It's difficult to decide just who is making a bigger fool of themselves this season over climate change: Politicians, Miss Earth Contestants or wait for this - Environmental groups?

At least the girls at the Miss Earth pageant do not have to attempt to appear too cerebral!  They just have to preach green in a bikini and tiara for the titles of Best in Swimsuit, Best Environmental Speech and the pompous sounding Miss Earth!

So we could smile as we wonder just how undereducated the girls are when Angelique declared that the "enviromnet" is in trouble and Natalia wept for an "enviorment" that sustains us! 

At worst, we have to fear for the environment when contestants at an environmentally themed contest such as Snezana points out that "salinization" of land is one of the major "environemtal" crises facing the world and Kirra warn that the biggest problem facing the world is the lack of water in the "enviroment"!

How disconcerting, when we think of people who are so keen to save something that they cannot even spell!  How utterly scary when we consider that many of the contestants want to save this thing that they cannot spell from something that they do not understand.

You see, some of the girls are utter Gore converts, have had their heads filled with wild fears of global warming that poor Amanda now wails that "the human race will eventually become extinct!"  Scared silly by professional panic merchants.  It seems that there's nothing that these girls will not now blame on global warming; even tsunamis caused by earthquakes.

Christine, for instance, says that she's been worried about global warming "from when the tsunami happened in Thailand back in December 2004!" Quick to join in, Georgina squeals: "Aside from an increase in natural disasters such as the fateful Tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, smaller changes to weather patterns are slowly being recognized!"

Surely we cannot blame the girls too much for believing something so stupid when even people who are supposed to be a bit more cerebral such as Al Gore could so falsely suggest that global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the drying of Lake Chad, the immigration of Pacific Islanders and whatever else that he could dream up when he flies around the world telling people to cut the kind of emissions that he regularly blows out the back of his private jet!

Which reminds me of the Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth, Wetlands, Treehugger and now even International Human Rights Organizations such as the Gesellschaft fur bedrohte Volker (GfbV) or the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP).  Astonishingly, blaming palm oil for a litany of environmental ills ranging from deforestation, destruction of orang utan habitat to, you guessed it, global warming, the FOE, Wetlands and Treehugger have done the environmental movement no favors by making these wild and unsubstantiated claims.

Now GfbV have stretched the strings of credulity by claiming that the palm oil boom in Europe is driving the "destruction of the rainforests of Southeast Asia" and calling for the banning of palm oil as it is not sustainable since it is "systematically deleterious for indigenous people" and "it ignores their land rights and Human rights" or "seriously disadvantages them" due to, hold your breath, "unjustified conditions"!

So we have to presume that indigenous people have absolutely no desire for education, medical facilities,nor the right to participate in the democratic decision process that countries like Malaysia as a matter of course, extends to them. Do we have to presume as GfbV wants us to do, that indigenous people as a whole do not clamour for the opportunity to advance their life and  to enjoy the creature comforts, that people in the West take for granted.

Now I have to ask myself:  Just who is making a bigger fool of themselves over the environment; the harmless beauty contestants, the politicians, environmental groups such as the FOE, Wetlands or Treehugger or Human Rights Organizations such as the GfbV?  THE END