The Geopolitics of Greece

A Sea at its Heart

By Stratfor

Throughout the history of Greece, its geography has been both a blessing and a curse, a blessing because it allowed Greece to dominate the “known Western world” for a good portion of Europe’s ancient history due to a combination of sea access and rugged topography. In the ancient era, these were perfect conditions for a maritime city-state culture oriented toward commerce and one that was difficult to dislodge by more powerful land-based opponents. This geography incubated the West’s first advanced civilization (Athens) and produced its first empire (ancient Macedon).

However, Greek geography is also a curse because it is isolated on the very tip of the rugged and practically impassable Balkan Peninsula, forcing it to rely on the Mediterranean Sea for trade and communication. None of the Greek cities had much of a hinterland. These small coastal enclaves were easily defendable, but they were not easily unified, nor could they become large or rich due to a dearth of local resources. This has been a key disadvantage for Greece, which has had to vie with more powerful civilizations throughout its history, particularly those based on the Sea of Marmara in the east and the Po, Tiber and Arno valleys of the Apennine Peninsula to the west.

Peninsula at the Edge of Europe

Greece is located in southeastern Europe on the southernmost portion of the Balkan Peninsula, an extremely mountainous peninsula extending south from the fertile Pannonian plain. The Greek mainland culminates in what was once the Peloponnesian Peninsula and is now a similarly rugged island separated by the man-made Corinth Canal. Greek mountains are characterized by steep cliffs, deep gorges and jagged peaks. The average terrain altitude of Greece is twice that of Germany and comparable to the Alpine country of Slovenia. The Greek coastline is also very mountainous with many cliffs rising right out of the sea.

Greece is easily recognizable on a map by its multitude of islands, about 6,000 in total. Hence, Greece consists of not only the peninsular mainland but almost all of the Aegean Sea, which is bounded by the Dodecanese Islands (of which Rhodes is the largest) in the east, off the coast of Anatolia, and Crete in the south. Greece also includes the Ionian Islands (of which Corfu is the largest) in the west and thousands of islands in the middle of the Aegean. The combination of islands and rugged peninsular coastline gives Greece the 10th longest coastline in the world, longer than those of Italy, the United Kingdom and Mexico.

Mountainous barriers in the north and the northeast mean that the Greek peninsula is largely insulated from mainland Europe. Throughout its history, Greece has parlayed its natural borders and jagged terrain into a defensive advantage. Invasion forces that managed to make a landing on one of the few Greek plains were immediately met by high-rising cliffs hugging the coastline and well-entrenched Greek defenders blocking the path forward. The famous battle of Thermopylae is the best example, when a force of 300 Spartans and another 1,000 or so Greeks challenged a Persian force numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The Ottomans fared better than the Persians in that they actually managed to conquer Greece, but they ruled little of Greece’s vast mountainous interior, where roving bands of Greek brigands — called khlepts — blocked key mountain passes and ravines and entered Greek lore as heroes. To this day, its rugged topography gives Greece a regionalized character that makes effective, centralized control practically impossible. Everything from delivering mail to collecting taxes — the latter being a key factor in Greece’s ongoing debt crisis — becomes a challenge.

With rugged terrain come defensive benefits, but also two geographic handicaps. First, Greece is largely devoid of any land-based transport routes to mainland Europe. The only two links between Greece and Europe are the Axios and Strimonas rivers, both which drain into the Aegean in Greek Macedonia. The Axios (also called the Vardar River) is key because it connects to the Morava River in Central Serbia and thus forms an Axios-Morava-Danube transportation corridor. While no part of the river is actually navigable, one can travel up the Balkan Peninsula on valley roads. The Strimonas takes one from Greek Macedonia to Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, and from there via the Iskar River through the Balkan Mountains to the Danubian plain of present-day Romania. Neither of these valleys is an ideal transportation route, however, since each forces the Greeks to depend on their Balkan neighbors to the north for links to Europe, historically an unenviable position for Greece.

The second handicap for Greece is that its high mountains and jagged coastline leave very little room for fertile valleys and plains, which are necessary for supporting large population centers. Greece has many rivers and streams that are formed in its mountains, but because of the extreme slope of most hills, most of these waterways create narrow valleys, gorges or ravines in the interior of the peninsula. This terrain is conducive to sheep- and goat-herding but not to large-scale agriculture.

This does not mean that there is no room for crops to grow. Indeed, rivers meeting the Aegean and Ionian seas carve short valleys that open to the coast where the sea breeze creates excellent conditions for agriculture. The problem is that, other than in Thessaly and Greek Macedonia, most of these valleys are limited in area. This explains to an extent why Greece, throughout its history, has retained a regionalized character, with each river estuary providing sufficient food production for literally one city-state and with jagged mountain peaks greatly complicating overland communication among these population centers. The only place where this is not the case is in Greek Macedonia — the location of present-day Thessaloniki — where a relatively large agricultural area provided for the West’s first true empire, led by Alexander the Great.

Lack of large areas of arable land combined with poor overland transportation also complicate capital formation. Each river valley can supply its one regional center with food and sufficient capital for one trading port, but this only reinforces Greece’s regionalized mentality. From the perspective of each region, there is no reason why it should supply the little capital it generates to a central government when it could just as well use that capital to develop a naval capability of its own, crucial for bringing in food via the Aegean. This creates a situation where the whole suffers from a lack of coordination and capital generation while substantial resources are spent on dozens of independent maritime regions, a situation best illustrated by ancient Greek city-states, most of which had independent navies. Considering that developing a competent navy is one of the costliest of state endeavors, one can imagine how such a regionalized approach to naval development c onstrained an already capital-poor Greece.

