Apes, spite and sympathy

I was dubious about reports of research said to show that 'spite is a uniquely human emotion'. But I haven't really thought my doubts through. It looks as if Neil Fairweather articulates one quite well in a letter to New Scientist:

Chimpanzees are incapable of spite, it seems...but researchers are having difficulty reconciling this with the idea that chimps do exhibit altruism. I suggest a simple explanation: spite is not the "evil twin that cannot be separated" from altruism, as researcher Keith Jensen puts it. Altruism is the tendency to do things that benefit others, at your own expense. Its opposite is miserliness. Spite is the tendency to attempt to harm those who have benefited in your stead. Surely its opposite is the tendency to attempt to help those who have suffered while you have gained. Is this not sympathy? If chimps show sympathy towards individuals who have been deprived for their benefit, but not spite towards those who have benefited from their loss, then there might be some explaining to do.

[For textbook nastyness, see reports of mass "execution" of gorillas in Congo.]

Pakistan: not a circle but a spiral

M Ilyas Khan 's commentary Pakistan's circular history is clear, concise and useful. But it omits at least one key factor. While Pakistani politics may have in some senses been going round in a circle, demographic, economic and environmental factors have not. So, for example, the population of what is now Pakistan (and in 1947 was Western Pakistan) has grown from about 30 to 35 million at independence to about 165 to 170 million today. Mobile phone use has exploded in the last five years or so. Such changes have the potential to rupture an apparently circular cycle of behaviour.

'Heretical thoughts'

To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass...so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land.

-- from Heretical thoughts about science and society by Freeman Dyson

[see also Artificial soil: quick and dirty]

[P.S. 14 August: Alun Anderson responds to Dyson here].

Warmer still?

...until now, [most] climate forecasters who worry about what greenhouse gases could be doing to climate...looked 100 years ahead, far enough so that they could safely ignore what's happening now. No more. In [ Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model], researchers take their first stab at forecasting climate a decade ahead with current conditions in mind. The result is a bit disquieting. Natural climate variability driven by the ocean appears to have held greenhouse warming at bay the past few years, but the warming, according to the forecast, should come roaring back before the end of the decade.

--from news report Humans and Nature Duel Over the Next Decade's Climate (Science, 10 August 2007). See also Ten-year climate model unveiled.

'Wonderland'

"Everything is broken, and there is total movement." -- Miren Eguiguren, a social worker in Caracas, as quoted by Ivan Bricoe in Venezuela: is Hugo Chávez in control?

Stalking horse

In a foreward to Europe’s Dirty Secret: Why the EU Emissions Trading Scheme isn’t working by Open Europe Max Andersson, a Green Party Member of the Swedish Parliament, the paper argues that

far from creating a credible basis for EU level action on climate change, the ETS has instead established a web of politically powerful vested interest groups, massive economic distortions and covert industrial subsidies...

...international action (whether through the EU or on a larger scale) should focus on setting tough and enforecable national targets for greenhouse gas reduction, but should leave decisions on how to reach those binding targets to individual countries. This would give national governments the flexibility to explore alternatives to emissions trading - most notably green taxes as part of their strategy for combating climate change.

Some criticisms of the shortcomings of the ETS are well taken (and have been previously highlighted elsewhere -- see, for example, ETS 'scandal'). The case for carbon taxes and (hence) a more predictable future price for carbon is gaining increasing support.

But there is at least one flaw in Open Europe's argument. Namely, "politically powerful vested interest groups, massive economic distortions and covert industrial subsidies" are as likely to manipulate national jurisdictions as supranational ones such as the EU. Clearly this is something they have been able to do in the past.

A trading system such as the ETS needs reform (including of the amount of credit that can be purchased outside Europe) rather than abolition. Perhaps that reform can come in combination with carbon taxes as one of the first steps in a long journey from 2008. The key issues is political will.

[P.S. 10 August. A friend writes: "the ETS [is] in trouble as phase one didn't change behaviour much; much will hinge on phase II but I think the data systems are up now so the Commission should be able to set [National Allocation Plans] much more accurately which was the main problem which allowed 'politics' to overwhelm things."]

Japanese robot dance

Storm in New York

Interesting to read about the impact of yesterday's sudden storm on the New York transport system. In the early '90s my boss Crispin Tickell used to say say that a big hurricane in New York might be just what was needed to convince the Americans to get truly serious about climate change. Storms like this one could be a nudge in that direction, in the context of attitudes changing more widely.

The wild

"Our culture has been raised against the wild but in its own unlikely way, the snake finds a gap and slithers through". -- Paul Evans on Wenlock Edge

Inequality

In the Grandpont area of Oxford where I live we were concerned a couple of weeks ago about flooding after what may have been the the heaviest rains in a 24 hour period recorded in Britain. In the event we remained above the flood water. And, of course, our concerns seem ridiculously, even grotesquely petty and selfish compared to what is happening to some people in Bihar and other parts of South Asia. I heard one item on the radio last night which featured a grandmother and her family of nine somewhere in Bangladesh stranded on the roof of their hourse for the last five days with only a few kilos of rice.

[P.S. 9 August: Surviving on snails and rats in Bihar; 10 August: Extreme Floods Hit 500 Million People a Year - UN]

A Taliban failure?

NATO officials categorize the Taliban into two types of fighters. Tier one, as they are called, are hardened, ideologically driven men who have come back to fight from their rear base in Pakistan. Tier two fighters are local men who may join the war for a variety of reasons — economic, tribal or religious.

“The biggest change from last year to this year is there has been no tier two mobilization,” [Lt. Col. Stuart Carver, who commands the Battle Group North, ] said. “They have tried,” he said of the Taliban.

-- from Carlotta Gall's article British Make Initial Gains Against Taliban, which gives the impression that the British approach in Helmand is working.

See too this account from Sangin by Mark Townsend.

And see the view from Rory Stewart (extracted and linked at Kabul no bull).

[P.S. 9 August: British Criticize Air [U.S.] Attacks in Afghan Region]

U.S. climate policy basics

James Hansen has framed a Declaration of stewardship for U.S. political candidates. It calls for a moratorium on 'dirty coal', a 'fair' and gradually rising price on carbon emissions, and incentives for energy efficiency and conservation.

Anthropologists and mercenaries

Matthew D'Ancona picks up on the likes of David Kilcullen as part of a bright new hope in the Brown era. For greater detail and insight into Kilcullen's thinking see George Packer's article last December, Knowing the enemy (not at time of writing linked on Kilcullen's wikipedia page). For example:

Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden's public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. "I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?" he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that "this wasn't a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy."

This is useful stuff, but what keep in mind, too, some economic drivers for war for profit's sake:

In the case of Iraq, ...the US and UK governments could give the public the false impression that the occupation was being scaled down, while in reality it was simply being privatised.

Forest follies

In an article on Chinadialogue, Xinzhou Song of GreenBeijing.net describes some of the dangers of monocropping:

In the late 1950s, problems arose with the [man-made] Feibo forest reserve in Sichuan, which consisted of Burma Pines. The forest floor was covered with a thick layer of pine needles, which produced no compost and supported no organisms in the soil. Animals and other plants found it hard to survive in such an environment, leaving the forest floor dry and prone to regular forest fires. The soil was also eroded by rain.

Another forest, this time in Heilongjiang and consisting of larches, fell victim to an infestation of pine caterpillars in 2002. A railway operated by the Qiqihar Railway Bureau ran through the forest, and on June 1, several kilometres of the track were covered by a layer of caterpillars two to three inches thick. Passing trains mashed the larvae into a pulp that covered the tracks and stopped the trains...

