China: time for a politics of climate change (2)

In early October I drafted an article for chinadialogue on China and the politics of climate change (based on this, with some figures amended) . I have updated the article in the light of some events over the last month, and am posting the new version here today on the first day of the Nairobi conference. As with the previous version, this is an invitation to engage. If you see flaws or gaps in the figures or the argument please let me know.

China: time for a politics of climate change

The richest industrialised nations need to act much faster and more effectively to tackle climate change; but failure in the West is not a reason for people in China not to act urgently too. China is close to or already exceeds its share of sustainable emissions. For reasons of basic self interest as well as natural justice, it is time for people in China to start engaging more actively with each other and the outside world on one of the most difficult challenges on the planet: the politics of climate change. This article is an invitation for engagement for activists and others both inside and outside China.

It is sometimes said that, given the track record of the richest industrialised nations in failing to reduce their emissions, Westerners are in no position to tell China what to do, still less other countries rising from poverty. Here I argue that it is time to move on from such a polarised position, and to think in new ways about the technical and political challenges ahead. The argument comes in three parts: 1. The “safe” level of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is probably much lower than is generally understood; 2. China is close to and will soon exceed its fair share of what is already an unsustainable burden of pollution, and; 3. This situation presents enormous political challenges, requiring extraordinary creativity and leadership at many levels within China and by the Chinese people internationally.

1. The “safe” level of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is probably much lower than is generally understood.

Unless there is radical change in the way the world produces the energy it needs and how land and other resources are used, mankind is likely to change the global climate in ways that will impose big dangers and high costs on people and nations worldwide.

China will not be exempt from the changes. Three key impacts are described by Stephan Harrison in his contribution to chinadialogue. Higher temperatures will shrink the glaciers in the Tibetan plateau, disrupting the water supply of many hundreds of millions people and the agriculture on which they depend. Climate change, allied to unsustainable land-use practices, will increase the number and size of dust storms from China’s deserts. And the thawing of previously frozen soils would both increase the scale of desertification and contribute to positive feedback to global warming caused by the release of greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide from frozen soils as they thaw.

Other effects of global warming would include more storms of the kind that displaced millions of people and caused $15bn in damage to coastal provinces (according to reports from Xinhua in August 2006). And, as former US Vice President Al Gore points out in his film An Inconvenient Truth, if as now seems possible, warming causes a substantial part of land-based ice in the West Antartic Ice shelf and Greenland to melt, then sea level rise will displace tens of millions of people from the regions of Shanghai, Beijing and elsewhere.

To avoid, or at least reduce the risk, of dangerous climate change with impact such as these it is necessary to:

• first, sharply reduce and then stop the increasing rate of emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and;
• second, reduce total global emissions in order to prevent atmospheric concentrations reaching substantially higher levels that trend lines indicate.

To date, much international discussion at the interface of science and politics has taken as a rule of thumb that, as a first step, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) should be not exceed approximately twice concentrations before the modern industrial era. A typical range used is 500 to 560 parts per million (ppm) of CO₂ in the atmosphere (see, for example, Socolow et al, Science 2004, and Scientific American, Sept 2006).

Each part per million of CO₂ corresponds to about 2.1bn tonnes of atmospheric carbon. The current level – about 380ppm – is 800bn tonnes. 560ppm would mean about 1,200 tonnes. On this reckoning the world adds 400bn tonnes of carbon to the global atmosphere, but no more, and not exceed this target.

It is sometimes argued that total global emissions of up to twice this amount, or 800bn tonnes, would be OK because vegetation, soils and the oceans will soak up half. But this argument is open to challenge. A warmer climate is likely to mean that vegetation and soils become a net source rather than a sink of carbon, leading to a positive feedback (warmer soils means more of the greenhouse gases CO₂ and methane, more greenhouse gases means warmer soils and so on). And using the oceans as a sink causes acidification that scientists now think may cause the most rapid and disruptive change to life in the seas since catastrophic events tens of millions of years ago (see Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, Royal Society August 2005 and The other CO₂ problem, New Scientist August 2006).

So it is far from sure that atmospheric concentrations of around 560ppm will be “safe” in the sense that this level will keep the risk of disasterous impacts, including those described for China, within acceptable limits.

Advisors to the British Government and others have suggested that 450 or even 400ppm of CO₂ may be nearer the mark[i], with a 2 to 20% chance of a temperature increase of 5 degrees Centigrade[ii] if global greenhouse gas concentrations were stabilised at the equivalent of 430ppm CO₂.

Virtually every advance in climate science points to bigger impacts and more serious consequences than previously predicted from human emissions of greenhouse gases. That being the case, caution is wise. And the time available to act is much shorter than is often thought. Currently, the combustion of coal, oil and gas, together with other activities, add approximately 7 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere every year. At the present rate, with no acceleration, it would probably take about 12 years for atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ to reach 400ppm [iii]. Other stocks of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by human action including methane and nitrous oxide have the effect of an additional 15% of CO₂ so the actual human forcing on the atmosphere when CO2 levels are 400ppm will actually be equivalent to 460ppm.

If, at such a time, it became clear that a higher concentration would cause catastrophic damage, then to avoid those impacts all emissions would have to cease immediately[iv]. Since this is virtually unthinkable, there may well be much less than twelve years for the world to begin a rapid, rational and effective transition to a very low carbon economy.

It is likely that the risk of catastrophic climate change is already as much as one in five. The risk is increasing with every passing month that the world fails to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. It’s like a game of Russian roulette: there is a bullet in one of the chambers of the revolver, and we are in the process of putting in a second bullet. The gun is pointed at the head of everyone in the world.

2. China is close to and will soon exceed its fair share of what is already an unsafe burden of pollution

As mentioned above, global emissions are currently about 7bn tonnes of carbon a year. China is the second largest single polluter, although the European Union as a whole emits more.

Estimates of China’s total emissions vary[v]. According to the Energy Information Agency[vi], China accounted for 14.1% of total world emissions of CO₂ in 2003. This accounts only for emissions from fossil fuel combustion and does not take into account other sources of greenhouse gases. It indicates that the Chinese contribution in that year was, at a mimimum, just under one billion tonnes of carbon (7 x 0.141 = 0.987).

But whatever the exact figures on Chinese emissions and those of other countries, there is some simple arithmetic from which we cannot escape – assuming, that is, that we want to start by stabilising global emissions at around today’s levels of 7 billion tonnes.

If present day global emissions were allocated equally to every person in the world, China – with something like a fifth (about 22%) of the global population – would be entitled to about 1.5bn tonnes.

