The Guardian Atlas

Time to put this morality tale on ice

Greens are using misinformation about melting Arctic ice caps to try to scare us into accepting their reactionary policies.

By Ben Pile 

‘Ice is the white flag being waved by our planet, under fire from the atmospheric attack being mounted by humanity. From the frosted plains of the Arctic ice pack to the cool blue caverns of the mountain glaciers, the dripping away of frozen water is the most crystal clear of all the Earth’s warning signals.’

It’s sheer poetry, from the silver-nibbed pen of the Guardian‘s head of environment, Damian Carrington, writing in the Observer last Sunday. It’s also sheer BS.

Carrington continues: ‘Last week saw the annual summer minimum of the Arctic ice cap, which has now shrunk to the lowest level satellites have ever recorded.’ Is this true? Anthony Watts, who runs the sceptical website Watts Up With That?, has a very useful page linking to sea-ice data. Carrington’s claim matches the record of ice extent produced by scientists at the University of Bremen. However, Watts also provides the equivalent data from five other institutions: the International Arctic Research Center/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (IARC-JAXA), the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the US, the Danish Meteorological Institute, the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. None of these other groups find that 2011 has produced a new record low.

Carrington wanted to give significance to a new record being set. But it seems to have been set only according to one out of six measurements of sea-ice extent. But if he’d mentioned these other measurements, that might have deprived him of his muse. Carrington, the poet, wants to paint a picture of the world, in which its white parts drain away. He wants to convey a feeling, not unlike the disappointment children experience when they see crisp white snow turn into muddy slush. The real picture of the world’s ice, however, requires grown-up eyes.

There may well be a trend towards an ice-free world. But there is still a great deal of sea ice remaining. The 30-year record, which Carrington believes is waving at us, begging for a ceasefire, hardly depicts this drama.

But it gets worse. (It always does.) ‘The lower glaciers are doomed. Kilimanjaro may be bare within a decade, with the Pyrenees set to be ice-free by mid-century and three-quarters of the glaciers in the Alps gone by the same date. As you climb higher, and temperatures drop, global warming will take longer to erode the ice into extinction. But at the “third pole”, in the Himalayas, the ice is melting as evidenced by dozens of swelling milky blue lakes that threaten to burst down on to villages when their ice dams melt.’

As has been widely discussed in recent years, if the ice on the top of Kilimanjaro does disappear, it will not be the consequence of man-made global warming. The glaciers there have been in retreat for longer than can be accounted for by climate change, and the temperatures there are not sufficient to explain the recession as the consequence of melting. The changes in Kilimanjaro are due to changes in local conditions.

As for the Himalayas, Carrington continues: ‘The threat posed is far greater than even this terrifying prospect: a quarter of the world’s people rely on Himalayan meltwater, which helps feed the great rivers that plunge down into Asia. The Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus nourish billions and will eventually lose their spring surges.’

Even if we take at face value the claim that a quarter of the world’s population rely on Himalayan meltwater — which doesn’t seem plausible — why should we imagine that they will always rely on the meltwater in the future, whatever the fate of those glaciers? Even if the glaciers melted — which we now know, as a result of ‘Glaciergate’, is a prospect that has been deferred by some three centuries — rain and snow would still fall on the mountains, and make their way to the sea. It should not be beyond the minds and means of a billion or more people in some of the world’s fastest developing countries to find ways of capturing that water and controlling its use.

So what is Carrington up to with all this revision of some of the most absurd global-warming alarmism that has materialised over the past few years? He writes: ‘Perhaps it is because ice is at the cold heart of all our deepest global-warming fears that climate-change sceptics wield their picks so heavily on it. The error by the publicists and cartographers of the Times Atlas, who stated that Greenland’s ice cover had shrunk by 15 per cent since 1999, prompted a renewed sounding of sirens by climate sceptics who saw another example of rampant alarmism by warming fanatics. In fact, it was climate scientists themselves who sounded the alarm, prompting the Atlas publishers to promise a new map would be inserted.’