The lack of capital generation is therefore the most serious implication of Greek geography. Situated as far from global flows of capital as any European country that considers itself part of the West, Greece finds itself surrounded by sheltered ports, most of which are protected by mountains and cliffs that drop off into the sea. This affords Greece little room for population growth, and contributes to its inability to produce much domestic capital. This, combined with the regionalized approach to political authority encouraged by mountainous geography, has made Greece a country that has been inefficiently distributing what little capital it has had for millennia.

Countries that have low capital growth and considerable infrastructural costs usually tend to develop a very uneven distribution of wealth. The reason is simple: Those who have access to capital get to build and control vital infrastructure and thereby make the decisions both in public and working life. In countries that have to import capital, this becomes even more pronounced, since those who control industries and businesses that bring in foreign cash have more control than those who control fixed infrastructure, which can always be nationalized (industries and businesses can move elsewhere if threatened with nationalization). When such uneven distribution of wealth is entrenched in a society, a serious labor-capital (or, in the European context, a left-right) split emerges. This is why Greece is politically similar to Latin American countries, which face the same infrastructural and capital problems, right down to periods of military rule and an ongoing and vicious lab or-capital split.

Greek Core: The Aegean

Despite the limitations on its capital generation, Greece has no alternative but to create an expensive defensive capability that allows it to control the Aegean Sea. Put simply, the core of Greece is neither the breadbaskets of Thessaly and Greek Macedonia, nor the Athens-Piraeus metropolitan area, where around half of the population lives. The core of Greece is the Aegean Sea — the actual water, not the coastland — which allows these three critical areas of Greece to be connected for trade, defense and communication. Control of the Aegean also gives Greece the additional benefit of influencing trade between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Without control of the Aegean, there simply is no Greece.

To control the Aegean and Cretan seas, Greece has to control two key islands in its archipelago, Rhodes and Crete, as well as the Dodecanese archipelago. With those islands under its control, the Aegean and Cretan seas truly become Greek “lakes.” The other island of importance to Athens is Corfu, which gives Greece an anchor in the Otranto Strait and thus an awareness of threats emerging from the Adriatic.

Anything beyond the main Aegean islands and Corfu is not within the scope of Greece’s basic national security interests and can only be gained by the projection of power. In this strategic context, Cyprus becomes important as a way to distract and flank Turkey and break its communications with the Levant and Egypt, traditional spheres of Istanbul’s (and later Ankara’s) influence. Sicily is also within the range of Greek power projection, and at the height of Greece’s power in ancient times, Sicily was frequently colonized by Greek powers. Controlling Sicily gives Greece the key gateway into the western Mediterranean and brackets off the entire eastern half of the Mediterranean for itself. But neither is essential, and projecting Greek power toward either Sicily or Cyprus in the modern day is extremely taxing, although Greece has attempted it with Cyprus, an attempt that led to a near disastrous military confrontation with neighboring Turkey.

The cost of controlling just the Aegean Sea and its multitude of islands cannot be overstated. Aside from the monumental expense of maintaining a navy, Greece has the additional problem of having to compete with Turkey, which is still considered an existential threat for Greece.

In the modern context, this has also underscored the importance of air superiority over the Aegean. The Greek air force prides itself on maintaining a large and advanced fleet of front-line combat aircraft well in excess of the country’s economic means, and many observers believe that their fighter pilots are among the best and most experienced in Europe — and beyond (they regularly tangle with Turkish pilots over the Aegean).

But maintaining, owning and training a superior air force means that Greece was spending more than 6 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, twice what other European countries were spending, just prior to the onset of the current financial crisis (it has since pledged to reduce it significantly, to below 3 percent). With no indigenous capital generation of its own, Greece has been forced to import capital from abroad to maintain such an advanced military. This is in addition to a generous social welfare system and considerable infrastructural needs created by its rugged geography. The result is the ongoing debt crisis that is threatening not only to collapse Greece but also to take the rest of the eurozone with it. The Greek budget deficit reached 13.6 percent of GDP in 2009, and government debt is approaching 150 percent of GDP.

Greece has not always been a fiscal mess. It has, in fact, been everything from a global superpower to a moderately wealthy European state to a political and economic backwater. To understand how this isolated, capital-poor country has devolved, we need to look beyond physical geography and contemplate the political geography of the region in which Greece has found itself throughout history.

From Ancient Superpower…

Ancient Greece gave the Western world its first culture and philosophy. It also gave birth to the study of geopolitics with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which is considered to be a seminal work on international relations. It is an injustice to give the ancient Greek period a quick overview, since it deserves a geopolitical monograph of its own, but a brief look provides a relevant glimpse at how geography played a role in turning Greek city-states into a superpower. The political geography of the period was vastly different from that of the present day. The Mediterranean Sea was the center of the world, one in which a handful of Greek city-states clutching the coast of the Aegean Sea could launch “colonial” expeditions across the Mediterranean. The rugged geography also afforded these city-states a terrain that favored defense and allowed them to defeat more powerful opponents.

Nonetheless, the ancient Greek period is the last time that Greece had some semblance of political independence. It therefore offers insights into how Greek geography has crafted Greek strategy.

From this ancient period, we note that control of the Aegean was of paramount importance, as it still is today. The Greeks — faced with nearly impassible terrain on the Peloponnesian Peninsula — were forced to become excellent mariners. Securing the Aegean was also crucial in repelling two major Persian invasions in antiquity, and each major land battle had its contemporary naval battle to sever Persian supply lines. Once the existential Persian threat was eliminated, Athens, the most powerful of the Greek city-states, launched an attempt to expand itself into an empire. This included establishing control of key Aegean islands. That imperial extension essentially ended with a long, drawn-out campaign to occupy and hold Sicily, which would have formed the basis of control of the entire eastern Mediterranean, and to wrestle Cyprus from Persian control.