Energy consumption in China is currently growing at nearly 6% (in fact 5.7%) per year. If 10% of that additional demand is met by so called zero-carbon sources such as wind and nuclear power (which may be controversial for other reasons), carbon emissions will still increase by more than 5% a year[vii]. At this rate it would be between about 8 years from 2003 for China to be emitting 1.5bn tonnes of carbon. And that means that by 2011 – little more than four years away – China could be exceeding its “fair” global share. Several scenarios indicate that by 2020 China will be contributing around 2 billion tonnes of carbon per year to the global atmosphere[viii].

3. This situation presents enormous political challenges, requiring extraordinary creativity and leadership at many levels within China and by the Chinese people internationally.

One of the first things that comes up when China and climate change are mentioned in the same breath is that the richest countries, historically and still today, are by far the biggest emitters per head, and have the responsibility to act first. This is certainly true. And it is often stressed, including, on chinadialogue, by Yu Hongyuan of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.

The responsibility of the rich industrialised nations to act first was recognised in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. China is a signatory to the Protocol, and benefits from some investment in clean and renewable energy projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (see, for example, World's Biggest Greenhouse Gas Deal Takes Effect in Win-Win Situation for China, Industrialized Nations ). The European Union is also offering some additional assistance with projects such as carbon capture and storage for one coal fired plant by 2020 (see the article by Jon Gibbins on chinadialogue). The United States, which has not ratified the Protocol, says it will assist through something called the Asia Pacific Partnership which does not set targets to reduce emissions. The majority of American businesses leaders expect that US to join some form of cap and trade system for greenhouse gases within a few years.

Current actions in the richest countries are hugely, even grotesquely, inadequate given the need for cuts. So far, very few have reduced their emissions at all except as fortuitous byproduct of other measures. For example, in my own country, Britain, emissions have been rising continuously for more than ten years, following a “dash for gas” which replaced much coal-fired generation with cleaner natural gas powered turbines. The unified German Federal Republic was allowed to take the carbon credits from the collapse of the economy of the former East Germany, which had been powered largely on lignite, one of the dirtiest form of coal.

The richest countries need to massively ratchet up their commitment to energy efficiency, demand management and clean energy at home and abroad. China and other countries should press them to act faster and more effectively. But neither China nor anyone else can cannot afford to wait for them to fail.

Recall that China will soon pass its “fair” share of total global emissions which we will need to reduce soon. Once China exceeds its fair share, it will no longer have the luxury of pointing the finger at other countries merely because they are even worse greenhouse gas polluters. Other, poorer countries want their place in the sun too. And China, for them, will have become a member of the club of global “bad guys”.

Hundreds of millions of people have risen from poverty since China began reforms about a quarter of a century ago. More live in hope of a similar transformation. But unless future development is undertaken with substantially lower emissions the foundations of China’s prosperity and its future potential will be in jeopardy. The same is true of the wider world to which China is ever more interlinked.

The political challenges to achieving greener growth and distributing its benefits widely and equitably are enormous. Support and advocacy by some at high levels of government, which occurs both in the West and China, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Powerful interests which profit from environmental destruction stand in the way of progress. This means that the challenges are political as well as technological.

Government and civil society in China can learn something from the manifold failures and limited successes in Western countries. On the plus side, countries like Britain now have something like a “mainstream” politics of climate – mainstream in the sense that the major political parties compete in pledging their commitment to green growth, and the issue is extensively debated in the media. Even in the United States – often considered the greatest obstacle to progress – the majority of citizens support action and some politicians are beginning to articulate the need for change. For example, Senator Jim Jeffords and Congressman Henry Waxman have said that the US needs to cut its emissions by at least 80%.

On 30 October the British government published a detailed assessment of the economic impacts of climate change. A team led by former World Bank chief economist Nick Stern concluded that the need for action was urgent, that acting now will be much cheaper than not acting, and that it is the only way to protect future economic growth in all countries. Crucially, “strong deliberate policies by goverments are essential to motivate change”. The British government has said it will introduce a bill in the next parliamentary session to address the challenge.

Many civil society groups in Britain welcome such rhetoric, but are not convinced the words will be translated into effective action because so many existing policies, from transport through regulation of the building industry, point in the opposite direction.

On 4 November some tens of thousands of delegates from some of these groups, which comprise environment and conservation organisations, churches, unions and womens’ and others organisations, and have a combined membership of many millions, took part in one of a series of demonstrations in over 50 countries, including some of the poorest and most vulnerable such as Bangladesh, calling for faster action to reduce emissions by the rich countries. In Britain the environmental group Greenpeace took more radical action by occupying and partly shutting down a coal-fired power station.

The path to a politics of climate change may be very different in China to that in the West. Certainly, westerners are in no position to tell Chinese people what they should do. But because this problem concerns all of us, it will help to share our experience – both failures and successes. China has great resources to draw on, including traditional values described on chinadialogue by Martin Palmer, some contemporary ideas discussed on chinadialogue by Pan Yue and campaigning such as that pursued by Ma Jun and his colleagues (and described here on Chinadialogue) .

At the recent summit in Beijing with 40 African leaders, Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi said "we take great pride in China's strong and warm friendship with Africa". If this is to friendship is to be genuine and durable, China needs to get serious about climate change, which unchecked is likely to have an even more severe impact on the peoples of Africa than it does on China . As delegations from the world’s governments assemble in Nairobi for the climate convention, it is time for the Chinese government and people to step forward and begin to play their full part in one of the greatest challenges ever faced by humanity.

---

[i] see, for example, Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, Schellnhuber et al and Can 2C warming be avoided? at RealClimate

[ii] Meinhausen 2006, cited in Stern Review, page 9

[iii] The calculation here is that at a rate of 7bn tonnes a year it takes 12 years to produce 84bn tonnes. 84bn tonnes translates to an additional 40ppm in the atmosphere, but half of this is soaked up by vegetation, soils and the oceans, meaning the net addition to the atmosphere over 12 years is approx 20ppm.

[iv] Some scientists suggest that a massive programmes to draw down carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere into stable sinks in soil and geological strata plus geoengineering to inject sulphates into the stratosphere could help should such a stage of crisis be reached. But such approaches are likely to be face both severe challenges of technical practicability and political acceptability.

[v] See, for example, Kyoto promises are nothing but hot air, Fred Pearce, New Scientist, 22 June 2006

[vi] Cited in supporting paper to the Stern Review on the economics of climate change

[vii] 5.7 – 0.57 = 5.13

[viii] e.g. IIASA 1, 2 & 3 as cited by Japan’s National Institute of Environmental Sciences as cited in Stern supporting paper in ref 2 above

Putting the Boot in

Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi demolish Max Boot, the "respectable face of neo-conservatism" here. They show quite clearly that with regard to Iran, Boot and those who share his line are enemies of freedom and democracy in any meaningful sense, and fellow travellers with a particularly vicious Stalinist cult.