...Of the more than 400,000 Chinese pines planted in Qingjian County, northern Shaanxi, only about 100 trees remain. The locals call them the “bandits of the hills”. In 2000, the city of Wuhai in Inner Mongolia decided to plant cypresses on 270 square metres of sand dunes. The result? The cypress trees died, and the sand dunes, which had been confined to one area, started to spread.

Stories

This morning I asked Hossein Derakhshan what his take was on a BBC report Death verdicts for Iran reporters. He replied this evening with a link to his new post Journalists or active members of armed separatist group.

Trobriand CC

Imagine it. Ricky Ponting is caught at square leg. The England team, all 57 of them, in war paint, feathers, flowers, some with spears, taunt the Australian captain as he begins the lonely trudge back to the pavilion. They surround him, humiliating him as he walks by, doing the octopus dance, waving their right hands in the air, to remind him that he has been caught. "The octopus is very sticky," they chant. "The ball sticks in my hand! In my hand! In my hand!" A mighty roar of approval goes up from the ecstatic Lords crowd, most of whom are topless ladies. See? Now that's what I call cricket.

-- from Sam Wollaston's review of an episode of Last Man Standing.

Dirty diggers

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg highlights a new book by Guy Pearse called High and Dry which looks as if it is well worth a read beyond Australia's shores too.

The strange love of Gordon Brown

Some but not all of what George Monbiot writes in [Gordon] Brown's contempt for democracy has dragged Britain into a new cold war looks about right. On the face of it, it does look sneaky, at best -- although not surprising -- that Des Browne disclosed that Menwith Hill will be used by the U.S for its missile defence system in a written statement just before Parliament went into recess. And the point about endless pork for American defence contractors has been well argued elsewhere.

But I wonder, among other things, about the claim that "the most likely strategic purpose of the [U.S] missile defence programme is to mop up any Russian or Chinese missiles that had not been destroyed during a pre-emptive U.S. attack". Arguing against this:

* (so far as I know) Russia has the capability to launch large numbers of missiles from submarines, and so has a retaliatory capacity not vulnerable to a pre-emptive attack of this kind. China may be in the same position within the next one or two decades -- the kind of timeframe on which the Pentagon is presumably planning -- if it is not already.

* Look at a globe rather than a flat map, and you'll see that the flight paths for missiles from Iran to most parts of the United States go over central Europe and the northern U.K., where the U.S. wants to locate the counter-measures. Missiles from Russia or China (assuming they were land-based in somewhere such as the Urals or remoter parts of China, which, as previously stated, they need not necessarily be) would more likely head over the 'top', in an arc from about Trondheim in Norway to about Opala in Kamchatka. (Dr Strangelove, we miss you!)

* listen to what they are actually saying: Rice has just repeated that the U.S. sees Iran as the biggest threat US[-Israeli] interests in the Mid-East. [The U.S. junta may be wrong in this -- imagine, as they say, how Americans would feel if the Soviet Union had occupied Canada and Mexico and had two or three battle groups just off Miami, and you may better understand how the Iranian theocracy/police-state sees the U.S presence on its borders at present -- but that does seem to be what they feel.]

* (and here's the 'I drank the Kool-Aid' bit) I think Gordon Brown may actually be serious about some returning powers to the Westminster Parliament, among other things, but is playing a careful game with regard to the U.S.-U.K. military-industrial complex.

Chinese floods

Xinhua is said to report that floods, mostly in southern and eastern China, have destroyed 452,000 homes and affected 119 million people. Chinese experts 'say the extreme weather conditions are all the result of climate change. The chief forecaster at China's meteorological administration, Wang Yongguang, said abnormal weather would continue to plague most parts of China this summer and in the years to come'.

So if this is what comes with about 0.7 C temperature rise, how will China cope with 2 or 3 C (see The New Normal)?

Even one of the least difficult, first best and most profitable options for reducing emissions -- increasing efficiency in the building stock -- seems to be beyond achievability in China at present (see Building for a cooler planet).

[See also Extreme weather brings flood chaos roud the world.]

The Last Laugh

A bullet wound is clean. Shrapnel will tear you all to pieces. He was laying there in a pool of blood. As we got to him, he said, ‘Shoot me.’ He was beyond all human aid. Before we could pull out the revolver to shoot him, he died. I was with him in the last seconds of his life.

-- Harry Patch, aged 109, on an incident at Passchendaele. Patch, who didn't speak about the war until he was 100 years old, says war is the "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings".

'We are walking repositories of the lost'

When we talk about ghosts, we are speaking in layers of metaphor. We are not usually speaking about wispy bodies in rotting shrouds, but about family secrets, buried impulses, unsolved mysteries, anything that lingers and clings. We are speaking of the sense of loss that sometimes overtakes us, a nostalgia for something that we can't name. There is a way in which the question "Do you believe in ghosts?" is unnecessary to ask: we all know a few, and they walk at all hours, if only through our memories. Our ancestors are encoded in our genes. Look at your face in the mirror, and one day you will see one of your parents, moving under your own skin; the next day it may be a grandparent who has come to visit. Within you, there are people you have never been able to mourn because you never knew them, people from the distant past; the traces of your animal ancestors still live in your instincts, in your physiology. As products of evolution, we carry all the past inside us; we are walking repositories of the lost.

-- from Ghost Writing by Hilary Mantel.

Unspeakable cataclysm

Development has not erased traditional values: in fact, selective abortion has been accelerating in a globalising India. Wealthier and better-educated Indians still want sons. A survey revealed that female foeticide was highest among women with university degrees. The urban middle classes can also afford the ultrasound tests to determine the sex of the foetus.

-- from Foetuses aborted and dumped secretly as India shuns baby girls by Randeep Ramesh. He notes that around 10 million girls are estimated to have been aborted in the past 20 years. An article earlier this week reported that there are thought to be over 11 million abandoned or orphaned children in India, 90% of them girls.

My reading list includes Martha Nussbaum's The Clash Within
Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future.

Hot tips from the Pontiff

For [Avraham Burg,] the so-called head of the Zionist movement to say all this—to say, ‘Get another passport for your kids,’ It’s like the Pope giving sex tips...

...The question is, is [Israel] a good enough place to come back to when they are married and have children? Finally, the Israeli government has to confront its own crazies and create a national consensus on democratic ideals, enact a secular constitution, and really confront the settlers. So far, the government is only willing to say that it is making ‘painful’ moves. We are told that we have to grieve with the settlers, think about making deals, but quietly let on that we actually think these are the real Israeli pioneers. Bullshit. Avrum Burg might not express the need to change in the most effective way, but at least he has the courage to insist on it.

-- Avishai Margalit, quoted by David Remnick in Letter from Jerusalem: The Apostate.

ETS 'scandal'

The power sector is especially annoying because it actually passes [the] costs on to the consumer, even though it doesn't actually pay for the permits, which are mostly given away in the EU system...They can pull this trick off because they are an oligopoly and don't face competition from producers outside the system. So even allowing for the permits that they have to buy because they are given fewer allowances than they need, the power companies profit from this by €1.8 billion.

-- from Emissions trading - notes on a scandal by Clive Bates.

(See also Tax not trade).

The good news from all this may be that the issue is extremely 'campaignable': not hard to construct a sense of political purpose around the outrage and (maybe) channel the energy into support of a tax regime that can serve the public good.

Some planet

On my way back from the library this afternoon I stopped by the Museum of the History of Science where, at about 3pm, just yards from objects from Tradescant's cabinet of curiosities and right next to Islamic and European sundials and astrolabes, Alexis Lemaire derived the 13th root of a 200 figure number in about 106 seconds, a new world record.

