Unhappy Feet  

The Independent asks " What can dying penguins tell us about the future of the planet ?" in "Global Warning: Brutal lessons from an Antarctic summer".

There are no sounds but the wash of the sea, the occasional calls of skuas. Every penguin is gone. The nests are abandoned. Listen to the silence. The silence of absence. The sound of failure.

Bill stands tall, still, on the carefully sorted pebbles. Standing where it should not be possible to stand, in the centre of a penguin colony, in the middle of summer. This season, on Litchfield Island, only seven pairs of penguins managed to keep eggs until hatching. Eighteen days ago, Bill counted four pairs of penguins in one colony, one pair in another. Five days ago, seven penguins remained. This space was still theirs. Now they have gone. The sound of extinction is approaching. In two to three years, Bill says, Litchfield will be vacant.

The map drawn in 1957 at Base N, showing the locations of local bird colonies, marks six Adélie colonies on the south-east peninsula of Litchfield. When Bill first arrived at Palmer in 1975, those colonies were extinct; 884 breeding pairs of Adélies were nesting further to the west, but still in the shadow of the high central hills, still on the island's southern slopes. With temperature change, with increased snow, the sites proved lethal. Storms tracking west to east between South America and the peninsula scoured snow from north-facing surfaces and dumped it in the lee. Penguin numbers fell rapidly.

Here is climate change in action, Antarctica as a living experiment. Litchfield Island is a precisely located landscape, with just two key species, Adélies and brown skuas. Their relationship is straightforward; the numbers have been collected. Contributing factors have been unpacked and understood, decline tracked over time. The hypothesis is clear, the outcome predicted.

Data from Litchfield had already revealed that, whenever an Adélie colony dropped below a certain number, the chicks were vulnerable to predation by brown skuas. Litchfield has six brown skua pairs. They are birds with long histories, many of them tracked.

As the population declined, they destroyed their meal table. This season, Litchfield's Adélie penguins failed to hatch chicks and so failed to deliver brown skua meals. This season, Litchfield's brown skuas fed until there were no Adélie eggs left, and no chicks. Nothing. Bill needed proof. Now he has it.

Shifting weather patterns challenge the precisely balanced interconnectedness of living things, their dependence on established networks to find food, to reproduce – to survive. Litchfield is an indisputable case study of the impact.

The Independent also reports the British army is about to withdraw from Iraq - "The generals have spoken, Mr Brown".

This paper has done more than any other to highlight the sacrifices being made by our troops in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For us, these are not forgotten wars. We did not and do not support the invasion of Iraq, flawed in its justification and calamitous in its outcome, but we did accept the need for intervention in Afghanistan to root out the Taliban which was harbouring al-Qa'ida.

Iraq and Afghanistan are two different fronts, two very different campaigns. In Afghanistan the presence of our troops is justified and useful; in Iraq, there is no further rationale for their presence beyond the political imperative to show solidarity with the US administration.

At Camp David, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said that he would listen to the commanders on the ground in deciding whether British troops should remain in Iraq. Today, this newspaper exclusively conveys the message from those commanders that there is nothing useful they can now do in Iraq. Two generals have said that "we've done what we can in the south" of Iraq. This is a sober statement of reality. About 500 troops are confined to Basra Palace, which is the object of regular missile attacks; there are already plans for their withdrawal. Another 5,000 troops are in Basra airport, in theory to reinforce the Iraqi forces if necessary, but in practice a target for insurgents. This is a long way from the role envisioned for British troops during the 2003 invasion, when officers were told that their war aims were to bring democracy and stability to Iraq.

Mr Brown has promised to report to Parliament in October. He should announce a troop withdrawal. Too many soldiers have died, 41 this year alone, in a war which should never have been fought. If the commanders say there is nothing more they can do, it would risk a tragic waste of life just to remain as a fig leaf for the US. We should retreat from Basra and redeploy in Afghanistan. There is no shame in such a retreat.