Understanding the A.C.M

Mullah Omar and his followers formed the Taliban in 1994 to, among other things, bring some justice to Afghanistan and to expel predatory commanders like Dado. But in the early days of Karzai’s government, these regional warlords re-established themselves, with American financing, to fill the power vacuum that the coalition forces were unwilling to fill themselves. The warlords freely labeled their many enemies Al Qaeda or Taliban in order to push the Americans to eradicate them. Some of these men were indeed Taliban. Most, like Abdul Baqi, had accepted their loss of power, but they rejoined the Taliban as a result of harassment. Amir Dado’s own abuses had eventually led to his removal from the Helmand government at United Nations insistence. As one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity out of personal safety concerns, put it: “Amir Dado kept his own prison, authorized the use of serious torture, had very little respect for human life and made security worse.” Yet when I later met Amir Dado in Kabul, he pulled out a letter that an officer in the U.S. Special Forces had written requesting that the Afghan Ministry of Defense install him as Helmand’s police chief and claiming that in his absence “the quality of security in the Helmand Province has dramatically declined.”

--Elizabeth Rubin: In the Land of the Taliban

Last days of the republic?

Chris Hedges, author of the outstanding book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, is not optimistic (see Bush's nuclear apocalypse).

As noted in this blog back on 15 August (Dates for your diary) , one analyst predicts 26 to 28 Oct for the attack.

Can I get odds on this at the bookies?

This being America, perhaps a movie man says it best. As Manola Dargis puts it in a review of Clint Eastwood's new film Flags of our Fathers, the actor-director's work "considers annihilating violence as a condition of the American character, not an aberration".

A richer conception

We cannot now today recover the passions with which mechanists and vitalists debated whether a "mechanical" account of life could be given. The point is not so much that the mechanists won and the vitalists lost, but that we got a much richer conception of the mechanisms. I think we are in a similar situation today with the problem of consciousness. It will, I predict, eventually receive a scientific solution. But like other scientific solutions in biology, it will have to give us a causal account. It will have to explain how brain processes cause conscious experiences, and this may well require a much richer conception of brain functioning than we now have.

John Searle, Minding the Brain

China’s New Leftist

“People ask in the West, How could China develop capitalism with an authoritarian state? But that’s ignoring how modern capitalism grew in the West, without much democracy and with the help of imperialism and colonialism. You have to ask whether this unique economic model of the West can be globalized without great wars and destruction of the environment. This is not an abstract issue. China has stopped felling itsforests, most of which have disappeared, but some country still has to produce wood for Chinese consumption.”

Wang Hui as quoted by Pankaj Mishra in China’s New Leftist

And here, 100 intellectuals protest the shut down of Century China.

Er, I'm sorry

An update today from Edge carries note about a presentation over a month ago by Scott Atran to the National Security Council at The White House titled "Devoted Actor v Rational Actor Models for Understanding World Conflict"

Accepting that neither Atran himself nor, even, the White House thinks that what he is presenting is a whole answer, it remains the case that it is probably a bit fxxxing late for this one, including obviously the version that David Hayes and I presented shortly after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Devoted Actor v Rational Actor Models for Understanding World Conflict" Presented By Scott Atran To The National Security Council At The White House, 14 September 2006 From extensive personal interviews and controlled psychological experiments with Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees, leaders of Hamas, radical Islamic groups in Pakistan and Indonesia, and (ongoing pilot work) with certain non-Muslim fundamentalist groups, I (with my research team) find that when disputed issues are transformed into sacred values, as when land ceases to be a mere resource and becomes "holy" or when structures of brick and mortar become "sacred sites," then standard political and economic proposals for resolving conflicts don't suffice and can be counterproductive by raising levels of outrage and disgust. But even token symbolic concessions, such as an apology for a perceived wrong that touches a sacred value, can be more important than material trade-offs in making peace.

(See also Jan McGirk)

Actively looking for deaths

Only when you go out and knock on the doors of families, actively looking for deaths, do you begin to get close to the right number. This method is now tried and tested. It has been the basis for mortality estimates in war zones such as Darfur and the Congo. Interestingly, when we report figures from these countries politicians do not challenge them. They frown, nod their heads and agree that the situation is grave and intolerable. The international community must act, they say. When it comes to Iraq the story is different. Expect the current government to mobilise all its efforts to undermine the work done by this American and Iraqi team. Expect the government to criticise the Lancet for being too political. Expect the government to do all it can to dismiss this story and wash its hands of its responsibility to take these latest findings seriously.

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, on the midrange estimate of 650,000 deaths as a result of the Iraq invasion.

Was this the first trillion dollar plus "minor" war.

P.S. 15 Oct: Paul Reynolds notes Huge gap in Iraqi death estimates.

P.P.S. 15 Oct: How army chief staged no 10 ambush

Those soft edges became razor sharp, leaving Blair little option but to claim last Friday that he agreed with 'every' word Dannatt had told Radio 4 in his interview. That meant that the Prime Minister actually believed the presence of British troops was exacerbating the violence in parts of Iraq; that the army risked being broken by the conflict and that the whole debate over withdrawal was not really news. Not even Blair's most trusted lieutenants thought that Blair believed that.

"Genocide liberalism"

You know that the forces of darkness have almost won when it is OK to conflate genocide with liberalism, as did David Frum.

Iftar bangers

Entrepreneur Asghar Ali, 32, has built a business on the back of changing trends among British Muslims. The biggest seller at Cafe Lahore in Bradford's west end is not biryani or spicy karahi chicken, but hot jam roly-poly and custard. Dressed in designer jeans and a Von Dutch cap, he tells me it is common for the cafe to be buzzing at iftar time, with people clamouring for their portions of pudding.

-- Saima Raza: If it's sausages it must be Ramadan

Anna's darkness

The heroism of Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead over the weekend, is beyond doubt (see Putin silent...).

It is sobering to read of the hatred in which she was held ("It was as though with the bloody act, a vassal was bringing his master [Vladimir Putin] the head of his arch enemy as a [birthday] present").

My own (very brief) impression of her was as someone nearly in thrall to the dark forces she sought to combat. At a reception by English PEN some months ago, I approached her to ask if she would contribute to openDemocracy. Her reaction seemed to be one of disgust, as if I was a corpse with maggots coming out of my eyes or, perhaps, an FSB agent. This is silly, of course. I guess I was just witnessing something in her way of being -- a mind obsessed with infinitely worse things than gauche liberals at a London meeting.