The 200 digit number he selected to derive a root from was one of several hundred generated randomly generated by a computer, but -- if I saw accurately -- the only one of which the last approximately 16 digits were zeros.

Lemaire describes some of his work and interests as follows:

Je prépare actuellement à Reims un doctorat en informatique sous la direction de Francis Rousseaux intitulé "Application de singularites de calcul mental vers la resolution de problèmes d'intelligence artificielle generale: test d'immortalité et test de Turing". Il s'agit de realiser un telechargement d'esprit reciproque entre l'esprit et un programme informatique (test d'immortalite) par l'imitation reciproque de moi-même ou d'une personne donnée par la machine, dans le cas du test de Turing cette personne est indéterminée.

Je suis computationniste, transhumaniste/posthumaniste et immortaliste.

L'objectif de la these est de permettre a terme d'atteindre la singularité technologique, l'immortalité, de realiser la téléportation et le voyage spatio-temporel.

Kabul, no bull

Rather than throwing more troops at Afghanistan and turning it into a second Iraq, we should use it as a model for a lighter, smarter approach.

-- says Rory Stewart (Where Less is More), reiterating a point he has been making since at least September last year (noted on this blog here), and probably much longer.

The new normal

Tibet is ' warming up faster than anywhere in the world'.

I heard that the Chinese national climate change strategy (which I have not read - aargh) assumes a 2 to 3 C temperature rise for 2050.

It was not climate change wot made them do it

Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable...that was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.

-- John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities, quoted in A Godsend for Darfur, or a Curse?, which looks at the implications of the underground megalake recently discovered beneath northern Darfur.

(See also It was climate change wot made me do it)

[P.S. 27 July Simon Donner finds there is no lake beneath Darfur]

Noticing

Some of the poems [by the monks of Enlli and places like it] read like jotted lists, or field-notes: 'Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent'...

...For these writers, attention was a form of devotion and noticing continuous with worship. The art they left behind them is among the earliest testimony to a human love of the wild.

-- from Robert Macfarlane's extract Island, published in Archipelago.

Homem do furo

...friends and family are gone. Everyone else you have ever known has vanished. Forever. The loneliness seems unimaginable. But this is reality for one solitary native Brazilian Indian living on a small island of Amazon rainforest amid a sea of cattle ranches and soya plantations.

Virtually nothing is known about him, except that he seems to be the last survivor of his group or people. He has been nicknamed the Man of the Hole because he digs holes a metre wide and 3 metres deep inside little houses that he builds from palm leaves. No one quite knows why he does this. Could they be bolt holes? He also builds huge holes lined with spikes in the nearby forest to trap large animals.

-- from New Scientist (also here).

Not denial, but short-termism

Much is made of irrationality and unwillingness of people in wealthy countries to change destructive consumption patterns. Hands are wrung over 'denial'.

And there plenty of is evidence that many if not most are willing to ignore evidence and cling to demonstrably false beliefs rather than face up to difficult realities, such as the need to reduce emissions rapidly. Paranoid conspiracy theories can be one of the ways in which people try to impose order on unpredictable events (see The Lure of the Conspiracy Theory).

But even in the most tooth-and-claw societies, people sometimes recognise the need for laws and government (see James Galbraith) that 'save' us from our own shorter term and more destructive desires, and the unethical businesses that feed the craving and so help create circumstances in which short-sighted behaviours are rewarded. Here are two examples.

In Fuel for thought James Surowiecki suggests that:

In calling for a law requiring better gas mileage in our cars...[U.S.] voters are really saying that they’re unhappy with the collective result of the choices they make as buyers. Sometimes, they know, we need to save ourselves from ourselves.

And in Obviation Not Generation (part of the Heat and Light NS supplement), Roger Levett suggested that:

[U.K. consumers taking advantage of absurdly cheap flights] had no trouble distinguishing sensible, individual action to exploit available opportunities from the question of whether those opportunities ought to be available.

[P.S. If this report in Mother Jones is right, it sounds as if John Edwards 'gets' this more than other candidates for the U.S. Democratic presidential candidacy. See also The Economist's profile of Edwards.]

Coming to a country near you

In the coming decades, close to 500,000 Afghani males will reach fighting age each year. Almost all of these young men want to prove themselves in the traditional warrior spirit of their homeland. Since 1945, every Afghan father who has retired from the battlefield has left his unfinished fighting to three or four sons. Almost none of these sons can find a legal job, i.e. in opium-free agriculture or within the army and police units financed with western money.

-- Gunnar Heinsohn, The demographics of rage.

I recall Emmanuel Todd, shortly after the publication of After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order back in 2001, making some disturbing projections for Pakistan on the basis of its demographic and sociological trends.

Ins Unbetretene

The most difficult of [our] three assignments is the first, which is to know what it is that we want. The problem is that we don't know who we are. We don't know any longer what it means to be a human. Almost every day there is some news from researchers that forces us to reevaluate a fundamental aspect of our existence. Are we different from animals? Are we even real? Is consciousness real, or special, or a mere commodity? Do we have limits, should we have limits?

--from The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life: Kelvin Kelly (Edge 217)

The edge of the Pakistani knife

It is true that the lawyers’ movement, if it destroys Musharraf, could create more problems than it solves. The fall of Musharraf could well lead to the rise of violent political Islam. I certainly believe that no civilian government on its own can put that genie back in the bottle. But, if idealism is naïveté, then so be it. It is ideals that move history forward—think of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Many thought they were politically naïve, but it was they, not the realists, who succeeded in changing the course of history.

-- Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher of the Friday Times, talking to William Dalrymple (Days of Rage).

[P.S. 16.30 BST: Meanwhile, Paul Rogers notes, the U.S. makes ready the Reaper.]

Business as usual

This cartoon from Tom Toles suggests he shares my puzzlement regarding the Murdoch/Bancroft hoo hah.

[P.S. 19 July Revealed: Blair's talks with Murdoch on eve of war and Open Secrets]

Six years on

in a dark and strikingly candid two pages...the National Intelligence Estimate suggests...the threat of terrorist violence against the United States is growing worse, fueled by the Iraq war and spreading Islamic extremism.

...[but] one...notable bright spot for the United States: jihadist sentiment has so far turned out to hold little attraction for American Muslims, by contrast with those in Europe generally and the United Kingdom in particular, with its large population of South Asian immigrants.

-- from 6 Years After 9/11, the Same Threat.

Brothers grim

Peter Galbraith writes:

We need to recognize...that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw. But there are still three missions that may be achievable -- disrupting al-Qaeda, preserving Kurdistan's democracy, and limiting Iran's increasing domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan. We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests. Unfortunately, we probably won't get it.

James Galbraith writes:

The function of the government...is to foresee [the] dangers [such as climate change, cultural infantalisation, etc.], and avert them. The powers of the government exist to permit the mobilization of resources required. And only government can hope to do the job.

This is bleak news not only in the present climate of thought, but also given the decay of the public sphere since at least 1981. Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today. A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush’s FEMA, is no one’s idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. Plainly the destruction of government—the turning over of regulation to predators, military functions to mercenaries, the Justice Department to a vote-suppression racket, and the Supreme Court to fanatics—has been the price of tolerating the Bush coup of November 2000. Soon we will face the aftermath of all this, with the fate of the earth in the balance.

Arctic tale

A film with some of my favourite animals -- reviewed here.

Does discount?

There's a useful exchange of views in the Policy Forum of Science (13 July) between William Nordhaus (Critical Assumptions in the Stern Review on Climate Change) and Nicholas Stern and Chris Taylor (Climate Change: Risk, Ethics, and the Stern Review).