Aha! Carrington senses that the ‘climate-change sceptics’ have stolen a march. And rather than letting them steal the show, Carrington rushes to make the claim that it was the scientists who saved the day, after all, spotting the error. But if it is important to state which side’s champions were instrumental in identifying the truth, it ought then to be important to state who precisely was responsible for propagating the misinformation in the first place.

As blogger Andrew Montford has pointed out, it was the Guardian’s environment editor, John Vidal, who wrote: ‘The world’s biggest physical changes in the past few years are mostly seen nearest the poles where climate change has been most extreme. Greenland appears considerably browner round the edges, having lost around 15 per cent, or 300,000 sq km, of its permanent ice cover. Antarctica is smaller following the break-up of the Larsen B and Wilkins ice shelves.’

This was ‘churnalism’. Vidal had merely copied the claim made by the press release announcing the Times Atlas publication.

Rather than quiet reflection on their own errors, Guardian environment staff make noisy statements, hoping to recover their credibility. This speaks loudly to the fact that these writers are engaged in a very political debate: they sense that the embarrassment caused by the Times Atlas affair undermines the wholly alarmist argument they have been advancing; they have lost ground to ‘the sceptics’, which must be recovered. Thus, Carrington waxes poetic on what the melting ice portends, before grasping for facts that will give this lyricism some substance. And he grasps for facts that do not bear the weight of the political argument. There doesn’t seem to have been any record set on the Arctic Sea this summer. There is still a great deal of ice left on the world. Kilimanjaro’s glaciers are not victims of climate change. People living beneath glaciers are not so dependent on them. Clinging on to these long-debunked claims is an attempt to keep up appearances: to sustain the view of the debate they have been maintaining for far too long.

It was scientists, not some imagined group of ‘sceptics’, who corrected the Times Atlas error. But in the same way, it isn’t ‘the sceptics’ who embarrassed the alarmist fools at the Times Atlas and at the Guardian; they embarrass themselves.

Chess or Russian roulette ?

Is Turkey Going Rogue?

 

Newly Islamist leadership threatens the entire Middle East.

By Daniel Pipes

In a Middle East wracked by coups d’état and civil insurrections, the Republic of Turkey credibly offers itself as a model, thanks to its impressive economic growth, democratic system, political control of the military, and secular order.

But, in reality, Turkey may be, along with Iran, the most dangerous state of the region. Count the reasons:

When four out of five of the Turkish chiefs of staff abruptly resigned on July 29, 2011, they signaled the effective end of the republic founded in 1923 by Kemal Atatürk. A second republic headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Islamist colleagues of the AK Party (AKP) began that day. The military safely under their control, AKP ideologues now enjoy can pursue their ambitions to create an Islamic order.

Ironically, secular Turks tend to be more anti-Western than the AKP. The two other parties in parliament, the CHP and MHP, condemn the AKP’s more enlightened policies, such as its approach to Syria and its stationing a NATO radar system.

Turkey faces a credit crunch, one largely ignored in light of crises in Greece and elsewhere. As analyst David Goldman points out, Erdoğan and the AKP took the country on a financial binge: Bank credit ballooned while the current account deficit soared, reaching unsustainable levels. The party’s patronage machine borrowed massive amounts of short-term debt to finance a consumption bubble that effectively bought it the June 2011 elections. Goldman calls Erdoğan a “Third World  strongman” and compares Turkey today with Mexico in 1994 or Argentina in 2000, “where a brief boom financed by short-term foreign capital flows led to currency devaluation and a deep economic slump.”

Some 15–20 percent of Turkey’s citizens identify as Kurds, a distinct historical people; although many Kurds are integrated, a separatist revolt against Ankara that began in 1984 has recently reached a new crescendo with a more assertive political leadership and more aggressive guerrilla attacks.

In the tradition of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Saddam Hussein, the Turkish prime minister deploys anti-Zionist rhetoric to make himself an Arab political star. One shudders to think where, thrilled by this adulation, he may end up. After Ankara backed a protest ship to Gaza in May 2010, the Mavi Marmara, whose aggression led Israeli forces to kill eight Turkish citizens plus an ethnic Turk, it has relentlessly exploited this incident to stoke domestic fury against the Jewish state. Erdoğan has called the deaths a casus belli, speaks of a war with Israel “if necessary,” and plans to send another ship to Gaza, this time with a Turkish military escort.

