I currently have the UK at the head of my betting market on which European nation will be the first to embrace fascism. Germany is one of the other favourites due to the increasing power of the left across their political landscape. In a post last August I point out that fascism is actually a left wing political construction that has been recast as a child of the right in order to cleanse the left (and particularly Europe's leftist elites) of any association with the Holocaust.
In this great article (h/t: Tim Blair) by Foreign Policy's Stefan Theil one can start to fully understand the peril that Europe faces with a generation or two of workers entering the market with an entitlement attitude rather than a responsibility attitude.
Fast forward 10-20 years to a Germany, for example, with a massive entitlement culture and 'progressive' cultural relativist immigration policies in which millions of rent-seekers have descended on the nation, as they have in France. In an environment with a shattered economy and falling living standards, which is going to be blamed for the problems - the entitlement economy or the immigrants? There is a reason why there's a rising nationalist sentiment in Europe. In my view, people are not reacting to the impact on their culture but the impact on their social programs and how it will affect them personally.
Last time I checked, socialism plus nationalism is what gave Germany the National Socialists - aka the Nazi Party.
I have had arguments on left wing websites before about the power of the free market and how command and control economies must, inevitably, fail. The example I use is this - in a socialist, command and control economy how does a Playstation come about?
The fact is that a Playstation - or, indeed, any item in our culture - represents the current result of an evolutionary investment process in which millions upon millions of dollars have been risked by non-government individuals in order to develop a product that people will buy. Each processor in a Playstation follows this law. Each hard disk, network adapter, graphics chip and display device are the result of entrepreneurs putting their money on the line. In a non-capitalist economy who decides where risk will be taken? Is it even moral to spend the nation's money on high-risk projects?
I wonder whether it ever dawns on the children of Europe that the terribly immoral, divisive, culturally destructive sin of free market capitalism is what brought them their mobile phone, their laptop computer, their games console or any other of a myriad of items that they would consider vital to their lives?
Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other Western countries. They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent, which they learn to recite as they prepare to attend many of the better universities in the world. Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts. And doing so will not be easy. But not because these children are found in the madrasas of Pakistan or the state-controlled schools of Saudi Arabia. They are not. Rather, they live in two of the world’s great democracies—France and Germany.
What a country teaches its young people reflects its bedrock national beliefs. Schools hand down a society’s historical narrative to the next generation. There has been a great deal of debate over the ways in which this historical ideology is passed on—over Japanese textbooks that downplay the Nanjing Massacre, Palestinian textbooks that feature maps without Israel, and new Russian guidelines that require teachers to portray Stalinism more favorably. Yet there has been almost no analysis of how countries teach economics, even though the subject is equally crucial in shaping the collective identity that drives foreign and domestic policies.
Just as schools teach a historical narrative, they also pass on “truths” about capitalism, the welfare state, and other economic principles that a society considers self-evident. In both France and Germany, for instance, schools have helped ingrain a serious aversion to capitalism. In one 2005 poll, just 36 percent of French citizens said they supported the free-enterprise system, the only one of 22 countries polled that showed minority support for this cornerstone of global commerce. In Germany, meanwhile, support for socialist ideals is running at all-time highs—47 percent in 2007 versus 36 percent in 1991. It’s tempting to dismiss these attitudes as being little more than punch lines to cocktail party jokes. But their impact is sadly and seriously self-destructive. In Germany, unemployment is finally falling after years at Depression-era levels, thanks in no small part to welfare reforms that in 2005 pressured Germans on the public dole to take up jobs. Yet there is near consensus among Germans that, despite this happy outcome, tinkering with the welfare state went far beyond what is permissible. Chancellor Angela Merkel, once heralded as Germany’s own Margaret Thatcher, has all but abandoned her plans to continue free-market reforms. She has instead imposed a new “rich people tax,” has tightened labor-market rules, and has promised renewed efforts to “regulate” globalization. Meanwhile, two in three Germans say they support at least some of the voodoo-economic, roll-back-the-reforms platform of a noisy new antiglobalization political party called Die Linke (The Left), founded by former East German communists and Western left-wing populists.
Many of these popular attitudes can be traced to state-mandated curricula in schools. It is there that economic lessons are taught that diverge substantially from the market-based principles on which the Western model is based. The phenomenon may hardly be unique to Europe, but in few places is it more obvious than in France and Germany. A biased view of economics feeds into many of the world’s most vexing problems, from the growth of populism to the global rise of anti-American, anti-capitalist attitudes.
Economics à la carte
“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.
When French students are not getting this kind of wildly biased commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism, they are learning that economic progress is also the root cause of social ills. For example, a one-year high school course on the inner workings of an economy developed by the French Education Ministry called Sciences Economiques et Sociales, spends two thirds of its time discussing the sociopolitical fallout of economic activity. Chapter and section headings include “Social Cleavages and Inequality,” “Social Mobilization and Conflict,” “Poverty and Exclusion,” and “Globalization and Regulation.” The ministry mandates that students learn “worldwide regulation as a response” to globalization. Only one third of the course is about companies and markets, and even those bits include extensive sections on unions, government economic policy, the limits of markets, and the dangers of growth. The overall message is that economic activity has countless undesirable effects from which citizens must be protected.
No wonder, then, that the French default attitude is to be suspicious of market forces and private entrepreneurship, not to mention any policies that would strengthen them. Start-ups, Histoire du XXe siècle tells its students, are “audacious enterprises” with “ill-defined prospects.” Then it links entrepreneurs with the tech bubble, the Nasdaq crash, and mass layoffs across the economy. (Think “creative destruction” without the “creative.”) In one widely used text, a section on technology and innovation does not mention a single entrepreneur or company. Instead, students read a lengthy treatise on whether technological progress destroys jobs. In another textbook, students actually meet a French entrepreneur who invented a new tool to open oysters. But the quirky anecdote is followed by a long-winded debate over the degree to which the modern workplace is organized along the lines imagined by Frederick Taylor, the father of modern scientific management theory. And just in case they missed it in history class, students are reminded that “cultural globalization” leads to violence and armed resistance, ultimately necessitating a new system of global governance.
This is a world apart from what American high school students learn. In the United States, where fewer than half of high school students take an economics course, most classes are based on straightforward, classical economics. In Texas, the state-prescribed curriculum requires that the positive contribution of entrepreneurs to the local economy be taught. The state of New York, meanwhile, has coordinated its curriculum with entrepreneurship-promoting youth groups such as Junior Achievement, as well as with economists at the Federal Reserve. Do American schools encourage students to follow in the footsteps of Bill Gates or become ardent fans of globalization? Not really. But they certainly aren’t filling students with negative preconceptions and suspicions about businesses and the people who run them. Nor do they obsess about the negative side effects and dangers of economic activity the way French textbooks do.