Iranian mirrors

America, with its characteristic readiness to forget the offences it has done to others while burnishing the memory of those it has suffered itself, thinks a great deal about the seizure of the embassy hostages in 1979, but very little about the coup it staged in Iran with Britain in 1953.

-- Martin Woollacott in a review of 7 books about Iran, all of which look like they are worth reading.

Fritz Stern

In 1979, when [Fritz Stern] was walking through the still bombed out centre of Berlin with Raymond Aron, [Stern and Aron] agreed that were it not for Hitler, the twentieth century might have been Germany's century. [Stern] had a grudging admiration for Germany of the kind voiced by Charles De Gaulle when he first ventured to Russia during World War II. Amid the ruins of Stalingrad, site of the farthest advance and greatest defeat of the German army, De Gaulle muttered "Quelle peuple!" An aide inquired, "You mean the Russians?" "No, " said De Gaulle, "the Germans". The general's judgement, [Stern] writes, says much about the German drama of the past century...Germany had "corrupted and nearly destroyed historic Europe" -- and civilisation itself --and yet its "prodigiously creative" people "would be indispensible for the post war recovery of Europe".

--from Amos Elon's review of Five Germanys I Have Known by Fritz Stern

Short lives, long summers

Birds were what became of the dinosaurs. Those mountains of flesh whose petrified bones were on display at the Museum of Naturla History had done some brillian retooling over the ages and could now be found in the form of orioles in the sycamores across the street. As solutions to the problems of earthly existence, the dinosaurs had been pretty great, but blue headed vieos and yellow warblers and white throated sparrows -- feather light, hollow boned, full of song -- were even greater. Birds were like dinosaurs better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so luck as to leave behind such heirs

-- from My Bird Problem by Jonathan Franzen

US too hard up for hard power?

US "soft power" may have been seriously damaged by Guantanamo, the abolition of habeas corpus etc. But when it comes to hard power, one of the things that really matters, behind the guns, is the money. Debt (largely to the US) destroyed British power in World War Two and after, and turned Britain into a editorial comes close to suggesting this:

...While foreign investors were putting up most of the $1.5 trillion the federal government has borrowed since 2001, they were also snapping up hundreds of billions of dollars in private sector securities, transactions that have been a big source of the easy money that allowed Americans to borrow heavily against their homes.

The result... is that for the first time in at least 90 years, the United States is now paying noticeably more to foreign creditors than it receives from its investments abroad.

In How to Fix the Global Economy (3 Oct) Joseph Stiglitz wrote:

China knows well the terms of its hidden “deal” with the United States: China helps finance the American deficits by buying treasury bonds with the money it gets from its exports. If it doesn’t, the dollar will weaken further, which will lower the value of China’s dollar reserves (by the end of the year, these will exceed $1 trillion). Any country that might benefit from China’s loss of export market share would put its money into a strong currency, like the euro, rather than the unstable and weakening dollar — or it might choose to invest the money at home, rather than holding more reserves. In short, the United States would find it increasingly difficult to finance its deficits, and the world as a whole might face greater, not less, instability.

Stiglitz suggests that, drawing on ideas from Keynes, a new reserve system based on a new international currency, could help stabilise the world economy.

China: time for a politics of climate change

Yesterday I joined Isabel Hilton and Becky Hogge in talking about chinadialogue.net with the Democracy Club in London. Isabel gave an overview. Becky described some of the technical challenges and achievements. This was fascinating and is worth a post and perhaps an article and discussion on chinadialogue itself. Some good points also came up in the discussion that followed. But here I want to publish some things I said regarding China's emissions, and the country's responsibilities.

My main point -- or challenge to engage -- for activists and others both inside and outside China is as follows. Yes, the richest industrialised nations need to act faster and more effectively to tackle climate change at home; but failure in the West is not a reason for people in China not to act urgently too. China may already exceed its share of globally sustainable emissions or is close to doing so, and the trend is negative notwithstanding all sorts of "green' investments. For reasons of basic self interest as well as natural justice, it is time for people in China to start engaging more actively with each other and the outside world on the politics of climate change.

The key points (or so I argue) are three. Here they are as a, b and c, followed by a request for responses:

A. China is close to or already exceeding its fair share of a "safe" level of emissions, and things are likely to get worse quickly.

Global emissions are currently about 7bn tonnes of carbon a year. China is the second largest single polluter, although the EU as a whole emits more. In 2004 China’s total emissions were about 1.2 billion tonnes – that is, about 17%, or slightly more than one sixth of the global total.

About one in five people on this planet is Chinese (actually 22%). If present day global emissions were allocated equally China would be entitled to about 1.5bn tonnes.

At recent rates of growth, Chinese emissions could take little more than three years to grow from 1.2bn tonnes, the level in 2004 to 1.5bn tonnes. This is assuming 10% annual economic growth and emissions rising more or less in step, which given consumption trends in China –- rising automobile ownership, more appliances in every household etc –- looks to me like a plausible scenario, although not of course the only one. (Incidentally, 10% growth gives a doubling time of a little over 8 years).

B. Where next?

Suppose you want to avoid dangerous climate change, or at least reduce the risk of it happening. The first step would be to slow and then stop the increasing rate of emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The next step would be to reduce total global emissions.

A proposal for a first step embraced by some policy makers in rich industrial countries is that emissions be stabilised at twice pre-industrial levels – that at approximately 560ppm of C02 (see, for example, Socolow et al, Scientific American, Sept 2006).

Each part per million of C02 corresponds to about 2.1bn tonnes of atmospheric carbon. The current level – about 380ppm – is 800bn tonnes. 560ppm would mean about 1,200 tonnes. So another 400bn tonnes would take us to 1,200. On this reasoning, it looks as if the world could emit another 400 billion tonnes, but no more, and not exceed this target.

Some people argue that we could actually emit twice that amount because the oceans and vegetation on land will soak up half of it. That argument has been challenged. Changes in the earth system as the world warms can mean that vegetation and soils become a net source rather than sink; using the oceans as a sink is causing acidification which is likely to have other serious consequences).

Further, it is open to question whether a doubling of GHG concentrations is “safe” – that is whether it means we avoid some [potentially disasterous impacts in China], and others. Advisors to the British Government and others have suggested that 450 or even 400ppm may be nearer the mark (see, for example, Schellnhuber et al Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change - and this discussion at RealClimate)

Virtually every advance in climate science points to bigger human impacts and more serious consequences than previously predicted. That being the case, caution is wise. And time is short. 560ppm would allow 57 years at present rate. 450 would allow 21 years. 400 would allow just 7 years. But in each case, emissions would have to be zero in the year after so there is even less time available for a feasible and rational transition, supposing you wanted to do it.

