Thinkable: why geotherapy should not be taboo

When European Union governments agreed in 1996 that avoiding 'dangerous climate change' meant keeping global average temperature rise during the 21st century to less than 2°Celsius, it was widely said that this could be achieved by allowing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to rise to about twice the pre-industrial level -- that is, about 550ppm CO2(e). (At present Angela Merkel and other European politicians remain adamant about the 2°C target, and it looks as if the European position will be buoyed by the Brazilian government, among others.)

But at least since a conference organised by the UK government in February 2005 (and Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, an edited version of the conference papers published as a book early in 2006), it has been increasingly held as credible that stabilisation at 450ppm or less will be necessary to have a fair chance of avoiding a rise of more than 2°C.

Accepting this position for the sake of argument [as does a background paper I wrote earlier this year for a UN report that appears later this year], I'd like to highlight what I think could be a matter that is not as well or widely discussed as it should be: some forms of geo-engineering or geotherapy should not be dismissed at the start of serious discussion about how to manage climate change.

Consider a point made by Paul Baer and Michael Mastandrea in High Stakes (IPPR November 2006), and restated in Two Degrees, One Chance, a paper from 4 UK development NGOs published for this week's G8 conference. They note that the most stringent pathway for GHG reductions still carries a 9 - 26% [i.e., up to about 1 in 4] risk of exceeding 2°C. "This pathway requires emissions globally to peak in 2010 and then contract by 5% each year thereafter, reducing concentrations to below 400ppm by the end of the century" (page 7 of the latter document).

I have never met someone I would consider sane who believes that global emissions can be made to peak in 2010. So if Baer and Mastandrea's reasoning and the modelling on which it is based are correct, then (I think) this follows: to be reasonably confident of a greater than 3 in 4 chance of avoiding 'dangerous climate change' we need to find out what possibilites, if any, there may be to actively reduce GHG atmospheric *concentrations* (and not just emissions) within the next few (say, one to five) decades. Hence the likes of Richard Branson's CO2 prize.

Amongst the arguments against this case are:

1) it can *never* work;

2) the cure may be worse than the disease; and

3) it will encourage people to think they can continue to pollute now because someone else will bail them out later -- a version of 'moral hazard'.

I have not seen a convincing rationale for 1), but would be glad to read or hear one.

As for 2), well yes there will always be some truly terrible ideas out there; but it is not clear that one that has had some air play -- Paul Crutzen's thought experiment on injection of aerosols into the stratosphere -- will necessarily be worse than the full range of effects of 'dangerous climate change'. And put that to one side, there *may* be (I am not saying *are*) other ideas which could deliver actual benefits such as large scale but community-based and controlled creation of biochar (Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University says biochar in combination with biofuels could store up to 9.5 billion tonnes of carbon a year. He may or may not be right, and he is one of the first to call for more R&D. See: Which biofuels? 2)

And regarding 3), of course there are plenty of people looking for excuses to keep polluting and who may latch on to geo-engineering but I think this misses an important point about where we actually are. 'Moral hazard' is most often used in argument by people on the right of politics -- to argue, for example, that healthcare should not be free because this only leads to abuse of the system. That risk exists of course, but the reality can be rather different, as Malcolm Gladwell has shown. With regard to climate change we are already in the emergency room. The science seems to be making it pretty clear that we need to take all possible measures to reduce emissions, but even if we do there may still a high level of risk (i.e. up to 1 in 4) of dangerous climate change. It may therefore be prudent to look at the possibilities, if there are any, for accelerated reduction in atmospheric concentrations back down below 400 and even to pre-industrial levels within a few decades (something alluded to by Tom Goreau at least 15 years ago).

Whatever the truths of these matters, future argument will benefit from more thought and less emotion, moralising and opprobrium. On this point, though on little else, I partly agree with Josie Appleton who criticised Six Degrees for not talking 'the language of environmental management'. As I wrote in my own review Six Caveats about Six Degrees, '...The fifth caveat is that Six Degrees makes only a brief contribution on perhaps the biggest of all questions: what humanity needs to *do* to get its act together...'

Having got so many people excited about climate change maybe we need to work hard on making this issue a little more boring. But even agendas as ambitious as that outlined in Heat may be inadequate to the challenge.

(see also A 21st century greenhouse gas budget?)

'The Making of a Terrorist'

...Families that allow children to marry for love are considered to have lost their izzat, or honour. In most circumstances, the only way for the family to regain it is to kill the offending boy or girl. Pakistan has the highest number of honour killings in the world...

...many British Muslim youths who had drifted towards fundamentalist or Islamist organisations were susceptible to the violent global jihadism that emerged in the mid-1990s. This is plain from the anti-traditionalist rhetoric of Sidique Khan's al Qaeda-produced video suicide note. The video is 27 minutes and 29 seconds long. Most of it is filled up by a speech from senior al Qaeda member Ayman al-Zawahiri, but the central feature is Khan's address, which runs to six minutes and 11 seconds. It has two parts, but it is only the first—about British foreign policy—that ever gets played in the mainstream media. Part two, which makes up three quarters of Khan's speech, is addressed to Muslims in Britain. Here is an excerpt: "Our so-called scholars today are content with their Toyotas and semi-detached houses. They seem to think that their responsibilities lie in pleasing the kufr instead of Allah. So they tell us ludicrous things, like you must obey the law of the land. Praise be God! How did we ever conquer lands in the past if we were to obey this law?… By Allah these scholars will be brought to account, and if they fear the British government more than they fear Allah then they must desist in giving talks, lectures and passing fatwas, and they need to sit at home and leave the job to the real men, the true inheritors of the prophets."

...For some reason, I translated my usual question of whether [Gultasab Kahn] thought what his brother [Sidique Khan] had done was "good" or "bad"—he had said that it was a terrible thing several times—and instead asked him whether he thought 7/7 was halal (permitted) or haram (forbidden) in Islam. Only when a look of stunned surprise come over Gultasab's face did I realise that I must have been asking him an entirely different question. After a brief pause, he replied. "No comment."

Here, it seemed, was the perfect example of the division between two worldviews—secular ethics and an embattled Islamic faith. How long had Gultasab managed to function with these two conflicting positions fighting within him? Everyday morality told him that his brother had committed a cold-blooded act of terror, while his own Islamic theology told him that there was no clear answer and maybe his brother was a hero. How many thousands of young British Muslims are similarly conflicted?...

...At the heart of this tragedy is a conflict between the first and subsequent generations of British Pakistanis—with many young people using Islamism as a kind of liberation theology to assert their right to choose how to live. It is a conflict between tradition and individuality, culture and religion, tribalism and universalism, passivity and action.

-- from My brother the bomber by Shiv Malik

Just getting started

Avaaz announces that nearly 270,000 people have signed a petition calling for binding global targets for emission reductions.

My feeling (as a signatory who also recommended it to friends) is well great, but actually a quarter million signatures is not really so many. As people have pointed out for years (I wrote about it ten years ago and I am seldom original), when the Chartists petitioned for universal suffrage in Britain in the early 19th century they got more than a million of signatures (out of a population of something like 20 million) using pen and ink, no telephones and horse-drawn transport. A comparable achievement today would probably mean a petition with many tens of millions of signatures (or even more: a twentieth of the global population would be more than 300 million people).

The (much abused example) of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the early 19th century is also instructive. It probably cost Britain 1.8% of national income over the next six decades (says Adam Hochschild in a review of Philip Anschutz's movie, citing Chaim Kaufman and Robert Pape: "Explaining costly international moral action"). Contrast that with projected costs of a start on reducing emissions in the direction of acceptable (i.e. towards concentrations below 450, although they may need to be lower to be 'safe'): global annual GDP reduction of 0.12% (IPCC 2007 WGIII) - although in practice the actual cost could prove negative (i.e. a benefit).