French students, on the other hand, do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics. When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of “la McDonaldisation du monde” and the benefits of a “Tobin tax” on the movement of global capital. This kind of anticapitalist, antiglobalization discourse isn’t just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde Diplomatique; it is required learning in today’s French schools.
Learning to love the dole
Germans teach their young people a similar economic narrative, with a slightly different emphasis. The focus is on instilling the corporatist and collectivist traditions of the German system. Although each of Germany’s 16 states sets its own education requirements, nearly all teach through the lens of workplace conflict between employer and employee, the central battle being over wages and work rules. If there’s one unifying characteristic of German textbooks, it’s the tremendous emphasis on group interests, the traditional social-democratic division of the universe into capital and labor, employer and employee, boss and worker. Textbooks teach the minutiae of employer-employee relations, workplace conflict, collective bargaining, unions, strikes, and worker protection. Even a cursory look at the country’s textbooks shows that many are written from the perspective of a future employee with a union contract. Bosses and company owners show up in caricatures and illustrations as idle, cigar-smoking plutocrats, sometimes linked to child labor, Internet fraud, cell-phone addiction, alcoholism, and, of course, undeserved layoffs. The successful, modern entrepreneur is virtually nowhere to be found.
German students will be well-versed in many subjects upon graduation; one topic they will know particularly well is their rights as welfare recipients. One 10th-grade social studies text titled FAKT has a chapter on “What to do against unemployment.” Instead of describing how companies might create jobs, the section explains how those without jobs can organize into self-help groups and join weekly anti-reform protests “in the tradition of the East German Monday demonstrations” (which in 1989 helped topple the communist dictatorship). The not-so-subtle subtext? Jobs are a right to be demanded from the government. The same chapter also details various welfare programs, explains how employers use the threat of layoffs as a tactic to cut pay, and concludes with a long excerpt from the platform of the German Union Federation, including the 30-hour work week, retirement at age 60, and redistribution of the work pie by splitting full-time into part-time jobs. No market alternative is taught. When fakt presents the reasons for unemployment, it blames computers and robots. In fact, this is a recurring theme in German textbooks—the Internet will turn workers into “anonymous code” and kill off interpersonal communication.
Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. One such workbook includes sections headed “The Revival of Manchester Capitalism,” “The Brazilianization of Europe,” and “The Return of the Dark Ages.” India and China are successful, the book explains, because they have large, state-owned sectors and practice protectionism, while the societies with the freest markets lie in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many French and German books, this text suggests students learn more by contacting the antiglobalization group Attac, best known for organizing messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.
One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe’s schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems. Some enterprising teachers and parents may try to teach an alternative view, and some books are less ideological than others. But given the biases inherent in the curricula, this background is unavoidable. It is the context within which most students develop intellectually. And it’s a belief system that must eventually appear to be the truth.
Can old Europe do new tricks?
This bias has tremendous implications that reach far beyond the domestic political debate in these two countries. These beliefs inform students’ choices in life. Taught that the free market is a dangerous wilderness, twice as many Germans as Americans tell pollsters that you should not start a business if you think it might fail. According to the European Union’s internal polling, just two in five Germans and French would like to be their own boss, compared to three in five Americans. Whereas 8 percent of Americans say they are currently involved in starting a business, that’s true of only 2 percent of Germans and 1 percent of the French. Another 28 percent of Americans are considering starting a business, compared to just 11 percent of the French and 18 percent of Germans. The loss to Europe’s two largest economies in terms of jobs, innovation, and economic dynamism is severe.
Attitudes and mind-sets, it is increasingly being shown, are closely related to a country’s economic performance. Edmund Phelps, a Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate, contends that attitudes toward markets, work, and risk-taking are significantly more powerful in explaining the variation in countries’ actual economic performance than the traditional factors upon which economists focus, including social spending, tax rates, and labor-market regulation. The connection between capitalism and culture, once famously described by Max Weber, also helps explain continental Europe’s poor record in entrepreneurship and innovation. A study by the Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, the Entrepreneurship Benchmarking Index, looks at nine countries and finds a powerful correlation between attitudes about economics and actual corporate performance. The researchers find that attitudes explain 40 percent of the variation in start-up and company growth rates—by far the strongest correlation of any of the 31 indicators they tested. If countries such as France and Germany hope to boost entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic dynamism—as their leaders claim they do—the most effective way to make that happen may be to use education to boost the cultural legitimacy of going into business.
The deep anti-market bias that French and Germans continue to teach challenges the conventional wisdom that it’s just a matter of time, thanks to the pressures of globalization, before much of the world agrees upon a supposedly “Western” model of free-market capitalism. Politicians in democracies cannot long fight the preferences of the majority of their constituents. So this bias will likely continue to circumscribe both European elections and policy outcomes. A likely alternative scenario may be that the changes wrought by globalization will awaken deeply held resentment against capitalism and, in many countries from Europe to Latin America, provide a fertile ground for populists and demagogues, a trend that is already manifesting itself in the sudden rise of many leftist movements today.
Minimal reforms to the welfare state cost former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder his job in 2005. They have also paralyzed modern German politics. Former communists and disaffected Social Democrats, together with left-wing Greens, have flocked to Germany’s new leftist party, whose politics is a distasteful mix of anticapitalist demagoguery and right-wing xenophobia. Its platform, polls show, is finding support even among mainstream Germans. A left-leaning majority, within both the parliament and the public at large, makes the world’s third-largest economy vulnerable to destructive policies driven by anticapitalist resentment and fear of globalization. Similar situations are easily conceivable elsewhere and have already helped bring populists to power in Latin America. Then there is France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to “rupture” with the failed economic policies of the past. He has taken on the country’s public servants and their famously lavish benefits, but many of his policies appear to be driven by what he calls “economic patriotism,” which smacks of old-fashioned industrial protectionism. That’s exactly what French schoolchildren have long learned is the way the world should work.
Both the French and German cases show the limits of trying to run against the grain of deeply held economic ideology. Yet, training the next generation of citizens to be prejudiced against being enterprising and productive is equally foolhardy. Fortunately, such widespread attitudes and the political outcomes they foster aren’t only determined by tradition and history. They are, to a great extent, the product of education. If countries like France and Germany hope to get their nations on a new economic track, they might start paying more attention to what their kids are learning in the classroom.