C. A political challenge

One of the first things that comes up when China and climate change are mentioned in the same breath is that the richest countries, historically and still today, are by far the biggest emitters per head, and have the responsibility to act first. This is certainly true. And it is often stressed, including, on chinadialogue, by Yu Hongyuan of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.

The responsibility of the rich industrialised nations to act first was recognised in the UNFCC in 1992 and in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. China is a signatory to the Protocol, and benefits from some investment in clean and renewable energy projects under the CDM. The Europeans are also offering modest help for one coal plant with CCS by 2020 (you can read more on this an article by Jon Gibbins on chinadialogue).

In my view, as well as that of many others, the present level of commitment in rich countries is inadequate. These countries need to massively ratchet up their commitment to energy efficiency, demand management and clean energy at home and abroad. But – and again this is my view, that does not mean China has no responsibilities. Recall that is already close to or even past its “fair share” of the 7billion tonnes per year that is probably not safe.

In UK, after more than 20 years of concerted effort from scientists and their allies, we now have a mainstream politics of climate change. (Incidentally, openDemocracy hosted the first forum and debate with this title in spring 2005. It’s still there to view)

So far Britain’s politics of climate change includes such delightful spectacles as the son of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite corporate raider calling for limits on aviation at the Conservative Party Conference, and a motion being defeated.

It also includes David Miliband, the environment secretary, telling the Labour Party Conference that cutting carbon emissions should become the European Union’s primary purpose. He told delegates the EU would appeal to a new generation only if it came to stand for Environmental Union.

(It is notable by the way that both Zac Goldsmith and David Milliband are among the youngest members of the shadow team and the government)

Could something like this emerge in China? So far there are few outward signs. In November this year, for example, there will be demonstrations in over 50 countries calling for faster action to reduce emissions by the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention (). Activists in some poor and vulnerable countries, such as Bangladesh, will be taking part. Two of the major countries where no events are listed are China and India.

Perhaps the first steps for a visible politics of climate change China will come elsewhere. Maybe they will be modelled on the kind of work that Ma Jun, a writer and campaigner on water issues, is doing with his colleagues. Ma Jun recently launched a site that names 2,500 companies that have broken pollution regulations in the water environment (see his recent interview on chinadialogue).

Responses, please

If you have read this far and are still awake and interested, please let me know what you think is right, wrong (irrelevant, passe) with the arguments I have outlined. I haven't even touched on inequalities within China, for example. My calculations regarding emissions should be checked too.

The full text on which I based my remarks is attached as a comment.

Perhaps this could help inform future dialogue on chinadialogue or elsewhere.

By the way, Isabel disagreed that there were few signs of a politics of climate change inside China. She pointed out that in a one party state (albeit a fragile one) much of the politics tends to take place inside the party. Deputy Environment Minister Pan Yue, she said, was among those pushing for political change on this issue.

"A disaster by any measure"

"Iraq now seems all but certain to be left broken as a state, immersed in sectarian violence and terrorism, in far worse condition than it was under Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship (which would have come to an end when Saddam died, or when he was overturned by a coup, or a revolt, as has happened to all of modern Iraq's previous leaders).

Afghanistan already is once again the world's principal producer of opium poppies, dominated by regional warlords, with the Taliban back and in control of a large part of the country beyond Kabul; the central government is feeble and American and NATO forces are struggling to enforce Kabul's authority.

For those who like conspiratorial explanations, involving oil and Israel, consider that now Iraq will produce little or no oil for the United States, or anyone else, for years to come, and the Saudi monarchy and the Gulf oil-producer governments are newly threatened by fundamentalist militants.

Saddam Hussein has been eliminated as a distant threat to Israel, and a ring of aggressive Shiite states and movements has been substituted, with Hezbollah having already brought Israel under rocket fire, and humiliated the Israeli army. Iran's influence in the world has grown larger than ever.

These results are due in part to the amateur geopoliticians of the neoconservative New American Century initiative, and their Washington allies. Israel needed no such friends, nor does George W. Bush, who with their help, on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, looked more than ever as though he'll finish his term as the most disastrous president in American history."

-- William Pfaff, 21 September

India not so shining

"[India's] hi-tech boom... is seen by some as a force that is transforming Indian society, but the reality is more prosaic. The IT sector employs about 1 million people in a country where 8 million join the labour force each year. Employment in the formal manufacturing sector has fallen over the past decade. Meanwhile, agriculture, the source of livelihood for three in every four people, is trapped in a cycle of low growth and under-investment.

Poor public services reinforce the impact of unbalanced growth. Uttar Pradesh, with a population bigger than Germany and Britain combined, has immunisation rates that compare unfavourably with those in Mali, and child death rates to match Sudan's."

-- Kevin Watkins

"Few foreign tourists visit Kanpur, and the city gets little attention even within India, where most people would rather visit, invest and live in places like Bangalore or Gurgaon, which epitomize the shining new India of technology and rapid economic growth. But far from being a relic of the past, Kanpur, which is among India's most polluted cities, is a harbinger of the future."

-- Aravind Adiga

Indigenes

"I never saw an Arab or an African soldier in my history books", says 23-year-old Salima, a student from the Paris suburb of Seine-St-Denis. (1)

"Ultimately, [the] is a challenge as much for European societies as for European governments. Much of the discrimination in France, for example, is the result of decisions by individual employers, who are going against the grain of public policy and the law of the land. It's the personal attitudes and behavior of hundreds of millions of non-Muslim Europeans, in countless small, everyday interactions, that will determine whether their Muslim fellow citizens begin to feel at home in Europe or not. Together, of course, with the personal choices of millions of individual Muslims, and the example given by their spiritual and political leaders. Is it likely that Europeans will rise to this challenge? I fear not. Is it still possible? Yes." -- Timothy Garton Ash (2)


1. French film aims to unite nation, BBC online, 27 Sep http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5386356.stm

2. Islam in Europe, NYRB, 6 Sep http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19371

Joining climate dots

In the summer Martin Rees called for a radical increase in spending energy R&D to tackle climate change. (see Science 313, 571. 2006)

On 25 Sep it was reported that the Earth may be close to the warmest it has been in the last million years.

On 26 Sep Tony Blair (keep a straight face, now) called for radical overhaul of energy policy.

And if the political will really was there where would the money come from?