There is no contradiction between opposing the war, as this paper does, and supporting our troops, which this paper also does. We have continued to have the highest expectations of our soldiers, and on those rare occasions when they have been found wanting, we have held them to account. We make no apology for that; we simply expect them to uphold the standards which the world has come to expect from the British Army in the bloodiest conflicts and the most demanding circumstances. With remarkably few exceptions, our forces have fought bravely and cleanly in a dirty war; certainly they have shown greater sensitivity than US troops though admittedly in different circumstances.

The reality is, however, that they can do no more good in Iraq. Indeed, their very presence may now be aggravating the conflict. Some 90 per cent of the violence in Basra is reputedly aimed at British troops. Mr Brown could justify the retention of sufficient numbers of British forces to train Iraqi soldiers and provide supporting expertise. But that would only amount to perhaps 1,500, and there is no justification for any of them to remain in the crossfire between the warring factions in Basra.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on "Why Iraqis oppose U.S.-backed oil law - Workers think foreign firms will take over". How on earth did they get that idea ? Aren't we there to get rid of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction ? Anyway - I'm sure there couldn't possibly be more than 300 billion barrels of "undiscovered" oil under Iraq to be handed over to our oil companies - and that would only be worth a measly 2.1 trillion dollars at current prices (though luckily US taxpayers have footed most of the acquisition costs, which makes the economic proposition a little stronger).

Across the political spectrum in Washington, members of Congress are now demanding that the Iraqi government meet certain benchmarks, which presumably would show that it's really in charge. But there's a big problem with the most important benchmark: the oil law. It is extremely unpopular in Iraq.

Congress has been told the law is a way to share oil wealth among Iraq's regions and religious sects. Iraqis see it differently. They say the law will turn over the oil fields to foreign companies, giving them control over setting royalties, deciding production levels, and even determining whether Iraqis get to work in their own industry.

Under Washington's guidance, the Iraqi government wrote the oil law in secret deliberations. It needed secrecy to obscure the fact that it gives foreign corporations control over exploration and development in one of the world's largest oil reserves, through agreements called "production-sharing" contracts. Such deals are so disadvantageous that they have been rejected by most oil-producing countries, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and otherwise conservative regimes throughout the Middle East.

The leaders of the Iraqi opposition to the oil law are the industry's workers. In early June, the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions shut pipelines from the Rumeila fields near Basra, in the south, to Baghdad and the rest of the country. Their main demand was that oil remain in public hands, although they also sought to force the government to improve conditions for workers.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responded by calling out units of the 10th Division of the Iraqi army and surrounding the strikers at Sheiba, near Basra. U.S. aircraft buzzed the strikers as well, while al-Maliki issued arrest warrants for the union's leaders. Facing the possibility, however, that the strike would escalate into shutdowns on the rigs themselves, cutting off oil exports, al-Maliki blinked. He agreed to hold off implementation of the oil law until October, giving the union a chance to propose alternatives.

This undoubtedly increased al-Maliki's troubles in Washington, where failure to move on the oil law benchmark has been held as evidence of weakness and incompetence. In Iraq, however, al-Maliki faces a fact that U.S. policymakers refuse to recognize: The oil industry is a symbol of Iraqi nationhood.

Because of its actions, the oil workers union has become one of the strongest voices of Iraqi nationalism, protecting an important symbol of Iraq's national identity, and, more important, the only source of income capable of financing the country's post-occupation reconstruction.

U.S. legislators trying to impose the oil law might note that they are requiring the Iraqi government to betray one of the few reasons Iraqis have for supporting it - its ability to keep oil revenue in public hands.

Some of the oil workers' other demands reflect the desperate situation of workers under the occupation. They want their employer, the government oil ministry, to pay wage increases and promised vacations, and give permanent status to thousands of temporary employees. In a country where housing has been destroyed on a huge scale and workers often live in dilapidated and primitive conditions, the union wants the government to turn over land for building homes.