Turkish hostility has renewed Israel’s historically warm relations with the Kurds and turned around its cool relations with Greece, Cyprus, and even Armenia. Beyond cooperation locally, this grouping will make life difficult for the Turks in Washington.

Companies operating out of Israel discovered potentially immense gas and oil reserves in the Leviathan field and other fields located between Israel, Lebanon, and Cyprus. When the government of Cyprus announced its plans to drill, Erdoğan responded with threats to send Turkish “frigates, gunboats and . . . air force.” This dispute, just in its infancy, contains the potential elements of a huge crisis. Already, Moscow has sent submarines in solidarity with Cyprus.

Ankara threatens to freeze relations with the European Union in July 2012, when Cyprus assumes the rotating presidency. Turkish forces have seized a Syrian arms freighter. Turkish threats to invade northern Iraq have worsened relations with Baghdad. Turkish and Iranian regimes may share an Islamist outlook and an anti-Kurd agenda, with prospering trade relations, but their historic rivalry, contrary governing styles, and competing ambitions have soured relations.

While Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu  crows  that Turkey is “right at the center of everything,” AKP bellicosity has soured his vaunted “zero-problems” with neighbors’ policy, turning this into wide-ranging hostility and even potential military confrontations (with Syria, Cyprus, and Israel). As economic troubles hit, a once-exemplary member of NATO may go further off track; watch for signs of Erdoğan emulating his Venezuelan friend, Hugo Chávez.

That’s why, along with Iranian nuclear weapons, I see a rogue Turkey as the region’s greatest threat.

Missing Milton Friedman

Who Will Speak For Free Markets?

By STEPHEN MOORE

I would rank Milton Friedman, next to Ronald Reagan, as the greatest apostle for freedom and free markets in the second half of the 20th century. I used to find great joy in visiting him and his wife and co-author, Rose, at their home in San Francisco. We'd have dinner at their favorite Chinese restaurant and chat about the latest silliness out of Washington.

I've been thinking a lot lately of one of my last conversations with Milton, who warned that "even though socialism is a discredited economic model and capitalism is raising living standards to new heights, the left intellectuals continue to push for bigger government everywhere I look." He predicted that people would be seduced by collectivist ideas again.

He was right. In the midst of this global depression, rotten ideas like trillion-dollar stimulus plans, nationalization of banks and confiscatory taxes on America's wealth producers are all the rage. Meanwhile, it is Milton Friedman and his principles of free trade, low tax rates and deregulation that are standing trial as the murderers of global prosperity.

When the University of Chicago wanted to create a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an avowed socialist and Chicago alum, fumed that "Friedman's ideology caused enormous damage to the American middle class and to working families here and around the world."

At academic conferences it has been open season on Friedman and his philosophy of limited government. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner, says that Friedman's "Chicago School bears the blame for providing a seeming intellectual foundation" for the now presumably discredited "idea that markets are self-adjusting and the best role for government is to do nothing." University of Texas economist James Galbraith is even more dismissive: "The inability of Friedman's successors to say anything useful about what's happening in financial markets today means their influence is finished," he says. And pop author Naomi Klein says triumphantly: "What we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street . . . should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology." One left-wing group is even distributing posters in Washington and other cities that proclaim: "Milton Friedman: Proud Father of Global Misery."

The myth that the stock-market collapse was due to a failure of Friedman's principles could hardly be more easily refuted. No one was more critical of the Bush spending and debt binge than Friedman. The massive run up in money and easy credit that facilitated the housing and credit bubbles was precisely the foolishness that Friedman spent a lifetime warning against.

A few scholars are now properly celebrating the Friedman legacy. Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economics professor, has just published a tribute to Friedman in the Journal of Economic Literature. He describes the period 1980-2005 as "The Age of Milton Friedman," an era that "witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. As the world embraced free market policies, living standards rose sharply while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined."

