The UN’s Krazy Kangaroo Klimate Kourt

By Paul Driessen

Vanuatu and other “climate vulnerable” island nations claim they are threatened by rising seas and worsening typhoons caused by fossil fuel use. In response to an emotional petition from them and law students at the University of the South Pacific, the United Nations General Assembly presented a resolution to the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ or World Court), asking two questions: 

• What obligations do countries have under the Kyoto and Paris Climate Agreements or other international laws to protect Earth’s climate from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions? 
• What legal consequences do (developed) countries face if they fail to abide by those laws and thus cause serious harm to the climate system and vulnerable communities? 
• The ICJ held hearings in December 2024 and (unsurprisingly) in July 2025 ruled formally, or declared in open court, that: 
• Greenhouse gas GHG) emissions are “unequivocally caused by human activities,” and are not confined by territorial boundaries” but are distributed throughout the atmosphere, thereby affecting Earth’s entire climate system. 
• The “climate crisis” is likewise “unequivocally” serious and caused by human activities. Indeed, manmade climate change is an “existential problem of planetary proportions,” a “universal risk” to all nations, a dire threat to “all forms of life and the very health of our planet.” 
• “A clean, healthy and sustainable environment” is a “human right.” 
• Member states (excluding China, India and other “emerging economies”) have a “duty” to prevent climate change, and failure of a state to “take appropriate action to protect the climate system … may constitute an internationally wrongful act.”

The Court’s pronouncements of legal and scientific expertise demonstrate yet again that the ICJ offers little more than politicized caricatures of law and justice – this time as a krazy kangaroo klimate kourt. 

Americans should be grateful that the ICJ ruling is nonbinding; advisory only, and the United States officially withdrew from the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction over UN member nations in 1986. 

Climate cultists will nevertheless demand obeisance to ICJ findings and dictates by the USA and other nations, and the ICJ decision and language will undoubtedly be cited in legal actions before their courts. 

The lawsuits will almost certainly include demands for billions or trillions of dollars in climate change “prevention” funds, “reparations” for past and ongoing damages, and money for “adaptation measures” that “victimized” countries will have to take to minimize horrific damage from climate changes caused by developed nations. They will also likely demand an end to fossil fuels and petrochemicals, despite our needing them to power vehicles, generators, furnaces and factories, and manufacture 6,000 petrochemical products, including solar panel, wind turbine, transformer, battery and electric vehicle components. 

The ICJ rulings raise endless issues and underscore the court’s propensity for vapid, ignorant analysis. 

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) certainly arise from human activities and become part of the global atmosphere. However, they are also the product of natural processes, like forest fires and vegetative and animal decay. The most important GHG is water vapor (~1-4% of the atmosphere), though climate activists never mention it. Other GHGs are minuscule components and play minor roles in climate and weather: eg, carbon dioxide (0.04%) and methane 0.0002%). 

The only places climate change is a “crisis,” an “existential problem of planetary proportions,” or a “dire threat” to people and planet are in climate cult computer models, fearmongering and press releases. 

Actual historic records, empirical data and ongoing measurements show no planet-wide or even national increases in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, sea level rise, forest fires or other catastrophes. They do show crops, grasslands and forests growing better, faster and with less water, as atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperatures increased. 

A true dire threat to humanity and nature would be another ice age. The Pleistocene Era’s mile-high glaciers bulldozed and buried everything for thousands of miles south of the Arctic, dropped sea levels by hundreds of feet, and replaced countless plant and animal species with new cold-weather varieties. The Little Ice Age (~1300-1850) brought floods, storms, famines and disease to Europe and Asia. 

How could Vanuatu have survived the 400-foot rise in sea levels since the last Ice Age, including a foot since 1900, but now is threatened by 1-2 feet more over the next century or two? 

The blunt reality is that the World Court cannot decree that a “climate crisis” is being “unequivocally” caused by fossil fuels and other human activities – any more than Spanish Inquisitors could decree that the sun revolves around our planet. Science doesn’t work that way. 

Under the scientific method, a theory like catastrophic manmade climate change (nee global warming) must be supported by empirical evidence (not hype or models) – or it must be rejected. Not only is there no “settled” climate science. What we now know demonstrates that we face no crisis, and the supposed “green” energy cure for this non-crisis would be far more devastating to humanity, wildlife and planet than any climate calamities alleged to be threatening us. 

