MPAs not MAD

Shortly before the election I recorded a thirty second slot for Greenpeace's 'Cut Trident' campaign. That message has only just gone up, more than a week after the election, here. (You'll need to search 'Caspar' in the box in the bottom right hand corner. If you find it, and like it, give me a 'heart'!)

Britain's new coalition government has agreed to go ahead with a replacement for Trident. This overrides the position taken by the Liberal Democrats before the election. They were the only one of the three largest parties to oppose a rush to renewal.

Greenpeace's campaign was framed for the run-up to the election so my message comes after the horse has bolted. I hope, however, that they and others will continue their opposition to this misguided, dangerous and costly policy.

I wrote a short backgrounder for the thirty-seconder and post it below. Even this, of course, simplifies many key issues. For an introduction to Marine Protected Areas you could hardly do better than Enric Sala's talk recently posted by TED. Callum Roberts of York University has also written about this brilliantly. And for a little more context on destruction of the seas, Jeremy Jackson TED talk is also good. Anyway, here's my spiel:

Trident is a weapon system of the Cold War, designed for the world of Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD. [1] But that’s not the world we live in today. We are moving into a multipolar world in which many, perhaps dozens, of emerging powers will have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them over long distances, and in which non-state actors may be able to explode a nuclear device in a major city. This is a world of significant and increasing risks. None of them will be reduced by British possession of weapons designed for the mass slaughter of innocent people.

The best way to tackle our present nightmare is through international cooperation that leads to more effective control of nuclear materials in the civil sector, and to better control, limitation and, ultimately, abolition of nuclear weapons. [2] The framework for this, imperfect as it is, already exists. It’s called the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the overwhelming majority of nations, including Britain, are committed to it. Under its terms, the five officially recognized nuclear powers of which Britain is one are required to move towards nuclear disarmament. In return, other countries give up their programmes. After nearly a decade of neglect by the Bush administration in the United States, the administration of Barack Obama has breathed new life into this process. And there has never been a better opportunity for Britain to help reduce threats to its own security as well as the rest of the world.

A small part of the money earmarked for a new generation of British nuclear weapons could make a real difference here. 100 million pounds -- just over one tenth of one percent of 97 billion -- could promote sustained, creative engagement with and between other powers: trust-building exercises, exchanges of expertise - especially where trust is least - help for the creation of nuclear weapon-free regions and so on.

If we’re serious about our future security and well-being we should also consider other priorities. How an additional ten billion for education, for scientific research and development, and for greater energy efficiency? Hey, we could even use some of the money to reduce the government deficit.

And here’s another idea: the protection of endangered species and vulnerable ecosystems worldwide. As a writer on the natural world, I have found that people are only beginning to understand the wonders and the true value of this, our common heritage, and that we destroy it at our peril. But as we breath species and ecosystems are probably being destroyed faster than at any time in human history and perhaps for tens of millions of years.

The challenges of ecosystem protection and restoration are huge and complex. Many of them cannot be solved or even mitigated by throwing money at them. But a few can. And in this, the International Year of Biodiversity, Britain can make a difference where it matters most. One of the best ideas around is the creation of new Marine Protected Areas, or MPAs. These can do more than anything else to stem the destruction of the ocean life, at least in the near term. Relatively tiny sums - just one or two million a year for the Chagos Archipelago, for example -- have helped ensure some of the world’s most extraordinary coral reefs have a good chance of getting through the next few decades. A worldwide network of MPAs, increasing coverage from under one percent of the oceans to as much as a fifth or even third, is achievable for globally trivial sums, and it can be done in ways that recognize the needs of local people. Unlike the enormous subsidies currently paid to the fishing industry, it would actually deliver a positive return on investment. Similar initiatives to protect biodiversity on land can work too. A billion pounds from Britain would be a good start.

Footnotes

[1] According to Aron Bernstien of the Council for a Livable World, 192 independently targeted warheads on a Trident submarine can deliver 100 to 300 KT (The Hiroshima bomb was 15KT). This means that they can deliver, on a conservative estimate, 19 MT or more than six times all of Allied ordnance deployed against Germany, Japan and other powers in World War Two: " It's reported that UK Trident submarines carry 48 warheads.

[2] See, for example, A World Free of Nuclear Weapons by George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn. The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007.

P.S. Martin Rees on Disarmament Labs

P.S. 24 May: See An Arsenal We Can Live With by Gary Shaub and James Forsyth, and a useful Guardian article from 20 May: Deadly - and very, very expensive

'Reaching far beyond Realpolitik...'

Or not:

[Obama's] Cairo speech laid out a series of initiatives for America’s reëngagement with Muslim countries. Almost a year later, as a few of those initiatives have begun to take shape, a general pattern has emerged. The programs focus on entrepreneurship and business development, science education, women’s and children’s health, student exchanges. They do not cover human rights, political empowerment of women, or governance. After an internal debate, the Administration decided to stay away from these more sensitive topics at first and, instead, to build credibility in worthy but uncontroversial areas. It was a legitimate decision, [sic] but it has reinforced a view among some Arab reformers that, according to a recent report by the Project on Middle East Democracy, “President Obama has said the right words, but is unwilling or unable to offer substantive new policies to support the aspirations of people in the Middle East.”

-- George Packer. A recent FOOC report on Egypt here.

'Lotte hatt blaue Augen'

A.O. Scott gets it:

Jean Renoir is often described as one of the great humanists of world cinema. That’s a word that has an implication of high minded abstract maybe soft-headed sentimentality: “underneath it all we’re all the same and why can’t we just get along?” But...Renoir was not really motivated by abstract concerns about humanity...he was motivated above all by curiosity about and sympathy for his characters, by an interest in people. The film abounds in so many moments of humour of warmth, of sensuality, of surprise that make you realise that anything more abstract is really an illusion.

"The entire Indian subcontinent"

At the moment, virtually nowhere on Earth has a wet-bulb temperature of more than 30 °C. But with a global rise of 11 °C [by 2300], huge areas would have wet-bulb temperatures of more than 35 °C for part of the year. According to the climate model used by the team, these regions would include much of the eastern US, the entire Indian subcontinent, most of Australia and part of China.

-- Earth 2300: Too hot for humans.

Of course, it's just a model.

Gandamak ghost

In a useful piece published back in January on Obama's options in Afghanistan, Rory Stewart (who is now the Conservative Member of Parliament for Penrith) stressed that the situation in Afghanistan today differs from 1842 as much as it differs from 330BC and 1980. Still, Dalrymple's comparison has some plausibility.

