by Alan Caruba

If you were to depend on the Huffington Post for your knowledge of the world, you would remain appallingly ignorant. As a leading website for liberal news and views, it is a platform for sheer nonsense and the wonder of it all is that so much is produced on a daily basis.
Take, for example, the June 20 post “State of the Ocean: ‘Shocking’ Report Warns of Mass Extinction from Current Rate of Marine Distress.” I doubt that most HP readers have a clue how vast the oceans of the world are. They compose the majority of the Earth’s surface, some 70 percent, and contain 97 percent of the world’s water.

According to its website, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) gathered at the University of Oxford, for “A high-level international workshop”, described as “the first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind… designed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the ocean, including warming, acidification, and over-fishing.”“The 27 participants from 18 organizations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats – and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world’s ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.”

Please, someone, please tell me the last time an international group of scientists did not get together and then announce to the world that some horrid future awaited everyone?

According to the IPSO geniuses, “We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s and generations beyond that.” The scientific panel concluded “that the degeneration in the oceans is happening much faster than has been predicted” and, therefore, all the coral reefs “could be gone by 2050.”
Why is it that every one of these apocalyptic groups always predict something “could be”, “might be”, “is expected to”, and a whole raft of wishy-washy terms that add up to “We don’t know, but we want to scare the crap out of you just the same”?
Implicit in this latest prediction is that human actions are responsible for whatever they claim is happening to the oceans. Never mind all the other creatures on Earth, gazillions of insects, millions of birds and all manner of mammals, not to mention all the fish, it is always humans despoiling the Earth.

Have we not lived with this tiresome nonsense since the early days of the environmental movement and, in particular, the creation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? A recent editorial in The Washington Times exposed the way the latest IPCC pronouncement that “the entire world will soon depend on renewable energy” was lifted from a paper whose primary authors were from Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council!

The IPCC has managed to destroy the integrity and the trust in science that has taken centuries to be built. Its constant flogging of the bogus global warming fraud has caused everyone except the Green Kool-Aid drinkers to conclude that scientists cannot be trusted.
Many can’t. Over the years, they have been seduced by billions in government funds for research that always seems to confirm whatever the political agenda is at the time. Galileo was put under house arrest by the Vatican because his findings conflicted with the teaching of the Church at that time. Now governments just buy scientists by the boatload. In addition, the scientists working for government agencies such as NASA know where their paycheck comes from.

A caveat, please. I am privileged to know quite a few scientists as the result of spending the last thirty years debunking global warming. A relative handful of very brave men and women risked their academic and professional careers to dispute the IPCC and other charlatans. From June 30-to-July 1, the Heartland Institute will convene its sixth international conference devoted to the truth about “global warming”, i.e., that it is a massive lie. So, yes, there are many good scientists and interested parties who fought the good fight.
Compounding the problem here in the U.S., the nation’s schools have been totally co-opted by the Green agenda and whatever passes for science is mostly some version of the Gaia religion spoon-fed to the kiddies in pre-school, kindergarten, and up to graduation. The process continues at most colleges and university. The result is a generation or two of enviro-robots for whom science is little more than propaganda.

So, like the marine prognosticators, be polite, listen to their ravings, and ignore them. Be serene and secure in the knowledge that the sun, the oceans, the clouds, the volcanoes, and other factors affecting the Earth are immune to any but the ancient cycles that were known by Chinese, Mayan and druid astronomers long, long ago.

That is why the end is always near, but thankfully never seems to arrive.