Australian socialist millionaire (why are all of the most outspoken socialists always the ones who can afford to be?) Phillip Adams doesn't seem to have much of a clue about the United States and the reality of racism in that great country.
His latest opinion piece in The Australian must have senior figures wondering whether he's becoming more of a liability than an asset.
Barack Obama is crazy brave.
As distinct from Adams who is crazy cowardly.
His victory in Iowa puts him in the crosshairs of many a gun-toting racist for whom the thought of a black president is an abomination.
What about gun-toting misogynists for whom the thought of a female president is also an abomination? Or gun-toting Baptists for whom a Mormon presents problems?
The prospect, even the likelihood, of assassination played a significant role in Colin Powell’s decision - and that of his wife - to abandon any thought of a presidential run.
Hooey. He knew he didn't have the support of the party.
They were thinking hat-trick: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Colin Powell. As was Ted Kennedy when he abandoned any White House ambitions: Jack, Bobby, Teddy.
Teddy? Teddy? The man's a buffoon! And a hypocrite. He actively supports death duties while at the same time restructuring the family business so the full value can be passed on to his children, avoiding death duties along the way.
Across the US, a fatalism was provoked by a culture of pervasive violence, hundreds of millions of guns, conspiracy theories and bitter experience.
Far from the Chappaquiddick scandal costing Teddy any hope of Pennsylvania Avenue, his grotesque behaviour after the drowning of MaryJo Kopechne may have been symptomatic of his desperation to escape dynastic destiny. He assassinated himself. (Yet Teddy would live to achieve more substantial political change than his brothers, as a consequence of 40 years as a crusading legislator.)
Has Adams ever written a more incoherent paragraph than this? "He assassinated himself"???
Inevitably, presidents and presidential candidates are prime targets for sundry loonies, with most being inside jobs. With two exceptions - attempts on the lives of both presidents Bush - assassinations and attempts came from enemies within.
What does Adams mean by 'inside job'? Is he saying that JFK wasn't killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? Is he a Troofer, as well? He needs to have a chat with Vincent Bugliosi.
Four serving presidents were gunned down: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and JFK. At least another 11 were targeted: Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes.
After leaving office, Theodore Roosevelt campaigned again for the presidency, this time standing for the Progressive Party. He was shot in the chest by a New York saloon keeper. Slowed by the folded 50-page speech in his pocket, the bullet would remain in Roosevelt’s body.
One month before FDR’s inauguration, Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at him, wounding four others and killing the mayor of Chicago. Two assassins blazed away at Blair House where Truman was staying during building work on the West Wing. One was killed, the other, Oscar Collazo, was sentenced to death. Truman commuted that to life imprisonment. Carter released Collazo in 1979.
President-elect JFK was targeted by Richard Pavlick, a would-be suicide bomber with a Buick full of dynamite. He had a change of heart when he saw Jackie and the kids waving goodbye to daddy. Nixon survived two attempts, one by a certain Arthur Bremer during a visit to Canada in 1972. Unable to get a clear shot, he would, a few days later, shoot and paralyse the deep-south bigot and Democratic presidential contender George Wallace.
Two years later, Samuel Byck hijacked a commercial airliner. Anticipating September 11, he planned to fly it smack-bang into Nixon’s White House. When there were problems taking off - the plane’s wheels were chocked - he shot the pilot, the co-pilot and himself.
In 1975, one of Charles Manson’s followers, Squeaky Fromme, tried to shoot president Ford as he reached to shake her hand in the crowd. The revolver held four bullets but, fortunately for Ford, the firing chamber was empty. Fromme remains in the slammer.
However, Ford’s next would-be killer was released on Boxing Day last month after serving 30 years of her life sentence. This loony of the Left also fired at Ford from close quarters but a bystander managed to deflect the weapon.
For people who don't know what cognitive dissonance is they need look no further than the positions Adams holds. Squeaky Fromme is a 'loony of the Left' because she attempted to kill a president. Stalin, Mao, Lenin and Casto are heroes to Adams for 'standing up for the people' while at the same time putting a hundred million of them in their graves.
In 1979, Carter was about to make a speech in a Los Angeles mall when a would-be Lee Harvey Oswald named Raymond Lee Harvey was seen with a pistol. He told the cops he intended to create a diversion while two Mexican snipers killed the president. He was later released. There was insufficient evidence for a conviction.
Who would want to kill Carter? He was busily wrecking the world's biggest economy and enabling Islamic terrorism to be what it is today. Mind you, if there was any case for an inside job then this would be it. I'd imagine, though, that America's enemies would have been doing all they can to make sure Carter stayed alive.
John Hinckley Jr fired six shots at Reagan in March 1984. A policeman and a Secret Service agent were seriously wounded. Another bullet entered the brain of press secretary James Brady, who never fully recovered. A bullet ruptured Reagan’s lung and lodged close to his heart. Hinckley was trying to impress Jodie Foster by re-enacting a scene from Taxi Driver. He was found not guilty because of insanity and remains institutionalised.
In 1994, Francisco Duran fired a fusillade at the White House, believing one of a group of men to be Bill Clinton. Three months after leaving office, George H.W. Bush was the intended target of a car bombing in Kuwait. The US held Saddam Hussein responsible and bombed Baghdad in return. In 2005 a hand grenade was thrown at George W. Bush as he gave a speech in Tbilisi, Georgia. The grenade failed to detonate.
At least 18 attempts on sitting or former presidents, or presidents-elect. Facing the likelihood of an African-American in the White House, how many far-Right racists - from the old-fashioned Ku Klux Klan to more recent blast furnaces of bigotry such as Aryan Nations - are fantasising about or planning the assassination of Obama?
Adams needs to go and look at the KKK and who they really were. Racism in the US is confined to a few right wing kooks and a huge majority of the left for whom the soft racism of low expectation is so widely evident in its support for the destructive affirmative action programs that have held so many black people back over the last 30 years.
Interesting question. Would Kennedy have skipped his inauguration had he foreseen that day in Dallas? I doubt it.
Unfortunately for all the world's cricket lovers, Indian cricket authorities have taken things to a new low with their ridiculous shenanigans following their Second Test loss in the final few minutes of the game in Sydney on Sunday.
International cricket is in turmoil with the Indian cricket board suspending its team's tour of Australia and media calls for Australian captain Ricky Ponting to step down.
Last night the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) flexed its muscles by suspending the tour pending the outcome of spinner Harbhajan Singh's appeal against his three-match ban for racially abusing Andrew Symonds.