Every year, the Oil Institute, a national technical training college for the industry's workers and technicians, has miraculously continued holding classes. Yet the ministry won't give work to graduates, despite the war-torn industry's desperate need for skilled labor. The union demands jobs and a future for Iraq's young people.

Fighting for these demands makes the union even more popular and further enhances its nationalist credentials. Many Iraqis see it defending the interests of the millions of workers who have to make a living and keep their families eating in the middle of a war zone. Conversely, the United States, which imposed a series of low-wage laws at the beginning of the occupation, looks bent on enforcing poverty.

Iraq has a long labor history. Union activists, banned and jailed under the British and their puppet monarchy, organized a labor movement that was the admiration of the Arab world when Iraq became independent after the revolution of 1958. When Saddam Hussein came to power, though, he drove its leaders underground, killing or imprisoning the ones he could catch.

When Hussein fell, Iraqi unionists came out of prison, up from underground and back from exile, determined to rebuild the labor movement. Miraculously, in the midst of war and bombings, they did. The oil workers union in the south is now one of the largest organizations in Iraq, with thousands of members on the rigs, pipelines and refineries. The electrical workers union is the first national labor organization headed by a woman, Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein.

Together with other unions in railroads, hotels, ports, schools and factories, they've gone on strike, held elections, won wage increases and made democracy a living reality. Yet the Bush administration, and the Baghdad government it controls, has outlawed collective bargaining, continuing to enforce a decree originally issued by Hussein in 1987 banning unions in the public sector.

The al-Maliki government has seized all union funds and turned its back on a wave of assassinations of union leaders. After the June strike, Iraq's oil minister ordered oil industry officials to refuse to recognize or bargain with the oil worker unions. Iraq's oil industry was nationalized in the 1960s, like that of every other country in the Middle East. The Iraqi oil union became, and remains, the industry's most zealous guardian.

When Halliburton Corp. went into Iraq in the wake of the troops in 2003, the company tried to seize control of wells and rigs, withholding reconstruction aid to force workers to submit. The oil union struck for three days in August 2003, stopping exports and cutting off government revenue. Halliburton then closed its Basra offices and left the oil region.

The oil and port unions compelled other foreign corporations to give up agreements under which the U.S. occupation gave them control of Iraq's deepwater ports. Muhsin's electrical union is still battling to stop subcontracting in the power stations, a prelude to corporate takeover of a public resource.

Iraqi nationalists make sharp accusations that the occupation has an economic agenda, including the wholesale privatization of the Iraqi economy. Paul Bremer, formerly head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, published lists in Baghdad newspapers of Iraqi public enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab labor leader Hacene Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization easy: First you destroy society, then you let the corporations rebuild it."

Hassan Juma'a Awad, president of the oil workers federation, wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress on May 13. "Everyone knows the oil law doesn't serve the Iraqi people," he warned. The proposed new statute "serves Bush, his supporters and foreign companies at the expense of the Iraqi people. ... The USA claimed that it came here as a liberator, not to control our resources."

The unions have vowed to strike if the law is implemented. At the occupation's end, the government in Baghdad will need control of the oil wealth to rebuild a devastated country. That gives Iraqis a big reason to fight to protect public ownership and control of the oil industry.

The Observer has a report on the vultures still circling the feast - "Oil giants rush to lay claim to Iraq".

The world's oil majors will descend on two key conferences about Iraqi oil next month, seizing their last chance to jockey for position before the expected passing of the country's hydrocarbon law sets off a scramble for its vast energy resources.

Iraqi officials, including oil minister Hussein Shahristani, will attend the gatherings in Dubai in September to meet international oil executives. All the big players will be there, including BP, Shell, Exxon and Chevron, as well as minnows such as Addax Petroleum, some of which have operations in Iraq.

David Horgan, managing director of Petrel Resources, an Irish explorer with a presence in Iraq since 1999, said: 'All the oil companies have been salivating at the prospect of Iraq for years. There is a good chance of very large discoveries. Nowhere else in the world offers that.'

