The horrific conflagrations of nuclear bombs are among the fictional scenes depicted in renowned director Christopher Nolan’s huge and haunting three-hour film.
The reality of life today, though, is far scarier, as seen by the growing threat of a nuclear holocaust arising from the ongoing war in Ukraine.
When a top diplomat from the United States declares that nuclear war is no worse than climate change, the impending annihilation of the world is not a far-fetched notion.
On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed the threat of nuclear annihilation is no more serious than the threat of climate change.
When asked whether nuclear war or climate change represented “the greater threat to humanity” during an appearance on 60 Minutes Australia, Blinken said, “Well, you can’t, I think, have a hierarchy. There are some things that are front and centre, including potential conflict, but there’s no doubt that climate represents an existential challenge to all of us.”Really?
The truth is, despite decades of “global warming crisis” stories highlighted by the media, the jury is still out on whether “climate change” is real.
So far, 1,551 scientists and scholars have signed the World Climate Declaration initiated by the Climate Intelligence Network (Clintel), based in The Netherlands.
The declaration begins with this statement: “There is no climate emergency.”
It continues that climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. It urges scientists to openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.
It states that the geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases, and points out that the Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850, hence it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
The declaration notes that the world has warmed significantly less than predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, but also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with carbon dioxide (CO2) is beneficial.
It highlights the fact that CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth and is not a pollutant. More CO2 is favourable for nature, greening our planet, and additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also profitable for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters or making them more frequent, but there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
The document states that there is no cause for panic and alarm, and strongly opposes the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050, whatever their causes are.
But of course, the signatories of the declaration, most of whom are distinguished professors and scientists from 22 countries, are dismissed as “climate change deniers” because their views do not fit the prescribed narrative of the global elites.
Since 2002, Clintel has been issuing commentaries and pointing out serious errors on the scientific claims made by the IPCC. These too are largely ignored by mainstream media.
To return to Blinken and his preposterous comparison of “climate change” against nuclear war, he must surely know the consequences of such a war. The thousands of atomic explosions would not only kill millions of people in a matter of minutes, but also create a nuclear winter resulting in billions of people starving to death.
Yet, US President Joe Biden’s administration continues to send arms and military equipment to Ukraine. The US and its allies have provided long-range missiles to Ukraine and are now discussing the possibility of sending fighter jets, despite repeated warnings from Russia that such weapons dramatically raise the chances of a nuclear war between Russia and the West.
Since the war began, the Biden administration and US Congress have directed more than US$75bil (RM339.4bil) in aid to Ukraine, which includes humanitarian, financial and military support.
Overall, the US has given more than US$41bil (RM186bil) in military aid to Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia in February 2022.
It is sending US$400mil (RM1.8bil) more in additional military aid, including munitions for the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System and the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, Stingers and Javelins.
European institutions and EU countries have given as much as the US to Ukraine since the start of the war.
There are nine countries in the world that are nuclear powers – the US, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
The nuclear weapons now are at least 80 times more powerful than those that Julius Robert Oppenheimer was involved in creating during World War II as part of the US’ top-secret Manhattan Project.
Two of the nuclear bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, obliterating both and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Russia, which inherited the former Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, has the world’s biggest store of nuclear warheads (5,977) while the US has 5,428.
This means that both Russia and the US can destroy the world many times over.
Media consultant M. Veera Pandiyan likes this quote from Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero: “Endless money forms the sinews of war.” The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
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