While the Athenians may have understood the geopolitics of the Mediterranean well, they did not have advanced bureaucratic and communications technology that makes running a country much easier in the modern age or the population with which to prosecute their plans. Athenian expeditions to Cyprus and Egypt were repulsed while Sicily became Athens’ endgame, causing dissent in the coalition of city-states that eventually brought about the end of Athenian power. This example only serves to illustrate how difficult it was to maintain control of mainland Greece. Athens settled for a loose confederation of city-states, which was not a sufficient basis of control on which to establish an empire.

Bitter rivalries among the various Peloponnesian city-states created a power vacuum in the 4th century B.C. that was quickly filled by the Kingdom of Macedon. Despite its reputation as the most “backward” of the Greek regions — in terms of culture, system of government, philosophy and arts — Macedon had something that the city-states did not: the ample agricultural land of the Axios and Strimonas river valleys — ample, at least, compared to the Peloponnesian Peninsula. Whereas Athens and other city-states depended on seaborne trade to obtain grain from regions beyond the Turkish straits and the Black Sea, Macedon had domestic agriculture. It also had an absolute authoritarian system of government that allowed it to launch the first truly Greek-dominant foray into global power projection under Alexander the Great.

This effort, however, could not be sustained. Ultimately, the estuary of Axios did not provide the necessary agricultural base to counter the rise of Rome, which was able to draw not only on the Tiber and Arno river valleys but also, in time, the large Po river valley. Rome first extended itself into the Greek domain by capturing the island of Corfu — illustrating the island’s importance as a point of invasion from the west — which had already fallen out of Greek hands in the 3rd century B.C. With Corfu secured, Rome had nothing standing between it and the Greek mainland, and through military campaigns ultimately secured control over all of Greece by 86 B.C.

The fall of Greece to Rome essentially wiped Greece out of the annals of history as an independent entity for the next 2,000 years and destined mainland Greece and the Peloponnesian Peninsula to the backwater status it had under Byzantine and Ottoman rule (save for Thessaloniki, which remained a key port and trading city in the Ottoman Empire). While it may be tempting to include Byzantium in the discussion of Greek geopolitics, since its culture and language were essentially Greek, the Byzantine geography was much more approximate to that of the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey than that of Greece proper. The core of Byzantium was the Sea of Marmara, which Byzantium held onto against the encroaching Ottoman Turks until the mid-15th century.

In the story of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, the territory of modern Greece is essentially an afterthought. It was the Ottoman advance through the Maritsa River valley that destroyed Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms in the 14th century, allowing the Ottomans to then concentrate on consolidating the remaining Byzantine territories and conquering Constantinople in the mid-15th century after a brief interregnum caused by Mongol invasions of Anatolia. Greece proper was not conquered as much as it was abruptly severed from the rest of the Balkans — and therefore Christian Europe — by the Ottoman power that thoroughly dominated all the land and sea surrounding it.

…To Vassal State

The ascent of the Ottoman Empire created a new political geography around Greece that made an independent and powerful Greece impossible. The Ottoman Empire was an impressive political entity that plugged up the Balkans by controlling the southern flanks of the Carpathians in present-day Romania and the central Balkan Mountains of present-day Serbia and Bulgaria. Greece, as part of the Ottoman Empire, was not vital for Ottoman defense or purse, although Greeks as people were valued as administrators and were assigned as such to various parts of the empire. Greece itself, however, had become an afterthought.

If we had to pinpoint the exact time and place where political geography in southeastern Europe changed, we could look at Sept. 11, 1683, at around 5 p.m. on the battlefields near Vienna. It was here that Polish King Jan Sobieski III led what was, at the time, the largest cavalry charge in history against the Ottoman forces besieging Vienna. The result was not just a symbolic defeat for Istanbul but also a failure to plug the Vienna gap that the Danube and Morava (the Slovak, not Serbian Morava) rivers create between the Alps and the Carpathians.

Holding the Vienna gap would have allowed the Ottomans to focus their military resources in defense of the empire at a geographical bottleneck — Vienna — freeing up resources to concentrate on developing the Balkan hinterland. The Pannonian plain, fertile and capital rich because of the Danube, would have added additional resources. The Ottoman Empire did not crumble immediately after its failure in Vienna, but its stranglehold on the Balkans slowly began to erode as two new powers — the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires — rose to challenge it.

Without the Vienna gap secured, the Ottoman Empire was left without natural boundaries to the northwest. From Vienna down to the confluence of the Danube and Sava, where present-day Belgrade is located, the Pannonian plain is borderless save for rivers. The mountainous Balkans provide some protection but are equally difficult for the Ottomans to control without the time and resources to concentrate on assimilating the region. The loss of Vienna, therefore, exposed portions of the Balkan Peninsula to Western (and, crucially, Russian) influence and interests as well as Western notions of nationalism, which began circulating throughout the Continent with great force following the French Revolution.

First to turn against the Ottomans was Serbia in the early 19th century. The Greek struggle followed closely afterward. While initial Greek gains against the Ottomans in the 1820s were impressive, the Ottomans unleashed their Egyptian forces on Greece in 1826. The Europeans were at first resistant to help Christian Greece because the precedent set by the nationalist rebellion was equally unwelcome in multiethnic Russia and Austro-Hungary or the imperial United Kingdom. Ultimately, the Europeans had a greater fear that one of the three would move in and profit from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and gain access to the eastern Mediterranean.