On 26 Sep Tom Burke made this modest proposal on openDemocracy:

"Europe currently spends 46% of its annual budget on a problem it has already solved: food security. It spends practically nothing on a problem that threatens the livelihoods and wellbeing of every single citizen in the union: climate security. It is time to look to the future rather than remain trapped in the past. That means a radical reallocation of European funds from the common agricultural policy into a climate security fund."

I'm not saying this is the only idea in town or even the best, but it is one for discussion in search for justice that balances liberty and security.

Western NGOs concerned with international development and justice could strengthen their case against agricultural subsidies in rich [European] countries, recommending reallocation to both energy R&D (and some the "good" bits of the Lisbon Agenda) and agricultural and use adaptation in Europe and its "near abroad".

Maybe our Chinese friends can help somehow.

Meanwhile, in another part of the wood, Nature reports that the Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes.

A triumph for state terror?

"Consider the juxtaposition of the phrase 'free thinking for the world' adorning the magazine's logo with Derakhshan's disparagement of an intellectual engaging in "comparative analysis of socio-political change in contemporary east-central Europe and the Islamic Republic of Iran". Perish the thought that a scholar should be free to undertake such studies and explore such terrain openly" -- Danny Postel on Jahanbegloo, Hoder and openDemocracy http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-irandemocracy/jahanbegloo_postel_3930.jsp

The Lost

"It is sobering to realize that one little story can keep someone living on in a descendent's memory. Once even that is forgotten, the person vanishes as if he never existed" -- Charls Simic in a review of Daniel Mendelson's The Lost

Swamiji

"In the taxi, he began to tell unintelligible stories about Haile Selassie and about wrestling Ethiopian sheep". -- Nick Paumgarten reports from the Department of Everlasting Peace

Full of noises

"Walnut Tree Farm, the house he eventually completed, and in which he died a month ago, is made largely of wood. It is as close to a living thing as a building can be. When big easterlies blow, its timbers creak and groan "like a ship in a storm", as Deakin put it, "or a whale on the move". He kept the doors and the windows open, in order to let air and animals circulate. Leaves gusted in through one door and out of another. Swallows flew to and from their nest in the main chimney. It was a house which breathed. Spiders slung swags and trusses of silk in every corner. As I sat with Deakin, 10 days before his death, a brown cricket with long spindly antennae clicked along the edge of an old biscuit tin".

-- Robert Macfarlane on Roger Deakin

The empire of Islam

"In Pakistan, rape is dealt with under Islamic laws known as the Hudood Ordinances. These criminalise all sex outside marriage. So, under Hudood, if a rape victim fails to present four male witnesses to the crime, she herself could face punishment. This has made it almost impossible to prosecute rape cases. According to the country's independent Human Rights Commission, a woman is raped every two hours and gang-raped every eight hours in Pakistan".

-- How Pakistan's rape reform ran aground

"Islam ...is strong enough to survive Islamism. Perhaps, in time, the religion's centrality will subside, but, for the forseeable future, the Islamic enlightenment in which so many Western thinkers have placed their hopes -- that is, secularism -- will not sweep the Muslim world. The Islamic revival, and its attendant struggles and ills, is less like the eighteenth century in Europe than like the sixteenth, the age of Luther".

George Packer in The Moderate Martyr, a profile of Mahmound Muhamad Taha and his legacy in Sudan.

P.S. 17 Sept:

"The attackers shot the [seventy year old] nun three times in the back at a children's hospital in the south of [Mogadishu]" - BBC

Military solutions to climate change

This map shows the rough location of forces from Europe's Frontex border agency -- in this case largely Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Senegalese -- attempting to guard the doors of fortress Europe. The accompanying BBC story reports that some authorities describe the influx of about 20,000 West Africans to the Canary Islands as Spain's greatest humanitarian emergency since the Civil War.

The causes of migration from West Africa and elsewhere to Europe are various, and may at present have little to do with climate change. But if conditions in large parts of Africa deteriorate significantly as a result of climate change (as they may do in Bangladesh and elsewhere) then could we be looking at "real" numbers -- hundreds of thousands of refugees or more? John Schellnhuber has referred to the prospect of this scenario. What kind of maps would we be looking at then?

Several years ago Aubrey Meyer attributed the quote "there is no military solution to climate change" to Colin Powell (who has just distinguished himself by coming out against Bush's politics of fear). Regardless of whoever said it first, will people listen?

Climate: UK numbers and US rumours

The report from Kevin Anderson and colleagues at the Tyndall Centre outlining how the UK could "do its fair share" in keeping global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases below 450ppm looks like a serious, professional bit of work (press release here, full report -- a 175 page pdf -- here, sensational Guardian coverage here). It charts a route to reducing UK emissions by 70% by 2030, with greater cuts beyond that.

Also interesting is a report in Platts that the Bush administration "may announce as early as next week a goal of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the global atmosphere at 450 parts per million by the year 2106".

This rumour, if proved true, looks like a canny bit of political triangulation: seize your opponents' issue and sound visionary while not actually committing to anything that requires real action or pain. 2106 is like 110 years from now, man. Dave Hamilton of the Sierra Club is reportedly of this view, saying that the stabilisation target should be reached much sooner, and by 2050 at the latest.

But Jon Gibbins argues it is not as simple as that: atmospheric concentrations will actually have to be lower than 450ppm in 2050 if (barring what he thinks are unlikely developments in capacity to draw down CO2 from the atmosphere at an accelerated rate) there is to be a chance of stabilising at that level by 2106. If correct, this would mean that if the Bush administration were serious about their target they would have to act even more urgently than even their harshest critics suggest -- a corollary that may have escaped them so far.

The reasoning here is simpler than I may have made it sound. An explanation from Jon is attached, with his kind permission.

Daughter, get your Irgun

"The native population, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists." It was thus "utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs", and the Zionists must be ready to use force by building an "Iron Wall".

--Geoffrey Wheatcroft quoting Vladimir Jabotinsky in Olmert should have more of an insight than most into terrorism

See also Cut off, Gazan economy nears collapse by Steven Erlanger

Changing tunes

Conservative and Labour politicians are heeding the tide of British public opinion with recent statements attempting to put distance between themselves and the thugs in the Bush administration. First David Cameron attacked the “unrealistic and simplistic” neoconservative philosophy (to the author of Neoconservatism: why we need it, I say "Ha ha ha ha ha ha"). Then Charlie Falconer calls Guantanamo "a shocking affront to the principles democracy".