So the Bernie Sanders crowd has things exactly backward: Milton's ideas on capitalism and freedom did more to liberate humankind from poverty than the New Deal, Great Society and Obama economic stimulus plans stacked on top of each other.

At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: "You don't understand. This is a jobs program." To which Milton replied: "Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels."

But in the energy industry today we are trading in shovels for spoons. The Obama administration wants to power our society by spending three or four times more money to generate electricity using solar and wind power than it would cost to use coal or natural gas. The president says that this initiative will create "green jobs."

Milton knew how to create real wealth-producing jobs. Once, when he visited India in the early 1960s, John Kenneth Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador, welcomed him by only half-joking, "I can think of no place where your free-market ideas can do less harm than in India." Talk about irony. India has adopted much of the Friedman free-market model and has moved nearly 200 million people out of destitution and despair.

I recently phoned Rose Friedman and asked her what she thought about the attacks on her husband. She was mostly dismayed at how far off-course our country has veered under President Obama. "Is this the death of Milton's ideas?" I hesitantly asked. "Oh no," she replied, "But it is the death of common sense."

Life goes on in the Islamic world

News in Brief

A quick scan of the news out of the Muslim world over the past week :

In Syria -- whose government lately has been paying less attention to the diabolical nature of Israeli children’s songs and more attention to torturing and killing its own citizens -- the death toll in the popular uprising now exceeds 2,700. Included in that number are at least 100 children.

In Pakistan, 26 Shiite pilgrims were ordered off a bus and gunned down, in the latest incident of Muslim-on-Muslim violence there. In Indonesia, a suicide bomber detonated himself in a church, wounding more than 20 worshippers, in the latest incident of Muslim-on-Christian violence that is a considerable problem in several Muslim-majority states, including Egypt.

In Somalia, al-Shabaab, an Islamist terrorist group, is refusing to allow food donations to reach drought-stricken areas. Aid groups estimate that 300,000 children may die if supplies don’t reach them soon. In Turkey, a bomb attack in Ankara killed three people and wounded more than 30. The bombers were probably Kurdish terrorists, seeking to free their homeland from the hold of the central government.

In Yemen, more than 70 people were killed by security forces while protesting the dictatorial rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh. In Libya, rebels discovered a mass grave holding the bodies of 1,270 prison inmates massacred in 1996. And, of course, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president ofAfghanistan and head of the country’s High Peace Council, was assassinated Sept. 20.

Read It and Weep

Obama’s Jobs Bill

An infernal mish-mash of taxes, subsidies, and regulations.

By Richard A. Epstein 

The dim news about the current economic situation has prompted the Obama administration to put forward its latest, desperate effort to reverse the tide by urging passage of  The American Jobs Act (AJA), a turgid 155-page bill. The AJA’s only certain effect is to make everything worse than it already is by asking Congress to tighten the stranglehold that government regulation has already placed on the economy.

That sad fact would certainly elude anyone who accepted the president’s justification for the AJA when he sent the bill to Congress. This bill, he said, will "put more people back to work and put more money in the pockets of working Americans. And it will do so without adding a dime to the deficit." How? Why, by closing "corporate tax loopholes" and insisting that the wealthiest American’s pay their "fair share" of taxes.

What is so striking about Obama’s shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures. This dreadful hodgepodge of a bill will likely be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but it remains a patriotic duty to explicate some of its worst provisions.

The most evident feature of the AJA is that it is a combination of ill-conceived, disparate measures. The wandering quality of the bill makes it impossible to cover all of its silliness, but it is possible to focus on some of the core job provisions, all of which kill the very jobs that the AJA is supposed to create.

One does not have to dip very far into the bill to find trouble. Section 4 of the AJA imposes "Buy American" restrictions on the use of funds appropriated under this statute for work on public buildings. "[A]ll the iron, steel and manufactured goods" used on such projects are to be fabricated in the United States. There are obvious administrative difficulties in deciding what counts as a "manufactured good" for the purposes of the act. But don’t sweat the small stuff. The fatal problem with this form of jingoism is that, in the name of economic efficiency, it forces American taxpayers to pay more for less. That upside down logic may seem sensible to a die-hard Keynesian, but not to ordinary people who realize that deliberate overpayment for inferior goods makes no more sense in the public sector than in the private one.

