head of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, opining about climate change at a press briefing in Geneva. Jarraud, who is part of the UN gang pushing for a multi-trillion dollar attempt to re-engineer the climate of the planet, seems to believe our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a world of unswerving certainties about the future — possessed of all the relevant facts and armed with collated crop statistics. Today’s uncertainty about the future, he said, “Is something completely new — to make decisions not on facts or statistics about the past, but on the probabilities for the future.”

Really? Given the ever-changing nature of life itself, along with the climate and a great many other factors that interact their way into the future, one might suspect the human race has always kept in mind some sort of running tab of probabilities. It’s called evolution and adaptation. In places where individuals have had the freedom to invent, experiment and profit in the marketplace from their insights, mankind has racked up a spectacular record of dealing with these probabilities — creating out of raw wilderness an environment in which Michel Jarraud can sit in air-conditioned comfort, well-housed, richly fed and sounding off to the international media.

But what’s Jarraud’s answer to all this uncertainty he now predicts? You guessed it — he wants the UN to plan the future for you. To this end, in the approach to the grand climate jamboree scheduled for Copenhagen this December, the UN is convening yet another in its endless series of conferences, this one to be held next week in Geneva and attended by what Reuters describes as “About 1,500 policy-makers, researchers and corporate leaders.” (For these UN hunter-gatherers, there is of course endless justification for the jet fuel, carbon emissions and meat entrees they would like to ration to the rest of us).

I’m guessing that what Jarraud was trying to say, in his odd locutions about past and future, is that he thinks there has been a shift in the weights one should assign to various factors and probabilities. Fair enough. But here’s one prediction I’m willing to hazard, based on the past: In the long record of mankind peering into sheep entrails and sniffing the wind to try to divine the future, it would be hard to find a process more self-serving, politicized and potentially, abusively expensive for mankind than what the UN will try to deliver in months ahead, in the name of its bureaucratic absolutisms on “climate change.”