One of the reasons nukes may not be such a good idea

You don’t have to obtain access to the nuclear fuel, get into the control room [of a nuclear power plant] or penetrate the containment shell. Most of the critical components of the cooling system, including pumps and water intake pipes, sit unprotected outside. If you can get a car bomb or a team with demolition charges near these components, you can shut off the cooling water to the reactor, and physics will take care of the rest.

-- Charles Faddis.

How it was

The Ambassador's Reception, broadcast earlier this month on BBC Radio 4, included two anecdotes from the publisher and editor Murat Belge, who was held by the military after the 1980 coup in Turkey.

At one time the jailor required Belge and other political prisoners to capture exactly one hundred flies every day and present them in the evening for inspection. On the occasions they failed they were required to eat the flies. 'Imagine having to eat ninety seven flies.'

Another time Belge was being tortured so badly that he gave way and agreed to sign a confession. He went to the next room with his torturer to sign a document. They both sat down at the table and the torturer's knee accidently brushed against his. Please excuse me, said the torturer most politely.

'Mind in nature'

Natasha Mitchell: I was interested to read that DH Lawrence talked about the mind in nature. It contrasted between what he described as a 'know it all' state of mind outside of nature and something different happening to the mind that interacts with the natural world. What did he mean by the 'know it all' state of mind? I think that's really interesting.

Richard Louv: Yes, I love that passage. He was writing about his experience of New Mexico. I had actually a park ranger tell me about the four corners of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Nevada, that nowhere on Earth or in few places on Earth was so much of the past so close to the surface. And the 'know it all' state of mind just assumes we've seen it all. You know, when we travel, 'been there, done that'. And what he was saying is that we can be fooled, we can fool ourselves into that belief, but underneath the surface of wherever we go are larger stories. I think that when you're in a natural environment you feel that more than anyplace else. I feel that natural history should be as important to a regions identity as human history, and that our sense of meaning and purpose and connection and place comes from natural history, not just human history.

-- from Nature Deficit Disorder on All in the Mind, ABC. Louv notes later in the programme:

David Sobel at Antioch in the US uses, 'ecophobia', that's the fear of environmental destruction. Sobel makes the point that we are programming our kids way too early to believe that the Earth is over, that nature is at an end

... [But] we're missing two-thirds of the story, [which] is that, because of those great changes, because of climate change et cetera, everything in the next 40 years must change. To any self-respecting creative 16-year-old, that could be good news, and we better be entering one of the most creative times in human history. That's exciting.

A reminder of the scale of just one of the challenges: the beaches on the most remote islands in the world's largest oceans are literally turning into plastic.

Ragnarök

Ash and lightning above Eyjafjallajökull. Photo by Marco Fulle via APOD.

Gold in the tar sands

[BP] Chief executive Tony Hayward received a 41% rise in his remuneration package in 2009 - meaning he took home about £4m in salary, bonus and share awards.

This was despite the firm seeing last year's profits fall by 45% to $13.96bn(£9.2bn).

-- from a BBC report, BP oil Canada plan faces shareholder vote.

Scolt Head Island

On 21 March I waded across Norton creek. An hour through marsh, sand and thick mud. This view, eastwards from the south side of the high dunes on the western part of the island, is towards towards Smuggler's Gap in the distance with Hut Marsh on the right:

And this is the view westward from the northern side the same dunes:

The view from those high dunes eastward and toward the sea:

Looking back to the high dunes from just above the beach on the northern side:

English Nature describes Scolt Head as "the prime example of an offshore barrier island in the UK...situated on a very dynamic coastline and...steadily growing westward."

Here is medieval glass showing the Man in the Moon at St Mary in Burnham Deepdale. A prayer on a pillar in the church begins: "O Thou who dwellest not in temples made with hands..." Scolt Head Island is right in front of you if you look north from the Saxon round tower of the church.


Snowdrops, still just about in flower in a spinney above Walsingham:

Later I wrote this.

Tell'em Paul

If we are going to be part of a third industrial revolution we are going to have to have a frank discussion about power.

All the power has been centred on finance and the financial model and, funnily enough, we have just hocked our entire economy to save that broken system.

-- Paul Mason

War games

By attacking without Washington's advance knowledge, Israel had the benefits of surprise and momentum - not only over the Iranians, but over its American allies - and for the first day or two, ran circles around White House crisis managers.

-- from Imagining an Israeli attack on Iran.

Roger Cohen notes a shift in thinking in the U.S.

Worse than a crime

Marc Thiessen's Courting Disaster embraces horrible, foolish crimes. In letting these go, Jane Meyer reminds us, the Obama administration has made a grave mistake:

By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it.

That's not entropy, man

John Gray finds fault with Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization (review). Some of his points may be well taken. But he says something rather odd:

How could human empathy possibly defeat the force of entropy, an irreversible physical process?

It seems Gray equates behaviour by human groups, nations and civilisations as a whole, and the outcomes of those behaviours, with the second law of thermodynamics. Eh? A defining characteristic of humanity and indeed life in general is that it/they exist despite the second law by using energy from outside the immediate system of which they are part (i.e. from the sun and to a lesser extent radioactivity from inside the earth).

It is not hard to find grounds for pessimism regarding progressive action on climate change and much else. But entropy is not the issue. If there is to be progress it is likely to be grounded on a whole lot of rational self interest, including the possibility that there is more money and power to be derived from generating and using energy in smarter ways. And there may, even, be a role for empathy.

Where the grickle grass grows...

Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. In their shadows, the glazed eyes of the street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the car. Our excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in the US could actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the earth. The statistics are staggering – 40sq miles of the 139sq mile inner city have already been reclaimed by nature.

-- Julien Temple

" 'Reality' is dispensable"

The message of what is now James Cameron's most popular movie thus far, and the biggest-grossing movie in history—like the message of so much else in mass culture just now—is...that "reality" is dispensable altogether; or, at the very least, whatever you care to make of it, provided you have the right gadgets. In this fantasy of a lusciously colorful trip over the rainbow, you don't have to wake up. There's no need for home. Whatever its futuristic setting, and whatever its debt to the past, Avatar is very much a movie for our time.

-- from The Wizard by Daniel Mendelsohn.

