Once you have risen to a certain level in the institutions, failure is hardly possible. There is virtually no blunder, no level of incompetence or weakness of character that would disqualify such a person from further career advancement.
The term expires, the failer has achieved nothing and, above all, caused damage, and the next plush seat is ready. In the worst case, the failer is given a job elsewhere, in the shadows, for a year or two before making his or her comeback to the fail-safe level. The generous pension scheme is never in danger.
Everyone knows the practical examples from their own work, we know them from politics and in international organizations. I have only a vague idea of how someone becomes Secretary General of the UN. In fact, I don’t think anyone has a clear idea about that. Of course you need to have a close-knit network in the depths of the UN headquarters, but there are so many; of course you must have been careful not to offend important UN member states during your career there, but that is also far from unique. And further? Horse trading in back rooms, and then at a certain point white smoke comes out of the chimney of the UN conclave: we have the Pope of the communion of the world!
Virtue proclamations
Mr Antonio Guterres deals in perfunctory, gratuitous condemnations of coups, violence against women, inequality and other things that you can confidently read. chatGPT you can have the press statement drawn up. You know in advance that everyone with direct involvement in such misery will wipe their behinds with those proclamations of virtue.
But has Guterres himself ever risked anything to correct those abuses, and has that demonstrably achieved anything? I’m curious. Dag Hammerskjold (UN Secretary General from 1953 to 1961) personally went on a diplomatic peace mission in Congo and paid for it with his life. I don’t see Guterres doing it yet.
The 21st century mandate of the UN Secretary General is primarily to morally assess the Western world from his safe, inclusive office tower in New York. This really started to stand out during the corona pandemic. Many times, in increasingly strident terms, Guterres accused the Western world for their vaccine policy.
As far as Guterres is concerned, the Western countries that developed, produced and paid for these vaccines should have distributed them free of charge throughout the world without any priority for their own people. Guterres predicted that Western vaccine selfishness would go down in history as one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever. Or words to a similar effect, I quote from memory, but his accusations were certainly not gentle.
Hysterical exaggeration
The reality is that the Western vaccines were used exactly where they had the most effect: in countries with a relatively old population and a good healthcare infrastructure, that is, in the West. In all other countries, corona was only one of many pressure factors on public health, and not the most important. The many billions of euros that, if Guterres had his way, would have been spent on mass vaccination campaigns in Asia and Africa would have been largely wasted because they would not have even kept up with the rapid spread of natural immunity.
Moreover, they would have significantly delayed the effective vaccination campaigns in Western countries, with all the damage and victims that entails.
Corona has now become insignificant as expected, but the hysterical exaggeration that proved so successful in publicity with the corona crisis apparently left Guterres wanting more.
And when the temporary, real crisis is over, there is always climate change. Following some forest fires and locally high sea water temperatures, Guterres declared that the era of global boiling had arrived, and when this week the warmest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere (that is, since measurements began) was declared, Guterres told us that we now have the climate breakdown (‘climate collapse’) happen. Guterres’s climate change scaremongering is inexcusable, with the only mitigating factor being that he may believe this nonsense himself.
I always wonder about officials at that flawless level, such as Guterres, but also Rob Jetten, Christianne van der Wal or Frans Timmermans, what information they take in, and from whom. Guterres studied and taught electrical engineering in the distant past, but has been around for half a century full timepolitician, so I don’t assume he can derive any independent judgment about climate science from that. Jetten, Van der Wal and Timmermans completely lack such basic knowledge of the natural sciences.
Who can patch their own bicycle tire?
In an earlier column I had already wondered which of those top people would be able to patch their own bicycle tires. My guess: Guterres can’t even cycle, Jetten will never get his hands dirty with it, Timmermans says he can but always lets Diederik Samsom do it, and I’m not entirely sure about Van der Wal. But I am convinced that the vast majority of the unfailing toppers have never read a scientific article or even a decent book about the fields that underlie their political hobbyhorses.
They have been receiving information from their closest advisors all their working lives, adorned with the daily hypes in the international media. The only other explanation for Guterres’ hysterical cries about climate change would be that Guterres knows better, but is an opportunistic liar.
Question for Guterres and all alarmists: what does that actually look like, a climate that has ‘collapsed’? What kind of weather will we have tomorrow? Or has it collapsed again, and what will that look like? Man-made climate change involves relatively minuscule changes. The sun sends 340 watts of energy to every square meter of Earth’s surface, and has done so for hundreds of millions of years. And the Earth radiates on average just as much infrared radiation back into the universe for just as long.
In the long run, the Earth’s radiation balance must be exactly in balance, otherwise the entire globe would have melted and evaporated long ago. During all that time, a temporary imbalance sometimes arose, causing the Earth to enter or emerge from an Ice Age. Even during the most intense Ice Age, lasting tens of thousands of years, the climate did not collapse, in any meaningful sense of the word.
Ask Guterres some quiz questions
Due to our greenhouse gases, other land use and some other human activities, we have been causing an imbalance in that radiation balance of effectively less than 1 watt, so relatively 0.3 percent, for several decades, although this will increase somewhat in the near future. A dynamic system that has existed for hundreds of millions of years and has survived enormous shocks would ‘collapse’ due to such a geologically speaking, minute perturbation that lasts only an instant?
Does Guterres have any idea of such numbers? Someone should ask Guterres a few quiz questions like that at a press conference. But the information officers will not allow that. Because at the level of the infallible, knowledge can no longer be tested.
Science journalist Arnout Jaspers is the bestselling author ‘The Nitrogen Trap’. His columns appear every Saturday in Wynia’s Week.
Wynia’s Weekis published 104 times a year with equally independent and much-needed reporting, which is freely available to everyone. The donors make that possible. Are you in? Thank you!
2023-09-09 04:57:32
#confronts #boss #Guterres #damage #causing #global #boiling #climate #breakdown #Wynias #Week