[P.S. Solana Larsen says 'Al Gore's petition got more signatures'.]

Old man of the forests

It's a proposition I will defend: 'the future of humanity depends on how we value the rest of life and on our learning to be more humane. An important dimension will be whether we can protect our closest relatives, the great apes, in the habitats of which they are a part'.

There are few better advocates for this position than Richard Leakey, who spoke for GRASP, the Orangutan Foundation and Wildlife Direct and others at the RGS last night. His key points (including a sharp dig at eco-tourism) are well summarised in this article from David Adam. But one of the things I most enjoyed in his presentation was as a humorous aside regarding the origin of orangs.

The evidence suggested orangs migrated from East Africa all the way to South East Asia something like 12 to 8 million (?) years ago. Orangs do not walk on the ground (although as an aside see this) so that means, said Leakey, that there was once gallery forest all the way from Africa to Indonesia. The thought of orangs gradually crossing it keeps him 'endlessly amused', he said, as he sometimes lies awake late at night

It is indeed a very pleasant thought, though of course informed by pain given what we know of current rates of destruction, with hundreds (out about 50,000 remaining individuals said Leakey; I think I've read fewer than 30,000) burning to death every year.

And it is an imaginative thought, capable of informing humanity grounded in the reality of this world (as distinct from metaphysical musings), where -- for example -- wildlife rangers protecting mountain gorillas in the Congo have seen some 150 of their colleagues murdered by poachers and in some cases have not been paid in three or four years: a situation that Leakey described as 'really quite demoralising, you know'.

Above: young man of the forest

Iran and the future

The day that a crackdown on Iranian academics was reported was as a good time as any for a discussion featuring Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mary Kaldor and Danny Postel of what is at stake.

Ziba Mir-Hosseini has described Iran as 'a state at war with itself', with the tension inherent in the junction of the two words 'Islamic' and 'Republic'. She said the economic situation in Iran is deteriorating, that Ahmadinejad's project is running into trouble as (according to Mir-Hosseini) he loses the support of the supreme leader and many of the senior clerics, and that Iranian extremists like him share with U.S. extremists such as the neo-cons an enthusiasm for military action from which they believe they would be the beneficiaries.

Mary Kaldor, who reminded us she had never been to Iran, said that the fate of, and the importance of dissidents in Iran reminded her very much of the East European intellectuals who she met in the 1980s when she was as co-chair of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly: people who were really serious about philosophical and political thought, going back to Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek, and who helped develop ideas about civil society that are now so influential. Encounters by Kaldor and her Western colleagues with East European dissidents came about following their realisation that not talking to dissidents behind the Iron curtain was tantamount to apology for the Soviet Union and was actually embedding the Cold War.

Danny Postel highlighted some key points from his new-ish (Autumn 2006) book 'Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran' (not, alas, available as a download from Prickly Paradigm Press, but this interview gives a jist).

The paramount issue, perhaps, is the future of progressive thought itself, (and the epigraph in Danny's book is from Edward Said: '...even in the midst of a battle in which one side is unmistakably against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critcal consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for...').

Among some highlights from the introduction (not new to many of us, but worth repeating for some who may be less familiar with the issue):

- the neoconservatives, who claim to be concerned about liberty and democracy in Iran, ardently support a 'Stalinist-Islamist cult group once funded by Saddam Hussein and officially deemed a terrorist organisation by the State Department, called the Mujahedin-e Khalg [MEK]'.

- Iranian democrats will not take a cent of funds made available by the US government for 'democracy' in Iran.

- to his 'great credit', Noam Chomsky ignored admonitions from self-styled radicals not to meet with Akbar Ganji, an eminent Iranian dissident who spent half a decade in the Evin prison. Instead Chomsky engaged in what Fred Halliday calls 'critical solidarity', asking what western supporters of the democratic struggle in Iran could do to help.

- Shirin Ebadi reprimanded a western antiwar activist who told her that she should not denounce Iran's human rights record. She made plain that any antiwar movement that advocates silence in the face of tyranny, for whatever reason, could count her out.

My own thoughts, such as they are, include two:

Obviously Iran, a theocratic police state (albeit with elements of real democracy and challenge to authoritarian rule), is very different from the USSR. The Iranian state may or may not be fragile as some say. Perhaps high oil and gas prices (assuming they endure) put it in a different position from the crumbling USSR in the 1980s - so long as Iran receives (among other things) sufficient capital investment for exploitation of its massive resources. In such a scenario (and maybe with or without a war with US-Israel), the Islamic Republic could well endure, albeit with a swing to more moderate conservatism - unless the weaknesses of a crony-rentier petro-state become insupportable.

Habermass's 'Legitimation crisis' has been translated in English as 'what happens when the organising principle of a society does not permit the resolution of problems that are critical for its continued existence'. It may be trite coming from self-described evironmentalists like me, but it looks as if as the global political economic system may face this crisis with regard to ecological constraints (such as how much greenhouse gas the atmosphere can 'safely' take), with attempts to resolve the problems fundamentally threatened by powerful interests.

Big coal

Among the proposed inducements winding through House and Senate committees: loan guarantees for six to 10 major coal-to-liquid plants, each likely to cost at least $3 billion; a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of coal-based fuel sold through 2020; automatic subsidies if oil prices drop below $40 a barrel; and permission for the Air Force to sign 25-year contracts for almost a billion gallons a year of coal-based jet fuel.

...In the Senate, champions of coal-to-liquid fuels include Barack Obama...

...At best, you’re going to tread water on the carbon issue, and you’re probably going to do worse,” said Howard Herzog, a principal research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of The Future of Coal.

-- from Lawmakers Push for Big Subsidies for Coal Process

Not new but...

...worth being reminded: 'ExxonMobil's revenues are a billion dollars a day. They invest less thean 0.2% of that in R&D. The US President's total resarch budget for renewable energy is less than one day of Exxon's revenues'. -- John Doerr

O, great

“More relevant terrorist skills are transferable from Iraq to Europe than from Afghanistan to Europe,” -- Militants Widen Reach as Terror Seeps Out of Iraq.

John Company

Through all the talk around Tony Blair's time in office, a silver thread of clarity emerges, continuous with much of British history. The man may embrace Catholicism or whatever when he leaves office, but his truest calling would seem to be incarnate (incarnadine?) as an agent for, er, Anglo-Persian in Libya. Ex Africa semper aliquid...

An ice cap in my backyard

The back yard just got bigger, writes Robert Butler.

(but before getting romantic about the Greenlanders, recall that they want to increase their take of whale meat from 450 to 730 tonnes. It's an important part of their cultural life, and culture must never develop, of course).

Climate politics, and a red herring

Articles relating to climate change in the Guardian today are uneven. Hope dries up for Nicaragua's Miskito is more or less below the line advertising for a new Oxfam paper Adapting to climate change: What’s needed in poor countries, and who should pay. (Oxfam says at least $50bn (£25bn) a year in addition to existing aid budgets is needed to help communities like the Miskito adapt to climate change.) The article quotes Nicanor Rizo, a community leader in the Miskito community of Riati on the Rio Coco: "We are a proud people[.] Do you think we want to have to ask for help or depend on handouts from outside agencies?"

All this -- heroic victims with touches of the noble savage to play to unconscious Western stereotypes -- is as fine as far as it goes, but should be read in combination with UK told to pay more for climate change which gives a little more detail on some key money questions and a useful report from WWF on energy efficiency.