Nordhaus concludes:

The Stern Review's unambiguous conclusions about the need for urgent and immediate action will not survive the substitution of assumptions that are consistent with today's marketplace real interest rates and savings rates. So the central questions about global-warming policy--how much, how fast, and how costly--remain open.

Stern and Taylor say:

In addition to revisiting the ethics, we also incorporated the latest science, which tells us that, for a given change in atmospheric concentration, the worst impacts now appear more likely. Further, the science also now gives us a better understanding of probabilities, so we could incorporate explicit risk analysis, largely overlooked in previous studies. It is risk plus ethics that drive our results.

...Traditionally, the discount rate has been applied to policies and projects involving small changes with direct benefits and costs over less than one generation (say a few decades at most), which means that people are feeling the impact of their decisions in their own lives. However, climate change is an intergenerational policy issue, and thus, we must see as a parameter capturing discrimination by date of birth. For example, applying a 2% pure time discounting rate ( = 2) gives half the ethical weight to someone born in 2008 relative to someone born in 1973. Surely, many would find this difficult to justify.

...as people become richer and environmental goods become scarcer, it seems likely that, rather than fall, their value will rise very rapidly, which was an issue raised in chapter 2 of our review and has been investigated in later analyses. And the flow-stock nature of greenhouse gas accumulation, plus the powerful impact of climate change, will render many consequences irreversible. Thus, investing elsewhere and using the resources to compensate for any later environmental damage may be very cost-ineffective.

...Many of the comments on the review have suggested that the ethical side of the modeling should be consistent with observable market behavior. As discussed by Hepburn, there are many reasons for thinking that market rates and other approaches that illustrate observable market behavior cannot be seen as reflections of an ethical response to the issues at hand. There is no real economic market that reveals our ethical decisions on how we should act together on environmental issues in the very long term.

Articles 38 and 39

[T]he great privilege of habeas corpus, and of trial by jury, which are the supreme protection invented by the English people for ordinary individuals against the State . . . —The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers—is, in the highest degree, odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments . . . Extraordinary powers assumed by the Executive with the consent of Parliament in emergencies should be yielded up, when and as, the emergency declines . . . This is really the test of civilisation.

—Winston S. Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943. (Hat tip Scott Horton)

A picture of addiction

The reality is probably no worse than most other boom towns, but somehow the drug abuse in this Alberta Boomtown on a bender seems to speak of a larger madness:

Many of the thousands of workers who live in barrack-like accommodation at nearby mines and construction sites come to [Fort McMurray] at weekends, to drink a beer or ten, brawl, and buy sex and drugs. “This town is awash in cocaine,” says one long-time resident. Marijuana, crack and crystal meth are also widely used. Drug abuse in the northern oil patch is more than four times the provincial average.

Where best to find leverage to turn Canada away from the destructive path likely to come with tar sands? Perhaps, as noted in Building on sand, from progressive legislators responding to informed consumers:

California and 11 other American states are planning to adopt pollution laws that would ban the sale of petrol from emissions-intensive sources.

But can this be the answer?:

Shell and other big investors in the oil sands hope to meet such requirements by siphoning off emissions from their mines and storing them underground—although the technology to do so is still in its infancy.

Bells in winter

Werner Herzog's film Bells from the Deep opens with an extraordinary, hallucinatory image of people crawling on the surface of a frozen lake, peering through the ice, as though in prayer to some unseen god. In fact, as Herzog narrates, they are looking for a great lost city called Kitezh that lies buried under the ice of this bottomless lake. The city had been sacked long ago by Tartar invaders, but God sent an archangel to redeem the inhabitants by letting them live on in deep underwater bliss, chanting hymns and tolling bells.

The legend exists and the image is hauntingly beautiful. It is also entirely fake. Hertzog rounded up a few drunks at a local village bar and paid them to lie on the ice. As he tells the story: 'One of them has his face right on the ice and looks like he is in very deep meditation. The accountant's truth: he was completely drunk and fell asleep, and we had to wake him at the end of the take.

-- from Herzog and His Heroes by Ian Buruma.

Feedback fun

Even if they escape the chainsaw, Indonesia's embattled tropical forests face a serious threat from drought-induced fires. That's the conclusion of researchers who have been monitoring fire-damaged plots in the south of Sumatra.

By studying the year-by-year recovery of [ fire-damaged plots in the south of Sumatra] - some of which had also been burned in an earlier El Niño in 1982 - Margaret Kinnaird of the Wildlife Conservation Society and her colleagues developed a model describing how the forest regenerates. This shows that if El Niños matching the 1997 event occur twice a decade, the prospects are dim: a 46 per cent loss of forest cover over the next century..

Unfortunately, El Niños seem to be getting more frequent and severe, so this is plausible. Protecting the forests is possible, says Kinnaird. "But you've got to have good fire management. Indonesia doesn't have that."

-- from Indonesia's forests could go up in smoke.

Red lines, dead lines

"The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack, the US will have to take decisive action...The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself." --Patrick Cronin, International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Almost half of the US's 277 warships are stationed close to Iran, including two aircraft carrier groups. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise left Virginia last week for the Gulf.

-- from Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran.

TomDispatch says that according to a recent ARG poll, 54% of Americans now favour the launching of impeachment hearings against the Vice President, while 40% oppose this.

Gleichschaltung

Muslims are entitled to establish political parties ... on condition that the parties are based on the [creed] of Islam and their adopted rules are [divine rules] ... Any party not established on the basis of Islam is prohibited.

Article 21 in the Draft Constitution by Hizb ut-Tahrir - pointed out by Brian Whitaker.

For an analysis of canny taqqiya by nationalists and Islamists see Tom Gallagher.

Harry's Place draws attention to this article by Shiraz Maher.

Los desastres de la guerra

What if your buddy got his meal-ready-to-eat standard spoon and asked you to take a photo of him pretending to scoop the brains out of a dead Iraqi?

Read The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness from Chris (War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning) Hedges and Laila Al-Arian.

Dumping on Mandela

BAE deal shakes SA democracy - another excellent report from Peter Marshall.

Norwegian good

The Norwegian government has forbidden the advertisement of any car as 'environmentally friendly', because no car is ever going to be environmentally friendly in the first place.

-- Kaarin Taipale in a forthcoming article.

In case you didn't get that

Q. Do you want to overthrow the British Government?

A. Of course.

Spokesperson for British Oppression, answering Riazat Butt on Islamaphonic (Guardian Unlimited), 28 June

CDB banned

China bans influential NGO newsletter

'After three billion years the Darwinian interlude is over'

I see a close analogy between John von Neumann's blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations...

...Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.

-- from 'Our Biotech Future' by Freeman Dyson

The day after

People will rarely acknowledge that an accustomed way of life is unsustainable except in the face of prolonged, devastating failure.

It may not come as a surprise to some who know me that I like this observation. Reducing the chance that it describes the current predicament with regard climate change (but not only this) is probably a central task in moral and political thought and in activism. What, then, to do?

Al Gore has been trying to build an effective approach in the U.S. since at least the early 1990s. The Live Earth concerts yesterday which he inspired are supposed to help build mass awareness among as many as two billion viewers, or nearly one in three people on the planet. He is asking people to demand that all governments join an international treaty within the next two years that, by 2050, results in greenhouse gases cuts of 90 per cent in developed countries and more than half worldwide.

At least two criticisms are made of Gore's approach by those who share his concern. The first is that he goes too far in building alliances with those who are too much a part of the problem to be a part of the solution, including SUV manufacturers for sponsors, and celebrity rock stars whose message of 'revolution' is falsified by super high consumption life styles and role as icons of a culture of instant gratification. See, for example The artists formerly known as huge carbon footprints (how, by the way, does Madonna reconcile her belief in the scientific method with a faith which says sperm ejaculated in onanistic practice are abandoned souls that become demons?).

