The best news from Antarctica had been that conservationists discovered three bottles of Mackinlay highland malt scotch that Ernest Shackelton left behind in 1909 at the end of his first expedition.  The second best news was reported last week in the journal The Cryosphere.

Scientists studying the logbooks of Shackleton and Robert Scott have concluded that Antarctic sea ice has been virtually unchanged for 100 years.

Alas, John Kerry, in the waning days of rescuing the planet, was on an early November global warming pilgrimage to the Ross Sea ice shelf, expecting a world windsurfing rendezvous.  Instead, he found a frozen mass more extensive than at any time since the middle of the 20th century.

Secretary Kerry's errand should have been to sub-Sahara Africa, where the World Health Organization says fewer than 16% of people have direct access to clean water.

Lack of clean water for human consumption is, in fact, the existential threat, not global warming, nor Styrofoam cups, nor plastic shopping bags.

Predicting imaginary human suffering should be a harmless diversion by dark matter pranksters.  But not so harmless when armies of acolytes – including U.S. senators – demand the quashing of First Amendment rights of skeptics, billions of taxpayer subsidies, and consumer surcharges for hopeless remedies, while extant causes and means to alleviate real human suffering and deprivation are ignored.

Human suffering today is headlined by lack of clean water, not global warming.  Nearly 750 million people have no access to clean water.  Two and a half billion have no access to sanitary toilet facilities.  Every 90 seconds, a child dies from unclean water-related disease.  One out of three schools globally has no access to clean water.  And in the Third World and in developing nations, one third of all health care facilities have no safe water.  Annually, some 800,000 children under age 5 die from diarrheal diseases. 

Disease, death, and prevention connected to unclean water, as documented by the Centers for Disease Control, affects a billion people, right now.  Every dollar invested in clean water sustainability delivers economic returns ranging from a low of 5:1 to a high of 46:1.

Use of fossil fuels for transportation, generating electricity, and production of industrial goods such as steel, cement, and chemicals has lifted more people across the globe out of poverty, serfdom, and subjugation than any other means in history.  Clean water is impossible without electricity.  Denying fossil fuel use to developing nations is just another form of elitism and colonialism, cloaked in phony moralizing and virtue-signaling, invoking more whimsy than wattage.

There are plenty of high horses to saddle in decrying human suffering.  Why isn't clean water activism one of them?  Simple: Clean water isn't glamorous, and it requires industrial technology, the dreaded bogeyman of environmental justice champions.

Instead, the global warming glitterati would rather ride tall on Pegasus, to ascend Mt. Olympus.  Of course, Pegasus can't be harnessed to power a water purification plant.  Real environmental justice is but another vapor tale.