Cameron see things differently. When Andy Revkin asks, why build a fantasy world? he replies:

People connect to that world, to the Na’vi and Na’vi philosophy, but it really is about reconnecting with our own world here. That’s how I see science fiction, functioning as a kind of a mirror. It’s often talked of as prophetic. But it’s generally been pretty lousy at predicting the actual future. To me, it allows us to step outside our own parochial interests and lets us look back at ourselves, at human nature, at the way we do things, without all the normal guilt-inducing buttons.

'A very good election to loose'

In the general gloom I have only one piece of potentially good news, and even that might be wishful thinking. The bank bonuses this year are so grotesque that there are only two explanations for them. One is that investment banking culture truly is psychotic, in the strict sense of being out of touch with reality. That’s possible. The other explanation is that, as a French economist said to me when the crunch kicked in, ‘It’s over.’ He meant the whole obscene-bonus culture, the model in which the banks’ shareholders let the bankers pay themselves half what the bank ‘earns’, in the context of a regulatory and political framework in which the banks are allowed to do whatever they like. The proposals now being touted do not guarantee systemic safety, but taken together they will, for sure, make the system much less profitable. Maybe, just maybe, the bankers are pigging out this year because they suspect this is the last of the good times. If we’re looking for a glint of silver lining, does that count?

from The Great British Economy Disaster by John Lanchester

Mountain

I do not think that Yucca Mountain is a solution or a problem. I think that what I believe is that the mountain is where we are, it's what we now have come to -- a place that we have studied more thoroughly at this point than any other parcel of land in the world -- and still it remains unknown, revealing only the fragility of our capacity to know.

-- from About a Mountain by John D'Agata. Reviews: LA Times, NY Times

Chagos

I've written a short note for ourKingdom here.

P.S. 2 March: a view from Greenpeace

The Murdoch Crime Family

Berlusconi's Italy is not such a distant nightmare in Cameron's Britain

says Henry Porter.

Innovation and innovation

The deeper and more pernicious problem with Gates’ framing is the implication that technology is where we innovate; in all other areas of life, we just ... manage. This taps into some deep archetypes that are worth digging up...

Innovations in the way we think, interact, and structure our lives require just as much imagination, intelligence, persistence, and funding as innovations in technology.

-- David Roberts

Curious Werner

Hat tip: Dan Colman, openculture.com

Special problems

A few days ago it was reported that a US military jet had succeeded in using a laser to hit a missile. By coincidence or in connection with this, NPR rebroadcast an interview with David E. Hoffman, author of The Dead Hand, which reminds how societies ostensibly committed to life and freedom carry with them a shadow of death and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale. [1] Lessons from the first 'Star Wars' are still worth attention:

there's been a long myth that Reagan's Star Wars forced the Soviet Union to collapse, forced it into bankruptcy. But that's not really what happened. Certainly, Reagan's vision gave them a fright, but in the end, Reagan didn't build it, the Soviet Union didn't build one, and the Soviet Union imploded of its own weight and its own failures.

Inevitably, given the audience for the program, Iran was a focus of the presenter's questions. But other states, including China and Israel, are likely pursuing special projects too.



[1] see transcript

The future of the IPCC

A New Scientist editorial suggests:

• keep intergovernmental status
• more studies on special topics (e.g. geo engineering, carbon sinks)
• yearly reports
• much more open discussion and transparency

The almost infinite game

The number of legal chess positions is 1040, the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy.

-- Gary Kasparov

Democracy now

Corporation to run for U.S. Congress: press release and video

Grief

Thoughtful piece . Striking story

South

Immigrants come to Italy to do jobs Italians don’t want to do, but they have also begun defending the rights that Italians are too afraid, indifferent or jaded to defend. To those African immigrants I say: don’t go — don’t leave us alone with the mafias.

-- Roberto Saviano

'Where language is corrupted...'

Waterboarding is not now and never has been, under any legal, moral or historical authority, an interrogation technique. No one can be "interrogated" with a cloth across their face and water poured over them to bring them to the point of drowning 183 times. They can merely be tortured, and then their broken psyche can be questioned.

That the NYT, that Isaacson and Tanenhaus, two decent and intelligent and humane people, should now be forced by style manuals to say that torture is something else, suggests how far we've come. And how fast.

-- Andrew Sullivan

Holes in the sky

Nature has a useful overview of The Real Holes in Climate Science. In 2007, the IPCC highlighted 54 key uncertainties:

...such [uncertainties] do not undermine the fundamental conclusion that humans are warming the climate, which is based on the extreme rate of the twentieth-century temperature changes and the inability of climate models to simulate such warming without including the role of greenhouse-gas pollution. The uncertainties do, however, hamper efforts to plan for the future. And unlike the myths regularly trotted out by climate-change denialists..., some of the outstanding problems may mean that future changes could be worse than currently projected...

An accompanying editorial says:

...Perhaps the most important lesson is that researchers must be frank about their uncertainties and gaps in understanding — but without conveying the message that nothing is known or knowable...

On 'future changes worse than currently projected,' see this.

Two more on Haiti

Andy Kershaw and Nicholas Kristof

Two on Haiti

When the media is the disaster - Rebecca Solnit

Suffering - George Packer. Acts of God and Man

System failure (4)

The last few weeks of political developments around the American-European financial system make us feel like we are back in the USSR. During the final years of communism’s decline, Soviet bureaucrats argued for futile tweaks to laws that would crack down on speculators and close “loopholes” – all in the vain hope they could keep the unproductive system of incentives intact. The US, UK and key European countries are now making the same error.

-- Peter Boone and Simon Johnson

Related: System Failure (3), (2), (1)

'This is your father and this is your mother'

An AK-47 gives you so much power when you hold it in your hand. With this thing I can shoot an elephant down. With this thing I'm equal as an adult, I can make an adult scream and beg for mercy. And the way it was brought to us was we were told: "this is your father and this is your mother". And it kind of makes sense. When you have an AK-47 you will not go hungry, you eat anywhere you pass, any village that you go to - you just sit under the tree and people will bring you food. That's the power it had. When you don't have it you become like a child again, you become vulnerable.