While Austro-Hungary and Russia had designs on the Balkans, more established European powers like the United Kingdom, France and (later in the 19th century) Germany wanted to limit any territorial gains by Vienna and St. Petersburg. This was vital for the United Kingdom, which did not want to allow the Russian Empire access to the Mediterranean.

Since the end of its war against the Ottomans in 1832, Greece has been geopolitically vital for the West. First it was vital for the British, as a bulwark against great-power encroachment on the crumbling Ottoman hold in the Balkans. The United Kingdom retained a presence — at various periods and in various capacities — in Corfu, Crete and Cyprus. To this day, the United Kingdom still has military installations in Cyprus that are considered sovereign territory under direct British rule.

Greece also became vital for the United States as part of the U.S. Soviet-containment strategy. To maintain influence in Greece, the United States intervened in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), furnished the Greek merchant marine with ships after World War II, rushed Greece and Turkey into NATO in 1952 and continued to underwrite Greek defense outlays throughout the 20th century. Even a brief military junta in Greece, referred to as the “Rule of the Colonels” (1967-1974), did not affect Greek membership in NATO. Neither did Greece’s near-wars with fellow NATO member Turkey in 1964 (over Cyprus), in 1974 (over Cyprus again), in 1987 (over the Aegean Sea) and in 1996 (over an uninhabited island in the Aegean).

The United Kingdom and later the United States were willing to underwrite Greek defense expenditures and provide Greece with sufficient capital to be a viable independent state and enjoy a near-Western standard of living. In exchange, Greece offered the West a key location from which to plug Russian and later Soviet penetration into the Mediterranean basin.

Geopolitical Imperatives

Before we go into a discussion of the contemporary Greek predicament, we can summarize the story of Greek geography as told by history in a few strategic imperatives:

·  Secure control of the Aegean to maintain defensive and communication lines with key mainland population centers.

·  Establish control of Corfu, Crete and Rhodes to prevent invasions from the sea.

·  Hold the Axios River valley and as far up the valley as possible for agricultural land and access to mainland Europe.

·  Consolidate the hold on inland Greece by eliminating regional power centers and brigands, then collect taxes and concentrate capital in accordance with the needs of the state.

·  Extend control to outer islands such as Cyprus and Sicily to dominate the eastern Mediterranean (this is an imperative that Greece has not accomplished since ancient times).

Greece Today

With the collapse of the Soviet threat at the end of the Cold War and the subsequent end of the Balkan wars with the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, the political geography of the region changed once again. This time the change was unfavorable for Athens. With the West largely uninterested in the affairs of the region, Greece lost its status as a strategic ally. And along with that status, Athens lost the political and economic support that allowed it to overcome its capital deficiencies.

This was evident to everyone but the Greeks. Countries rarely accept their geopolitical irrelevance lightly. Athens absolutely refused to. Instead it did everything it could to retain its membership in the first-world club, borrowing enormous sums of money to spend on the most sophisticated military equipment available and producing erroneous financial records to get into the eurozone. This is often lost amid the ongoing debt crisis, which is commonly described — mainly by the Western European press — as a result of Greek laziness, profligate spending habits and irresponsibility. But faced with a geography that engenders a capital- poor environment and an existential threat from Turkey that challenges its Aegean core, Greece had no alternative but to indebt itself after its Western patrons lost interest, and now even that option is in doubt. (Trying to keep up with its fellow EU states in terms of quality of life obviously played a role in Greece’s financ ial overextension, but this can also be placed in the context of keeping up with a modernizing Turkey next door.)

Today, Greece cannot even dream of achieving its fifth geopolitical imperative, dominating the eastern Mediterranean. Even its fourth imperative, the consolidation of inland Greece, is in question, as illustrated by Greece’s inability to collect taxes. Nearly 25 percent of the Greek economy is in the so-called “shadow” sector, by far the highest rate among the world’s developed countries.

Succeeding in maintaining control of the Aegean, Greece’s most important imperative, in the face of regional opposition is simply impossible without an outside patron. Going forward, the question for Greece is whether it will be able to accept its much-reduced geopolitical role. This, too, is out of its hands, depending as it does on the strategies that Turkey adopts. Turkey is a rising geopolitical power intent on spreading its influence in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus. The question is now whether Turkey will focus its intentions on the Aegean, or instead will be willing to make a deal with Greece in order to concentrate on other interests.

Ultimately, Greece needs to find a way to become useful again to one or more great powers — unlikely, unless a great-power conflict returns to the Balkans — or to sue for lasting peace with Turkey and begin learning how to live within its geopolitical means. Either way, the next three years will be defining ones in Greek history. The joint 110 billion-euro bailout package from the International Monetary Fund and European Union comes with severe austerity strings attached, which are likely to destabilize the country to a significant degree. Grafted onto Greece’s regionalized social geography, vicious left-right split and history of political and social violence, the IMF-EU measures will further weaken the central government and undermine its control. An eventual default is almost assured by the level of government debt, which will soon be above 150 percent of GDP.

It is only a question of when, not if, the Europeans pull the plug on Athens — which most likely will be at the first opportunity, when Greece does not present a systemic risk to the rest of Europe. At that point, without access to international capital or more bailout money, Greece could face a total collapse of political control and social violence not seen since the military junta of the 1970s. Greece, therefore, finds itself in a very unfamiliar situation. For the first time since the 1820s, it is truly alone.

The Holly Book

The IPCC exposed: political to its core

A new book demolishes the neutral, scientific façade of the UN’s climate change body and reveals its real, debate-ending purpose.

By Rob Lyons

‘We meet here at a time when greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have never been higher, when the number of livelihoods that have been dissolved by climate change impacts has never been greater and when the need for action has never been more compelling or more achievable.’