A second, less common, criticism is that the Gore's suggested emissions reduction target is insufficent. This sobering note from Clive Hamilton (which continues a dialogue noted and linked here) might be used to support such a critique. Hamilton notes that the report of IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (WGI) suggests stabilisation of atmospheric greenhouse gases below about 400 ppm CO2 equivalent is required to keep the global temperature increase to less than 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial temperature. Since a concentration target of 400 ppm CO2(e) equates to a target of around 350-375 of CO2 and the current concentration is [about] 380 ppm, "we are already past the two degree threshold, and will without question go well beyond it. Even three degrees is looking very hard to avoid".

I support Gore’s pragmatism: you have to rally wealth generators to your side, and somehow wean them away from destructive practices of wealth generation; but I think there is something to both criticisms. Certainly, they speak to a gap between where things are and where they need to be. But being clear about the scale of the challenges and being an optimist-idealist that there may be solutions doesn't necessarily mean being dogmatic about what those solutions will be. What looks like a solution now may be superceded by events. Consider three technical(-political) issues and one political(-technical) one.

Nuclear power is endorsed by some who consider themselves environmentalists, while carbon capture and storage and geo-engineering are not. But these positions are probably wrong. While there may be some inaccuracies in the Oxford Research Group report Too Hot to Handle?, the fundamental points -- including that nuclear power is likely to increase the availability of plutonium in an unstable world, and that it ties up large amounts of capital that could be far more effectively deployed to reduce emissions in other ways -- are likely to stand the test of time. Both CCS and geo-engineering are sometimes described as 'get-out-of-jail-free cards' for the bad guys (although always not by the same people, and some apply the label to one but not the other). In my view (as outlined here and elsewhere), they probably be necessary evils.

[By they way, the use of probabilities to guide policy, which I adopted here, is strongly criticised by David Stainforth et el in Confidence, uncertainty and decision-support relevance in climate predictions and Issues in the interpretation of climate model ensembles to inform decisions -- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2007) 365. See also Footnote 1]

Turning to a political(-technical) example, Kyoto 2 may offer a useful, pragmatic advance on the idealism of Contraction and Convergence. It 'parks' but does not abandon 'equity now' by allowing in the near term for rights to emit (under a declining cap) to go the highest bidder at auction. By not requiring that the rich world hand over lots of money to the poor world 'right away', it may be more politically workable than C&C and may offer a more effective route to reductions with lower transaction costs than the existing Kyoto Protocol and its likely successors. [To implement Kyoto2 would, of course, be hard and it could be as vulnerable to subversion by vested interests as some other approaches, but it is worth further consideration, as are carbon taxes. See here and here.]

Some of what ‘we’ (by which I mean self-defined progressives) do in the days after 07/07/07 is articulated in agendas like the one outlined by I Count. Even more essentially, ‘we’ need to go a lot further to combine (among other things) subtlety of thought, broad-mindedness and firmness of purpose.

Subtle thought because the insufficiently fine-grained kind can lead into traps such as a form of determinism. Thomas Homer-Dixon comes perilously close to it in the book in which he quotes the words I have put at the top of this post: by, for example, buying into the peak oil red-herring (see footnote 2).

Broad-mindedness because the challenges of climate change are seldom likely to be apparent on their own, but (like the three-dimensional chess game that Joseph Nye has described – see second item here: Imagining War) will rather be tied up with many other challenges requiring negotiation and struggle (see, for example, It was climate change wot made me do it). It’s vital, also, to fully acknowledge the limits of liberal democracies and the attractions and dangers of alternatives such as technocracy: a tension well explored by Louis Menand in his recent review of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.

And firmness of purpose because, informed by what science indicates about ecological limits, ‘we’ must stick to core humanist values. Where cultural traditions, including the Abrahamic triplets and other religions, accord with these (through, for example, a genuine and lived commitment to the imperatives of justice, balance, knowledge and loving kindness) they can be allies, but forget any Deus ex Machina: people living in freedom have a responsibility to sort out this mess and help others adapt or die trying.


Footnote 1: See also Another Global Warming Icon Comes Under Attack (Science, 6 July) reporting work by Robert Charlson, Stephen Schwartz and Henning Rodhe which argues that future warming could be much worse than most the climate modeling used by the IPCC suggests, or even more moderate.

Footnote 2: Homer-Dixon also leans towards fatalism/determinism in suggesting that migration and the demographic transition in Europe is necessarily a recipe for extreme instability. The dangers are clear, but precisely this can concentrate minds on renewing alliances for progressive politics which will include but not be limited to confronting brutal practices such as ‘honour’ killing and other kinds of subjugation which reinforce oppressive and destructive behaviour.]

Chinese water and ice

A profile of Chinadialogue.net contributor and advisor Ma Jun:

Ma's institute's online China Water Pollution Map - ipe.org.cn - names and shames the worst offending regions and companies. It is a symbol of a new kind of social activism in China: pragmatic rather than idealistic, and relying more on maps and data than votes and speeches to lobby for change.

On a different but related topic, see Guanli Wang on Everest’s dying glaciers

Wenlock Edge

The holy wells and sacred springs, the ponds and pools and boggy flushes, the streams and brooks which stitch the land to rivers - all these have meaning, a poetry of forgotten names and an ecological significance which is sometimes greater than our own. They are also more than a metaphor for the flow of life and a passing through this world that we all must make. We may have lost our respect for the wild waters, but that may be about to change.

-- from County Diary by Paul Evans

'Cosmic Forgetfulness'

Assumptions (or prejudice) will remain necessary for knowing the precise state of the Universe, which cannot be fully justified within science itself.

-- What happened before the Big Bang? by Martin Bojowald (reported for non-specialists here).

Headline of the week

is here.

Smoking lessons

Clive Bates draws some wider lessons from the smoking ban in England: value the "slow wins"; aim for culture change; don't be paralysed by the losers; create good examples; and discount business scare tactics.

Why?

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

-- Hassan Butt

In the country of the blind

Brown...is a politician before he is an intellectual. He does not want to speak truth to power, he wants to identify those truths that will give him power

-- Anthony Barnett's view of Gordon Brown.

It was climate change wot made me do it

Analysis and discussion of the impacts of climate change on human security (featured as a key note issue in this piece by John Ashton and Tom Burke in the spring 2005 openDemocracy-British Council debate on the politics of climate change) grows and grows. See, for example, a small sample of the news reports across the last few months here, here and here.

Work by military, academic and allied institutions may turn up all kinds of things, some more useful than others. See, for example Culture, Conflict...and Climate?, which notes a provision for the U.S. FY08 intelligence authorization bill to explicitly direct the U.S. intelligence community to consider climate impacts when preparing future National Intelligence Estimates, or How climate change is pushing the boundaries of security and foreign policy, a paper for a conference this week at Chatham House, 'Step-change' needed on climate change.

But there may be at least two 'reality checks' to some of this thinking.

One, climate change is not an excuse for some current behaviour. Responding to Rainfall records could warn of war (New Scientist, 30 May), the International Crisis Group said:

we find the suggestion of a "link between climate change and conflict" overly simplistic. The humanitarian disaster in Darfur results primarily from the Sudanese government's extremely brutal counter-insurgency campaign...resulting in over 200,000 deaths and 2.5 million displaced. Look not to the cloudless skies but to Khartoum.