Harbhajan Singh was reported for calling Andrew Symons a 'monkey', the same taunt that the crowds used against Symons during Australia's last tour of India. Neutral umpires made the report, the incident was referred to the match referee and Singh was found guilty. Australian authorities have absolutely nothing to do with the decision.
People may not be aware that Indian cricket board, the BCCI, effectively runs world cricket and is using this non-incident in order to leverage more power from the International Cricket Council. For the BCCI to suspend the team's tour shows the depths that India's cricketing authorities are now plumbing in order to flex their muscles.
Why do we have neutral umpires in the first place? Because teams touring India and Pakistan in the pre-neutral umpire days couldn't get a fair go. There wasn't a problem with umpiring in Australia or England or the West Indies at the time. The number of crazy LBW decisions that finally led to the introduction of neutral umpires was a stain on sub-continental cricket's reputation.
Pakistani authorities complain about incompetent umpiring because they had a few decisions go against them but don't look at the other side of the ledger to see if there was anything that went for them. Ponting's dismissal was clearly not out. Did Ponting carry on like a pork chop? No. He accepted the decision and off he went.
Peter Roebuck's ridiculous assertion that Ricky Ponting should be replaced as captain indicates to me that this normally (or formerly?) very good cricket journalist has let a few sheep out of the top paddock. Any fair assessment of the various incidents that took place in the series so far could come back with any judgement other than Australia plays 'hard but fair' and Ponting captains the same way.
Does anyone remember the way India's captain at the time, Sourav Ganguly, behaved during Australia's last tour there? Contemptuous. Arrogant. Unsporting. Unseemly. Ungentlemanly. He did more to damage India's cricketing reputation than any other single player for many a year. Did the ACB carry on about Ganguly? No. It's part of the game.
I've commented before on the International Crisis Group's inept policy positions on matters of global importance. For those not familiar with it, the ICG is a left-leaning, Brussels-based think tank headed up by Australia's most over-rated foreign ministers of all time, Gareth Evans.
ICG analysts seem to have missed the change that has occurred in the world since 9/11, the associated rise of Islamic militancy and the lessons of history.
There are probably few better examples of US State Department incompetence than what they have tried to achieve in Pakistan. Like the ICG, the State Department is a 9/10 organisation that operates almost as an independent authority, particularly so if there's a Republican in the White House.
Pakistan now is not the Pakistan of five years ago. It is under serious threat from Al Qaeda and Taliban-like forces that have taken over the northern part of the country in a deal done with Musharraf and turned it into an Afghanistan style state when the Taliban ruled that country.
It is surely true that Musharraf has played both sides of the game in his post-9/11 'support' of the United States' War On Terror and that the results have been less than effective. This, however, is now reason to throw him overboard.
The lesson of history that should be remembered by the ICG, US State and those wishing to see and end to Musharraf (or even military rule in Pakistan) is that of Iran, as the parallels are clear for all who wish to see them.
Through the mid-70s, the position of the Shah of Iran became less tenable in the eyes of its major ally, the United States, mainly due to the increasingly brutal activities of Iran's security services in dealing with its opponents. We conveniently overlooked the fact that those opponents were not your brave, morally well attuned group like Solidarity in Poland but were mainly agents of the Islamic radicals who went on to gain power. The worst ever President, Jimmy Carter, chose to cast the Shah adrift, which led to the Iranian Revolution, the rise of Iran's state-funded terror groups around the world (Hezbollah, Hamas and others) and the weakening of the economy not to mention a war with Iraq in which over a million soldiers perished.
Supporters of a plan to oust Musharraf point to the fact that the majority of the people support a secular democracy in Pakistan. They seem to forget that this is the same situation as in Iran before the revolution and that the Iranians were even more pro-Western and pro-democracy than the population of Pakistan is now.
The power vacuum and political mayhem that followed the Shah's fall paved the way for the Ayatollah Khomeini who presented himself and his followers as moderates seeking to restore the state to the people. As Time wrote in its 100 most influential people of the 20th century comment, "...it is enough to say that Khomeini presided brilliantly over the overthrow of a wounded regime. He was merciless and cunning. His well-advertised piety complemented a prodigious skill in grasping and shaping Iran's complex politics. Most important, he knew how to exploit the feelings of nationalist resentment that characterized his time."
Resentment is a word that well describes the average Pakistani's feeling about the political mess that afflicts the country and, given the poor quality and corrupt leadership of Pakistan's established political parties it's not at all clear that a move to democracy, as recommended by the ICG, is achievable in the current environment.
It's very possible that the fall of Musharraf could see the rise of a radical Islamist party in Pakistan. With its nuclear arsenal in the hands of these people the much sought after stability in the region will be shattered.
The overview to the ICG's analysis on Pakistan is as follows:
Gravely damaged by eight years of military rule, Pakistan’s fragile political system received a major blow on 27 December 2007, when former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Her murder, days before the parliamentary elections scheduled for 8 January 2008 and now postponed to 18 February, put an end to a U.S. effort to broker a power-sharing deal with President Pervez Musharraf which the centre-left Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader had already recognised was unrealistic. Her popularity and the belief Musharraf and his allies were responsible, directly or indirectly, have led to violent countrywide protests.
The fact that the ICG sees Bhutto has popular shows how much they've missed the changes on the ground in Pakistan. Opposition to her was palpable and it was clear that her opponents would not stop trying to kill her until they succeeded. The crowd numbers she pulled to her rallies were not that great for someone who was supposedly returning to popular adulation, as the Western media seemed to report it.
Stability in Pakistan and its contribution to wider anti-terror efforts now require rapid transition to legitimate civilian government. This must involve the departure of Musharraf, whose continued efforts to retain power at all costs are incompatible with national reconciliation; an interim consensus caretaker government and a neutral Election Commission; and brief postponement of the elections to allow conditions to be created – including the restoration of judicial independence – in which they can be conducted freely and fairly.
A legitimate civilian government is certainly the ideal for Pakistan. The ICG makes no comment on the possibility of a 'legitimate' government such as happened in Gaza with the election of Hamas. They need to make an assessment of this possibility given how high the states are.
Bhutto’s death has drawn the battle lines even more clearly between Musharraf’s military-backed regime and Pakistan’s moderate majority, which is now unlikely to settle for anything less than genuine parliamentary democracy. Many in Pakistan fear that the federation’s very survival could depend on the outcome of this struggle.