But Our blind faith in oil growth could bring the economy crashing down is not up to the columnist's standards (or of some other articles on the UK energy white paper) The idea of general economic collapse due scarce or expensive oil is misguided, as study of the 1970s oil shocks and the options for fuel conversion shows. The Stern Review (part three) is almost certainly right on this if not everything else when it states:

Increasing scarcity of fossil fuels alone will not stop emissions growth in time. The stocks of hydrocarbons that are profitable to extract (under current policies) are more than enough to take the world to levels of CO2 concentrations well beyond 750ppm, with very dangerous consequences for climate-change impacts.

London as 'the Star Wars bar scene'

in Londonistan calling.

'UK govt loses control of emissions growth'

...If matters had gone according to plan, the 2007 White Paper should have reported on the progress towards the 2020 figures laid out four years ago. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this week's document does no such thing. It barely mentions the 2003 paper and most certainly does not assess whether the 110-120 million tonnes figure is going to be achieved.

Instead, the 2007 document offers a brand new estimate of the likely 2020 emissions. The figure is now 151.2 million tonnes of carbon. Let us be clear what this means – instead of expecting to achieve a reduction to between 110 and 120 million tonnes, the White Paper sees a figure 12% higher than in 2003. A substantial fraction of the increase in the forecast has occurred since the Green Paper of summer 2006. Four years of active policy making, endless initiatives and international conferences too numerous to count have totally failed. The government is finally acknowledging that it has lost control of emissions growth...

-- Chris Goodall on the UK Energy White Paper

P.S. 25 May: Dieter Helm on the White Paper - well worth reading

'Don't be panicked into nuclear power'

A sensible letter in The Guardian.

Err Imbalance

In a more or less flip comment on Scott Barrett's latest contribution on the yet-to-prove-itself blog Climate Policy, I wrote "Maybe the American people will rise above parochial obsessions to face the challenges of climate change".

The comment could apply to people almost everywhere else of course, but one could make a case that this is an area in which America leads the word. I recall being surprised and a little shocked quite a few years ago when staying with a good friend in San Francisco who was something of a poet and writer that he was glued day after day to coverage of the O.J. trial. I recalled this today when reading an extract of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason including the following:

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time...

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.

For an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of The Assault on Reason see Michihko Kukatani's review.

P.S. All is not lost if Citizens for a Better America get their way!

Heckuvajob

NOAA 22 May: "Experts at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center are projecting a 75 percent chance that the Atlantic Hurricane Season will be above normal this year".

Admiral Lautenbacher of NOAA is one of the senior US military types who recently co-signed off on a surprisingly sensible report (for the military at least) about climate change and security issues (see Grapes of Wrath)

Some days in the life

Perhaps China has changed, even in its handling of dissidents. When Hu [Jia]'s father was persecuted, there were not even fake trials. There were public executions.

-- from Enemy of the State by Sami Sillanpää.

'Close your eyes'

Here's your first job: With your eyes closed, try to see our world honestly for what it is and then perform a magical act: Conjure up a new set of previews--fit for a future for which it's worth doing a great deal

-- from Graduates, Close Your Eyes by Tom Englehardt.

Government by "24"

There was a telling moment during the second Republican presidential debate, when Brit Hume of Fox News confronted the contenders with a hypothetical "24"-style situation in which torturing suspects is the only way to stop a terrorist attack.

Bear in mind that such situations basically never happen in real life, that the U.S. military has asked the producers of "24" to cut down on the torture scenes. Last week Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, circulated an open letter to our forces warning that using torture or "other expedient methods to obtain information" is both wrong and ineffective, and that it is important to keep the "moral high ground."

But aside from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don't get the access to lawyers they get when they're on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo." His remarks were greeted with wild applause.

-- from Don't Blame Bush by Paul Krugman (18 May)

'Defend freedom of information'

Click here to sign up against an exemption for MPs from freedom of information legislation. (see also Richard Allan and Martin Rosenbaum's Open Secrets)

What a crime...

...to broadcast Mark Thomas's My Life in Serious Organised Crime so late on a Monday night. Few people make a political point so funny.

Security advice for Gordon Brown

You must start the process of reorientating political and security thinking towards the real long-term global challenges. What is interesting is that none of this will cause you substantive electoral problems - indeed the country may well be ahead of the current administration on some of these issues.

-- from SWISH Report (8).

'Intolerant zeal'

...is Edward Gibbon's felicitous phrase to describe some of the philosophes. Anthony Gottlieb revives it in Atheists with Attitude, his review of recent works by Hitchens and co:

When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided. He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it. He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions. In “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,” Jonathan Glover...documents such opposition, and writes, “It is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have . . . come from principled religious commitment.” The loss of such commitment, Glover suggests, should be of concern even to nonbelievers...

...The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take. For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief.

All this and more is well said, but Hitchens (who I have criticised elsewhere) is continues to show his undoubted talents in his observations on the late Jerry Falwell, attached as comment to this post.

[P.S. 9 June: See also Atheism is pretentious and cowardly by Theo Hobson, and We of little faith by Sue Blackmore.]

Getting climate politics right

In an interview with Andy Revkin, Bill Clinton reflects on what he would have done differently on climate change if he had known in the '90s what he knows now. He says that rather than try a carbon tax, which he says Gore and he did in '93 but which even his own party would not support, or try to go head to head with Detroit and the UAW on vehicle efficiency standards, he would have concentrated on the low hanging fruit of energy efficiency in the built environment. The latter is the central drive of his large cities initiative today.

At first sight it seems strange that the benefits of investing in building stock efficiency were not better recognised in political circles at the time, given that Amory Lovins and others had been talking about the soft energy path since the early to mid '70s. But whatever the reasons that Clinton and Gore neglected this route, studies such as the McKinsey paper A cost curve for greenhouse gas abatement make it virtually impossible to ignore now.

Of course such investments are only one of the first steps, as noted in Winners and losers from climate change. A further report from McKinsey, scheduled for publication today, is said to make this point well.

The Ben and Jerry's at the end of the planet

[Norway's] Environment Minister Bjoernoy said she saw no contradiction between showing off the impacts of global warming in the Arctic when many oil companies, such as Norway's state-controlled Statoil, are hoping for new finds as the sea ice recedes.

-- from Arctic Islands Invite Tourists To See Climate Woes. Tourists spent a total of 70,000 nights in the islands last year, up from almost zero 20 years ago. "Bergstrom said tourists were rich", the article continues, "and so could be influential [in the drive to tackle climate change] when they returned home."

Norway wants more world action to fight global warming and last month set the toughest national goal in the world, to become 'carbon neutral' by 2050, with no net emissions of greenhouse gases that come mostly from burning fossil fuels.

The article describes Norway as the world's fifth largest oil exporter. But the US EIA lists it in third equal position (along with Iran and UAE) in 2006, with net exports of 2.5 million barrels per day.

That's 912.5 million barrels per year. The first two rough estimates I have to hand say that burning a barrel of 'average' oil releases between a sixth and an eighth of a tonne of carbon. So while Norway goes for 'carbon neutrality' at home, it is likely to be profiting from the release of 114 to 152 to million tonnes of carbon per year by consumers of its products even if oil exports remain static.

(for something on my own experience on Svalbard see here and here)

Christopher Hitchens is a twat

In his excellent review of Allan Brandt's The Cigarette Century, Robert N. Proctor reminds us that every year five million people die prematurely from smoking and the number will grow to about ten million in the next two decades. A hundred million people died prematurely as a result of smoking in the 20th century and ten times that will die in the present century if trends continue.

It was not until the 1990s that manufacturers admitted any real harms caused by smoking. Part of this about-face was dictated by a change in legal strategy, which by this time had recentered around the argument that 'everyone has always known' that smoking is bad for you--so people have only themselves to blame for whatever diseases they contract from the habit.

What a disappointment after this to come across Christopher Hitchens, opposing a ban on smoking in public places -- or keeping an end of the swimming pool for peeing in.