-- Emmanuel Jal, interviewed on ABC. But Jal found a way out:

When I was smuggled into Kenya [to go to school] by Emma [McCune], I still have the anger and desire to kill even in cold blood. When she takes me out with Muslim friends, some would say my name is Mohammad or like this. I feel like taking that fork or the knife and jumping at their throat and doing something. But luckily you know Kenya became a transforming area to help me to forgive. But you know when I visit my family the wounds are scratches that have healed and I feel the pain again and I tend to forget I forgave and I want to pick an AK-47 again to go and fight. Then part of my brain tells me no, this is not about Muslims, it's not about Arabs, what is killing you is the oil. So, because I discovered the truth oil is what is killing us, and it's the religion has been manipulated to mobilise people because...so they get what they want. And so now I know the truth, should I continue hating or not? And so that's where I have to keep on struggling when I get really mad and have to suppress it.

Photo: (Congo/Rwanda) Marcus Bleasdale

Dismal, utterly dismal or moderately cheerful

As the extent of the devastation in Haiti was becoming clearer, I happened to be listening to Al Bartlett talking to Tim Harford and giving his own gloss on three theorems of Kenneth Boulding:

"The Dismal Theorem"- If the only ultimate check on the growth of population is misery, then the population will grow until it is miserable enough to stop its growth.

"The Utterly Dismal Theorem" - This theorem states that any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for so long as misery is the only check on population, the [technical] improvement will enable population to grow, and will soon enable more people to live in misery than before. The final result of [technical] improvements, therefore, is to increase the equilibrium population which is to increase the total sum of human misery.

"The moderately cheerful form of the Dismal Theorem" - Fortunately, it is not too difficult to restate the Dismal Theorem in a moderately cheerful form, which states that if something else, other than misery and starvation, can be found which will keep a prosperous population in check, the population does not have to grow until it is miserable and starves, and it can be stably prosperous.

Haiti, of course, is relatively self-contained and the situation may be salvageable through the efforts and wisdom of its own people, together with concerted external support. A nightmare is that Haiti's cycles of vulnerability, misery and destruction are a small prefiguring the global future for a civilisation that does not evolve to realise the moderately cheerful theorem.

'War is god'

Joe Penhall argues that in some respects The Road is McCarthy's most optimistic novel:

His other books give the impression that he thinks inhumanity is intrinsic. Those books are about the worst, the extent of man's inhumanity. The Road is very much about the best. It seems to be very autobiographical - a clever love story about McCarthy and his son, who was eight when he wrote it - but thrown into this post-apocalyptic landscape.

Contrast this, spoken by the judge in Blood Meridian:

It makes no difference what men think of war...War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

Al Qaeda franchise

The attempted Christmas attack also put Al Qaeda’s resourcefulness on full display. In its third decade, under severe pressure, it has evolved into a jihadi version of an Internet-enabled direct-marketing corporation structured like Mary Kay, but with martyrdom in place of pink Cadillacs. Al Qaeda shifts shapes and seizes opportunities, characteristics that argue for its longevity. It will be able to wreak havoc periodically for as long as it can recruit suicide bombers and well-educated talent, as it has done consistently.

Yet Al Qaeda is also weakening. Osama bin Laden sought to lead the vanguard of a spreading revolution. Instead, he and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hunkered down, presumably along the Afghan-Pakistani border, surrounded by only about two hundred hard-core followers. Their adherents in Yemen and Africa number no more than a few thousand. Al Qaeda in Iraq is a tiny fragment of its former self. Bin Laden’s relations with the Taliban seem brittle. Unlike Hezbollah, Al Qaeda provides no social services and thus has built no political movement. Unlike Hamas, its bloody nihilism has attracted no states that are willing to defend its legitimacy. In a world of at least one and a half billion Muslims, this does not a revolution, or even a vanguard, make.

--Steve Coll.

Relating to Coll's observations on hysteria in the U.S, Mark Mardell has suggested that sometimes American media do Al Qaeda's job for it.

'Guantanamo reunited'

Here

$75bn doesn't buy a way out of stupidity

according to Tom Englehardt and Nick Turse

Under the sun

Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.

...The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

-- from Uncle Vanya (1897)

Last of the nijyuu hibakusha

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Writing in England

I think England is the very place for a fluent and firey writer. The highest hymns of the sun are written in the dark. I like the grey country. A bucket of Greek sun would drown in one colour the crowds of colour I like trying to mix for myself out of grey flat insular mud.

-- Dylan Thomas, Letter to Lawrence Durrell, December 1938

Fire from heaven

Testing of the LGM-118A Peacekeeper re-entry vehicles, all eight shot from only one missile. Each line represents the path of a warhead which, were it live, would detonate with the explosive power of twenty-five Hiroshima-style weapons.

A long way from chimpanzee aggressive display.

'The mirage is the traveler's book'

...Just as at nightfall
I say to my two friends
If there has to be a dream
Let it be like us and simple.
For example after two days
The three of us will dine
To fete our dream's premonition
That after two days not one of us will have been lost.

So let's celebrate in the moon's sonata
And make a toast to the lenience of death
Who saw the three of us happy together
And decided to look the other way.

I don't say, far way life is real with its imaginary places.
I say, life here is possible.

-- Mahmoud Darwish, by some oversight read by John Berger on BBC Radio 4 this morning.

(The line breaks are erratic as I haven't read the original, which is in any case only a translation...)

Iran

What we have to understand - and what I have come belatedly and painfully to grasp - is that our collective narcissism can be an obstacle to successful statesmanship. In blunter terms: This is not about us. In so far as we have made Iran about us, we have added mountains to the landscape of human misery and pain. This is a struggle for the Iranian people, a long, brutal, bitter struggle. We should do all we can to support them, without the neocon grandstanding that actually helps the regime rather than hurts it. But we have to understand our limits.

-- Andrew Sullivan reflects on U.S., Israel and Iran.

P.S. Gideon Rachman asks how long can the Iranian government last? and guesses it will fall before the end of 2010

Writing that works

These two small examples may not work for everybody but they work for me:

Coppice hornbeams seem to gesture like hands thrown up generously, or the ash coppice like fingers thrust up through mud -- the fingers of a drowning man. Hazel coppice like sea anemones. I snorkel through.

-- Roger Deakin

The valley sinks into mist, and the yellow orbital ring of the horizon closes over the glaring cornea of the sun. The eastern ridge blooms purple, then fades to inimical black. The earth exhales in the cold dusk. Frost forms in hollows shaded from afterglow. Owls wake and call. The first stars hover and drift down.

-- J A Baker

African future

Africa's population, 110 million in 1850, passed 1 billion in 2009. It is projected to reach 1.9 billion by 2050. For optimists the second half of the 21st century may be African.