Belying his reiterated slogan of “Pakistan first”, Musharraf is placing regime survival and his personal political fortune first, just as he did in November. That month he imposed martial law, suspended the constitution, imprisoned thousands of lawyers and politicians and sacked the judiciary with the sole objective of preventing the Supreme Court from challenging the legitimacy of his re-election as president by a lame-duck and stacked Electoral College.
Musharraf gave up his position of Army Chief on 28 November under U.S. pressure, but the legitimacy of his presidential election remains contested. He withdrew martial law formally on 15 December, ending the emergency and reviving the constitution. At the same time, however, he not only did not restore the dismissed judges or void the repressive decrees he had issued but also unilaterally and without any legal basis proclaimed amendments to the constitution purporting to deny the courts and the parliament their constitutional prerogatives to challenge his changes.
Bhutto’s PPP and the centre-right Muslim League (Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, PML-N) of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had reluctantly agreed to participate in the 8 January elections, motivated primarily by the desire to expose Musharraf’s intention to rig the vote. Stacked courts, partial caretaker governments, a subservient Election Commission, the gagging of the media, curbs on political party mobilisation and association and the actions of the security agencies all undermined the essential conditions for free and fair elections.
Anyone who has followed Pakistani politics for any length of time would understand what a disaster it would be for Nawz Sharif to regain power...
The regime’s international backers, particularly the U.S., continue to give signs of wanting to retain Musharraf in the presidency in the belief that he and the military (his sole support base) are the only guarantors of stability in a crucial country. But after Bhutto’s murder, and with the extent of popular anger now evident, elections that are not seen as free and fair would have disastrous consequences. The person of Musharraf has become so unpopular that his continuation in a position of power guarantees increasing domestic turmoil. By continuing to back him, Western governments might not just lose the battle for Pakistani hearts and minds, but could also be faced with the nightmare prospect of a nuclear-armed, Muslim-majority country of 165 million descending into violent internal conflict from which only extremist forces would stand to gain.
Assassination is par for the course in Pakistan of which Bhutto's own family in non-living proof. The country gets over these things quickly and sorts itself out. The ICG's assessment of 'popular anger' wildly overstates the reality and is not a reason for uncontrolled change.
Bhutto’s party will survive her demise, and will, should her successors act wisely, remain a force for moderation and stability in Pakistan. Sharif’s party has vowed to work with the PPP to restore democracy, peace and stability in the country. The U.S. and its Western allies must recognise that Musharraf is not only not indispensable, but he is now a serious liability. Instead of backing a deeply unpopular authoritarian ruler who is seen as complicit in the death of Pakistan’s most popular politician, they must instead support democratic institutions and the people of Pakistan. It is time that the West acknowledges that only a legitimate elected government, led by one of the moderate parties, would have the authority and the popular backing to return Pakistan to its moderate democratic moorings.
Someone should remember that Bhutto's party is hardly democratic with her 19 year old son now being appointed to head it up, with a co-head until he comes of age, which was a part of Bhutto's will. The way Bhutto ran Pakistan when she was Prime Minister is not dissimilar to the way Putin now runs Russia - as a personal cookie jar for her and her cronies.
In summary, the policy outcomes that need to happen over the next two months, and which should be strongly and consistently supported by the international community, and particularly those like the U.S. most capable of influencing them, are:
- Musharraf’s resignation, with Senate Chairman Mohammadmian Soomro taking over under the constitution as acting president and appointing neutral caretaker governments at the national and provincial levels with the consensus of the major political parties in all four federal units; - postponement of the polls, accompanied with the announcement of an early new election date. The Election Commission announced on 2 January a postponement until 18 February. This is reasonable in and of itself but it said nothing about the other crucial changes discussed in this Briefing and which are needed if this step is to contribute to restoration of democracy in Pakistan; - full restoration of the constitution, including an independent judiciary and constitutionally guaranteed fundamental freedoms of speech, assembly and association and safeguards against illegal arrest and detention; - reconstitution of the Election Commission of Pakistan, with the consensus of all major political parties; and - the transfer of power and legitimate authority to elected civilian hands.
Everyone hopes for a good outcome in Pakistan. The ICG's proposal creates more problems than it solves. Perhaps they're looking to generate more crises and more work for themselves?
Last year I dedicated Sunday night posts to Australian rock 'n' roll. In 2008 I'll spread my wings and bring something from the entire rock pantheon, starting today with one of my favourite bands, Hawkwind.
Hawkwind is a British rock band, one of the earliest space rock groups. Their lyrics favour urban and science fiction themes. The band settled on the name Hawkwind after briefly being billed as Hawkwind Zoo, Hawkwind being the nickname of Turner derived from his unappealing habit of clearing his throat (hawking) and excessive flatulence (wind). An Abbey Road session took place recording demos of "Hurry On Sundown" and others (included on the remasters version of Hawkwind), after which Slattery left to be replaced by Huw Lloyd-Langton, who had known Brock from his days working in a music shop selling guitar strings to the busking Brock. The addition of bassist Lemmy and drummer Simon King propelled the band to greater heights. One of the first gigs this band played was a benefit for the Greasy Truckers at The Roundhouse on 13 February 1972 and a resultant single "Silver Machine" was released, reaching #3 in the UK charts. This generated sufficient funds for the subsequent album Doremi Fasol Latido Space Ritual tour. The show featured dancers Stacia and Miss Renee, mime artist Tony Crerar and a light show by Liquid Len and is immortalised on the elaborate package Space Ritual. At the height of their success in 1973, the band released the single "Urban Guerrilla" which coincided with an IRA bombing campaign in London, so the BBC refused to play it and the band's management reluctantly decided to withdraw it fearing accusations of opportunism.
Of course, Hawkwind was the band that allowed the incomparable Lemmy to hone his skills and, when he was chucked out of the band for taking waaaaaaay too many drugs, he formed the band with the greatest heavy metal song ever written, Motorhead. The song? You'll have to wait until I do a Motorhead night.
Here are a few videos including their biggest hit, Silver Machine, a classic. There's also one that would earn them a decent fatwa if any of the lunatic Muslim clerics and imams actually went to a rock concert and heard it.
The Russians have been a nation of Climate Blasphemers pretty much since the beginning of the unscientific drivel that passes for consensus. It's ironic that the nation that instituted socialism (to the peril of tens of millions of its own citizens) is now at the vanguard of scientific opposition to the Climate Establishment, which hopefully will save us from the socialist policies of Big Green.
Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute. In this piece he describes that the warming we've seen is completely normal and that we're headed for a cool period. I reckon that the Climate Faithful understand completely that we're headed for cooler times and want to be able to take the credit when it actually happens, thus strengthening their position.
Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.
The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.
Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.
This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.
It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations—in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote’s duel with the windmill?
Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents—an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.
The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.
Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean’s surface warms up, it produces the “champagne effect.” Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.
Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution—a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.
Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.
Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence—not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.
Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.
Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.
The principal among those diverse links is Earth’s reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.
What can’t be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.
Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north—but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.
These are facts, of course, so the Climate Faithful will studiously ignore them, question the author's credentials and/or pull out the Big Oil slur.
When considering the hysteria from the Climate Faithful that the world needs to take immediate and drastic action to deal with a 'planetary emergency' by reducing CO2 emissions by 80% you need to remember that the predictions of temperature increase come from climate models; models that have never been accurate once, ever, at all.
These models are meant to reflect the sum total of all of the knowledge of climate science. The fact that the models have such a poor record seems to have no impact on the Climate Faithful, for whom facts really do seem to be the real inconvenient truth.
Climateaudit is the home of Steve McIntyre, a good-natured and unassuming Canadian statistician who is not in the pocket of Big Oil, doesn't believe the earth is flat and doesn't defend the science that smoking is harmful (to repeat the three accusations of the Climate Faithful of their detractors), who is also the slayer of the infamous Hockey Stick and the person who pointed out the errors in NASA's US temperature data set. Steve is now posting a number of communications with well known climate scientists, the latest from James Annan.
A few days ago, Judith Curry, another well known climate scientist, included with a comment at Climateaudit the following:
...the way clouds are currently parameterized in climate models, there is no way to build into the model an assumption like cloud fraction decreases 10% if surface temperature increases by 1 degree. The “tuning knobs”, if you will, that are available to modify the cloud properties in climate models are the specification of the threshold grid scale humidity for the onset of cloud formation (possibly different for ice vs liquid clouds), the treatment of particle fall speed, several tunables in the convective parameterization, the way in which cloud phase is determined to be liquid or ice (or mixed), and the thresholding for onset of rainfall/snowfall.
So relationships like cloud fraction decreases 10% if surface temperature increases by 1 degree are used to evaluate climate models, not as input into climate models. if the climate model disagrees with the observations, then it is not straightforward to figure out what part of the model to “fix”: the problem may be the ocean dynamics influencing sea surface temperature, problems with the atmospheric dynamics, problems with the surface flux parameterization or the boundary layer parameterization, or problems with aspects of the cloud parameterization itself.
Climate models have become very complex and have substantial physical basis in the parameterizations, but the parameterizations do introduce errors owing to neglected degrees of freedom in the parameterization or coarse resolution. So it is actually fairly difficult to “tune” a climate model to give a specific result in terms of a relationship between two internally determined model variables. Other than “tweaking” parameterization elements such as described above, the only way you can tune a climate model is with the external forcing (and aerosols are the only realy wiggle room you have).
The cloud parameterization problem in climate models is so difficult owing to the complexity of the scales of the problem (from the scale of a micron sized drop to to scale of a tropical or extratropical storm system), with a model resolution that is order 100 km.
P.S. the word “definitive” was used in the sense of defining our current understanding of the problem, not to imply the problem is definitely solved.
and:
The reason that the climate modelers were startled by the uniformly positive cloud feedbacks in the IPCC runs is that typically (previously) the cloud feedbacks have been all over the place. It is almost impossible to anticipate how the cloud feedback will turn out when you change an element of the cloud parameterization, since it interacts with so many things such as atmospheric dynam ics, atmospheric stability, boundary layer, etc.
And to Steve McIntyre's current post:
I’ve been seeking an engineering-quality exposition of how 2.5 deg C is derived from doubled CO2 for some time. I posted up Gerry North’s suggestion here , which was an interesting article but hardly a solution to the question. I’ve noted that Ramanathan and the Charney Report in the 1970s discuss the topic, but these are hardly up-to-date or engineering quality. Schwartz has a recent journal article deriving a different number and, again, this is hardly a definitive treatment. At AGU, I asked Schwartz after his presentation for a reference setting out the contrary point of view, but he did not give a reference. I’ve emailed Gavin Schmidt asking for a reference and got no answer.
James Annan, a thoughtful climate scientist (see link to his blog in left frame), recently sent me an email trying to answer my long-standing inquiry. While it was nice of him to offer these thoughts, an email hardly counts as a reference in the literature. Since James did not include a relevant reference, I presume that he feels that that the matter is not set out in existing literature. Secondly, a two-page email is hardly an “engineering quality” derivation of the result. By “engineering quality”, I mean the sort of study that one would use to construct a mining plant, oil refinery or auto factory - smaller enterprises than Kyoto.
Part of the reason that my inquiry seems to fall on deaf ears is that climate scientists seem to be so used to the format of little Nature and Science articles that they seem not to understand what an engineering-quality exposition would even look like.
Anyway on to James who writes:
I noticed on your blog that you had asked for any clear reference providing a direct calculation that climate sensitivity is 3C (for a doubling of CO2). The simple answer is that there is no direct calculation to accurately prove this, which is why it remains one of the most important open questions in climate science.
We can get part of the way with simple direct calculations, though. Starting with the Stefan-Boltzmann equation,
S (1-a)/4 = s T_e^4
where S is the solar constant (1370 Wm^-2), a the planetary albedo (0.3), s (sigma) the S-B constant (5.67×10^-8) and T_e the effective emitting temperature, we can calculate T_e = 255K (from which we also get the canonical estimate of the greenhouse effect as 33C at the surface).
The change in outgoing radiation as a function of temperature is the derivative of the RHS with respect to temperature, giving 4s.T_e^3 = 3.76. This is the extra Wm^-2 emitted per degree of warming, so if you are prepared to accept that we understand purely radiative transfer pretty well and thus the conventional value of 3.7Wm^-2 per doubling of CO2, that conveniently means a doubling of CO2 will result in a 1C warming at equilibrium, *if everything else in the atmosphere stays exactly the same*.
But of course there is no strong reason to expect everything else to stay exactly the same, and at least one very good argument why we might expect a somewhat increased warming: warmer air can hold more water vapour, and I’m sure all your readers will be quick to mention that water vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas anyway. We don’t know the size of this effect precisely, but a constant *relative* humidity seems like a plausible estimate, and GCM output also suggests this is a reasonable approximation (AIUI observations are generally consistent with this, I’m not sure how precise an estimate they can provide though), and sticking this in to our radiation code roughly doubles the warming to 2C for the same CO2 change. Of course this is not a precise figure, just an estimate, but it is widely considered to be a pretty good one. The real wild card is in the behaviour of clouds, which have a number of strong effects (both on albedo and LW trapping) and could in theory cause a large further amplification or suppression of AGW-induced warming. High thin clouds trap a lot of LW (especially at night when their albedo has no effect) and low clouds increase albedo. We really don’t know from first principles which effect is likely to dominate, we do know from first principles that these effects could be large, given our current state of knowledge. GCMs don’t do clouds very well but they do mostly (all?) suggest some further amplification from these effects. That’s really all that can be done from first principles.