Two, climate-related insecurity that is a reality today should not be neglected because of concern about the medium to long term future. Responding to an exchange noted here, one correspondent writes:

There is a tendency in some of the debate on climate change to [focus on] an apocalyptic future. While I accept that this future is plausible, what about the human development catastrophes that are emerging less dramatically today in the form of small but rising increments to risks associated with drought, extreme weather, floods etc.? In rich countries, people deal with increased risk through government protection...and private insurance. Having recently spent time talking with farmers in drought prone areas of South Gonder, Ethiopia and Kenya, I can confirm the blindingly obvious insight that social risk insurance is not widely available. As a recent Oxfam report has argued, isn't it time that we addressed head-on how we mobilize support for a campaign for climate justice that includes rich countries paying now for the damage their citizens and governments have chosen to inflict on poor people in poor countries?

P.S. 2pm - the Chatham House meeting also featured Transforming our energy within a generation by the redoubtable Walt Patterson, who puts it (almost) all in a nutshell, partly summarised as:

• Energy is not about commodities but about infrastructure.
• Climate is an energy issue; energy is an infrastructure issue; therefore climate too is an infrastructure issue, demanding policies to match.
• Transforming our energy starts with transforming how we think about it, and can start immediately.

A ‘Painful Way to Die’

Of the many people I’ve met here [in Congo], one I can’t get out of my mind is Cecilie Nyirahabinana, a young woman with a shrinking family. A few years ago, fighting led to famine and her two oldest children died. Her youngest, Anita, was still a baby and survived on Cecilie’s breast milk. Then a couple of months ago, soldiers shot her husband dead. Since then, Cecilie has had nothing to feed Anita but green leaves. So Anita is now skeletal and barely able to move, having slowly starved for months. Aya Schneerson, who runs the World Food Program office in the area, explained what Anita is going through: “These kids are in constant pain,” she said. “It’s a very painful way to die.” And the way things are going, hundreds of thousands more will die that way.

-- Nicholas Kristof

City limits

Last week quite a few people were circulating a story from that very great publication The Onion titled: Addressing Climate Crisis, Bush Calls For Development Of National Air Conditioner. I half joked to one correspondent that, from Timothy Egan's account (The First Domed City), Phoenix was already on the way.

Deeper observations on the future exclusive urban environments came in A tale of two towns, an account by Paul Rogers of Heritage Park, Baladia and other 'communities' that seek exclude the planet of slums.

Fun fun fun

This fun game is easy to learn but difficult to master...Players take turns aiming and firing at each other with over 85 weapons of mass destruction including nuclear bombs...You can blast your enemy with a vast array of weapons...The landscape you battle on...can be destroyed in real time for real scorched earth. Features include over 85 of the biggest weapons, and beautiful scenery with 25 realistic landscapes.

-- promo for Atomic Canon. The weapons include:

A-Bomb, Acid Rocket, Anthrax, Artillery, Ashes, Avenger, Barrage, Big Wheel, Black Brat, Black Rain, Blow Fish, Blue Beam, Bomb, Breakout, Burial Mound, Cannon, Cannon Ball, Cleaner, Cluster Bomb, Contra, Cowinator, Cremation, Defiled Pig, Digger, Dirt Cloud, Dirt Destroy, Dirtox, Dirty Boy, Dirty Duo, Earth Destroy, Escaper, Excavator, Gas Rocket, Gatlun Gun, Grate Beam, Grave Digger, Ground Hog, Heavy Armor, Heavy Shield, Hellfire, Hercules, Hex Bomb, Hydrogen Nuke, Isotope 244, Land Fill, Light Armor, Light Shield, Machine Gun, Magma Beam, Medical Supply, Medkit, Mountain, Move Far, Move Mid, Move Near, Penetrator, Pig Blaster, Plasma, Plasma Bomb, Plower, Plutonium Nuke, Porcupine, Rail Gun, Rail Slice, Rebounder, Retro Rocket, Rocket, Roller, Runway Bomb, RX2, Sabot, Seeker, Shell, Shotgun, Six Under, Spreader, Stingers, Strikers, Tallboy, Tomcat, Toxic Cow, Toxic Grave, Tracer 3, Tracer 5, Trojan, Uranium Nuke, and the Wave Beam.

The line on CCS

In the Today programme this morning following reports that China's greenhouse gas emissions have overtaken those of the United States, John Ashton said:

"We need to do a very fast track programme to make [Carbon Capture and Storage] the universal technology standard for burning coal, if we want to carry on burning coal... We are accelerating [work in this field] and European leaders in March at their summit took a momentous decision to try and make Europe the world's fist low carbon economy with CCS as the universal standard for coal and gas by 2020. Now that really is a fast track. At the moment that's an aspiration. We need to deliver it. We are beginning to see how with a plan to build a dozen demonstration plants over the next few years including one in the UK...Gordon Brown mentioned this in the budget and it's in the White Paper [on Energy]. We are still not going fast enough. But we need to do it in collaboration with China, the United States and others because we are all in this together."

[This is my rough transcript; the actual interview can be found here, about 23 minutes in]

This post was updated at 19.00 or 7pm BST

Hungry ghosts and positional goods

An unnamed buyer at the Paris air show has placed an order for an Airbus A380 superjumbo to use as a private jet. Airbus said the individual, "not from Europe or the US", would use the plane for "personal use for him and his entourage"

-- from Airbus superjumbo for private use.

Our profligate consumption is no longer aimed at meeting material needs but at reproducing ourselves psychologically. In modern consumer capitalism, consumption activity is the primary means by which we create an identity and sustain a fragile sense of self. If, in order to solve climate change, we are asked to change the way we consume, then we are being asked to change who we are—to experience a sort of death. So desperately do we cling to our manufactured selves that we fear relinquishing them more than we fear the consequences of climate change.

-- from Clive Hamilton, blogged here on 18 June.

Serious climate politics?

Given the psychological grip of capitalist consumption patterns, and the forces blocking attempts to tackle climate change—fossil fuel lobby, heavy industry, airlines—what is the best strategy for environmental action? Can ambitious targets and moral exhortations bring any improvement on existing treaties?

-- from Building on Kyoto by Clive Hamilton.

A response here from George Monbiot.

Lustration

Most revolutions have two phases. First comes a struggle for freedom, then a struggle for power. The first makes the human spirit soar and brings out the best in people. Th second unleashes the worst: envy, intrigue, greed, suspicion, and the urge for revenge.

--from The Polish Witch-Hunt by Adam Michnik.

Tax not trade

...the biggest problem, at least politically, is that carbon taxes are transparent and simple, whereas cap-and-trade systems are complicated and conveniently opaque. Under a cap-and-trade scheme, governments can pay off politically powerful polluters (such as the coal industry) by giving them permits...

-- this (from Doffing the cap) catches a key point. I've been reminded however (!) that it's far from the first time the point has been made (see, for example, Emission Impossible).

So we know well now that the case for a carbon tax is strong. How broad should it be? I recall visiting six or seven years ago John Flemming (a man of excellent qualities) and listening to him outline the advantages of making it global (acknowledging, however, that politically this was a long way from being a realistic prospect).

The political obstacles -- for proper carbon taxes (or indeed something like the auction proposed in Kyoto2 which, I have argued, shares some features of a tax) -- remain the "real story".

[P.S. A much fuller exploration of the issues now appears on Baconbutty: To cap or to tax?]

Sic

The remit of the committee, to include Sir David Walker, a former chair of investment bank, Morgan Stanley International, and Philippa Foster Back, director of the Institute of Business Ethics [sic], will be confined to the firm's present and future conduct.

-- Woolf denies BAE review is knee jerk reaction to US investigation. Who wouldn't for £6,000 a day?