But the UN and Climate Industrial Complex cling so desperately to manmade climate cataclysm claims (and the money and power those claims generate) that they want to criminalize climate “misinformation, disinformation, misrepresentation, denialism and greenwashing” – which the UN, ICJ and nation states would define, prosecute and penalize. 

Any lawsuit claiming a “human right.” to a “clean, healthy, sustainable environment” falsely assumes that developed nations can actually control Earth’s climate and fulfill their “duty” to prevent both natural and human-caused climate change, for whatever climate exists wherever the litigants live. 

It must ignore harms from eliminating fossil fuels, reliable coal- or gas-based electricity and 6,000+ products made from petrochemicals. It must dismiss the fact that those life-enhancing products and other modern technologies were created and manufactured by the very countries they now vilify and blame. 

The lawsuits must also assume that “clean” wind, solar and battery technologies will magically arrive once the coal-oil-gas era ends – and will not involve mining and processing, toxic pollution, child and slave labor, and ecological destruction from blanketing vast areas with wind, solar and transmission installations. They must ignore the disease and death from the blackouts and reduced living standards and medical services that inevitably come with that unreliable energy. 

This “human right” proclamation also presumes that people will have no desire – and no human right – to act and live outside the dictates of UN, ICJ or other ruling elites regarding: what foods they may eat; what homes they may live in, and how warm or cool they may keep them; where, how, how far and how often they may drive or fly; and what they are permitted to read, think and say about any of this, without running afoul of Disinformation Police. 

This International Court of Justice is the height of arrogance, tyranny and injustice to the vast majority of the world’s people. The court and this opinion should simply be ignored and rejected. 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, economic development and human rights.

Israel’s War on Hamas is the Least Deadly War in the Region

ByDaniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II”.

The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”

That’s all the more impressive since even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children) as the media does, this is still probably one of the least violent conflicts in the region.

In 2016, the Washington Post described the Syrian Civil War, with a possible 250,000 deaths, as “the most destructive conflict in the region”. In 2020, the UN had called the Yemeni Civil War, with 150,000 deaths, “the most destructive conflict since the end of the Cold War”.

And then there’s the current phase of the war in Sudan (which the media is currently uninterested in) in which 15,000 people have been killed over the course of last year, as part of a larger conflict that may have claimed as many as 2 million lives.

The Tigray War in Ethiopia over the last three years (which you may have missed because the media chose not to hysterically cover every single bomb dropped and protesters stayed home knitting instead of blocking traffic) may have cost the lives of between 80,000 to 600,000 people.

(El Pais, Spain’s newspaper, which did report on Ethiopia’s civil war, described it as “the deadliest of the 21st century” and then had to pivot to argue later that Israel was worse in, “25,000 deaths in Gaza: Why the destruction of this war exceeds that of other major conflicts”.)

In reality, every significant war and civil war in the region had a much higher death toll than the Hamas war: including the Iraq-Iran War with an estimated 500,000 to 2 million deaths. And in nearby Africa, the Congo War has been blamed for 6 million deaths since 1996.

How does the media justify arguing that 25,000 is more than 2 million?

There are plenty of statistical gimmicks available to anyone who wants to argue that 2 + 2 is really 5. Media “analyses” that claim that Israel’s campaign against Hamas is the deadliest and most destructive, and might even be worse than WWII, adjust their claims accordingly.

As the author of every dubious research study knows, to get the results you want, you manipulate your parameters. Media analyses selectively compare Israel’s campaign to battles, rather than wars, they narrowly focus on very specific timetables, they try to estimate per capita rather than gross figures. But drawing a circle around a particular area and going per capita works both ways. The Hamas attack of Oct 7 killed 10% of the population of Kibbutz Be’eri making it far worse per capita than anything in Israel’s response to those atrocities.

But statistical fudging is all in where the line is drawn to achieve a particular agenda.

For example, the New York Times declares that, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israel in Past 40 Years”. Of course the last major Arab-Israeli war took place 50 years ago.

The 40 year figure is based on the Lebanon War, but the actual numbers for that war vary wildly from the thousands according to Israel, 10,000 according to the CIA, 18,000 according to Lebanon and 30,000 according to Arafat and the PLO.

While the media at the time emphasized the highest estimates, in order to criticize the Israeli campaign against the PLO, they now use lower estimates to attack the Gaza campaign.