A last, autumnal reprieve

The genius of Vladi­mir Putin

By Ralph Peters

There is one incontestably great actor on the world stage today, and he has no interest in following our script. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — soon to be Russia’s president again — has proven remarkably effective at playing the weak strategic hand he inherited, chalking up triumph after triumph while confirming himself as the strong leader Russians crave. Not one of his international peers evidences so profound an understanding of his or her people, or possesses Putin’s canny ability to size up counterparts.

Putin’s genius — and it is nothing less — begins with an insight into governance that eluded the “great” dictators of the last century: You need control only public life, not personal lives. Putin grasped that human beings need to let off steam about the world’s ills, and that letting them do so around the kitchen table, over a bottle of vodka, does no harm to the state. His tacit compact with the Russian people is that they may do or say what they like behind closed doors, as long as they don’t take it into the streets. He saw that an authoritarian state that stops at the front door is not only tolerable but also more efficient.

As for the defiant, he kills or imprisons them. But there are no great purges, no Gulag — only carefully chosen, exemplary victims, such as anti-corruption activist  Sergei Magnitsky, who died in police custody, or the disobedient billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoned on charges Russians regard as black humor. Western consciences may be briefly troubled, but Putin knows the international community won’t impose meaningful penalties. Seduced by Kremlin policies — from oil and gas concessions to cynical hints of strategic cooperation — Western leaders have too many chips in the game. And at home, the common people, the chorny narod, don’t mind. Instead, they gloat when the czar cuts off the beards of the boyars — or humbles an envied oligarch. As for gadfly journalists, Putin wagered that they could be eliminated with impunity, as in the case of Anna Politkovskaya. Our outrage is pro forma and temporary.

Domestically, Putin’s tactile sense of his people is matchless. His bare-chested poses seem ludicrous to us, but Russians see a nastoyashi muzhik, a “real man.” And his sobriety makes him the fantasy husband of Russia’s beleaguered wives.

Not least, Putin has renewed Russian confidence in the country’s greatness. Consistently playing an international role far greater than Russia’s capabilities warrant, he reawakened the old Stalinist sense that while the people may suffer, they do so in service to a greater destiny.

Internationally, he sizes up interlocutors with the deftness of the skilled agent-handler he was in the bad old days. His outbursts of temper and brutal language make news (while, again, appealing to his base), but his policies are cold-blooded, ruthless — and strikingly successful.

It’s worth noting how much Putin has achieved: Like his hero, Peter the Great, he tamed the new nobility (of wealth) and consolidated the power of the state. He returned Russia to great-power status — largely through bluff. He steamrolled a one-sided  new START agreement over American negotiators who desperately wanted a deal. His manipulation of Europe has given him virtually every pipeline agreement he wanted while sidelining NATO’s new members in the east and keeping Ukraine weak and disunited. He dismembered Georgia but paid no price for it. He has even achieved a grip over supplies for our troops in Afghanistan second only to the chokehold we granted Pakistan in a fit of strategic ineptitude.

If Putin has a weakness, it’s his disdain for economics. Russia relies on oil and gas exports to a potentially fatal degree. Yet that, too, stems from calculated policy: A diversified economy and consequent diffusion of wealth would make Russia far more difficult to control. Today’s relative handful of oligarchs fit perfectly into the mold of the old czarist nobility (if with fewer social graces): They spend ostentatiously, party abroad and remain politically docile. Putin would rather risk a monopoly economy than a proliferation of power bases.

For centuries Moscow called itself the “Third Rome,” after the cities of St. Peter and Constantine. The allusion may be particularly apt, since Putin has done what a series of strong emperors did after the first fall of Rome or the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople: He has restored, if briefly, a fallen glory.

Demographically, economically, developmentally, militarily, even educationally, Russia appears doomed to fierce decline. But one man of genius has brought his people a last, autumnal reprieve. Vladimir Putin is a dangerous man, but a splendid czar.