The Economist notes that the British defence sector employs 65,000 people, or 0.23% of those working in Britain, and accounts for 2.2% of all exports: "Leave aside for the moment Mr Blair's implication, no doubt cruelly unfair, that the Saudis take kickbacks and would be miffed if it were laid in the open".

The ulimate renewable resource

...is fear. According to Naomi Klein,

the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror".

Thought crime

Mobster hid secret life as philosopher

Puzzled

The answer to this question may be quite simple, but can somebody please tell me why the Bancroft family is (said to be) so concerned to protect the editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal as and when it sells to Rupert Murdoch?

I would have thought the editorial stance of News Corp. and Journal Opinion are a natural match.

When to walk

In The Upside of Down, Thomas Homer-Dixon writes that 11 September 2001 "won't be the last the last time we walk out of our cities".

But a hot tip from William J. Perry, Ashton B. Carter and Michael M. May (After the Bomb) is:

...for those downwind and more than a few miles from ground zero, the best move would be to shelter in a basement for three days or so and only then leave the area.

This is a hard truth to absorb, since we all would have a strong instinct to flee. But walking toward the suburbs or sitting in long traffic jams would directly expose people to radiation, which would be the most intense on the day after the bomb went off. After that, the amount would drop off day by day (one-third as strong after three days, one-fifth as strong after five days, and so on), because of the natural decay of the radioactive components of the fallout.

Dreaming

Sleeping one time in Burgate Wood on the moated island of the old hall, I put my cheek against the loam and the cool ground ivy. When I closed my eyes I saw the iceberg depths of the root-world.

-- from Roger Deakin's Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees.

Research

Research is often like a quest. You start with a question that sounds impossible to answer: how much aid leaks into military spending, or how much of Africa's wealth has fled the continent. How would you go about answering those questions? Ask each third-world army where it got its money? Knock on the doors of the Swiss banks and ask them to report their African accounts? There is a different way of getting to the answers, and it is statistical. This stands in contrast to the crude images that often provide us with what we think we know about the world. For rebellion, as an example, the image is often that of Che Guevara, ubiqitous in my generation on student walls. The poster did our thinking for us. Our notions about the problems of the poorest countries are saturated with such images: not just of noble rebels but of starving children, heartless businesses, crooked politicians. You are held prisoner by these images. While you are held prisoner, so are our politicians, because they do what you want. I am going to take you beyond images. Sometimes I am going to smash them And my image smasher is statistical evidence.

-- Paul Collier, in his introduction to The Bottom Billion

Hospitality

Walking down the carpeted aisle of Sodertalje’s low-slung St. John’s Church on a recent morning, Anders Lago’s broad, blond features looked out of place among the crowd of hundreds of black-clad Iraqi mourners at a memorial service.

Mr. Lago is the mayor of this scenic Swedish town of 60,000 people, which last year took in twice as many Iraqi refugees as the entire United States.

-- Far From War, a Town With a Well-Used Welcome Mat (New York Times, 13 June).

Would Emma Goldman have written "Send your huddling masses to Sweden"? I guess in this case there is fear of a liability issue.

Far out

Gigantic ocean waves, spanning hundreds of kilometres from crest to crest, have been speeding up thanks to global warming, a new model suggests...The model also shows that by the end of the 21st century, the waves will be a further 20 to 40 per cent faster compared with pre-industrial speeds.

-- from a report in New Scientist on a paper by John Fyfe and Oleg Saenko published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Politicide achieved

Lama Hourani, coordinator of the Palestinian Working Women’s Society for Development, speaking on the phone from Gaza to The World Tonight on 11 June described the violence as the worst she has ever seen - worse even than Beirut in the early eighties.

Last Words from Richard Rorty

...When I was told that another figure much discussed in Tehran was Habermas, I concluded that the best explanation for interest in my work was that I share Habermas’s vision of a social democratic utopia. In this utopia, many of the functions presently served by membership in a religious community would be taken over by what Habermas calls “constitutional patriotism.” Some form of patriotism — of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future — is necessary if one is to take politics seriously. In a theocratic country, a leftist political opposition must be prepared to counter the clergy’s claim that the nation’s identity is defined by its religious tradition. So the left needs a specifically secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens’ respect for one another rather than on the nation’s relation to God.

My own views on these matters derive from Habermas and John Dewey. In the early decades of the twentieth century Dewey helped bring a culture into being in which it became possible for Americans to replace Christian religiosity with fervent attachment to democratic institutions (and equally fervent hope for the improvement of those institutions). In recent decades, Habermas has been commending that culture to the Europeans. In opposition to religious leaders such as Benedict XVI and the ayatollahs, Habermas argues that the alternative to religious faith is not “relativism” or “rootlessness” but the new forms of solidarity made possible by the Enlightenment....

-- (some) Last Words from Richard Rorty

From vision to reality...

in the eyes of the U.S. DoD:

whereas [Isaac] Asimov's [Three Laws of Robotics drawn up in the 1950s] were intended to prevent robots from harming people in any circumstances, [Ronald] Arkin's are supposed to ensure only that they are not unethically killed.

-- Robot Wars, The Economist, 7 June.

Climate change communication

"The IPCC gets an A+ for scientific assessment, but a gentleman's C for communication." says climate modeler Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California.

-- from Pushing the scary side of global warming (Richard A. Kerr in Science, 8 June 2007).

Britannia's derin devlet

A photograph on the front page of the UK print edition of today's Financial Times shows the bow of the first of the Astute class submarines about to launch, with the Union flag and the BAE corporate logo displayed with equal billing. It is almost a charicature of the idea that the military-industrial complex lies at the heart of Britain's "deep state" (see Who's in charge?).

Carne Ross is right to say that we should not regard the story of possible corruption between BAE and the Saudi government episode as an aberration. And the story goes beyond BAE, Saudi Arabia and few other countries. For a little more substance see Michael Hopkins on Business, BAe, and politics, but the whole story goes far beyond BAE, of course.

One relatively minor and dated anecdote about Iron Britannia is that annual reports for the ECGD up to about 1999 were still showing on their books substantial credits (hundreds of millions of pounds) that had been extended to Saddam Hussein some years before (if I recall correctly from my research for an internal report that was a basis for Exporting Pollution from Greenpeace back in 2001).

Mistaking liberties

Pretending things are worse than they are does no one any favours, from wherever the pretence comes.

-- Martin Kettle: No, Labour has not turned Britain into a police state

Who's in charge?

What BAE sells in the Warfare State.

Has Hoder lost it?

I'm proud to be Iranian, not because of Cyrus, but because of Khomeini, a true anti-colonial leader who created the only true post-colonial state in the world, Islamic Republic of Iran.

-- Hossein Darakshan.

Planetary taboos, part two

John Sterman of MIT (and author of many fascinating papers including All Models are Wrong: Reflections on Becoming a Systems Scientist) took a moment to send a strong rebuttal of my earlier post Thinkable: why geotherapy should not be taboo. With his kind permission I am publishing it here, together with a response:

Hi Caspar,

Interesting argument. The more people confront the necessity of large reductions in GHG emissions the more they grab at the straws of a technical deus ex machina to save the day without requiring any change in lifestyle or any wealth redistribution. Hence the attraction of nuclear power, geoengineering, Branson's prize, etc.

Crutzen's aerosol injection scheme is foolish. It won't stop the acidification of the ocean. It's much much cheaper, faster, doable, and safer for ecosystems to retrofit every building in the developed world to first-rate energy efficiency standards, using a WPA-style "army" of volunteers, or to do so through a national service program like the Peace Corp. Quite frankly I'm astounded that such otherwise sensible scientists would consider aerosol injection a serious proposal.