See also Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait (scroll down for image of 65,000 cigarettes, denoting the number of US teenagers who become addicted every month).

CiF

An oD alumnus and an oD associate on CiF: Caspar Melville on Saturday and Danny Postel today. Both good.

Also on CiF a welcome outburst of refusal-to-be-beaten-down-by-mere-reality optimism from Khaled Diab:

And here lies the biggest potential weapon in the Arab arsenal: militant peace. Arabs should dialogue directly with Israelis and tell them clearly and unequivocally that they want to live alongside them in warm peace once they reach a settlement with the Palestinians and Syrians.

Paranoia was the name of the game during the Cold War in Europe. After the Iron Curtain fell, people were confounded that we ever feared the other side so much, especially with many of our former "enemies" now members of the EU. I am optimistic that the same will occur in the Middle East once the Zion Curtain is lifted.

Partners in received logic

Now here is a comparison that some people will find seriously obnoxious, but when John Bolton says:

“Our obligation was to give [the Iraqi people] new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war....Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic.”

and Paula Dobriansky — the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs — and her colleague Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, "mainly agreed with him", how precisely does this differ from the attitude of the Sudanese government towards refugees from Darfur?

There are an estimated 4,000,000 Iraqi refugees and 'internally displaced persons', about 15% of the population. Since 2003 the United States has given asylum to 701.

(the quotes are from The Flight From Iraq by Nir Rosen)

Evil, and a choice

"I think the real objective (of the US negotiators) is not just to keep the lid on and have nothing happen while President Bush is in office, but they are trying to lay landmines under a post-Kyoto agreement after they leave office...It lies in the hands of Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor Merkel, whether it's all sweetness and light or whether they are prepared to stand up and say 'I'm sorry, but the rest of the world is moving in a different direction from you' ".

-- Philip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust as quoted by Richard Black in US seeks G8 climate text changes.

Hubbard

There's fuss about John Sweeney's outburst after he was bullied by Thetans. For a cool, calm and collected approach, try Alex Gaeta's investigation.

Which biofuels? (2)

(Continued from 10 May post)

Since last autumn, it's been reported that Richard Branson is allocating up to three billion dollars for research into biofuels. A long article in the 14 May edition of The New Yorker fails to provide any substantial detail on the nature of the research he is supporting, despite its length.

Tom Goreau of CGRA, Danny Dan of Eprida and others recommend large scale production of biochar. Goreau and others say this may be the only way to avoid dangerous climate change because it can actually reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. 'Merely' cutting global emissions by 80 to 90% within a few decades will not be enough, they say.

An article published last summer in Nature (Black is the New Green, 10 August 2006) reported estimates by Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University that biochar in combination with biofuels could store up to 9.5 billion tonnes of carbon a year. ( Last summer I expressed an interest in investigating this claim for a widely read science magazine. The editor was actively unwelcoming of the idea.)

Goreau and collleagues were promoting char and tidal power on behalf of the Small Island Developing States at the Commission on Sustainable Development meeting in New York finishing 11 May (a background paper is here). Unfortunately I was unable to make it. Media coverage of CSD coverage seems to have been dominated by a row about Zimbabwe assuming the Commission Presidency.

Whostory

In "Mao II", [Don] DeLillo advanced the startling argument that, in the media age, the terrorist had supplanted the novelist as a cultural force. ”True terror is a language and a vision,” he explained. ”There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.” The writer and the terrorist are rivals: they want to imprint their way of seeing things on the world. The 9/11 attacks and the attendant media spectacle banished novelists to the fringes. Falling Man attempts to claw back some ground...[Fiction] repudiates terrorism’s death drive.

-- Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in a review of Falling Man (FT, 11 May).

Sometimes, during my workday, after several hours’ writing, I lift my head up and think — right now, at this very moment, another writer whom I don’t even know sits, in Damascus or Tehran, in Kigali or in Belfast, just like me, practicing this peculiar, Don-Quixote-like craft of creation, within a reality that contains so much violence and estrangement, indifference and diminution. Here, I have a distant ally who doesn’t even know me, but together we weave this intangible cobweb, which nevertheless has tremendous power, a world-changing and world-creating power, the power of making the dumb speak and the power of tikkun, or correction, in the deep sense it has in kabbalah.

-- David Grossman Writing in the Dark

Two useful pieces

...in the FT on climate change. In yesterday's print edition Richard McGregor says Pressure can spur China into climate action, and in today's Paul Klemperer asks Awkward questions on behalf of our children such as "Is it morally correct to value our great-grandchildren one-tenth as much as ourselves?"

Coelho

Mario Maestri, "one of the few Brazilian critics who does not reflexively dismiss Coelho" writes:

In spite of belonging to different genres, Coelho's narratives and self-help books have the same fundamental effect: of anesthetizing the alienated consciousness through the consoling reaffirmation of conventions and prevailing prejudices. Fascinated by his discoveries, the Coelhist reader explores the familiar, breaks down doors already open, and gets mired in sentimental, tranquilizing, self-centred, conformist, and spellbinding visions of the world that imprisons him. When he finishes a book, he wants another one that will be different but absolutely the same.

-- from The Magus by Dana Goodyear

'What has sustainable development to do with human rights?'

...asks Boniface Chidyausiku, Zimbabwe's ambassador to the UN.

Lullaby of Tony

Tony Blair sings The Clash and Tony Blair eats his words (thanks to Nick Edwards for the latter). But, as Michael Goldfarb puts it well, he never made the killer gaffe, and no performance could match his.

[P.S. 14 May: Avi Schlaim says It is not only God that will be Blair's judge over Iraq]

Hatred, betrayal and long shadows

GM Tamás writes (Hatred and betrayal, The Guardian, 9 May):

Eastern European nations still see their politics, 60 years after the end of the second world war, essentially as a confrontation between communism and fascism. So when a former dissident such as myself denounces the desecration of the grave of a former enemy, I am not joined by members of the politburo, still very much alive among us. Perhaps they are too busy on the stock exchange. And so the danse macabre continues.

This reminds me of observations by Istvan Deak (Scandal in Budapest, NYRB, 19 October 2006):

Hungarians continue to face a troubling moral dilemma. Was it right to work within an oppressive system so one could try to encourage reforms or was it better to remain an outsider and thereby condemn oneself to political and professional irrelevance? At what point must one take a stand against oppression even at personal peril? One day each one of us might be forced to make such a decision.

See also Deak's thumbnail description of the historical context:

Perhaps the best way to explain Hungarian history between the collapse of democratic and Communist experiments in 1919 and the reestablishment of democracy in 1989 is that during that period, the country experienced two authoritarian regimes and two tyrannies. The conservative nationalist government of Miklós Horthy between 1919 and 1944 and the greatly relaxed Communist system of János Kádár after 1963 were authoritarian. The far right governments between March 1944 and January 1945 were responsible for the wartime destruction of the country and the killing of a majority of the country's 800,000 odd Jews: the hard line Communist regime between 1948 and 1963 imprisoned thousands and executed many real and imagined enemies.

Which biofuels? (1)

Another trip to the redundant restatement of the bloody obvious department, but here's a point that sometimes gets missed in much of the discussion about biofuels. It's important to distinguish a range of currently large scale aproaches that are currently available and feasible, and the conversion of cellulosic biomass - a technique that may be practicable some years hence if it gets adequate support now.

Biofuels have been high on the news agenda this week after the publication of a UN report expressing concern about their impact (see UN waffles furiously about biofuels, UN warns on impact of biofuels and the report itself).

Moving beyond generalisations such as "the worst idea humanity has had in a long time" (as one leading ecologist has put it), campaigns such as this one in the UK targetting 'deforestation diesel' are well and good.