Horgan said that once the oil law was passed, oil executives would rush to sign exploration and production deals, despite Iraq's security situation. Under severe US pressure, the Iraqi administration is now expected to push through the oil law before the end of September.

The majors have stayed away from Iraq, which has the world's third largest oil reserves, because there was no legal framework for investing in its energy sector. Unusually for the Middle East, the oil law will provide generous rates of return and production sharing agreements that allow companies that have had to write down their reserves, such as Shell, to book massive new reserves.

Muhammad-Ali Zainy, from the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London, said: 'Why do international oil companies rush in to divide the loot at a time when Iraq is submerged in blood? Iraqis will not benefit from this.'

Energy Bulletin has an article on "Why Dick changed his mind".

In a widely viewed You Tube clip, taken from a C-Span interview conducted in 1994, Dick Cheney argues persuasively that the United States was right not to topple Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War.

He cites the potential disintegration of the country and the risk of American casualties as good reasons for the decision not to take Baghdad.

So what was it that changed his mind by the turn of the century?

An acute awareness of impending peak oil.

In a world of looming oil shortage, Iraq represented a unique opportunity. With 115 billion barrels (officially) Iraq had the world’s third biggest reserves, and after years of war and sanctions they were also the most underexploited. In the late 1990s Iraqi oil production averaged about 2 million barrels per day, but with the necessary investment it was thought its reserves could support three times that output. Not only were sanctions stopping Iraqi production from growing, but also actively damaging the country’s petroleum geology by denying the national oil company access to essential chemicals and equipment.

In one of a series of reports to the Security Council, UN specialist inspectors warned in January 2000 that sanctions had already caused irreversible damage to Iraq’s reservoirs, and would continue to lead to “the permanent loss of huge reserves of oil”. But sanctions could not be lifted with Saddam still in place, so if Iraq’s oil was to help defer the onset of global decline, the monster so long supported by the West would have to go.

As I reveal in The Last Oil Shock, the CIA was also well aware of Iraq’s unique value, having secretly paid for new maps of its petroleum geology to be drawn as early as 1998. Cheney also knew, fretting publicly about global oil depletion at a speech in London the following year, where he noted that “the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies”. Blair too had reason to be anxious about oil: British North Sea output had peaked in 1999 - and has been falling ever since - while the petrol protests of 2000 had made the importance of maintaining the fuel supply excruciatingly obvious.

Britain and America’s shared energy fears were secretly formalised during the planning for Iraq. It is widely accepted that Blair’s commitment to support the attack dates back to his summit with Bush at Crawford in April 2002. The Times headline was typical that weekend: Iraq Action Is Delayed But ‘Certain’. What is less well known is that at the same summit Blair proposed and Bush agreed to set up the US-UK Energy Dialogue, a permanent diplomatic liason dedicated to “energy security and diversity”. No announcement was made, and the Dialogue’s existence was only later exposed through a US Freedom of Information enquiry by Rob Evans and David Hencke of the Guardian.

Both governments continue to refuse to release minutes of meetings between ministers and officials held under the Dialogue, but among some papers that have been released, one dated February 2003 notes that to meet projected world demand, oil production in the Middle East would have to double by 2030 to over 50 million barrels per day, and proposed “a targeted study to examine the capital and investment requirements of key Gulf countries”. So on the eve of the invasion British and American officials were secretly discussing how to raise oil production from the region and we are invited to believe this is mere coincidence. Iraq was evidently not just about corporate greed but strategic desperation.

The bitterest irony is of course that Dick was right in 1994. The invasion has been a disaster not only for the people of Iraq but also in terms of its hidden agenda - creating conditions that guarantee Iraqi oil production will remain hobbled for years to come.

Bruce Sterling has a post on a Wexelblat disaster in China - "Climate Crisis Brusquely Drowns Chinese Coal Miners". "Excessive" rain has also knocked out Indonesian coal exports, making Australia's exporters of the filthy stuff even happier than usual.