Regarding what to do about Afghanistan, British foreign policy is still in use-full-force-mode. Informed and thoughtful voices such as Rory Stewart, who served with the British mission to southern Iraq and seems to know Afghanistan quite well too, are asking whether putting more force into the south may only inflame affront to local identity and increase the sense of threat to local power elites. The question I haven't heard much asked is how far if at all those local interests can be split from others with, shall we say, an internationalist mission, not to speak of how if at all heroin supply could be reduced.

More torture

"Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon ... would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening". (more)

And collective punishment in Gaza continues with Israeli military action "creating suffering and mass despair rather than any desire for political compromise", according to Karen Aybzayd of UNRWA.

"Whatever it costs"

John Ashton argues on BBC online today that:

"We need to see the pursuit of a stable climate as an imperative to be secured whatever it costs through the urgent construction of a low carbon global economy, because the cost of not securing it will be far greater."

I have forwarded his piece to colleagues working on development issues, including in Africa. One responds that the ways Ashton chooses and describes his examples may undermine what may otherwise be a strong case.

This is something that it would be useful to examine further (including, perhaps, in context of Chinadialogue.net?).

Climate change may be important, but on the morning this story appears, the most popular story on BBC online site is about a man forced to marry a goat.

The Fourth Afghan War

Two quite thoughtful pieces of journalism in recent days on what has gone wrong in Afghanistan. In the 5 Sep New York Times, David Rohde reports from Lashkah Gah, "An Afghan symbol for change, then failure"(with Carlotta Gall contributing from Kabul). And in Financial Times, also on 5 Sep, Rachel Morarjee writes that Afghanistan is on course for failure:

"The invasion of Iraq in 2003 drew attention, money and troops away from Afghanistan as the job of reconstruction was just beginning. The 'sexier aspects of state-building', namely drafting a constitution and holding elections, were the first to be accomplished, [Francesc] Vendrell [special representative of the European Union in Afghanistan] points out. The more painstaking business of paying a police force, training a judiciary and building a competent civil service fell by the wayside, as did channelling aid money in a manner that would create jobs for nskilled labourers".

But Rohde and Gall's report suggests that it may not have been so much that the less sexy aspects of state-building fell by the wayside as that they were poorly managed, not to say messed up. The key failure -- d'oh and double d'oh -- was a failure to establish security.

Failure of imagination

"It was on the Thursday after September 11 that 'Persians' first started making sense to me. All those years I'd been teaching it, I'd failed to notice the most obviously remarkable thing about it—the device that transmutes the raw and chaotic stuff of lived history into something bigger, something with a universal resonance. As I have said, the play was produced a mere eight years after the Greeks' fabulous and unexpected victory over their immense foe. How much more striking, then, that Aeschylus—who, it's perhaps necessary to point out, fought in the Persian Wars, and lost a brother in the aftermath of the great naval triumph at Salamis, a description of which, put in the mouth of an impressed Persian, furnishes his play with its glittering rhetorical climax—should have chosen to focus is imaginative sympathy not on the exulting Greeks, but on the sorrowing Persians. Which is to say that in the very moment of their greatest victory, he asked his fellow Athenians to think radically, to imagine something outside of their own experience, to situate the feelings they were having just then—about themselves, about those others—in a vaster frame: one in which they might see that present triumph could induce a complacency that just might bring about future disaster. The sense of these larger, moral themes hovering over the play's spectacle is, in the end, what gives the play a resonance that transcends the particulars of the history it purports to represent. No wonder the Athenians, for whom tragedy was a form of political dialogue as well as popular entertainment, gave it the prize that year."

Daniel Mendelsohn - September 11 at the movies

My comment on United 93 is here.

Bike to the stars

It's said there is a film festival for everything, and -- lo -- there is a bicycle film festival (hat tip Rob Cawston, who remembered The peach wins!).

A film in Estonian, Russian and Chinese about a bike trip from Mongolia to Nepal looks particularly promising...

Laughter and forgetting

Here’s how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler’s appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain’s hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Frank Rich -- Donald Rumsfeld's dance with the Nazis

Naghib Mahfouz

Writing was a joy to him. He loved the sheer act of it, writing every morning and always in longhand. This made the worst drama of his own life particularly cruel. In his 83rd year, a knife-wielding religious fanatic stabbed him in the neck. The would-be killer—inspired, it seems, by clerical objections to allegorical characters in one of Mr Mahfouz's books—failed in his mission, but nerve damage stopped Mr Mahfouz writing for five years.

He himself might possibly have dreamed up such an act of sudden violence for one of his plots, but religion would never have been the motive. As he accepted the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, he declared himself a happy and grateful receiver of Egyptian, Islamic and Western cultural traditions. What exemplified Islam for him, he said, was the decision by one early Muslim ruler to ransom Christian prisoners in exchange for works of Greek philosophy, medicine and mathematics. It was that curiosity, and generosity of spirit, that Mr Mahfouz wished to prevail in his city.

Obituary of Naghib Mahfouz in The Economist

End of an auld sang

"at least half of these Christians - around 350,000 people - have fled Bush's new Iraq and its violence, mass abductions and economic meltdown...The Christian community in Iraq [was] one of the oldest in the world.

...Almost everywhere [across the Middle East] the Christians are leaving, as ill-judged Anglo-American adventures, intended to suppress terrorism, actually have the reverse effect and steadily radicalise the entire region".

William Dalrymple, arguing that Syria"the final place of refuge for Christians in the Middle East is under threat."

More bad news

"America itself, its state and system of government, is undergoing defeat", says Anthony Barnett:

It is a moral defeat, from Guantánamo to the Manichaean unilateralism of good against evil. It is a constitutional defeat for a system that permitted Bush to steal an election and whose courts have yet to re-establish fundamental rights. It is a democratic defeat because the politics which permitted it is based on a financially suborned, gerrymandered, often uncheckable, low-turnout voting system that threatens to reduce suffrage in the US to government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich – while it invades countries abroad in the name of democratic self-rule. It is a defeat for its media that misleads and misjudges. A defeat for its political class which as a whole has lost the capacity to oppose.

Phew! Glad you got that off your chest, Anthony. Have a glass of water. Meanwhile, in Damascus, Hugo Chavez makes whoopy with the president of a police state who is the son of a mass murder.

Bad news from Tehran

Ramin Jahanbegloo, "formerly a prominent thinker and writer on democracy and non-violence", has made his confession. As The Economist noted last week:

Thanks to America's reorganisation of Iraq in favour of its Shia majority and the Islamic Republic's successful cultivation of the new elite there, Iran has a degree of influence to its west that it has not enjoyed since it lost its Mesopotamian possessions in the 17th century...For most of Iran's sad reformers, it is Mr Bush's blunders, not the clergy's inspired leadership, that have put Iran in its present strong position.