Similarly, the AP cites its own claim that battles against ISIS in the Iraqi city of Mosul “killed around 10,000 civilians” to indict Israel. Some Iraqi estimates however peg it as high as 40,000. PBS headlined its coverage by warning that “the human toll of the battle for Mosul may never be known.”

The New York Times, after using the shaky Lebanon numbers to prop up the shaky Gaza numbers, admits that “as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.”

That much is true.

The Times cites its own claim that, “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible”.

That’s why the death toll for everything from the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars to the mass deaths in Sudan and the Iran-Iraq War are broad estimates with vast differences between them.

Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, warned that truth is the first casualty of war. And accurate casualty counts are the first and final casualty of every conflict.

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once courted controversy with its claims that the Iraq War had killed, first 98,000 Iraqis and then over half a million or 2.5% of the country. By 2007, a British data company, claimed that 1 million Iraqis had been killed. These claims were quickly debunked and the claims are in the rearview mirror now that the debate over the war is over.

During the Iraq War it was politically convenient to inflate the death toll just as it’s now politically convenient to deflate the death toll while unthinkingly accepting casualty figures from a terrorist group whose main hope of survival lies in inflating civilian deaths while minimizing its own casualties.

The most troubling thing about the universal acceptance of the Hamas numbers is just that.

Estimated death tolls in the Syrian Civil War have varied wildly from the low six figures to over 600,000. Different organizations with different agendas have produced very different sets of numbers. And while many of those may be unreliable, there is at least a healthy debate.

When it comes to Gaza, the media cites no figures other than those of Hamas. And it insists at the same time that most of Gaza has been destroyed, its medical centers pulverized and its government shattered, and that this same system can not only be trusted, but is also somehow capable of producing infallible statistics that don’t exist in any other regional conflict.

The numbers for the Iran-Iraq War vary by 1.5 million, those of the Syrian Civil War and Tigray War by half a million, and yet somehow Gaza is the place where the numbers never vary and where a terrorist group got it just right. That’s something even America can’t do.

On September 11, 2023, DNA testing identified two more victims of the original 9/11 attacks. After 20 years, 1,000 human remains are still unknown. The exact number of deaths from when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 is still being debated and it took months to nail down the death toll from the Maui wildfires. And yet somehow the medical experts at Hamas can produce better numbers in a shorter timespan in a war zone than we can while at peace.

Casualty figures have always been the subject of propaganda and the most obvious symptom of propaganda is the lack of meaningful debate. Why does every regional war, including the Iraq War, have a wide range of estimated deaths, but not in Gaza? Because there is no dissent.

There is no dissent in Gaza or in the media which publishes absurd claims that a few months of fighting have somehow been more brutal than WWII or regional conflicts which claimed millions.

How many died in Gaza? The real answer is that, like the other wars, nobody knows.

After the fighting there will be studies that will pump up the estimated total even higher by using excess death statistics. Surveys of empty houses, heat maps or satellite images will be used to estimate even higher losses without regard as to whether they reflect deaths or evacuations. Local research based on anecdotal accounts and statistical legerdemain will be used to bake a variety of faulty figures into a far more grandiose number than the current 25,000. Expect claims that will go as high as the low six figures to be reported on and treated as fact and history.

Techniques like these account for the wide range of reported deaths from other conflicts. And then we can expect debates over the X curve and the correct readings of genealogical records. The end results will be deeply dubious but there will at least be some room for debate. There is little point in even debating the current numbers coming out of an arm of a terrorist organization.

But what the debates will reveal is that, agenda or no agenda, we don’t really know. Wars and natural disasters are messy. People disappear, some uproot themselves and some it will turn out never existed but were a mistake in the records of an unreliable part of the world.

Palestinian Authority and Hamas numbers, including population figures and birth rates, have reflected political agendas, rather than reality. As have those of UNRWA, the UN agency dedicated to serving the ‘Palestinians’ but locally staffed by Hamas, so there will be plenty of bad numbers to drown out the good ones.

“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics,” Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once reportedly quipped. The media’s coverage has offered plenty of all three.

But numbers in war mainly matter when it comes to outcomes of victory or defeat. The obsession with numbers in conflicts is an unhealthy distraction from the real issues.

The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths and neither is any other.

A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war: only one of the two sides was engaged in a total war of extermination.

The morality of a war is not measured in civilian casualties, but in deliberate civilian killings.

On Oct 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.

Morality is defined by intent, not statistics. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.