So said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as she opened the organisation’s latest extravaganza in Durban, South Africa this week. Her words are a neat demonstration of how UN bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), far from being neutral and independent organisations, are highly political. The task before the gathered governmental delegations is urgent, we are told, because the concentrations of greenhouse gases have ‘never been higher’, the impacts have never been ‘greater’ but action is ‘achievable’. (Figueres was also being disingenuous - there’s pretty much zero chance of any meaningful agreement coming out of the Durban talks.)

These statements are all built upon the wisdom provided by what Donna Laframboise rightly refers to regularly as the ‘Climate Bible’: the periodic assessment reports produced by the IPCC. But while the UNFCCC is clearly a political body, hammering out just who is going to pay to sort out the planet-threatening problem of global warming, the IPCC is widely seen as a body simply offering the very best expert advice from the finest scientific minds in the world.

In The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert (a fabulous title that surely deserves to be a winner with charades players everywhere), Laframboise provides chapter and verse on the Climate Bible and the body that produces it. The IPCC is presented as being made up of thousands of top scientists who work tirelessly and self-critically to bring together the best peer-reviewed research and reach an unbiased, cautious and independent assessment of where global temperatures are heading and what the consequences will be. Sadly, as Laframboise shows, the reality is very different.

Sitting in a coffee shop around the corner from the spiked office, Laframboise explains to me how she came to write the book. Formerly a feature writer and editorial board member at Canada’s National Post, she left the paper in the early Noughties and turned her back on journalism, feeling it was ‘time for a change’. She continues: ‘I didn’t write anything for seven or eight years but in early 2009 I became so annoyed at the way climate change was being covered in the media, it was just so shallow... so I started doing my own research and I started blogging.’

What Laframboise found was that there is a lot more uncertainty about climate change and its effects than the general public has been led to believe. Indeed, her original book project was simply going to spell out 10 reasons why we should stay calm about the whole issue. What really drew her to focus on the IPCC, she tells me, is that ‘this organisation is regarded as a prototype. It’s the golden child, it’s won the Nobel Peace Prize. So the UN has now set up an IPCC-like body for biodiversity and another one for agriculture, and another for soil degradation. And in each case, they appear to be trying to recruit the science and the scientists to help them pursue a global agenda on these issues.’

Before digging deeper into the issue, Laframboise tells me that she assumed - like most people - that the IPCC was ‘dependable, trustworthy and professional’. She adds: ‘The more I investigated the IPCC, the more I thought it was like a child that had been praised and flattered, that had been given rules to follow but, when it doesn’t follow the rules, faces no consequences. And now it’s grown up into a problem, collectively, for all of us.’

In her book, Laframboise takes us through the major claims made about the IPCC and demolishes them one by one.

For example, there’s the idea that the IPCC report is the product of the world’s top experts. But in reality, knowing a subject well is not nearly as important, it seems, as having a face that fits. So, leading IPCC contributors sometimes do not even have PhDs in their subjects, never mind being world-class experts, while other researchers in charge of chapters had expertise in a completely different area to the one they were working on. Meanwhile, the nature of the review process means that when leading experts are critical, they can safely be ignored by chapter authors.

Another piece of IPCC spin is that its reports are built upon the best available research. In fact, there is heavy reliance on the so-called ‘grey’ literature - material that is not from peer-reviewed journals at all. This material can even just be magazine articles or propaganda from environmentalist groups. The most famous example of this is the ‘Himalayagate’ affair, which centred on the important claim made in the 2007 report that glaciers, apparently crucial to the water supply for billions of people, would disappear entirely by 2035.

Nothing could demand urgent action more than this. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The glaciers are likely to last for hundreds of years, as was pointed out by expert reviewers - who were ignored. However, in early 2010, it was pointed out that the erroneous idea came from a document produced by environmental group WWF, which in turn had quoted an earlier interview in New Scientist magazine.

In March 2010, Laframboise decided to take on the task of working out just how many references in the 2007 report were to non-peer-reviewed sources. With the help of volunteers from her blog readership, her audit found that 30 per cent of the references were from newspaper and magazine articles, unpublished masters theses, reports produced by green groups and even press releases. That hardly inspires confidence, particularly when she also reveals how IPCC movers and shakers have exploited links with peer-reviewed journals to get the ‘right’ kind of research into print just in time to bolster their views in the assessment reports - and to block the ‘wrong’ kind of research from getting the kudos of peer-reviewed publication.

Time and again, the IPCC claims to do one thing while in reality doing something quite different. For example, it declares that there is a cut-off point for each report for research to be considered because, of course, expert reviewers need to have time to consider and comment upon chapters in which that research is mentioned. However, such deadlines are routinely ignored so that chapters refer to work published after the deadline. The result is that those sections of the assessment reports don’t even receive the easy-to-ignore comments of reviewers.

This was particularly blatant in relation to the Stern Review, a report commissioned by the UK government that reported in late 2006 that immediate action to tackle climate change would be much cheaper and more effective than adapting to rising temperatures. Many references to the Stern Review were included in the 2007 report - even though the cut-off for material to be included was officially January 2006. It’s no surprise that such a politically helpful publication should find its way into the IPCC report, despite its inclusion being in breach of IPCC rules.

There is more - much more - detailed in Laframboise’s book, but in truth, none of it should come as a surprise. Because the purpose of the IPCC is not to assess science in a disinterested manner. Its job is to be a debate-ender, a shut-the-fuck-up to anyone who disagrees with the underlying political agenda. Indeed, far from the political process arising out of the gloomy prognostications of the scientists, it is the demand for scientific legitimation that comes out of a pre-existing political process.