Hidden

Peter Bradshaw thinks Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is one of the best films of the decade. He may be right. Few films resonate as this one does.

It's suggested that this deceptively simple photo by August Sander provides a link:


The subject's uniform and helmet grab the modern viewer's attention. But the background -- the specific context (perhaps his home village?)-- is also a vital part of the image. And the young face can be interpreted in many ways. As for the fate of this individual, what do we know?

Writing in 1931 -- some years before this picture was taken, of course -- Walter Benjamin dryly observed of the early stages of Sander's great project:

Work like Sander's could assume an unlooked-for topicality.

Benjamin also quotes Goethe:

There is a delicate empiricism that so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.

P.S. 30 Dec: In the NYT, A.O. Scott is sniffy about this film:

Forget about Weimar inflation and the Treaty of Versailles and whatever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse. Or maybe by the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings.

But the film allows for, indeed encourages a more complex view: not a case of either (historical determinism) or (human weakness), but both.

A great game

Rory Stewart thinks Obama is playing poker in Afghanistan as well as his hand allows. The situation is not that of Iraq in 2006 or Afghanistan in 1988, but neither is it Afghanistan in 1842, still less in 330 BC.

'Progressive imprisonment without parole'

This cockroach-like existence is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable. "Cockroach" is of course an allusion to Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into an insect. The point of the story is as much the responses and incomprehension of his family as it is the account of his own sensations, and it is hard to resist the thought that even the best-meaning and most generously thoughtful friend or relative cannot hope to understand the sense of isolation and imprisonment that this disease imposes upon its victims. Helplessness is humiliating even in a passing crisis—imagine or recall some occasion when you have fallen down or otherwise required physical assistance from strangers. Imagine the mind's response to the knowledge that the peculiarly humiliating helplessness of [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] is a life sentence (we speak blithely of death sentences in this connection, but actually the latter would be a relief).

-- from Night by Tony Judt.

Newspeak

Chinese authorities convict Liu Xiabo to 11 years and declare 2009 the “year of citizens’ rights.”

P.S. As Perry Link has noted, Charter 08 (of which Liu Xiabo is a principal author) invokes in its opening paragraphy the rights that should accrue to all Chinese citizens according to China’s own constitution:

The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.

An aura

What is an aura, in fact? A gossamer fabric woven of space and time: a unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close at hand. Lying back on a summer's afternoon, gazing at a mountain range on the horizon or watching a branch as it casts its shadow over the beholder, until the moment or the hour shares in the manifestation -- that is called breathing in the aura of those mountains, that branch.

-- from Brief history of photography by Walter Benjamin. (1931)

The whole shebang

'Cockup or conspiracy?'

Some will always believe that Tony Blair took the country to war in Iraq on a lie, but the most damning charge emerging from the Iraq war inquiry so far is that Britain went to war on a wing and a prayer.

-- Patrick Wintour summarizes the Chilcott inquiry so far.

Good COP bad COP

Joe Smith is cautiously optimistic about COP15. But Mark Lynas says the Chinese broke it.

Some sensible voices and others give a view here.

Evan Osnos has previously noted that If China’s emissions keep climbing as they have for the past thirty years, the country will emit more greenhouse gases in the next thirty years than the United States has in its entire history.

Winking at the brim

The great age of Islamic literature, much...was devoted to wine. There's a line I came across in Rumi: "The wine is intoxicated with me, not me with the wine."

-- Roger Scruton on Start the Week

The rising of the sun and the running of the deer

Sometimes this year I've felt as if I was up to my ears in quick setting concrete. One of the things that has helped has been to get out on the river and kayak. I've done this in all weathers but it's especially good when the sun is bright and the air is clear. And so it was this afternoon near the turning point of the year. On the main channel the bare trees were in glory, a crescent moon was high in the blue, and I followed a kingfisher looping from one bough to another, trying to get away from me as I shucked my boat through the water.

Mostly when paddling I listen to the sounds around me but sometimes -- especially when I want to put some welly into the strokes -- I listen to music. And today I thought back over the music I've been listening to this year.

Impossible to remember or summarize it all. I enjoyed a new version by Keane of Under Pressure produced by my friend Kenny Young on Rhythms del Mundo Classics. It's a fitting tribute to the original -- one of the great songs of its time, sung by perhaps the least introverted Zoroastran who ever lived. The main point is in the two words at the climax: "give love". Jack Johnson's version of Imagine on the same album is good too.

I understood a little better the greatness of Shostakovitch. The allegro of the tenth symphony, which I imagine to be a portrait of Stalin. The second movement of the eighth string quartet: one of the most terrifying things ever written (although you really have to hear it played live and played well to get this). The weird, haunted ending of the fifteenth symphony.

Now we have a two year old we are doing the Christmas thing. It's part of the cultural baggage, it has good stories for children, and I can just about take some parts of it in small doses as metaphors and images for things that matter. The stories are no more real than the sunset in a Van Gogh painting is real, but some of them do speak. For example, the most precious thing can sometimes be found in the most humble place.

Today I was listening to band called Kerfuffle who have a fresh version of The Sussex Carol:

On Christmas night all Christians sing
To hear the news the angels bring.
News of great joy, news of great mirth,
News of our merciful King's birth.

Then why should men on earth be so sad,
Since our Redeemer made us glad,
When from our sin he set us free,
All for to gain our liberty?

When sin departs before His grace,
Then life and health come in its place.
Angels and men with joy may sing
All for to see the new-born King.

All out of darkness we have light,
Which made the angels sing this night.
"Glory to God and peace to men,
Now and for evermore, Amen!"

Carols like this and the great medieval English lyrics bring something of the past to life so that it is not really past. They embody what T.S. Eliot called "a condition of complete simplicity costing nothing less than everything." Or, as my two year eight month old daughter said after I played this one to her again this evening, "that was a lovely music."

Some Middle English lyrics are less simple but no less direct. Take this from the fifteenth century:

I shall say what inordinat love is:

The furiositie and wodness of minde,

A instinguible brenning fawting blis,

A gret hungre, insaciate to finde,

A dowcet ille, a ivell swetness blinde,

A right wonderfulle, sugred, swete errour

Withoute labour rest, contrary to kinde,

Or withoute quiete to have huge labour.

Birdsong is sparse at this time of year. How much will we have in the spring? We know that songbird numbers continue to fall. Conservation efforts in Britain may be worth little absent a better scenario for climate change than looks likely and reduced pressure on migrants elsewhere, not least in Africa (or, in the case of the lapwing, regions such as the Near East).

