Canada's posture on global warming shows contempt for victims of Typhoon Haiyan

Prime Minister Harper and other members of his government -- and even the PM’s wife, Laureen -- are doing a fair bit of grandstanding against the backdrop of the cruel and devastating typhoon that struck the Philippines.

Almost daily, they are announcing various forms of Canadian aid: from cash to airplanes to teams of disaster relief specialists.

Anything Canada can do is desperately needed, of course. The people of the Philippines will welcome whatever assistance actually gets to those in need.

Typhoon Haiyan: The Global Poor Bear the Deadly Brunt of Climate Change

In 1494, Spain and Portugal were in serious competition over other peoples’ lands. This bothered the church, and Pope Alexander VI made it his duty to write up the Treaty of Tordesillas, which dictated that Spain was free to attempt to conquer lands west of an imaginary line on the Atlantic, and Portugal could attempt the same for all lands east of that line, essentially creating Eastern and Western hemispheres.

A little more than two decades later, Spain’s influence in what it thought was a new world grew nearly as much as its avarice. It wanted more lands, and all the resources that came with those lands. Ferdinand Magellan, who was Portuguese, offered his services to King Charles of Spain. His plan was to sail west, as the treaty obliged—but to sail so far west that he would essentially reach the Eastern Hemisphere, and attempt to conquer those lands for Spain. He eventually landed in what we now call the Philippines.

Is This the Best Humanity Can Do for the Philippines?

Now that a storm, perhaps the most powerful in recorded history, has struck the Philippines, with winds gusting to 170 mph, a storm surge exceeding 20 feet, and an estimated 10,000 people dead; now that bodies are piling up in such quantities that local officials are digging mass graves; now that desperate survivors are telling reporters things like "Help us, help us, we are very thirsty," and "There were people—babies, children, old people—lying out on the street, with blisters over their bodies … hundreds of them;" now the world is rushing to send help.

Yes, Typhoon Haiyan Was Caused by Climate Change

It seems these days that whenever Mother Nature wants to send an urgent message to humankind, it sends it via the Philippines. This year the messenger was Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Yolanda.

For the second year in a row, the world’s strongest typhoon barreled through the Philippines, Yolanda following on the footsteps steps of Pablo, a k a Bopha, in 2012. And for the third year in a row, a destructive storm deviated from the usual path taken by typhoons, striking communities that had not learned to live with these fearsome weather events because they were seldom hit by them in the past. Sendong in December 2011 and Bopha last year sliced Mindanao horizontally, while Yolanda drove through the Visayas, also in a horizontal direction.