Did you hear about the 60 localities “swallowed by the salt sea”? If their woes can be chalked up to global warming, perhaps implicated is all that medieval industry and auto use. They can’t get climate-relief aid, though, because these localities were engulfed during the Grote Mandrenke (Great Drowning of Men) flood in Denmark in 1362. But though coastal flooding has ever plagued man, the political climate is different in 2022. Hence the following story.
Per Native News Online:
Yesterday [11/30], the Department of Interior (DOI) announced the launching of a new program for federally recognized tribes seeking to relocate as a result of climate change.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland initially announced $135 million in funding at the 2022 White House Tribal Leaders Summit. The funds will assist 11 Tribes in advancing relocation efforts and adaption planning.
“As part of the federal government’s treaty and trust responsibility to protect Tribal sovereignty and revitalize tribal communities, we must safeguard Indian Country from the intensifying and unique impacts of climate change,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in a statement on Nov. 30. “Helping these communities move to safety on their homelands is one of the most important climate-related investments we could make in Indian Country.”
The Voluntary Community-Driven Relocation program is led by the DOI and will assist Tribal communities severely impacted by climate-related environmental threats. The funds have been allocated through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, with additional support to be provided by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and the Denali Commission.
Never mind that late atmospheric and space physicist S. Fred Singer had pointed out that there’s “no need to panic about the rising sea level.” The climate alarmists have their story and they’re stickin’ to it. And USA Today, which, as a recent article attests, can’t figure out why students who attack teachers get arrested, provides more detail. “Joe Biden announced the funding Wednesday for Newtok and Napakiak, both on the Bering Sea coast in Alaska, and the Quinault Indian Nation on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula,” the paper writes. “Biden spoke at the start of a two-day tribal summit in Washington, D.C.”
“‘There are tribal communities at risk of being washed away, washed away, by superstorms, rising sea levels and wildfires raging,’ Biden said. ‘It’s devastating,’” USA Today continued. Though Biden once stated, back when he was lucid in 2008, that FDR went on television after the 1929 stock market crash to tell Americans “what happened” (even though FDR wasn’t president then and TV service didn’t exist), don’t worry, he’s apparently an expert on climate change. Perhaps it’s reassuring that he now can’t remember what he didn’t know.
USA Today also informs that tribes “will need $4.8 billion in assistance over [the] next 50 years [or, at least, whatever Ukraine doesn’t get?] to relocate imperiled buildings, harden water treatment plants and protect themselves from erosion and flooding, according to a 2020 federal study.” The paper further claims that the tribes “also face the loss of their way of life through subsistence hunting as climate change alters migration patterns of fish, caribou, whales, birds and other game.”
Of course, this assertion — brought to you by the people who so adroitly managed Covid — is one for which there’s no evidence whatsoever.
Note here that this has nothing to do with whether one believes these villages should receive government aid. (We could wonder, though, how federal involvement is constitutional and why wealthy Alaska can’t foot the bill. The state is poised, after all, to have a $3.4 billion budget surplus just for fiscal years 2022 and 2023 alone.) Rather, it concerns the climate-change justification.
And, in reality, though there are true believers, it now often is merely a justification because when all you have at your disposal is a global-warming hammer, everything must be called a nail. Just consider what British science writer Nigel Calder pointed out years ago about what he’d do if he wanted a grant to study squirrels. He wouldn’t ask for just that; he’d instead say he wanted “to investigate the nut-gathering behavior of squirrels with special reference to the effects of global warming.” “And that way I get my money,” Calder explained. “If I forget to mention global warming, I might not get the money.” So “climate change” is today’s abracadabra — a magic word that, in our case, opens up government coffers.
Interestingly, USA Today also quotes an attorney-activist named Robin Bronen as saying that while Biden’s announcement was primarily about the Indian communities, “we know that other places like Miami are in the process of possibly being permanently submerged.” We do?
It certainly has happened in the past. At one point, in prehistoric times, the ocean around Florida was 100 feet higher, which today would submerge most of that very low-lying state; at another point, the waters were 300 feet lower. Yet man had nothing to do with these phenomena.
As for beach “erosion,” it’s a “continual natural process” that “has occurred for as long as land has met water,” writes Encyclopedia.com. In fact and apropos to Bronen’s statement, my family would sometimes vacation in Miami when I was a child. Well, I remember when the government launched a major project to widen Miami’s beach — because of erosion.
This was close to the time, mind you, when doomsayers were warning about an impending ice age.