Added 23 Dec: Over their short lifetimes many migratory birds fly a distance equivalent to that between earth and the moon. Some people call them courageous.

(Related post: Fear and trembling)

Facing death

...it is not fear as such, because I am not afraid of what might happen to me; I think I would accept it, for I have accepted many hard things, and I'm not one to back away from a challenge. But I fear that my beautiful dream may never be brought to fruition, may never be realized. I'm not afraid for myself but for something beautiful that might have been.

-- from the journal of Hélène Berr, quoted by Ian Buruma.

How Israel lost

As prophesied long ago by the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz and others, the occupation -- and above all the settlement project -- have profoundly eroded the moral fiber of Israel, corroded central institutions of the society and undermined our integrity as a political community. None of this happened in a vacuum; the "other side" has much to atone for as well. But even I can remember a time when charges of war crimes were not simply sloughed off by Israel's leaders, when military mistakes that cost innocent civilian lives were acknowledged as such and elicited expressions of sorrow, and when Israeli courts clearly articulated the principle that a soldier has not only the right but indeed the duty not to carry out an order that is at odds with his consciousness as a human being or with basic human values.

-- from Israel without illusions by David Schulman.

P.S. Mustafa Barghouthi

Getting on with it after the fiasco

Wise heads such as John Schellnhuber have predicted for months if not years that COP15 would end in failure. [1] But the fact that even pretensions to a minimal global deal are unmet at least makes the scale of the challenges clearer than ever. And rather than tearing out hair (see the comment from Save the Children here) it's time to get on with what is achievable in the circumstances. [2] Individual countries can still move in the right direction. Sectoral deals are possible. Mike Hulme had this to say back in November:

One of the arguments I make about Copenhagen is that we’ve stitched together so many concerns – quite serious and real concerns – under one umbrella [namely, the reduction of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere]. It’s a bit like the Rubik’s Cube that came out some years ago. There are so many different combinations that I could never solve it. And this is what we’ve created with Climate Change. A Rubik’s Cube that we can’t solve. Whereas if we begin to tease out the various elements of the problem – the problems of development, the problems of adaptation, the problems of short-lived greenhouse gasses like methane or black soot, separate those out from the problems of long-lived CO2, we could find a much easier set of pathways.

Evan Osnos has a good piece on China's energy and technology choices.

Footnotes

[1] (Added 16.00) described by one delegate as "carefully managed collapse".

[2] (added 21 Dec) including harder campaigning. See, for example, Johann Hari

Heat

In a note from Stupid TV, Franny Armstrong quotes Climate Interactive's assessment that current proposals at COP15 would mean a 3.9C temp rise which would which would equate to something like:

- Africa uninhabitable
- Southern Europe a desert
- Australian agricultural system wiped out
- All coral reefs gone
- Most forests gone

But as John Sterman has explained, there's a significant probability, perhaps 50%, that temperature rise could be higher than that. This applies for 2 C as well:

there is a real risk of what we call “eroding goals” — of slipping what we strive for in the face of difficulty. Since when is a 50/50 chance of limiting warming to 2 °C by 2100 acceptable as a target? Sure, that’s better than doing nothing, but who thinks playing Russian roulette with half the chambers loaded is a good gamble? To limit the chance that warming will exceed 2 °C by 2100 to no more than, say, 5%, emissions would have to fall even farther and faster than the “Low Emissions” path... That’s still like playing Russian roulette with 1 in 20 chambers loaded. Who among us would play that game? Who among us would play that game when the gun is pointed not at our heads, but at our childrens’?

P.S. 18.05: supposedly the UN draft means 3 C

Words and deeds

Further to footnote [2] of War and law, consider this from George Packer:

In his address, Obama said, “When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, or repression in Burma, there must be consequences,” and he added, “We will bear witness to the quiet dignity of reformers like Aung San Suu Kyi; to the bravery of Zimbabweans who cast their ballots in the face of beatings; to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran.” This was the least convincing passage of the speech: so far, there have been no consequences in places like Darfur, and bearing witness—or at least such low-key witness—to Iranian protesters has done nothing to sway the mullahs. The weakness of Obama’s strategic flexibility is that it depends so heavily on practical skill, above all in diplomacy, a field in which America has lost its touch over the past two decades. Failure will seem like a failure of vision and principle.

American pressure on Egypt to tighten the blockade on Gaza is also inconsistent with Obama's vision.

'More than an army'

A profile of Erik Prince. Jeremy Scahill adds context.

A wider vision

So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly inreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. "Let us focus," he said, "on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions." A gradual evolution of human institutions.

-- Barack Obama in his Nobel prize acceptance speech. [Emphasis added] And yes this is right, but Obama still has a blind side:

Our problem is that the Obama Administration seems to want both impunity and oblivion. That won’t work—if nothing else, it’s unworthy of us as a nation.

The fix

Oliver Morton has a first rate overview of geoengineering in Prospect. A clearer and more sensible piece is hard to imagine. An excerpt:

Shortly after Paul Crutzen’s 2006 article, Tom Wigley...looked at ways of combining emissions reduction and sunlight reduction. Wigley suggested that sulphates might be squirted into the stratosphere in the near term as a way to slow the rate of warming and buy time for the massive and costly industrial shift to alternative energy. Wigley’s “buying time” approach has not enjoyed much enthusiasm from other researchers, who fear that it will reduce the sense of urgency needed to drive emissions elimination. The Royal Society report spoke for many in treating geoengineering techniques only as an insurance policy. But this is also inconsistent. Rejecting the Wigley scenario reflects a view that political decision-making cannot summon the nuanced, self-disciplined approach needed to geoengineer a little without losing your commitment to reducing emissions a lot. The “Plan B” scenario rests on a political process with characteristics just as unlikely: it requires schemes to be researched in depth but to stay unused until (but only until) some unspecified assessment commanding international political assent deems disaster imminent but not unavoidable. Good luck with that.

About two years ago I spent about six months trying to persuade New Scientist to let me write a feature on this topic. They didn't agree, and in any case I doubt I could have written anything as good as this.

The Sakharov Prize

has been awarded to Memorial. There is still hope in the idea of Europe and 'the European project' at its best.

For some context see Orlando Figes here and here, and an interview with Ludmila Alexeyeva at openDemocracy.