(((This is a classic example of what's known in the Greenhouse-pundit trade as a "Wexelblat Disaster.")))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wexelblat_disaster

181 feared dead in flooded coal mines in China: The Times of India.


China: Distraught relatives protested and demanded answers Sunday nearly two days after a collapsed dike in eastern China flooded two coal mines, leaving 181 workers missing and feared dead. The Huayuan Mining Co.mine flooded on Friday afternoon when the Wen river burst a dike, sending water pouring into a shaft and trapping 172 miners, Xinhua and state television said. Nine more miners were trapped when water poured into the nearby Minggong Coal Mine on Friday evening, according to Xinhua. (...)

China's coal mines are the world's deadliest, (((especially to non-Chinese, who have to share the same sky with Chinese smokestacks))) with thousands of fatalities a year in fires, floods and other disasters. Many are blamed on managers who disregard safety rules. The government has promised for years to improve mine safety, but China depends on coal for most of itselectric power, and the country's economic boom has created voracious demand. Production has more than doubled since 2000. Storms that swept through the region on Friday and Saturday dumped 232 millimeters (9.13 inches) of rain, Xinhua said.

(((There's not a coal mine in the world that could avert nine inches of sudden Greenhouse rain. Those miners were digging their own graves.)))

Government Executive magazine has a look at one of Bruce Schneier's favourite bugbears - "Security Theatre".

Author and security consultant Bruce Schneier has dubbed such cost-ineffective measures "security theater" because they evoke feelings of security without actually improving it. But it's easy to understand how the lighter ban came to pass. Lawmakers wanted to show voters they were doing something in response to Reid and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Airlines were eager to restore confidence and happy to let the federal government take on the cost and responsibility of baggage screening. Neither had a motivation to argue that shoe bombers did not represent a serious enough threat to aviation to merit the lighter ban, or even to ask the question of whether they posed such a threat. Alarm overpowered reasonable cost-benefit analysis and a measured response.

Welcome to homeland security, where everyone has an incentive to exaggerate threats. A Congress member whose district includes a port has little to lose and much to gain by playing up the potential for container-borne terrorism. A city with a dam talks up the need to protect critical infrastructure. A company selling weapons-detection technology stresses the vulnerability of commercial aviation. A civil servant evaluating homeland security grant applications has an interest in over-estimating dangers that might be addressed by grantees rather than denying funding and risk blame in the event of a disaster.

Each has an incentive to be alarmist. Hardly any of the players has good reason to contemplate terrorism reasonably or to consider threats in terms of probability and finite budget resources. That lonely job falls to the Homeland Security Department, which, four years after its creation, is just beginning to integrate the complicated notion of risk analysis into its work. Most observers credit Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff with talking enough about risk - not just threats - to bring some improvement. But they also say the climate of fear makes it nearly impossible to have a dispassionate discussion about the real threat of terrorism and the response it truly merits.

John Mueller suspects he might have become cable news programs' go-to foil on terrorism. The author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (Free Press, 2006) thinks America has overreacted. The greatly exaggerated threat of terrorism, he says, has cost the country far more than terrorist attacks ever did.

Watching his Sept. 12, 2006, appearance on Fox & Friends is unintentionally hilarious. Mueller calmly and politely asks the hosts to at least consider his thesis. But filled with alarm and urgency, they appear bewildered and exasperated. They speak to Mueller as if he is from another planet and cannot be reasoned with.

That reaction is one measure of the contagion of alarmism. Mueller's book is filled with statistics meant to put terrorism in context. For example, international terrorism annually causes the same number of deaths as drowning in bathtubs or bee stings. It would take a repeat of Sept. 11 every month of the year to make flying as dangerous as driving. Over a lifetime, the chance of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as being struck by a meteor. Mueller's conclusions: An American's risk of dying at the hands of a terrorist is microscopic. The likelihood of another Sept. 11-style attack is nearly nil because it would lack the element of surprise. America can easily absorb the damage from most conceivable attacks. And the suggestion that al Qaeda poses an existential threat to the United States is ridiculous. Mueller's statistics and conclusions are jarring only because they so starkly contradict the widely disseminated and broadly accepted image of terrorism as an urgent and all-encompassing threat.

