Margaret Wente is confused

Margaret Wente, everyone's favourite contrarian from the globe and mail, has written an article on the Copenhagen summit.

She asks a few good questions about a proposed fund to help poor countries cope with climate change. But her final paragraph displays utter incomprehension:

"It was the West that invented airplanes, too. Bad us. The trouble with energy consumption is that it is inextricably linked with prosperity, productivity and progress – even in righteous Denmark, which oozes green but remains highly tied to fossil fuels. Canada emits far more greenhouse gases than Kenya because we are far more prosperous and successful. And so – no matter how carbon virtuous we are – we're doomed to be cast as global greenhouse villains."

Carbon virtuous? Us!? We emit 50 times more carbon per capita than Kenya does. We are the global greenhouse villains, if you want to use that terminology.

As far as success goes, we can do lots of neat things now, using fossil fuels, but at the cost of destroying our system by upsetting the global climate. It does look pretty successful if you suffer from myopia.

Of course, I'm pretty sure Ms. Wente doesn't believe we are causing climate change, so that could explain her indignation.

Obama collects his peace prize

I'd sort of forget the President hadn't received his prize until now. But the timing is good, because it comes shortly after he's escalated the war in Afghanistan. As he promised to do in his campaign. I'm not sure why people were surprised, given that he's doing more or less what he said he would do. But it does heighten the irony surrounding this "peace" prize.

From the article:

"He also spoke bluntly of the cost of war, saying of the Afghanistan buildup he just ordered that “some will kill, some will be killed.”

You can't accuse the man of lying. Regarding those that will be killed, I would add that Afghans tend to die in multiples of thirty.

Public Relations - Hacked Climate change emails

As some of you may know, hackers gained access to years worth of emails from an important climate change research center in Britain. They released them onto the internet a little while ago. I'd say they timed it more or less perfectly to coincide with the Copenhagen summit.

I have to give it to them. They are brilliant, and well organized. They knew that from years worth of emails, you can always find some that look damning out of context. These have been spread around the right wing blogosphere, and they've built up momentum to the point that the mainstream media is taking an interest.

Apparently the Saudis are now arguing that human caused climate change is now false, and that the warming was due to natural variation. Which is funny, given that the people bandying about these emails are saying they prove that there's been no warming at all. Which is also funny, given that the northwest passage is becoming navigable. But hey, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

I'm impressed though, these guys have an excellent understanding of how the modern English language media works. Things don't get investigated. Instead, you find two sides, and report what both sides are saying. It's cheaper, and makes for more sensational stories.

From what I've read, there doesn't seem to be anything all that troubling there, when you take the time to examine them in context. Efforts to thwart the Freedom of Information act seem the most problematic. We'll see what the investigation turns up. No one will care by then though, as it will be after the Copenhagen talks. This is purely a short term move to thwart what remains of the momentum to do something at the conference.

Afterwards, it will be shown that it's nothing serious, and live on in right-winger lore, but that's about it. For anyone who's read some of the emails, and would like to know the context, this page has some of that.

I'm very impressed by the saavy and organizational prowess of the anti-climate change forces. They've managed to turn it into a left versus right culture war issue, an issue of freedom and the good guy underdog, against liberal elites. I imagine that's why less Americans believe in climate change than they did previously.

Someone should have told Margaret Thatcher that she was supposed to have believed it all to be a fraud. But her speech warning of the dangers of climate change was in 1990, before this became a hot issue, before the propagandists got to work on it.

Update: Here's a good overview of the situation from Fred Pearce. He also considers the long-term impact this may have on public support for the idea that climate change is occurring, something I should have considered.

Plus ca change....

Thomas Friedman, the man who believes the world is flat, writes about Afghanistan. He's found Walter Cronkite interviewing John F Kennedy.

Kennedy: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the [Vietnamese] government to win popular support that the war can be won out there......

Cronkite: “Do you think this government still has time to regain the support of the people?”

Kennedy: “I do. With changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can. If it doesn’t make those changes, the chances of winning it would not be very good.”

Frieman then writes that what Kennedy understood is that it's all about America's Afghan [Vietnamese] partners. The interview took place on September 2nd, 1963. He suggests Obama follow Kennedy's example and pay more attention to the Afghan Government.

....

Kennedy's example. A couple of months later, on November 1st, 1963 Kennedy murdered his Vietnamese partners. Or let them be murdered, and encouraged the people who murdered them. In Imperial politics, there's no functional difference.

Incidentally, one of the things the Americans disliked about Diem was his corrupt brother. Karzai's corrupt brother has been in the news recently.

If I thought more of Friedman and American subtlety, I would say this column is an oblique warning that the Americans are going to depose and/or kill Karzai if he doesn't shape up.