Once the whole process is politicised, there’s no going back. If the conclusions of your supposedly disinterested work will have a major influence on political decisions, it is surely impossible to expect anyone to remain completely disinterested. One example of this is the way in which green lobby groups have recruited IPCC-connected authors. For example, Laframboise lists 78 people involved with the IPCC who are also members of WWF’s parallel climate panel. Of these, 23 are IPCC co-ordinating lead authors - the people in charge of individual chapters of the reports. ‘Ladies and gentlemen’, she writes, ‘the IPCC has been infiltrated.’

This surely undermines the IPCC’s claim to impartiality. ‘The IPCC is, in many ways, analogous to a trial judge’, she tells me in that noisy coffee shop. ‘In a murder trial, for example, there are supposed to be two sides - prosecution and defence - with the conduct of the trial and the outcome decided by a neutral referee. But if you found out that the judge went out partying with the prosecution every night, I think we could all agree that was a problem because there is another avenue of communication between them that we weren’t all party to.’ If those scientists had the slightest sense of their role as neutral arbiters, they should surely be keeping their distance from such lobbyists, not getting into bed with them.

When it comes to global warming, what we have at present is considerable uncertainty about what the future holds, combined with a variety of possible policies we could pursue to deal with climate-related problems. The real job of the IPCC is to remove that uncertainty, replacing it with an armageddon scenario that can short-circuit the political debate. The Science has spoken became a mantra at the time of the release of the last assessment report in 2007. Anyone who dared to deny The Science was abused as a ‘denier’, a ‘flat-earther’.

Laframboise has done the world a favour by pointing out, in detail, why the so-called Climate Bible is nothing of the sort. That doesn’t mean we won’t face environmental problems in the future - though the experience of the IPCC farce should reinforce our scepticism about any such claims - but it does remind us that those problems have to be balanced up with all the other demands made upon society’s time and resources.

That balancing act is called politics. It’s a messy, frustrating but utterly vital process that should never be shut down by anyone waving a holy book and a hidden agenda.

Unemployment Solutions

Both Weird and Scary

By Jeffrey Tucker

There was a brief moment of joy at the news that retailers hired 206,000 new people in November. But only one day later, the other shoe dropped: Jobless claims are, again, past the 400,000 mark — meaning that the unemployment problem is, overall, getting worse, not better. The broadest measure of unemployment exceeds 17%. It is much higher among new college graduates. And this doesn’t even speak to the larger problem of job downgrades; there’s a personal tragedy embedded in each one.

The longer the unemployment problem persists, the more we are seeing oddball theories and proposals for dealing with it. Ben Bernanke remains enthralled with the antique view that the way to cure unemployment is to depreciate the value of money. You have to blow the dust off some old Keynesian macroeconomics texts, surely to be found in some dingy library somewhere, to see his rationale.

I’ll cite two additional cases in point (one news story and one commentary) as indicators of a more widespread problem.

A New York Times news story by Adam Davidson regrets how the economic changes of the last half-century have made job opportunities fewer than ever. He cites the common complaint about international trade. Steel, textiles, toys, furniture, electronics were once domestic industries, but these goods are, mostly, made overseas now, presumably, leaving less for us to do.

This is the common protectionist line, and it is rooted in fallacy. Offloading these industries where they can thrive more efficiently does two things: saves American consumers money so that they can save or spend on different things, and saves American workers from wasting time making things that can be made more cheaply elsewhere, so that they can do things that are more productive, rewarding and remunerative.

The end result should be more and better jobs at home. (I’ll get to why that is not happening in a bit.)

His second complaint is straight out of the Luddite playbook. Davidson regrets how technology (capital) has replaced human hands with machines. This isn’t about technology only recently online. He regrets that “countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, email and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs.” It gets worse. He seems to regret even your ability to buy a bookshelf at OfficeMax because there are no longer “a bunch of people…helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.”

My goodness. He might as well regret the invention of the wheel, because those employed to carry others around on their backs are now out of work. If we take this logic far enough, we would be back to the Stone Age, when, it’s true, everyone had jobs to do. Then again, the living standards were rather low.

It seems trivial to point it out, but market-created technology is not violence to society. It appears because we want it, and we want it because it helps our lives. We become better at what we do. The outmoded technology no longer needs to be made — shed a tear for typewriter manufacturers! — but there are new jobs in making the new technology, and industries that use that new technology can expand because they are more efficient than ever.

I’m sorry for wasting your time by pointing out some commonplace refutations of brainless nostrums, but apparently, there is nothing so brainless that it is unworthy of being featured in The New York Times. And if it is being featured there, it strongly suggests the need for refutation. So let us visit yet another piece along these lines, this one even wackier and more wicked than the last one.

In “The Age of the Superfluous Worker” by Columbia sociologist Herbert Gans, we discover an even-more-bizarre explanation of why unemployment persists. He begins by pointing out that having surplus workers is hardly a new problem; it has been an issue faced by all countries in all times. But in the old days, he writes, surplus workers were afflicted with “illnesses” that caused them to be “incapacitated” or were otherwise “killed off.”

Wow, bring back the old days, huh? What’s more, he writes, wars were a blast, because they “absorbed the surplus” of labor by employing people to kill or be killed. Ah, the salad days of mass bloodshed when “sufficient numbers of those serving in the infantry and on warships were killed or seriously enough injured so that they could not add to the peacetime labor surplus.”

Sadly, those days are long gone, he writes, because people are so much healthier now. Not even war works its magic on the labor pool anymore: “Iraq and Afghanistan wars have left many more service members injured than killed.” (This whole line is based on a myth that war and death have an economic upside.)