Most other geoengineering schemes are similar -- large, centralized, exotic, not yet available, and with unknown risks of harmful side effects [the argument #2 in your earlier post).

As to the moral hazard argument, you don't have to be a political conservative to recognize that the phenomenon is real. People move into flood plains when levees are raised; they move into fire hazard zones when the forest service builds firebreaks; they build luxury beachfront homes when there is federally subsidized flood insurance (note the feedback: once people live in such zones they form a powerful constituency to increase protections). And one doesn't have to be a liberal to see that corporations argue that regulations should be relaxed once they start to work: witness the pressure to remove creatures from the endangered species list once their numbers stop declining, to relax standards for lead, water pollution, and other toxics once the regulations start to work. Promise the world that geoengineering will sequester CO2 and there will be immediate calls from business and developing nations to let them keep emitting because the sequestration technology will have "solved" the problem.

I fear that the technological optimism of the would-be geoengineers is the way they resolve the cognitive dissonance caused by their profound pessimism about the possibility of collective action for the long-term benefit of all. We can cut emissions enough to bring CO2 concentrations down. It won't be through geoengineering, but through the application of technologies we mostly already have. It will be by putting carbon prices up high enough to create opportunities for firms to profit by helping retrofit and replace existing stocks of buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure, for millions of people to innovate and for our behavior to change. Sure, it's going to be hard work,but it's more likely to succeed than so-called "geotherapy." If we are in the emergency room, if it's a planetary crisis, if we are on the threshold of tipping irreversibly into "dangerous interference" then let's recognize it and make the short-run sacrifices needed to preserve the world. Our parents and grandparents did so in the second world war; if we are now too soft and comfortable to make similar economic sacrifices (unlike the war, no one needs to die for this cause) then we are truly lost.

No more delay. No more blame. If not us, who? If not now, when?

I replied:

Dear John,

You argue powerfully. I particularly like your vision of retrofitting every building in the developed world to first-rate energy efficiency standards, using a WPA-style "army" of volunteers or a national service program like the Peace Corp. And I would agree that massively increased efficiency in energy use, supported by regulations that provide incentives, should be a top priority. (Indeed, I put this kind of thing at the centre of a special supplement for New Statesman magazine that I edited last year, relying on the work of first-rate thinker-doers in the UK like Roger Levett).

A paper titled A cost curve for greenhouse gas reduction, published by McKinsey in January, reinforced what has become an increasingly mainstream message – that a lot of energy efficiency and carbon reduction can be achieved in the developed world for negative cost (i.e., profit). Campaigns like C40 Cities seem to have ‘got’ this (drawing in the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg thanks to that, er, old black magic called Bill Clinton, who seems to have learned something from his earlier attempts at climate politics), and are seeking to put it into practice.

But whatever happens with the C40 and programmes like it (and imagine the likes of Barack Obama pushing for vastly more ambitious versions thereof rather than, say, big subsidies for big coal!), will even the very best of such efforts get us close to stabilization at 450 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent, let alone 400?

The McKinsey paper suggests not. (The paper can be wrong of course: maybe there are a lot of innovative and credible Amory Lovins-style soft energy policies they didn’t think to include, but I’ll use it as a yardstick here until I learn of better data and analysis). It includes a graph showing a various technologies and policies approaches all needed to get towards 450ppm, with estimated maringal abatement costs of about 40 Euros (€) per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent to get you to 450, and about €50 to get you to 400ppm. [see also footnote 1]

Accepting – absolutely – that the solution is not all about technologies (and that there are big question marks over the practicability and social and environmental side-effects of some technologies such as CCS, many biofuels, etc), one still comes up against the question: how much will people be willing to pay?

Let us be highly optimistic be about the possibility of collective action for the long-term (and not so long-term) benefit of all, and say yes people will ‘get’ the scale of the crisis very soon and they will be willing to pay up to a marginal cost of €50 a tonne. Further, let’s assume that abatement down to 400ppm comes in cheaper than expected - maybe only €40. Hooray, we get €10 per tonne to not spend on not consuming!

But even then, with atmospheric concentrations at around 400ppm, we may *still* not be out of the woods because (if I understand correctly – and please someone correct me if this is wrong) atmospheric concentrations will stay close to that level for a while (several decades at least), with a lag until we see the effect of those concentrations on the global climate (albeit that effect may progressively diminish if the earlier forcing signal has not triggered siginificant positive feedbacks). The effect could be not good. There could, as discussed earlier, be a chance of up to about 1 in 4 of it being not good at all at all (and, again, any corrections or criticisms of this understanding are most welcome).

And it’s having got to this point, I think, that a discussion of geo-engineering may need to start.

You describe Paul Crutzen’s idea as foolish. He has certainly been pilloried for it, and the downsides have been extensively described. The point about ocean acidification is well made. (On a lighter note, Alan Robock at Rutgers University says that 100 Hiroshima sized bombs over major cities – roughly equivalent to an all out nuclear war between India and Pakistan – would lower global average temperatures by 1.4 C for a few years).

The reason I hesitate to join this chorus is that, whether this idea is a good one or not, Crutzen is no fool. (I read his original paper and he's aware of the downsides). He, and other distinguished scientists such James Hansen warn that we may have already in doodoo stepped in so far that, should we wade no more, returning may no longer be an option. That one in four chance of more than 2 C is something to do with it, and we may have to consider doing something pretty serious about it.

As David Wolman wrote in Wired,“Advocating the study of geoengineering does not mean campaigning for the deployment of every ludicrous notion that comes along”.

My favoured list of more or less ludicrous notions would probably be limited to approaches that accelerate the reduction of atmospheric concentrations back towards pre-industrial levels. (It sounds a bit mad, doesn't it?). Such approaches would also be low-tech and empower local communities (to be cuddly, call it geotherapy rather than geoengineering). It may just be that biochar and other techniques that draw down more carbon than they consume in operation could fit the bill (assuming they actually work!).

Caspar

Footnote 1: A more recent study from McKinsey, Curbing Global Energy Demand (May 2007), says that 'by capturing the potential available from existing technologies with an internal rate of return of 10 percent or more, we could cut global energy demand growth by half or more over the next 15 years'.

Geldof, baby killers and power's bitch

I have been more tolerant of the likes of Bob Geldof than, for example, my good friend and co-orchardeer Paul Kingsnorth, but something snapped when I saw this photo. Does Saint Sir Bling Bob find himself a winking bubble in the froth topping the champagne (1) that intoxicates the powerful?

Diving beneath the surface, George Monbiot skillfully cuts and pastes some press releases and other material from Baby Milk Action and ibfan to recount the pushing of unsafe formula milk down the throats of babes while the fine words flow at Heiligendamm. (The example is the Philippines, but this is the third report in as many weeks in The Guardian, following Johanna Moorhead's first hand investigation into goings on by Nestlé and other companies in Bangladesh, and Marie McGrath on the deadly effects of formula in disaster zones).

Mark Danner (Words in a time of war) might respond "Well, D'oh!":

[The attitude of the Bush administration] is brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: "Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism." Let me repeat that little troika of "weapons of the weak": international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and.... terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything.

[ (1) I first typed "champagne" as "champaign", which RB suggests be defined as "a cause that celebrities get involved in".]

Twin disasters for Britain

The Iraq debacle (see comments by Michael Rose and Paddy Ashdown reported in The War is Lost. Now what?) and the fact that a quarter of British Muslims believe the government and security services were involved in the July 7 suicide bombings in London.

One of the factors behind this mess is the cover-up dissected by Chris Ames.