If you want to look at things in the framework of feedback analysis, there’s a pretty clear explanation in the supplementary information to Roe and Baker’s recent Science paper. Briefly, if we have a blackbody sensitivity S0 (~1C) when everything else apart from CO2 is held fixed, then we can write the true sensitivity S as
S = S0/(1- Sum (f_i))
where the f_i are the individual feedback factors arising from the other processes. If f_1 for water vapour is 0.5, then it only takes a further factor of 0.17 for clouds (f_2, say) to reach the canonical S=3C value. Of course to some extent this may look like an artefact of the way the equation is written, but it’s also a rather natural way for scientists to think about things and explains how even a modest uncertainty in individual feedbacks can cause a large uncertainty in the overall climate sensitivity.
On top of this rather vague forward calculation there are a wide range of observations of how the climate system has responded to various forcing perturbations in the past (both recent and distant), all of which seem to match pretty well with a sensitivity of close to 3C. Some analyses give a max likelihood estimate as low as 2C, some are more like 3.5, all are somewhat skewed with the mean higher than the maximum likelihood. There is still plenty of argument about how far from 3C the real system could plausibly be believed to be. Personally, I think it’s very unlikely to be far either side and if you read my blog you’ll see why I think some of the more “exciting” results are seriously flawed. But that is a bit of a fine detail compared to what I have written above. Assuming I’ve not made any careless error, I think what I’ve written is entirely uncontentious among mainstream climate scientists (I certainly intended it that way).
Feel free to post and/or pick at as you please (maybe you’d like to LaTeX the maths first).
James
A Few Comments
As noted above, the above note contains only one (not very useful) reference and fails my request for something in the literature literature.
Annan says:
if you are prepared to accept that we understand purely radiative transfer pretty well and thus the conventional value of 3.7Wm^-2 per doubling of CO2
I do accept that we know radiative transfer of CO2 “pretty well”. I’m not as convinced that all the details of water vapor are understand as well. IPCC TAR GCMs all used a HITRAN version that included an (undisclosed) clerical error in water vapor NIR that amounted to about 4 wm-2 or so. This error had been identified prior to IPCC TAR, but not in time to re-do the GCMs. The error was not disclosed in IPCC TAR. The water vapor continuum seems to have a certain amount of hair on it yet.
Worse, as far as I’ve been able to determine, radiative transfer theory is not itself sufficient to yield the “conventional value of 3.7 Wm^-2 per doubling of CO2″. Getting to that value requires assumptions about the atmosphere and lapse rates and things like that - I’m not saying that any of these calculations are poorly done or incorrect, only that they are not simply a matter of radiative transfer.
Next, James identifies a second important assumption in the modern calculations:
constant *relative* humidity seems like a plausible estimate and GCM output also suggests this is a reasonable approximation
It may well be a “plausible estimate” but something better than this is required. I cannot imagine someone saying this in an engineering study. Lots of things “seem plausible” but turn out to be incorrect. That’s why you have engineers.
Annan goes on to say “GCM output also suggests this is a reasonable approximation”. I’m not sure entirely what he means by this as he did not provide any references. I interpret the statement to mean that GCMs use the constant relative humidity assumption and yield plausible results. Could one vary the constant relative humidity assumption and still get reasonable results from a GCM or a re-tuned GCM? I don’t know. Have people attempted to do so and failed? I don’t recall seeing references to such null experiments AR4 or elsewhere, but might have missed the discussion as it’s not a section that I’ve read closely so far.
In an interesting Crowley paleoclimate article (that I’ve not discussed yet but will at some point), he questions this particular assumption on the basis that allowing for varying lapse rates could explain otherwise puzzling paleo data.
Obviously in an engineering quality assumption, the constant relative humidity assumption would need to be thoroughly aired. I think that this is probably a very important topic and might take dozens of pages (if not a few hundred). A couple of sentences as done here by Annan is merely arm-waving through the problem.
Clouds
Annan says quite candidly:
The real wild card is in the behaviour of clouds, which have a number of strong effects (both on albedo and LW trapping) and could in theory cause a large further amplification or suppression of AGW-induced warming. High thin clouds trap a lot of LW (especially at night when their albedo has no effect) and low clouds increase albedo. We really don’t know from first principles which effect is likely to dominate, we do know from first principles that these effects could be large, given our current state of knowledge. GCMs don’t do clouds very well but they do mostly (all?) suggest some further amplification from these effects. That’s really all that can be done from first principles.
If we go back to the Charney Report in 1979, clouds were even then identified as the major problem. Given the seeming lack of progress in nearly 30 years, one wonders whether GCMs are really the way to go in trying to measure CO2 impact and whether irrelevant complications are being introduced into the assessment. There was an interesting discussion of cloud feedbacks at RC about a year ago, in which Isaac Held expressed astonishment when a lay commenter observed to him that cloud feedbacks in the models were all positive - Held apparently expecting the effects to be randomly distributed between positive and negative.
James says:
We really don’t know from first principles which effect is likely to dominate, we do know from first principles that these effects could be large
This is a pretty disquieting statement. If we don’t know this and if this is needed to assess doubled CO2, how does one get to an engineering-quality study?
As far as I’m concerned, James’ closing paragraph about feedbacks is tautological: if you know the feedback ratio, you know the result. But you don’t know the feedback ratios so what has James done here other than re-state the problem?
Thus, James’ exposition, while meant kindly, is not remotely close to answering my question. So the search for an engineering-quality explanation remains.
As I’ve said on many occasions, I do not jump from the seeming absence of a reference to the conclusion that such an exposition is impossible - a jump that readers make much too quickly in my opinion. Murray Pezim, a notorious Vancouver stock promoter, actually had a couple of important mineral discoveries (e.g. Hemlo). I do think that the IPCC has been seriously negligent in failing to provide such an exposition. Well before the scoping of IPCC AR4, I corresponded with Mike MacCracken and suggested that IPCC AR4 should include an exposition of how doubled CO2 leads to a 2.5-3 deg C overall temperature increase - the sort of exposition that readers here are thirsting for.