So we are in a pickle. Gans says that we need an “industrial policy” that brings together government and business to make new jobs. An example he offers: “Reducing class sizes in all public schools to 15 or fewer would require a great many new teachers, even as it would raise the quality of education.”

We could have government employ some people to dig holes and other people to fill them back up again. Laugh if you want, but this is precisely what J.M. Keynes suggested in his General Theory. His plan was to have government fill up bottles with money, throw them into mines, fill the mines with trash and have private enterprise set loose to find them. Voila, no unemployment. He failed to add that this would be incredibly stupid and a ghastly waste of resources. (Thebest refutation of this fallacy should be distributed by the case.)

Gans ends his theorizing with the suggestion that government restrict everyone to working only 30 hours per week. When that time is done, presumably, others will be standing right by to step in to fill up the rest of the week, while the first workers go home to vegetate and wait for their turns at the wheel again. Actually, I don’t know why he says 30 hours per week. We have a growing population. Maybe we should all be forbidden by law from working more than 10 or five hours per week! That would, surely, bring prosperity.

All these cockamamie theories are deeply dangerous, and they evade the incredibly obvious point as to why there is unemployment in the first place. If you read economics books from the 15th-19th centuries, there was hardly a word written about unemployment at all.

Why is that? Because there is more than enough work to do in this world. There is no shortage of jobs, now or ever.The only question concerns the terms of exchange between the worker and the person who is being hired. Only in the 20th century and, mostly, beginning during the Great Depression has there been widespread unemployment, and that is because of the government’s interventions in the relationship between workers and employers.

What kinds of intervention? There are legal restrictions that make hiring and firing a litigator’s paradise. There are high payroll taxes that vastly increase the cost of new works. There are minimum wage laws, labor union privileges and “child” labor laws that cartelize the workplace to benefit the few at the expense of the many. There are restrictions on immigration that make it very difficult for many businesses to function and expand. If you could somehow get rid of all these problems in one fell swoop, the so-called unemployment problem would vanish rather quickly.

The problem of unemployment is not really an economic problem; it is a political problem. It is one of the many costs imposed by a state that involves itself in things it ought to leave alone. But rather than eliminating these costs, there is a growing fascination with wacky ideas, which will only guarantee that a bad problem grows ever worse. If you know aNew York Times editor, send him or her a book on the basics of economics, and soon.

As for Bernanke, he has never met a problem in life for which he doesn’t see the solution as more paper-money printing. If he could find a way for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to hire 7 million people, and another 6 million to fly the helicopters needed to distribute the new bills, we’d had full employment, and absolutely no reason to work.

Good as Gold

Stupid Arguments Against Gold

By George Selgin 

Persons familiar with my writings on monetary reform know that, far from being anyone's idea of a gold bug, and despite my conviction that those monies work best that governments govern least, I've always shied away from arguing that we ought to re-establish a gold standard. Instead, I've favored reforms aimed at preserving our existing fiat standard while eliminating the role of bureaucrats, and increasing that of competitive market forces, in regulating that standard.

I respect nonetheless those who, having given serious thought to the matter, conclude that gold remains our best hope. Alas, such people make up but a small fraction of self-described gold bugs. My standard reaction to finding myself within earshot of any of the rest is to look for a more remote and unoccupied bar stool.

But there's one thing that's guaranteed to bring out the gold bug in me, and that is ill-informed arguments against the gold standard. No, make that stupid arguments, because the ones I have in mind aren't  merely ill-informed. They are ill-informed in a way that suggests that the persons who make them don't even think about what they're saying.

An example of the sorts of arguments I have in mind is this opinion piece ^[1] from yesterday's New York Times, in which Eduardo Porter responds to recent pro-gold testimonials of various Republican presidential candidates and conservative talking heads. Such persons aren't exactly heavyweights when it comes to making good arguments for returning to gold. Yet in trying to show just what lightweights they really are, Mr. Porter mainly succeeds in revealing his own featherweight grasp of monetary economics and history.

For his opening salvo Mr. Porter turns to R.A. Radford's famous article ^[2] on the employment of cigarettes as money in German P.O.W. camps, noting how, according to Radford, the prices of other goods sometimes fluctuated dramatically in response to new cigarette deliveries or to cigarettes' gradual disappearance in the absence of such. This experience, we are assured, proves that a gold standard is a dumb idea since gold, "as money,...share's tobacco's basic drawback" of being a commodity.

This would be an unanswerable argument against the gold standard were it not for two minor issues: first, gold isn't tobacco; second, P.O.W. camps aren't ordinary economies. Those who plead for a return to gold have a right to be understood to be extolling the merits of a gold standard rather than those of a tobacco standard or a cowrie shell standard or some other commodity standard; and the instability exhibited by any standard in a P.O.W. camp might not supply an accurate indication of the same standard's likely performance in a more usual economic setting. I would bet, for example, that the real price of cigarettes was subject to more violent changes within the confines of Stalag Luft III than in the surrounding German economy; and after the war the real price of a pack of cigarettes net of taxes, in the U.S. at least, was more-or-less constant until the early '80s, when it started to rise gradually. (It is now about twice what it was then). Finally, there isn't even any good reason for supposing that cigarettes were a poor monetary medium for P.O.W. camps, given the available options. Indeed, having often assigned Radford's article myself in teaching monetary economics, I have always understood its lesson to be, not that cigarettes make crummy money, but that markets are remarkably clever when it comes to expediting exchange. The logical implication of Mr. Porter's argument, on the other hand, seems to be that by relying on the market the P.O.W.s blew it: it would have been wiser, according to his point of view, for them to have invited their captors to supply, in exchange for some of their precious Red-Cross parcel contents, fiat money especially designed for their use, and backed by a solemn promise to manage the stuff scientifically, so as to best provide for the prisoners' macroeconomic well-being.