(P.S. 1 Sep: Rasool Nafisi comments here on Jahanbegloo’s release)

Good news from Columbus

Ohio to delay destruction of presidential ballots - "With paper ballots from the 2004 presidential election in Ohio scheduled to be destroyed next week, the secretary of state in Columbus, under pressure from critics, said yesterday that he would move to delay the destruction at least for several months".

Nature cures

Apples in the Tamar Valley:

Upstream from Cotehele Quay, in his 10-year-old orchard of local varieties, all labelled with names and provenance, James has summer-pruned the cherries, looking forward to a mature orchard of overarching boughs. Some have already developed distinctive shapes above their lichen-encrusted trunks. Speckled wood butterflies flutter beneath the Queens apple tree, over ground strewn with fallen red fruit, and the beauty of Cornwall is laden with pale yellow apples streaked with scarlet. In readiness for the visit of a group of 40 Belgian fruit enthusiasts, sward has been topped, contrasting with sheltering boundary hedges, all thick with reddening hawthorn berries, hazel nuts, blue sloes, blackberries, elderberries and late-flowering honeysuckle.

Wolves are back in Germany:

The wolves, who arrived from Poland or other neighbouring countries, live in a largely vacant area of abandoned strip mines and vacated troop training grounds southeast of Berlin.…Other species, like the crane and the white-tailed eagle have also flourished in the east as the human population decreases. "The wolves were gone for over 100 years and first started coming back a while after the Berlin Wall fell," said Matthias Freude of the Brandenburg state environmental office…"They swam across the Neise river or walked across the ice in winter," he added. "There are hardly any people left there now."

"Fear is a method"

Camus was no pacifist, but he deplored the logic of thinking in categories. "We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology," he wrote. Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking. The way out of [behaving like the pathological character Mersault in The Outsider] is to think about particular people, proximate causes , and obtainable objectives -- not an easy thing to do in any circumstance and nearly inpossible in the face of those ideologies, left and right, for which, Camus writes "fear is a method".

--from Adam Gopnik's comment in The New Yorker (28 August) on George W. Bush's summer reading list.

Fianuis

"They took their surnames from the colours of the sky, rainbow and clouds"--Kathleen Jamie quoting Martin Martin in The island at the edge of the world

Al Qaeda -- the whole story?

In his 250th column for openDemocracy, nearly five years on from the attacks in New York and Washington, Paul Rogers says that Al Qaeda "far from being a nihilistic phenomenon...is better described as an unusual transnational revolutionary movement rooted in a quasi-religious ideology which promotes a number of clear-cut aims".

It is vital to know one's enemy, and this description seems like a contribution to a good start on that, but I'm not convinced it's the whole picture.

Others argue that Al Qaeda phenomenon and its associates have many of the characteristics of a cult. How useful is this analogy and what can it teach us?

One other thing. Paul Rogers lists one of Al Qaeda's five near term aims to be the establishment of the Palestinian state. He does not mention the elimination of the state of Israel. But is this not an Al Qaeda aim?

Almost miraculous

By the tenth week of gestation, a human embryo is forming 250,000 neurones in the brain every minute. And the rate increases each week thereafter.

Who smote?

I am happy to be alive on the day that Saddam goes on trial for the Anfal, one of the worst crimes of the 1980s in which more than 180,000 people were killed (see here and here). My three wishes are:

• 1) may Saddam and others accused, if any, get a trial that is very clearly fair so that if convicted no reasonable person can doubt justice has been done;
• 2) may it give pause to some Islamo-nutters and their fellow travellers to recall that the biggest killer in modern times of people ycleped Muslims was Saddam; and
• 3) may the trial hearings help remind more people in the US and elsewhere of essential role of the Western powers in supporting Saddam when he was at the height of his tyranny.

In chastening times (see Hendrik Hertzberg, Frank Rich and Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro) perhaps there is some possibility of progress on number three.

Dates for your diary

Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be...Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”

-- from Watching Lebanon by Seymour Hersch, 14 August

Hersch reports that, following the Israeli experience in Lebanon, Donald Rumsfeld may be more cautious about an attack on Iran, but that policy is being led by Dick Cheney and Elliott Abrams. Paul Rogers thinks the pressure for an attack on Iran is likely to increase (see An Unfinished War, 14 August).

In an e mail I received back on 27 April one analyst said:

“I've pencilled in 26-28 October [for a US attack on Iran], just before the mid-sessionals [i.e. the US Congressional Elections], just after a new moon and with the mid-sessionals taking place after 'mission accomplished' but before the Iranians can respond fully”.

As a side note, a senior British diplomat working closely with the Prime Minister's office on a different issue says he thinks Blair has gone quite mad.

Radetsky March

I got back from Papau a few days ago, but have had a medical problem that has knocked me back a little, and I am still finding my bearings. This is just to note the worth of a good piece of serious fiction: Joseph Roth's still relevant meditation on decaying empire, The Radestzky March.

I was very young when I first read Tolstoy, Chekov and Thomas Mann, so missed a lot. Now, many years later, I have come to Roth for the first time, and probably appreciate this remarkable (if not quite as “great”) writer more fully.

Radetzky has luminous passages that bear comparison with the very greats. There is, for example the description at the beginning of chapter 9 of the swampy district on the Russian frontier and the people who live there. (Regarding the traders of the district who deal in everything including slaves, it looks like not much has changed since the book was written). And there is the account of the death of the servant Jacques, which is Tolstoyan in its realism.

I understand Roth has been criticised for creating characters who behave like martinets or automatons, and who are often not very bright. But I think that is part of the point of his vision. It is a profound and disquieting truth that human behaviour can be shallow and predictable as well as nasty (Roth was after all a contemporary of Kraus and Kafka as well as Freud and Mann), and it’s not as if we won’t see evidence of this in contemporary life.

It is the true that Radetzky March pays little attention to women. And some passages stretched credulity, at least for me – the Hungarian officers skipping gleefully to a speeded up funeral march on the news of the Sarajevo assassination, for example.

Is the novel excessively portentous? The ravens coming south with advent of war, for example. But to me this seems very real. Like the grandson’s dismissal of his manservant’s selfless generosity as something out of a bad fiction, the point, says Roth, is that we have been fooled by bad copies into thinking that such things don’t really happen.

“Sympathy” is not the right word for Roth’s attitude to conservatism, which he understands so well (the obvious pigeonhole for Roth himself would be “progressive”); but his historical, moral and psychological vision is more complex and enriching than can be described by any label I can think of.