War and law

A few days I contributed a comment to OurKingdom regarding Sir John Scarlett's comments to the Chilcot inquiry. As I said at the time (10 Dec), I had little to offer at that moment except sarcasm.

Several things have come to light since then, not least Tony Blair's statement that he would have found another pretext for invasion if not WMD. Jonathan Steele says:

Apart from WMD there was no other conceivable [legal] foundation for an invasion. Using force to produce regime change on humanitarian grounds is not permissible under international law, and the attorney general told Blair as much in July 2002. [1]

There's a chorus to condemn Blair now. It remains the case, however, that having no foundation in law to remove a regime on humanitarian grounds is not a satisfactory state of affairs. Governments that commit appalling large scale crimes ought to be vulnerable to removal by force approved under international law...at or very close to the time that those crimes are committed. [2]


[1] P.S. see also Hans Blix and Ken Macdonald

[2] In his Nobel acceptance speech, Barack Obama observed that the conditions that led doctrines such as a 'responsibility to protect' in the 1990s and early 2000s have not gone away:

wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

The prospects for co-ordinated international humanitarian action have, however, deteriorated.

Afpakinam

For George McGovern it's déjà vu all over again. Scott Atran argues:

We need to bring [a] perspective to Afghanistan and Pakistan...that is smart about cultures, customs and connections. The present policy of focusing on troop strength and drones, and trying to win over people by improving their lives with Western-style aid programs, only continues a long history of foreign involvement and failure. Reading a thousand years of Arab and Muslim history would show little in the way of patterns that would have helped to predict 9/11, but our predicament in Afghanistan rhymes with the past like a limerick.

Last week, Tom Englehardt mapped nine surges in Afghanistan.

Prussia and Israel

Uri Avnery sees similarities

System failure (3)

Paul Krugman writes that the U.S. Republican party is committed to a bankrupt ideology. But, Frank Rich notes, the failure goes deeper than the relationship of just one political party to the financial industry.

Those at the top are separated from the consequences of their actions. They are exemplified by Robert Rubin, formerly of Citigroup and a mentor to both Obama’s Treasury secretary and chief economic adviser. He looked the other way when his bank made ruinous high-risk bets, and then cashed out and split, leaving taxpayers to pay for the wreckage while he escaped any accountability.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the financial industry has spent $344 million on lobbying in the first three quarters of 2009.

Zombies and window dressing

Ben Goldacre makes several useful points about popular reactions to climate change including the following:

* The public know that evidence-based policy is window dressing for the government, so now, when they want us to believe them on climate science, we tend to be suspicious

*contrarians use 'zombie arguments', which survive to be raised again, for eternity, no matter how many times they are shot down.

Myles Allen notes of journalists on the CRU hack:

Even if they were reporting on Berlusconi's sex life they would be more careful...But it's only climate change.

Clive James, perhaps suffering from road rage, tells us that 'science is never settled'. Would that apply to evolutionary theory, Clive? To the germ theory of disease? To the heliocentric model of the solar system?

Tragedy and climate change

There is something genuinely tragic about the whole question of climate change. Whilst we know there are political ramifications, we know people are responsible, we know there’s culpability and all of that, at the same time it is a genuine tragedy to me in the sense that it’s something that we’ve all inherited, it’s something that we didn’t necessarily set into motion knowingly and it’s disproportionate in its impact...This sense of there being this long secret waiting to be discovered under the ice or in the atmosphere and it then was discovered too late and responded to too late.

-- the playwright Steve Waters, interviewed by Robert Butler at Ashdenizen

Related post: Climate change, poetry and tragedy

Humility

He took pleasure in copying the work of Millet, Delacroix, Courbet, Rembrandt, and writes to his brother Theo that copying "teaches, and above all, consoles". This is the humility of greatness.

-- Margaret Drabble on Vincent Van Gogh

Beyond 'evil'

Andrew Sullivan posts an excerpt of a response from the DiA blog commenting on the interview with a suicide bomber that he described as 'evil'. DiA is right to go into depth here. DiA concludes:

[American] Bombs can only do so much. Long after the bulk of American troops have left the region, Pakistani moderates will still be fighting the long war of ideas. And there is no guarantee that they will win.

Two comments on that: 1) American bombs probably only make things worse; and 2) No there is no guarantee the moderates in Pakistan will win. Indeed, it looks at least as likely that people with the mentality of this would-be suicide bomber will get their hands on nuclear weapons, or rather that their handlers will.

'No conscious intention'

[Sir John Scarlett] denied being under pressure to "firm up" the September 2002 dossier which contained the claim Iraq could use Weapons of Mass Destruction within 45 minutes of Saddam's order. But he said it would have been "better" to have made clear it referred to battlefield munitions not missiles.

Tony Blair wrote in the introduction to the dossier that it was "beyond doubt" that Saddam could hit British targets with biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes.

No conscious intention was involved. Perhaps the Holy Ghost intervened.

Remainforest

Nepstad et al think an end to deforestation in the Amazon is possible.

Norway: one billion points

Coming soon?

Is Andrew Sullivan right on a looming US Israel split?

Only to see

I found the poems in the fields

And only wrote them down.

-- John Clare, quoted by Roger Deakin

Priorities

Minimum amount the US military has spent since 1985 on attempts to develop a missile shield: $150,000,000,000.

Factor by which this exceeds spending on the Apollo moon landing and the Manhattan project combined: 5

Rank of global warming among national priorities cited by Americans in a January poll: 20

Percentage of Americans and Chinese, respectively, who think action on global warming is worth it even if prices rise as a result: 41, 88

from Harper's Index, Harper's, Dec 2009

from a Nature editorial on CRU hack

...The paranoid interpretation [of climate change denialists] would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real - or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails...

...In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings - and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition. After all, the pressures the UEA e-mailers experienced may be nothing compared with what will emerge as the United States debates a climate bill next year, and denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.

-- Complete text here.

On the brink

RBS ups the ante

A history and a future of lies

It does not make me feel any better about those who willfully distort and misrepresent climate science to know that there are even worse liars around.

In Russia, for example, as John Sweeney reports, official textbooks say that Britain was appeasing the Nazis in 1940 and 1941, and airbrush out the millions who died in the famines and the gulags.

P.S. Sweeney relays a good Russian joke: "You never know what's going to happen yesterday".

Conspiracy!

It's a strange mindset indeed that brings Nick Griffin and Melanie 'only a theory' Philips together.

