The preeminent issue of our times, proclaim many politicians is global warming. President Barack Obama recently expressed real concern over the issue, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to make climate change the top priority within both the G8 and the EU.
Likewise the media assailed us with increasingly dramatic stories of our ever worsening climate. Time did a special report in 2006 on global warming, with the cover spelling out the doom and gloom that awaits mankind with repetitive alarmism: “Be worried. Be very worried”. Warning its readers that the climate is crashing and playing havoc with our biosphere and our health through “heatstroke, asthma and wait for this…infectious diseases!”
On the cover was the heartbreaking image of a polar bear on a melting ice floe, searching in vain for the next piece of ice to jump to. Time reported that due to global warming, polar bears “are starting to turn up drowned” and that they are heading to extinction!
Al Gore shows a similar picture and tells us gravely, that a new “scientific study” shows that polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers. The Independent tells us that temperature increases “means that polar bears are wiped out in their Arctic homeland,” relying extensively on research published in 2001 by the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union.
A closer examination of the Polar Bear Specialist Group Report however reveals something quite different from what Gore and the media had selectively cherry picked and wanted the public to believe! What the report really said was that “of the 20 distinct sub-populations of polar bears, one or possibly two were declining in Baffin Bay; more than half were known to be stable and two sub-populations were actually increasing around the Beaufort Sea!”
Moreover, the report goes on to say, “global polar bear population has increased dramatically over the past decades, from about 5 thousand in the sixties to about 25 thousand today, through stricter hunting regulation.”
What was most damning was that the report clearly showed that the 2 sub-populations in decline actually came from areas where it had actually been getting colder over the past 50 years!
In recent years, it is this tendency to cherry-pick their data that has brought great discredit to the environmental movement and the oddly named Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth (FOE) appears to have mastered this art of data manipulation to a fine degree!
The grotesque manipulation and utter disregard for true facts and figures by Greenpeace and FOE would have made Gore proud!
Making wild and exaggerated claims in their “report” of October 2008 and called: “Malaysian Palm Oil: Green Gold or Green Wash”, FOE accused the Malaysian state of Sarawak of developing “large-scale plantations at breath-taking speed having overexploited its timber resources and depleted its forests.” The “report” contends that oil palm plantations are being expanded at the expense of tropical forests.
The problem with the “report” is that the agriculture to forest land ratio in Sarawak currently stands at 8:76. If agricultural land in Sarawak is currently only 8%, how could it even be remotely possible for Sarawak to be expanding palm oil plantations “at the expense of tropical forests”? Isn’t it obvious then that the true situation in Sarawak is that palm oil plantations are primarily developed on legitimate agricultural land or previously logged over areas?
Not to be outdone, Greenpeace quickly joined the parade of the absurd! Donning monkey suits and screeching like the juvenile delinquents that they really are, monkey suited Greenpeacers scaled the walls of Unilever factories throughout Europe, on the grounds that Unilever was a major consumer of palm oil, despite Unilever having helped initiate the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). What really takes the cake is the way Greenpeace issued its own “report” criticizing the first shipment of RSPO certified sustainable palm oil by United Plantation (UP).
In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, it is actions such as these that raise the specter that Greenpeace is not really sincere in their much vaunted claim of working towards sustainable development of palm oil. The ugly truth could be far more sinister than even the least rabid of their media supporters would suspect – that Greenpeace is really interested in promoting the bad science, pandering environmental politics and misguided policies that is so all-pervasive in their anti-palm oil debate! THE END.
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