By contast, conversion of cellulosic biomass may (and this is yet to be proven) offer part of a relatively low-impact, large-scale answer to low-carbon energy future. However a lot of basic research still has to be done. At present, note Chris Sommerville and Donald Kennedy in Science, the U.S. government spends on all of plant physiology just one-hundredth of the research budget of the National Institutes of Health. They say that the importance and the scale of the challenge means research budgets should be greatly increased.

[P.S. See also Which biofuels? (2)

'What the Bush Administration Has Wrought in Iraq'

"Any Iraqi officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is already dead" -- a US Marine quoted by Patrick Cockburn in the introduction to a new edition of The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq.

The 3% solution

As a new father I am finding little time for coherent thought, and the following may be redundant re-statement of the bloody obvious, but here goes.

The headline figure in IPCC Working Group III summary of a 3% reduction in global GDP in order to stabilise atmospheric concentrations at less than 450ppm does not mean that global GDP would be reduced by 3% every year. Rather, the estimate is 0.12% lower annual global average growth each year up to the year 2030, meaning global GDP would be 3% lower in that year than it would otherwise be (Table SPM.4 on page 14).

The summary further notes:

depending on the existing tax system and spending of the revenues, costs may be substantially lower under the assumption that revenues from carbon taxes of auctioned permits are used to promote low carbon technologies or reform of existing taxes

and:

studies that assume the possibility that climate change policy induces enhanced technplogical change also give lower costs. However, this may require higher upfront investment (page 15)...

...in all analysed world regions near term health co-benefits from reduced air pollution as a result of action to reduce GHG emissions can be subtantial and may offset a substantial fraction of mitigation cost (page 16).

In other words, the cost could be less than 0.12% of GDP per year, and we can afford not to put the planet at high risk of dangerous climate change.

[P.S. Climate curbs: Who will buy? by Paul Reynolds is good as brief analysis goes]

One nation, indivisible

The AIPAC defendants weren’t spies, they were merely ahead of the curve, anticipating the day when a distinction is no longer being made between American and Israeli interests. That is the line we are hearing, as the curtain goes up on the trial of Rosen and Weissman. Whether the jury or the public falls for it remains to be seen.

-- from AIPAC on trial by Justin Raimondo

Bush proposes spending cut on climate change

A colleague of Paul Ehrlich notes:

Tom Brewer has posted a brief analysis of the US administration's proposals for the fiscal year 2008 climate change budget, which is now before the Congress for its consideration. The proposed amounts for the Climate Change Science Program represent a 1.6% real, inflation-adjusted reduction over fiscal 2007 - and 22.8% less in inflation-adjusted, constant dollars compared with five years ago. The proposal for the International Assistance component represents a 10.1% real increase over fiscal 2007 - but is nevertheless 31.5% less in real terms compared with five years ago. These and other details are available for free downloading at www.usclimatechange.com.

450ppm would cost '3% of GDP'

Aiming for a total greenhouse gas concentration equivalent to 650 parts per million of carbon dioxide would reduce global GDP by about 0.2% [the IPCC report on mitigation will say], whereas...550ppm would cost about 0.6% of global GDP...

... many climate scientists now argue that only agreeing to keep below about 450ppm can prevent major climatic consequences. The IPCC draft says keeping concentrations at this level could cost up to 3% of GDP.

"I can tell you that the probability for achieving 450ppm in anything approaching the world as it now is is almost impossible," commented Professor Stephen Schneider from Stanford University in California, who helped draft the IPCC's first report this year on the science of climate change. "But a temperature rise over 2-3C leads to potential mass extinctions, serious problems with coasts, mountain glaciers disappearing, melting ice sheets... and one has to talk about stabilisation at 450-550ppm range to have a better than 20-30% chance of preventing that."

-- from Climate Talks Enter Final Phase, Richard Black, BBC online.

"The Ultimate Staff Guy"

“The irony of the whole situation is, he was bluffing,” [George Tenet] Slam said of Saddam on “Larry King Live” on Monday night, adding, “And he didn’t know we weren’t.” Mr. He-Man Tenet didn’t understand the basics of poker, much less Arab culture. It never occurred to him that Saddam might feign strength to flex muscles at his foes in the Middle East? Slam couldn’t take some of that $40 billion we spend on intelligence annually and get a cultural profile of the dictator before we invaded?...

“By your silence you helped build the case for war,” the former C.I.A. officials wrote [to Tenet]. "....Although C.I.A. officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered Bin Laden an enemy ... you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda. ...your tenure as head of the C.I.A. has helped create a world that is more dangerous. ... It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated.”

-- Maureen Dowd Better Never Than Late.

Swindle

George Marshall asks Why was the Great Global Warming Swindle was so persuasive? and comes up with some useful and thoughtful observations about media manipulation.

2000

The World Tonight reported that MI5 is tracking some 2000 Islamist extremists in the UK. For each of those under surveillance there may be ten or a hundred sympathisers. So it looks like there are some bumps ahead. As is almost always the case, Steve Bell is on to something, but radicalisation was happening without the 2003 Iraq invasion. Kashmir, Bosnia and Chechnya already offered material for entrepreneurs of rage and hate.

[P.S. 3 May: Catherine Bennett on angst about the UK's national slaggishness]

Some sense

Varying degrees of originality and/or good sense in Foreign Policy's 21 Solutions to Save the World.

Fear itself

Did you ever feel any guilt that you killed your father, your brother and those [four] civilians?

What I felt was great fear. I remember being very very scared when I was killing those people.

-- A young boy from eastern Congo in an interview with Mike Thompson broadcast this morning on BBC Radio 4. The whole interview is here.

The Darfur divide

Scorched, a report on the role of climate change in the Darfur crisis by Julian Borger, contains passages very close to Stephan Faris's The Real Roots of Darfur published over a month ago. But Borger's report contains a note of optimism that one would hope is well grounded -- and that is, it is possible to make choices even in severely adverse circumstances. Borger quotes Said Ibrahim Mustafa, the sultan of the Chadian border region of Dar Sila: "The real problem here is moral, it is not a question of climate."

This is a key point too in the Globe for Darfur demonstrations today. Unfortunately, it look as if no organisations with an Islamic dimension are involved in the London protests, indicating a potential risk of sectarianism over what should be a universal concern: the murder of up to 400,000 people and displacement of many more.

Meanwhile in Turkey today there is a big demonstration by secularist-nationalists, and things look as if they could turn serious (is the subtext: "a military coup, please"?). In the background, neither the secularists nor their Islamist opponents seem fully ready to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, even though, as the historian Taner Akçam writes, "only full integration of Turkey's past [with its historical record] can set the country on the path to democracy."

England sleeps

All the true constitutional watchfulness of England was dead to the only real danger... we are come to the moment when the question is, whether we shall give to the king, that is the executive government, complete power over our thoughts.'

-- Charles James Fox, quoted by Henry Porter

AI and the timorous beastie

At first blink, simulating half a mouse brain at one tenth the speed may not sound overly impressive. But quite seriously this looks like a step towards something like Ray Kurzweil's singularity. And as noted in this review of one of Kurzweil's earlier books, an observation from Nietzsche may still hold good: "Technology is the premise whose thousand-year conclusion mankind has not yet dared to draw".

Creepers of the wholly baseless

Most countries sent delegates [to the IPCC] only from their environment ministries, but of the seven delegates representing Saudi Arabia at the negotiations, four were dispatched by the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.

-- from Saudis blocking reductions in fossil-fuel consumption (New Scientist, 27 April). See also More on IPCC censorship.

Digital parapraxis

Not since Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ has Hollywood produced anything so rabidly, ferally frenzied. 300 feels as if Adolf Hitler had come back from the dead, got hooked on gay fisting web-sites, done the best digital film course in the world, then stalked into liberal-Jewish Hollywood and convinced them to give him $60m to make a movie...