William Shaw, Brian Davey and Joe Smith explore aspects of the phenomenon.

Spencer Weart observes:

The theft and use of the emails does reveal something interesting about the social context. It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.

Ben Santer of the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has circulated this open letter to the climate science community:

Dear colleagues and friends,

I am sure that by now, all of you are aware of the hacking incident which recently took place at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). This was a criminal act. Over 3,000 emails and documents were stolen. The identity of the hacker or hackers is still unknown.

The emails represented private correspondence between CRU scientists and scientists at climate research centers around the world. Dozens of the stolen emails are from over a decade of my own personal correspondence with
Professor Phil Jones, the Director of CRU.

I obtained my Ph.D. at the Climatic Research Unit. I went to CRU in 1983 because it was - and remains - one of the world's premier institutions for studying the nature and causes of climate change. During the course of my Ph.D., I was privileged to work together with exceptional scientists - with people like Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, and Sarah Raper.

After completing my Ph.D. at CRU in 1987, I devoted much of my scientific career to what is now called "climate fingerprinting", which seeks to understand the causes of recent climate change. At its core, fingerprinting is a form of what people now call "data mining" - an attempt to extract information and meaning from very large, complex climate datasets. The emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit are now being subjected to a very different form of "data mining". This mining is taking place in the blogosphere, in the editorial pages of various newspapers, and in radio and television programs. This form of mining has little to do with extracting meaning from personal email correspondence on complex scientific issues. This form of mining seeks to find dirt - to skew true meaning, to distort, to misrepresent, to take out of context. It seeks to destroy the reputations of exceptional scientists - scientists like Professor Phil Jones.

I have known Phil for over 25 years. He is the antithesis of the secretive, "data destroying" character being portrayed to the outside world by the miners of dirt and disinformation. Phil Jones and Tom Wigley (the second Director of the Climatic Research Unit) devoted significant portions of their scientific careers to the construction of the land component of the so-called "HadCRUT" dataset of land and ocean surface temperatures. The U.K. Meteorological Office Hadley Centre (MOHC) took the lead in developing the ocean surface temperature component of HadCRUT.

The CRU and Hadley Centre efforts to construct the HadCRUT dataset have been open and transparent, and are documented in dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers. This work has been tremendously influential. In my personal opinion, it is some of the most important scientific research ever published. It has provided hard scientific evidence for the warming of our
planet over the past 150 years.

Phil, Tom, and their CRU and MOHC colleagues conducted this research in a very open and transparent manner. Like good scientists, they examined the sensitivity of their results to many different subjective choices made during the construction of the HadCRUT dataset. These choices relate to such issues as how to account for changes over time in the type of thermometer used to make temperature measurements, the thermometer location, and the immediate physical surroundings of the thermometer. They found that, no matter what choices they made in dataset construction, their bottom-line finding - that the surface of our planet is warming - was rock solid. This finding was supported by many other independent lines of evidence, such as the retreat of snow and sea-ice cover, the widespread melting and retreat of glaciers, the rise in sea-level, and the increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. All of these independent observations are physically consistent with a warming planet.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. The claim that our Earth had warmed markedly during the 20th century was extraordinary, and was subjected to extraordinary scrutiny. Groups at the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina (NCDC) and at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York (GISS) independently attempted to reproduce the results of the Climatic Research Unit and the U.K. Meteorological Office Hadley Centre. While the NCDC and GISS groups largely relied on the same primary temperature measurements that had been used in the development of the HadCRUT dataset, they made very different choices in the treatment of the raw measurements. Although there were differences in the details of the three groups' results, the NCDC and GISS analyses broadly confirmed the "warming Earth" findings of the CRU and MOHC scientists.

Other extraordinary claims - such as a claim by scientists at the University of Alabama that Earth's lower atmosphere cooled since 1979, and that such cooling contradicts "warming Earth" findings - have not withstood rigorous scientific examination.

In summary, Phil Jones and his colleagues have done a tremendous service to the scientific community - and to the planet - by making surface temperature datasets publicly available for scientific research. These datasets have facilitated climate research around the world, and have led to the publication of literally hundreds of important scientific papers.

Phil Jones is one of the gentlemen of our field. He has given decades of his life not only to cutting-edge scientific research on the nature and causes of climate change, but also to a variety of difficult and time-consuming community service activities - such as his dedicated (and repeated) service as a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Since the theft of the CRU emails and their public dissemination, Phil has been subjected to the vilest personal attacks. These attacks are without justification. They are deeply disturbing. They should be of concern to all of you. We are now faced with powerful "forces of unreason" - forces that (at least to date) have been unsuccessful in challenging scientific findings of a warming Earth, and a "discernible human influence" on global climate. These forces of unreason are now shifting the focus of their attention to the scientists themselves. They seek to discredit, to skew the truth, to misrepresent. They seek to destroy scientific careers rather than to improve our understanding of the nature and causes of climate change.

Yesterday, Phil temporarily stepped down as Director of the Climatic Research Unit. Yesterday was a very sad day for climate science. When the forces of unreason win, and force exceptional scientists like Professor Phil Jones to leave their positions, we all lose. Climate science loses. Our community loses. The world loses.

Now, more than at any other time in human history, we need sound scientific information on the nature and causes of climate change. Phil Jones and his colleagues at CRU have helped to provide such information. I hope that all of you will join me in thanking Phil for everything he has done - and will do in the future - for our scientific community. He and his CRU colleagues deserve great credit.

With best regards,

Ben Santer

The Unequal States

In the US today, the Gini coefficient—a measure of the distance separating rich and poor—is comparable to that of China.

notes Tony Judt in an essay exploring the fate of social democracy in the United States. He quotes Adam Smith:

The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition...is...the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

Elizabeth Warren charts the death the American middle class.

What next?

The 'Thinker' and Female Figurine From Cernavodă, Danube Valley 5000-3500 BC

Never mind the science...

...We look out of the window and it’s very cold, it doesn’t seem to be warming.

says Benny Peiser.

Oh. That's alright then. For just a moment there I thought we should be paying attention to a report by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

Justin Hewitt has a great geo-engineering idea:

There are a good few meters between water levels at high and low tide and none of these places are flooding at high tide, so surely if we blow up the moon [sic] sea levels will be a constant somewhere between the 2 and a rise of 0.5m will still mean sea levels lower than they were at the previous high tide.

Hat tip: RB