American reaction to two failed attacks in Britain in June further illustrates our national hysteria. British police found and defused two car bombs before they could be detonated, and two would-be bombers rammed their car into a terminal at Glasgow Airport. Even though no bystanders were hurt and British authorities labeled both episodes failures, the response on American cable television and Capitol Hill was frenzied, frequently emphasizing how many people could have been killed. "The discovery of a deadly car bomb in London today is another harsh reminder that we are in a war against an enemy that will target us anywhere and everywhere," read an e-mailed statement from Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. "Terrorism is not just a threat. It is a reality, and we must confront and defeat it." The bombs that never detonated were "deadly." Terrorists are "anywhere and everywhere." Even those who believe it is a threat are understating; it's "more than a threat."

Mueller, an Ohio State University political science professor, is more analytical than shrill. Politicians are being politicians, and security businesses are being security businesses, he says. "It's just like selling insurance - you say, 'Your house could burn down.' You don't have an incentive to say, 'Your house will never burn down.' And you're not lying," he says. Social science research suggests that humans tend to glom onto the most alarmist perspective even if they are told how unlikely it is, he adds. We inflate the danger of things we don't control and exaggerate the risk of spectacular events while downplaying the likelihood of common ones. We are more afraid of terrorism than car accidents or street crime, even though the latter are far more common. Statistical outliers like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are viewed not as anomalies, but as harbingers of what's to come. ...

The Political Compass has an interesting chart showing what most people understand intuitively - most of the current crop of US presidential candidates are essentially fascists. I'm a bit dubious about Ron Paul's spot though - I would have thought he would be a long way below the line on the authoritarian / libertarian scale (and slightly further to the right on the economic axis too).

Doing their test is mildly illuminating - unsurprisingly I made it into the lower right corner, though only just - I'm closer to the left than I would have thought (and I'm slightly to the left of Hillary, though I do occasionally wonder if she is actually a social democrat in wolf's clothing). This might account why some ignorant and confused commenters accuse me of being a left winger from time to time - their political landscape is restricted to a frame that starts at liberal and ends at "neoconservative" (cough).

In response to many requests, not only from Americans, The Political Compass™ has charted the most prominent names in the 2007 US Primaries. They have been evaluated through scrutiny of public statements, manifestos, interviews and, crucially, voting records. Our apologies for those not included.

It is important to recognise that The Political Compass™ is a continuum rather than consisting of hard and fast quadrants. For example, Ron Paul on the social scale is actually closer to Dennis Kucinich than to many figures within his own party. But on the economic scale, they are, of course, far apart.

When examining the chart it is important to note that although most of the candidates seem quite different, in substance they occupy a relatively restricted area within the universal political spectrum. Democracies with a system of proportional representation give expression to a wider range of political views. While Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are depicted on the extreme left in an American context, they would simply be mainstream social democrats within the wider political landscape of Europe. Similarly, Hillary Clinton is popularly perceived as a leftist in the United States while in any other western democracy her record is that of a moderate conservative.

Links:

* Grist - Kristof hits a home run
* The Times - Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world
* TreeHugger - British Retailer Tesco Deploying MODEC Electric Vans
* TreeHugger - Global Warming Rapidly Changing Lake Tahoe
* The Oil Drum - Hurricane Dean Update
* BBC - Atlantic yields climate secrets
* The Norway Post - Iraqi oil workers warn Statoil
* The Independent - Military commanders tell Brown to withdraw from Iraq without delay.
* The Independent - Menzies backs demands for Army to leave Iraq
* SMH - British military sparks US fears of losing Basra. A double take of neocon spin - part 1 is to blame the British for the failure of 'the surge", part 2 is to blame the Iranians for "making them" leave.
* Alternet - Cheney, Lieberman and the Iran War Conspiracy
* SMH - Diabetic hospitalised after airport securty takes insulin