For hours after I saw 300, I puzzled over how a film industry like Hollywood's - soft, liberal, formulaic - could give birth to such a snarling, unique beast. Then I remembered Freud's 1916 lectures on parapraxis. That's what 300 is: a slip of the tongue (or camera), an inadvertent "mistake" produced by the Hollywood system....the liberal surface of American cinema overlays conflicting, strongly held impulses that are far less liberal.

-- Mark Cousins in the May edition of Prospect on a film that has already grossed half a billion dollars at the box office.

That beheading

Sam Zarifi of Human Rights Watch calls the clip (available on YouTube) of a 12 year old boy cutting the throat of a grown man for the Taliban "truly shocking, without cultural context or historical precedent". One can see what he means, or rather feels. But he misses a point. Everyone, including the Taliban, is operating in a global media environment (not merely Greater West Asia, the Ummah, South Yorkshire or whatever). In that global media context, where all are influenced by all, the actions have plenty precedents in West Africa (Sierra Leone etc) and elsewhere, and in an arms race of atrocity may be inevitable.

Goodbye, Yeltsin

...Yeltsin’s courage was partly born of calculation. He was, after all, an apparatchik, versed in the tortuous politics of the Soviet system. He had already staked out his position as the spokesman of radical reform in the politburo and then as the first democratically elected president of Russia. By 1991 he had to oppose the coup. But these were also the correct choices: he was on the right side of history. He recognised that the Soviet Union had become an empty shell and had the effrontery to break it...

...he made three huge mistakes: the war on Chechnya, which brought the security services into the heart of government; the “loans for shares” programme of 1995, which transferred a vast part of the natural wealth of Russia into a tiny number of private hands; and the selection of Mr Putin as his successor. These three errors, together, led to a reversal of the move towards a more democratic, liberal and open Russia... [The] mistakes were not Yeltsin’s alone. The west also made big errors...

-- from Martin Wolf's evaluation of Yeltsin

Spring

'Now, my fair'st friend, I would I had some flowers o' the spring that might become your time of day' -- The Winter's Tale. (Pictures taken near Oxford on 22 April)

Another one bites the dust

'Hunters in Russia's Far East have shot and killed one of the last seven surviving female Amur leopards living in the wild, WWF said on Monday, driving the species even closer to extinction.' (more here)

'Meals now divided by five instead of six don’t feed an emptiness'

Jason DeParle's A Good Provider is One Who Leaves is an outstanding piece of journalism about migrant workers. It alive to and respectful of the dignity of the people it describes and also includes a good account of arguments in development theory and politics regarding migration and remittances (explored elsewhere by Dani Rodrik and others).

Hamid and Flanagan on the GWOT

"[The] aspiration [for a more cosmopolitan identity] is entirely correct and I don’t think it’s necessarily doomed. The problem is, if we’re talking about a global cosmopolitan order, the collective punishment of people needs to be ended. In the United States, if there were people who were potential terrorists in the foothills of Appalachia, a police force would be sent in, it would do investigative work, and the people involved would be apprehended and put in jail. It would not be tolerated that cluster bombs would be used to wipe out several hundred people in the hope that some of them are terrorists. That kind of group punishment of people is the antithesis of global citizenship".

--Mohsin Hamid , author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, interviewed in Foreign Policy.

"You cannot justify murder," says Flanagan when [asked] whether his attempts to understand the motives of terrorists will cause him further vilification, "but the danger for western societies at the moment is that we seek to protect ourselves by creating and feeding difference, and by making people feel alienated, and that it's not possible to share with other human beings the possibility of being fully human. The best defence we can offer against evil and the possibility of terrible, murderous acts is by letting people back in. Then the appeal of a death cult starts to evaporate. But in a world where people feel ever more frightened, alienated and tossed out to the periphery, death cults offer a way back."

-- Richard Flanagan, author of The Unknown Terrorist, interviewed by Stephen Moss in The Guardian.

Googling Darfur

Thanks to Bacon Butty (Atrocity Exhibition) for drawing attention to emerging political uses of Google Earth re Darfur and UNEP.

'On not getting too down about the world'

- by No Impact Man

The Gramsci-Schwarzenegger dialectic: China, the U.S. and climate change politics

In his second Reith Lecture, Survival in the Anthropocene (recorded in Beijing and first broadcast last night), Jeffrey Sachs predicted that the same logic that had led to the Montreal Protocol would lead to a new and comprehensive framework for addressing climate change by 2010.

Writing in the Washington Post last Sunday (Clearing the Air With China), Orville Schell made this proposal for China and US co-operation:

How should we proceed? By forming a coalition of respected scientists, business leaders and policy experts, calling a high-level emergency summit with their counterparts in China and then enlisting the U.S. presidential candidates to pledge to make the coal/climate change issue a priority. The ultimate goal should be to undertake a $25 billion collaborative effort, with the United States providing capital, technological know-how and entrepreneurial and managerial skills and China providing some resources of its own, research, critical leadership among developing countries, its low-cost manufacturing base and its prodigious market energy.

Schell is probably be right to highlight the future of coal as a central technical challenge. Sachs picked up on this too, emphasising the potential importance of carbon capture and storage. But in the question and answer session after Sach's lecture it was questions of governance and politics that came to the fore, not least in a question from Ma Jun.

Last November I wrote on chinadialogue that it was time for a politics of climate change in China. I do think that political issues are still a central challenge [see note 1 below] -- a point that appears reinforced by the reported role of the Chinese government, among others, in watering down the summary of IPCC WGII (climate impacts).

For this reason I would add to the list for Schell's coalition civil society actors and (to the surprise of some)...the military. As noted on this blog here, it does look like people with influence on the US military really are beginning to 'get' the issues, and it would be nice to think they might engage with their Chinese counterparts.

So, note to Schell et al: please add the likes of Ma Jun and Anthony C. Zinni to the list of candidates for your coalition.

[Note 1: 'political' in both a narrow and a broad sense, the broad one being politics, culture and values as they interact with and within the technological and scientific sphere. In this case, cultural change might thrive on a 'Gramsci-Schwarzenegger dialectic', synthesising (an ahimsa mediated version of) Antonio's insights into the importance of culture with Arnie on being hip.]

[P.S. 20 April: On ClimatePolicy Paul Higgins asks So what's the problem with China?]

[P.S. 24 April: The Financial Times reports 'China delays climate change plan indefinitely'. See here.]

'A hundred years ago, Iowa had 1,300 opera houses'

Bill McKibben here.

'inspiring progress', and at least 157 dead

"We've seen both inspiring progress, and too much evidence that we still face many grave challenges," the US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell told reporters today. "We've always said securing Baghdad would not be easy."

-- in a report (4pm) about 157 dead and more than 90 injured in Baghdad today.

32 dead a la Virgina Tech would be a quiet day in Baghdad.

Pitching for $645 billion

The Bush administration is asking the US Congress for $645bn for the military in 2008, more than all the rest of the world put together. It's part of a strategy (see Paul Rogers) to deal with all threats, wherever they may appear. On the sales talk, Tom Englehardt has this:

with rare exceptions, the language of Bush's Washington (and Baghdad) has been swept remarkably clean of the past -- and, on the tabula rasa of no-image, in place of everything that once was there, a new set of words and images have been implanted. Consciously or not, these mine a deep strain in our national mythology: the belief in an all-American right to a second chance, to light out for the territories and start anew.

As a description of reality on the ground in a country wracked by mass killing, flight, destruction, civil war, religious strife, ethnic cleansing, vast flows of refugees, private militias, insurgents, terrorists, foreign jihadis, criminals, and kidnappers, this new language may be out to lunch, but in terms of its appeal on the "home front," it has in its cross hairs the deepest realms of the American character...

