Virtue-signalling climate budgets don’t meet urgent human needs

Is global warming to blame for the Syrian war? Democratic presidential candidates Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke and Bernie Sanders seem to think so. At the CNN climate town hall this month, Buttigieg and O'Rourke referred to climate change as a national security threat that contributed to causing the Syrian civil war. “Wars that were precipitated by climate change, like Syria, will pale in comparison to the wars that we see in the future,” O'Rourke warned. Both candidates follow the lead of Sanders, who has long claimed that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism”.

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets. The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War.

Interview for The Voice of Russia by Yekaterina Kudashkina, 6 Dec, 2012.

Global warming is real, it is man-made and it is an important problem. But the way it is often being portrayed as the cause of the vast majority of extreme weather incidents is simply unfounded.If we look at a lot of the catastrophes that we’ve seen over the last years and that have been very well published, they are by far mostly driven by social factors.