He undertook to pass the suggestion on to Susan Solomon. However, this idea was apparently rejected somewhere along the process. The first chapter of AR4 consists instead of a fatuous and self-congratulatory history of climate science that has no place whatever in a document addressed to policy-makers.
A side-effect of this IPCC failure is perhaps the dumbing down of the AGW debate, giving rise to shallow and opportunistic expositions like An Inconvenient Truth, in which we get polar bears, hockey sticks, Katrina, all artfully crafted to yield a promotional message. This places thoughtful climate scientists in a quandary, since, by and large, they agree with the AIT conclusion, but not the presentation and the details, and have tended to stay mute on AIT.
As I've said before, the whole global warming scam will seriously impact on the public's belief in science and that's a tragedy.
The New York Times' John Tierney has a great article summing up the hysteria associated with the pronouncements of the Climate Faithful in the form of predictions for 2008.
I like the bit describing the BBC's headline for 2007's climate. That organisation has been one of the most strident promoters of the whole global warming scam and, given its left wing positioning, it comes as no surprise that they don't let facts get in the way of opinion.
The level of cognitive dissonance it takes to believe the output of climate models in light of real world measurement is truly astonishing. I'm struggling to think of many other examples that can rival it.
I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.
You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.
Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.
But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).
Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.
A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”
When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.
When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).
The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.
When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.
Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.
“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”
Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.
Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?
It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.
I've mentioned before that the Turkish Daily News is an interesting read, especially the opinion pieces, which really show the freedom Turks have to speak their mind.
From Mustafa Akyol comes this piece reflecting on the failure of the French Revolution to create a society that could keep up with the English speaking world, which has dominated global affairs for the last 500 years or so. The fact that it's coming from an entirely different world view helps make the analysis even more interesting.
France today is in a parlous state and the expectation is that Sarkozy will be able to energise French workers to increase the number of hours they actually work (note that efficiency is on a par with the rest of Europe) and when they retire and start receiving benefits.
Today Edmund Burke’s genius is manifested not only in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon ways over that of the French, but also in the utter failure of imitations of the latter.
Chou En-Lai, the late prime minister of communist China, was once asked what he thought about the French Revolution. He declined to comment, and explained, “It's too early to tell.”
That was in the early 1960s. Perhaps today it is a little bit less early to comment on whether the French Revolution really was a good idea. That seminal event – which inspired not just the French but also many other revolutionaries in many countries all around the world, including Turkey – has borne some notable fruits by which we might judge their political roots.
The next sick man of Europe?
To be blunt, today France is on a slippery slope toward becoming the next sick man of Europe. Its economy is in bad shape, in particular compared with its historic rival, the United Kingdom. French society is growingly nationalist, protective and even xenophobic – evidenced by its obsessive reaction to Turkey's European Union membership process. (Again, compare that to the Britain's self-confident and all-embracing attitude.) In world politics, the influence of France is in continuous decline, and has become not a creative but a reactionary force in the face of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. No wonder that the man who promises to restore France's good-old days, Nicolas Sarkozy, tries to do that through Anglo-Saxon ways.
Even French culture, of which virtually all Frenchmen are proud, is in acute crisis. Several weeks ago, Time magazine's cover story was titled, “The Death of French Culture.” “Once admired for the dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians,” the story noted, “France today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace.” This has something to do with the protectionist, statist and socialist attitude so prevalent in the country. “There is a strain in the national mind-set that distrusts commercial success,” Time noted. “Success is considered bad taste."
French Enlightenment revisited
But why? Why does the common French mind prefer statism to free-markets, nationalism to globalism, and, moreover, despair and melancholy to hope and joy? According to historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, the answer lies in the foundational ideas of French society. In her book, “The Roads to Modernity” she contrasts the French Enlightenment with that of the British and the American. The former, according to her, “was excessively preoccupied with reason and insufficiently concerned with individual liberty.” (Hence the tyranny of the Jacobins and the guillotine.) In contrast, “the British Enlightenment was underpinned by ideals of social virtue; compassion, benevolence and sympathy.” British thinkers were also “tolerant and pragmatic.”
Attitudes toward religion were also a fundamental divide. According to Himmelfarb, the French Enlightenment saw religion as “the enemy” while the Anglo-Saxons regarded it as “ally” in modernization. Unlike the French, the American and the British did not wage wars on churches and the clergy. Instead, they drew spiritual support from religion for individual entrepreneurship and social reform.
Probably no one foresaw the doomed destiny of France as clearly as the Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797. In his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Burke argued that the revolution was not a signal of a representative, constitutional democracy, but rather a violent rebellion against tradition and proper authority, and an experiment disconnected from the complex, natural (and divinely ordained) realities of human society. In the face of French obsession with “reason” as a constructive and autocratic force, Burke defended tradition, liberty and evolutionary change.
The France in Turkey
Burke was right. Today his genius is manifested not only in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon ways over those of the French, but also in the utter failure of imitations of the latter. In that regard, Turkey is a perfect case study. Right from the beginning of the republic, the Turkish state and the elite emulated all the ideas of the French Enlightenment and tried to impose them on society. The veneration of “the Republic” as if it is an end in itself; the obsessive hatred toward traditional religion and the conception of secularism (laïcité) as an alternative faith; distrust toward freedom and free markets, and a deep-seated belief in protectionism and “statism”, are all ideas that the Turks borrowed from the French and made far worse.
But of course – and thank God – not all Turks bought into the same ideas. Some of them have found an alternative road toward modernity, a one that is similar to that of the Anglo-Saxons. Turkey's center-right politics, best represented by the governments of Adnan Menderes (1950-60) and Turgut Özal (1983-93), have corresponded to that. This political line defended freedom and tradition in the face of an authoritarian and ultra-secularist establishment. Menderes paid the price by being executed by the military in 1961. Özal was abhorred, and continuously blocked, by the Kemalists.
During the 2000s, the AKP has done a great job by moving away from the Islamist line to the conservative/liberal tradition of Menderes and Özal. By doing so, it has started to transform Turkey's conservative Muslim masses, who have always despised their Jacobin rulers (for good reasons) and held modernity to be the problem. With the AKP experience, these masses have started to realize that the problem is not modernity itself, but rather a specific way of attempting to get there.
Meanwhile the Turkish champions of that specific way are growingly insecure, reactionary and xenophobic — a devolution which parallels the experience in its motherland, France, and which signifies that the French Revolution was a lot less progressive than its protagonists assert.