...almost four years after [Bush] declared "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" against the backdrop of a banner that read "mission accomplished," all is again "new" in that country. If the pronouncements of his top military and civilian officials were to be believed, we are now at the dawn of a new military/political moment in Iraq, the kind of moment in which you just can't help using words like "first" and "early" and "beginning."

Grapes of wrath

(I haven't read it yet, but) from reports (see US generals urge climate action), National Security and the Threat of Climate Change looks like a sensible advance in thinking from former US military types compared to the Pentagon study I criticised in Einstein's Gravediggers (see also The Daze After Tomorrow and Military Solutions to Climate Change).

[P.S. 16 April: The report is mostly sober and sensible. And on a lighter note the recommendation for greater energy efficiency in the US military ("improved business processes and innovative technologies that result in improved U.S. combat power through energy efficiency") is reminiscent of something David Fleming pointed to with humour in the early 1990s: a drive to put ozone friendly cooling systems on the ICBMs].

We need new words for and worlds of imagination

[Herbert] later attributed his reluctance to fall on his knees before the mighty not as an act of bravery or strength of character, but to his sense of taste: an inability to bear the regime's execrable rhetoric, its torturer's dialectic and reasoning without grace. In other words, aesthetics saved his soul: beauty played a subversive role in his refusal to become one of the corrupted.

-- Charles Simic on Zbigniew Herbert in The Philosophy of 3 am, a review of The Collected Poems 1956-1998.

When he first started to think about his book [Sari Nusseibeh] happened to be reading Amos Oz's description of a parallel city on the other side of the conflict, only a "hundred feet", as he put it, away, there were hardly any Arabs and no hint of the world he had known as a child. This made Nusseibeh ask what his parents had known of the people in Oz'sworld and of the holocaust that determined their outlook on life: "Weren't both sides of the conflict totally immersed in their own tragedis, each one oblivious to, or even antagnostic toward, the narrative of the other." Isn't this inability to imagie the lives of the 'other' at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

--Amos Elon on Sari Nusseibeh in Hard Truth About Palestine, a review of Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life.

'Mountains of the Mind in Chinese Art'

An account of a NY Met exhibition of Chinese landscape art from classical times to today with slide show is here.

A big color photograph, taken in 2005 by the Beijing artist Hai Bo, of a Chinese peasant riding a bicycle toward us down a long country road. He’s the Maoist hero of yesterday pedaling out of a nostalgia-shrouded past into a confusingly unheroic present.

Freedom is untidy

'I saw a four-year-old boy sitting beside his mother's body, which had been decapitated by the explosion. He was talking to her, asking her what had happened.' - Saad, an Iraqi humanitarian worker in an extract from the ICRC's Civilians without protection – The ever-worsening crisis in Iraq, quoted here.

Stuff happens.

More on IPCC censorship

A journalist who was in Brussels on 6 April to report the launch of the IPCC Working Group 2 summary (see IPCC Censorship) and who I asked for further details has responded to note George Monbiot's 10 April column, and also said:

The chairs didn't seem to notice that the good news is now the first thing North American readers light on when they go to the regional section...[But] more problematic for [the] G8 process is removal by the sole Russian [of] the table linking CO2 with consequences.

I replied:

Putin and the Siloviki seem to buy the same argument as Gregg Easterbrook, with whom I debated 'winners and losers' on The World Tonight last Thursday [see here]: that global warming will be good news because it will bring a longer growing season to Siberia. Like the Soviet Union, this view may be overtaken by events.

[P.S. 12 April - Desmogblog compares the released version to the pre-censorship draft here.]

Hope, and reason

'Don't tell me things can't change. We need to fight for them.' -- Jeffrey Sachs in question and answer after the first 2007 Reith Lecture.

I like Sach's refusal to give in to pessimism. Under cross examination from gloomsters he pointed out that in the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy made the speech which Sachs took as the starting point for his lecture, the great majority of U.S. citizens thought a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable.

[P.S. 11.05pm: and hooray for the redoubtable Yorkshireman Edward Pearce for bringing it home in his comment -- The horror of it, as phrased by a Daily Telegraph reporter, Amy Iggulden, of "a lost generation" of 1.2 million such people "draining £3.65bn a year from the exchequer, enough to fund a 1p cut in income tax," is eloquent in unintended ways.]

Lara

was born at 1:04pm BST, 8 April 2007. Her blog is here.

Bowdlerowitz

John Cassidy's long New Yorker profile of Paul Wolfowitz, purporting to be warts and all, is worth a look. But it has at least one glaring ommission. Referring to the time in early 2003 when the Turkish parliament turned down a request by the United States that Turkey allow U.S. troops through Turkey in order to invade Iraq, Cassidy reports an innocuous comment Wolfowitz made later about the virtues of democracy. What he does not say is that at the time Wolfowitz criticised the Turkish army for not intervening over the decision made by the civilian government.

[P.S. 1 May - Cassidy's article, and my post, just predate the whole scandal blowing open. One of the most amusing takes on that scandal, by Kenneth Rogoff no less, was published in Foreign Affairs for here].

IPCC censorship

A few minutes ago BBC environment correspondent Roger Harrabin reported from Brussels that the struggle continued through much of the night over the final draft of the IPCC's document describing likely impacts of climate change. He quoted a paragraph describing significant negative impacts on North America which has been struck out, and quoted the next paragraph describing some positive impacts on North America in the near term which has been kept it. (Note, please can someone post these on the web?)

Call me naive, but if this is as described it is beyond shocking. It does, of course, serve the kind of comfortable message found in places such as Gregg Easterbrook's recent article (see previous post)

[P.S. 9.40 BST - the document has been published. The BBC reports: 'Several delegations, including the US, Saudi Arabia, China and India, had asked for the final version to reflect less certainty than the draft.']

Winners and losers from climate change

This evening, unless our baby decides to be born, I will be taking part in a exchange on The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 about the implications of tomorrow's report from the IPCC's on the impacts of climate change.

It looks as if I will be discussing this with Gregg Easterbrook, who published an article in The Atlantic stressing there will be winners as well as losers from climate change. Here are some points I may touch on if there is time.

Easterbrook is right to say it’s doesn't have to be all gloom in facing up to manmade climate change, and that there’s a lot that can be done which can create benefits, opportunities and profits. This message is an important one. But it’s not enough to say there are winners and losers. We need to look very hard at what that will mean. There are winners and losers in wars too, and the winners are mostly war profiteers and jihadi recruiters. Optimism, if it is to last, has to be well grounded.

Easterbrook also underestimates the nature of the challenges and down sides of climate change. This in itself can be unhelpful if it leads to insufficient action. And on top of that he misrepresents the nature and extent of scientific understanding of climate change.

Taking the last point first, in an interview published along with the article he says:

‘There’s still a huge range of doubt about exactly why climate change is happening. We have no idea what component is natural and what part is artificial and no one has even the slightest clue about exactly what’s going to happen, what the degree of change will be’.

Let’s look at each of those claims in turn.

1. ‘still a huge range of doubt about exactly why climate change is happening’

This is not right. Even back in 1990 at the time of the first IPCC assessment it was only partly true. There were significant uncertainties at that time, but the range of doubt was not 'huge'. Now, after 17 years of massive effort, there are still some uncertainties but the range of doubt is not ‘huge’. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation unless we accepted that the scientific community has a pretty good idea of why climate change is happening.

