UN Coverup of “Climate Refugees” Scandal Fails
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

The UN Environment Program (UNEP) had warned in 2005 that sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by man-made climate change would lead to massive population disruptions. In a map, the organization highlighted areas that were supposed to be particularly vulnerable, such as the Caribbean.

But it turns out that, not only did those areas fail to produce any “climate refugees,” their populations are actually booming. The first reporter to pick up the story, Gavin Atkins with Asian Correspondent, reviewed some of the most recent censuses and made a mockery of the UN’s alarmist claims.

For example, the population of the Bahamas, a low-lying nation of islands off the coast of Florida, grew by more than 50,000 people according to a 2010 census. It now has more than 350,000 — up from around 300,000 a decade ago. The population of St. Lucia grew by five percent during the same period. The population of the Seychelles and the Solomon Islands grew significantly as well.

“Meanwhile, far from being places where people are fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest growing cities in China, Shenzzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded areas identified as being likely sources of climate refugees,” noted Atkins in the piece, entitled “What happened to the climate refugees?” A similar situation was observed in America.

Atkins concluded that “a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.” More census data will be available later this year.

After Atkins’ April 11 report, news outlets around the world began to pick up the story. And the UN responded immediately with a half-baked attempt at damage control. But instead of admitting its predictions were way off the mark, the organization tried to take down all evidence that it had ever made them. Now it claims the 50 million “environmental refugees” will materialize by 2020.

But it was too late to hide the truth. Google has a function that allows people to view a “cached” file of a web page even after it is taken down. So the UN’s bogus prediction is still available for the world to see online. And critics have pounced on the story, lambasting the global body for its false alarmist claims.  

Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs the world's most-visited website about climate science, called the incident “government idiocy at its finest.” In a piece entitled “The UN ‘disappears’ 50 million climate refugees, then botches the cover-up,” Watts said attempts to conceal evidence of its bogus prediction were “hilariously inept,” adding that “they’ve now brought even more distrust onto the UN.”

Investor’s Business Daily also savaged the UN in an editorial, calling its claims a hoax. “The endless fraud perpetrated by the climate hucksters knows no bounds. Neither does the inaccuracy of climate models that cannot predict the past,” explained the piece. “Yet they keep trying, like the cartoon prophet carrying the sign predicting the world will end tomorrow.”

The UN and its climate “science” have been exposed in recent years as misleading, alarmist, and in many instances, completely false. Its most recent IPCC report made significant errors on everything ranging from the percent of the Netherlands that is below sea level to an outrageous claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. Many of its errors were later shown to be taken from alarmist organizations’ press releases.

At least one critic suggested in a piece about the climate-refugee scandal that sinister motives behind all of the fear-mongering could be identified. “One is to increase the institutional UN’s governance responsibilities, authority, legitimacy, and power,” wrote columnist Kenneth Anderson for FavStocks. “The other is to increase the amount of money that runs through UN mechanisms from rich countries to poor countries, with an administrative cut to the UN itself.”

But despite the exposure, the international organization is still acting as if nothing had happened. It continues hosting expensive conferences around the world to deal with allegedly man-made climate change even as scientists ridicule the theories underpinning the hysteria.

As the organization and its claims become ever-more discredited in the public mind, fewer and fewer people are taking notice of its aims. But even with the global-warming movement on the verge of collapse and the exposure of its links to eugenics efforts, proponents of climate theories are becoming increasingly militant, hysterical, and irrational.

And the danger of an international treaty limiting economic activity, transferring wealth, and creating global taxes still persists. The next major UN climate summit is set for December in Durban, South Africa. And by 2012 — the 20th anniversary of the global-warming campaign — the UN hopes to have its “green world order” fully in place.