However, Occam's razor would suggest that Friedman is merely an idiot. Or Alden Pyle. It is fairly common for Americans not to know their own history, or to know only the nicer sounding parts of it. And the way the American media works, if Thomas Friedman were smarter or more insightful in certain ways, he wouldn't be the rich man he is today.

Regardless, if I were Hamid Karzai, I'd be watching my back.

Texas Bans Marriage?

Maybe? They passed a constitutional amendment back in aught-five, as a pre-emptive ban to gay marriage. It includes this provision:

""This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

I'm only a few months into my legal studies, so I haven't got the expertise to tell you if banning something identical to marriage is identical to banning marriage. I'll let you know once I get this figured out.

In the meantime, imagine the possibilities:

Man: Won't you have dinner with me?

Woman: I'm sorry, I'm married.

Man: Nope.

Woman: ....Pardon me?

Man: You're not married.

Woman: ....um....yes, I am.

Man: Not according to the constitution! Dinner?

Woman: *Swoon*

We Don't Know the Future

I just heard on the news that Obama is finishing up his visit to China. The announcer described them as "the superpowers of the 21st century".

You hear this sort of thing a lot. I think it's silly. Maybe they will be. But maybe they won't. We don't know. You couldn't have predicted who would be the superpowers at the end of the 20th century by looking at the great powers of 1909 (Britain?). The term superpower didn't even come into use until after WWII.

Part of our nature as humans is having a sort of silly tendency to assume that the future will be much like the present. We can look backwards at the past and understand that lots of things changed, but our predictions for the future are surprisingly static. I'm sure people in the past would have thought it impossible that the British Empire would go away. But....it did.

In short, I wish newscasters would stop saying that about the US and China.

Leaders Reach Consensus on Doing Nothing

Oh good. Political leaders have agreed to produce no meaningful agreement at the Copenhagen climate change summit in December. They've agreed to agree on principles, but not to set any binding goals. I wonder what sort of useful principles they will agree upon. Maybe:

"Carbon emissions should be reduced, somehow, sometime, by someone. If it doesn't cost too much."

"People should be nice to each other."

I have great hopes for the coming agreement.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons that our leaders have agreed to do nothing may well be that few people seem to believe climate change is a serious threat, or that it's caused by us at all. Here's a survey showing that only 41% of britons think that climate change is largely man made. And in America, support for that idea has dropped by 11% in a year, so that now only 36% of people though global warming was happening and was man made.

Harrumph. George Monbiot speculates that this denial is related to our fear of death, and as the scientific evidence has become stronger and more frightening, people are turning away from it.

Maybe? Or maybe now that Obama is in the White House, and the Republicans have lost all restraint, more people are starting to hear and accept their messages of climate change denial.

Reality will press forward regardless, heedless of the fondest wishes of those who would stick their heads in the sand. Here's a good post from the resident blogger on climate change at Shell, making clear that we must get rid of carbon emissions entirely, and that it is the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere rather than our annual emissions which is the real measure of the problem.

I actually used to be confused on this point. A good analogy would be that we're drowning in a tank, slowly filling with water. When it fills, we drown. The water is already at a dangerously high level, and more is being pumped in. The big question debated in the media is how much to cut the levels of water pumped into the tank. This is important, but it misses the real issue, which is how high the water level in the tank is.

Our discussion on climate change is similar. The most important thing is how much total CO2 and other warming agents are in the atmosphere.

He points us to this website, which shows how much we would have to cut carbon emissions per year to avoid putting a total of one trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. It's currently 2.14% per year, until we hit zero emissions. That's the goal politicians are currently shooting for, and hoping that it would keep us under 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

The website also shows how much we would have to cut emissions to reach a safer goal of 750 billion tons, and we would have to start reducing emissions now by 4.5% per year. It says that if we keep under this limit, there is less than a one in four chance of the planet warming more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Meanwhile, emissions are actually rising. Every bit of delay makes the eventually change harder, as we'll have already increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and gotten closer to emitting one trillion tons.

Of course, the really scary fact is that both of those measures might be too lenient, and that we may already have put too much carbon into the atmosphere. The correct goal in that case for CO2 concentrations would be somewhere in the past.

We're seeing evidence for this. We're told, for example, that arctic sea ice is now effectively gone in the summers. The thick ice that used to build up over many years has now been replaced by thin ice that forms over one winter and melts in the summer. This is decades ahead of predictions made just a few years ago.

What would even more CO2 and warming do?

I recommend not thinking about that question, and instead pretending that nothing is happening, and that if something is happening, then it certainly isn't caused by us. Certainly we shouldn't try and do anything about all of this if it costs any money. After all, we wouldn't want to hurt the economy.