2. ‘No idea what is natural and what is artificial’

Again, not right. The Fourth assessment report concludes that we can say with very high confidence (more than 90% probability) that the effect of human activities since 1750 has been to warm the planet. It also says that it is very likely (more than 90% probability) that observed temperature increases since the middle of the twentieth century have been caused by the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

3. 'No one has even the slightest clue about exactly what’s going to happen, what the degree of change will be

It’s of course true that we can’t know exactly what’s going to happen. But the scientific community, through the IPCC and other bodies such as the National Academies of Science of all of the world’s leading nations, have some quite specific things to say about what will happen if we carry on as we are. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report says that for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 the most likely rise is between 2 and 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, with a tails on either side of for rise as low as 1.1 and as high as 6.4°C depending on how much feedback there is in the Earth system.

The scientific evidence also indicates that a rise in global average temperature of more than 2°C is a bad idea. And in order not to exceed 2°C we have to limit atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to substantially less than double of pre-industrial – probably quite some way below 450 parts per million by volume.

This is something very much within the realm of human choice. We can decide what we want to happen – for example by setting targets for emission reductions and meeting them.

This is where Easterbrook's positive message comes in. He says ‘The history of anti-pollution programs is that it is always cheaper to prevent emissions than to reverse any damage they cause’. A good example supporting this case that I don’t think he mentions is the US Clean Air Act of 1970. According the U.S. Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the best estimate of the net human health benefits (benefits minus costs) of the Act was more than $22 trillion (trillion, not billion) over its first 20 years (ref here). That is, more than a trillion dollars a year.

There are some who go even further than Easterbrook. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute says there’s a sign error on the global warming problem. That is, solving it - through smarter design and addressing market failure – will be entirely profitable, a negative cost.

Few go as far as Lovins, but it is clear there are big profits to be made from efficiency gains that reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. An analysis published in the McKinsey Quarterly, A cost curve for greenhouse gas abatement, finds that almost a quarter of possible emission reductions would result from measures that carry no net life cycle cost—in effect, they come free of charge. These measures include better insulation in building, increased fuel efficiency in commercial and private vehicles, more efficient lighting, air conditioning and water heating and so on.

One of the problems is that, just as US industry opposed the Clean Air Act and had to be dragged along kicking and screaming into compliance despite the overwhelming benefits the Act delivered to the American people, so vested interests and entrenched market failure prevent realisation of efficiency gains today. We have this problem right now in Europe with car manufacturers who do everything they can to wriggle out of higher fuel efficiency standards (see, for example this from Mark Mardell).

And there is an even bigger problem. Even if it these efficiency gains are realised it is very unlikely this will be enough to be enough to deliver cuts in emissions sufficient stabilise CO2 at less than 450ppmv. A whole range of investments in industrial redesign, new energy technologies and other measures in both the already rich countries and most especially in emerging economies will be necessary. So will better land management and a great reduction in the rate of tropical deforestation which is adding hundreds of millions of tonnnes, at least, of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Some of these challenges are very hard.

Turning finally to winners and losers, Easterbrook overestimates the number of gains relative to the losses. His key point is that there will be big gains in high latitudes, and this is good news for Russia, Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska. ‘Examine a Mercator projection and observe how the Earth’s landmasses spread from the equator towards the poles’, he says. Well maybe, but recall first that, unlike the Mercator projection, the Earth is not flat. The Mercator projection grossly distorts land area with respect to latitude. It shows Greenland as three to four times the size of India, for example, whereas in reality it is rather smaller.

There is much less land in the far North than appears from a Mercator projection, and we would be unwise to use it as a route map for a changing world. Remember too the sheer numbers of people who are likely to become environmental refugees from the Global South even under a best case scenario. There are, for example, more than nineteen thousand times as many people in India as there are in Greenland. Even now, Pakistan’s population is more than that of Russia and by mid century it is likely be twice the size. We cannot all "shuffle off to Buffalo" without it all getting rather bumpy.

Easterbook highlights forecasts that a warmer climate may bring a longer growing season and fewer deaths from cold in Russia and other northern climes. This may be so in the short run, although there are also likely to be negative consequences in the short run including forest fires, heat waves. But there’s another danger. He advises us to ‘assume global warming is uniform’, because ‘even though models suggest it will vary widely... all predictions regarding an artificial greenhouse effect are extremely uncertain’.

This is to misrepresent both actual observation to date (see, for example, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) and the degree of confidence in predictions. The evidence from both points strongly to global warming not being uniform, and high latitudes heating faster. And if, as looks probable, that continues to happen then we could see the acceleration of some potentially dangerous effects.

For example 90% of the upper layer of tundra, or permafrost, may thaw by 2100. These regions contain a lot of carbon – perhaps 1600 billion tonnes. Recent measurements already show a 10 to 15% increase in the area of thaw lakes in northern and western Siberia. In northern Siberia, methane emissions from thaw lakes are estimated to have increased by 60% since the mid 1970s. It remains unclear what rate methane could be released in future, but preliminary estimates indicate that, along with the drying out peatlands this could add another 10 to 25% to current man made emissions (source Friedlingstein et al, Lawrence and Slater, quoted in Stern, page 16)

There's more. Perhaps above all, the rich North is not going to be isolated from big disruptions in the Global South. On a lighter note, do we really like the idea of Starbucks in Nunavut but no polar bears? - but I am out of time.

[P.S. 6 March: the debate can be heard via the listen again feature on the World Tonight's web site (Thursday). It starts at 31 minutes in to the programme]

"Not the most attractive"?!

Anyone who knows me well, knows that walruses have long been my greatest love - my pinniped paramours, my Helen of Troy meets Audrey Hepburn, only with tusks. So this informative article that describes them as "not the most attractive of Arctic creatures" is a gross insult to walruses everywhere.

Cold road

At least two issues arise in a fine piece by James Painter, Farewell to a melting glacier.

One, reflection and sadness: "It really hurts...We have had the privilege of seeing [the glacier's] beauty. The next generations will not."

Two, who if anyone will pay for adaptation (to the degree this is possible) by financing new dams (and, I guess, other measures including water conservation, though the article doesn't mention that).

There's an interesting but not-easy-for-the-unitiated exchange on mitigation 'versus' adaptation at Prometheus here.

Spinoza

I believe the real problem for Jews is not the problem of identity - namely, who are are - but the problem of identification - with whom should we identify. Whose values and views and qualities do we want to adopt as our own? The so called identity crisis should more accurately be seen as an identification crisis. Spinoza, in my view, is not a problem for the Jews but a solution for them. He is a saintly 'secular' Jew who, unlike religious saints, does not believe we should be burdened by our sense of guilt. Spinoza is an ethically serious man with whom Jews, or at least secular Jews, can and should identify, in feeling, thought and action.

--So writes Avisahai Margalit in a review of books about Spinoza, Leibniz and modernity. This is well and good, but I guess that Margalit might agree this analysis can have bearing on many in the other 99.78% of humanity (including when it comes to the guilt thing those from Christian backgrounds), who are still struggling towards ethical, coherent modernity. And, of course, there are others besides Spinoza to learn from.

US Supreme Court narrowly in favour of sanity

As the US Supreme Court today orders the Bush administration to shape up, a reminder of the arguments:

“Would you be up here saying the same thing if we’re trying to regulate child pornography, and it turns out that anyone with a computer can get pornography elsewhere?” Justice Breyer asked, adding, “I don’t think so.”

(30 Nov 2006)

Rivers of blood

Schools have avoided teaching the Holocaust and the Crusades in history lessons because they are concerned about causing offence to Muslim pupils or challenging 'charged' versions of history which children have been taught at home, government research has found.

(Guardian, 2 April).

"The heart beats iambically"

...Si non e vero, e ben trovato, but this article about one of England's finest is not as good as it should be.

How remarkable it is that "Andrei Tarkovsky's film Mirror revealed verse to Harrison as the 'fittest narration' for stark, even terrifying, images" - although in my memory the actual images in Mirror are not in themselves horrific; it is what they don't show and what haunts them which is.