And gold itself? Is its supply in fact subject to the sort of shocks to which P.O.W. camps' cigarette endowments were exposed? Though Mr. Porter seems to assume so, he offers no proof. Had he bothered to inquire into actual facts he might have learned that by far the most notorious of all precious metal "supply shocks"--the one following Spain's conquest of the New World--led to the sixfold increase in European prices that has since come to be known as the great European "Price Revolution." ^[3] Q.E.D. for Mr. Porter? Well, not quite, because that sixfold increase occurred over an interval of over 150 years, which translates into a continuous rate of inflation of just 1.1 percent--a rate that would have Ben Bernanke and many other modern central bankers squawking about being on the brink of a deflationary crisis.

And what about that other famous gold supply shock started by a lucky discovery at Sutter's Mill? Well, have a look if you will at a chart showing the progress of the U.S. CPI since 1800 ^[4] or so, and see if you can pick out the rise in prices this discovery caused. Unless you happen to be on drugs, you can't, because it isn't there: there are price jumps, sure enough--in or around 1812, 1862, and 1918--but they all mark moments when the U.S. temporarily abandoned the gold standard, which is to say moments when it embraced the sort of paper standard Mr. Porter thinks so obviously superior to gold. (During WWI, although the U.S. didn't suspend the gold standard outright, it limited gold exports.) Wars are exceptional, of course. But then what about the CPI lift-off after 1971, when the dollar's last link to gold was severed once and for all? Is the CPI a Republican plot?

If not, are we not entitled to wonder why Mr. Porter, in assuring us that "the Fed can print dollars at will to meet the growing demand for money as the economy grows," does not seem to realize that it can, and often does, "print" too many dollars? Are we not entitled to wonder why, in making a case against gold and in favor of paper money, he supplies us with an almost perfectly irrelevant story about tobacco-plus-paper inflation, without so much as hinting at the many far more serious inflations fueled by paper alone? Is "Zimbabwean" inflation to him nothing other than a bogeyman invented by some right-wing talking head? Perhaps Mr. Porter was so absorbed by his vision of P.O.W.s struggling to carry on despite occasional cigarette windfalls that he managed to overlook the damage irredeemable paper monies have done at one time or another to the entire populations of Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, North Korea, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Zaire--to offer but a very incomplete list.

But why harp on inflation? After all, fiat money at least has the virtue of hardly ever being in short supply, so that economies need not fear being unable to grow for want of it. In contrast under a gold standard, Mr. Porter assures us, "the economy couldn't grow faster than the supply of gold." Evidently Mr. Porter here overlooks another relevant episode in economic history. This episode is known as "the 19th century."

It's hardly surprising under the circumstances that Mr. Porter should share the very widespread opinion that the gold standard was to blame for the United States Great Depression. Yet even by his own telling it wasn't the gold standard as such, but the particular rules by which the Fed administered that standard, that led to the Fed's failure to prevent the post-1930 collapse of the U.S. money stock. In fact the Federal Reserve's requirement of a 40 (not 60) percent gold cover for its outstanding notes was not a necessary part of the gold standard but a regulation based on naive ca. 1840 British Currency-School ^[5] thinking. (In Scotland's free-banking based gold standard, in contrast, banks managed quite well with specie reserve ratios that varied little from one or two percent.)

The stipulated gold minimum was, moreover, something that the Fed itself had statutory authority to lower, had it considered doing so worthwhile. In fact, it didn't, because (as Dick Timberlake ^[6] points out) the Fed never ran up against the 40 percent limit during the crucial, early years of the depression: in August 1931 the Fed's gold holdings of $3.5 billion were over twice what it needed to meet that requirement; and even at the time of the Bank Holiday in March 1933, despite having endured a run on gold triggered by fear of an impending devaluation, the Fed was sitting on more that $1 billion in excess gold reserves. What the Fed was short of wasn't gold but what clueless Fed officials, subscribing to the bogus "real-bills doctrine," considered good private securities, which until 1932 were the only assets eligible for backing its notes other than gold. If Mr. Porter knew his Friedman and Schwartz, he'd know that those authors, among several others, conclude on the basis of such facts that the gold standard was not the cause of the Fed's failure to combat the Great Depression. Since Christina Romer ^[7] is among the authors in question, I trust that Mr. Porter will not be tempted to declare that they must all be Republicans.

While the general thrust of Mr. Porter's essay is that one has to be daft to say nice things about the gold standard, he is generous enough to allow that this might not be the only reason for Ron Paul's defense of gold. After all, Porter informs us, "much of his [Paul's] wealth is tied up in gold-mining stocks." Consequently, Porter reasons, Paul "would certainly benefit if even more American's caught the gold bug." But would he? Have a look at any plot ^[8] of the real price of gold ^[9], and ask yourself whether, if you had "much of your wealth" in gold mining, you would be pleading for a return to the gold standard, or pulling hard for a continuation of the fiat-money status quo. Besides not making sense, and being nasty, Porter's argumentum ad hominem is profoundly silly. Would he have us conclude that Paul is pro-life only because he's a pediatrician an obstetrician, or that, since he favors drug legalization, he must be long on marijuana, coca, and poppies?

What I find most obnoxious about Mr. Porter's arguments isn't that they are arguments against reviving the gold standard (for I recognize good arguments for not attempting such) or even that they are bad arguments. It is that they are both bad and smug; indeed they are bad because they are smug. Starting from the premise that only idiots can favor a gold standard, Mr. Porter imagines that no great effort is required to prove that such a standard is deeply flawed. He then cobbles up his proof, by plucking up a fistful of old anti-gold canards from the murky bottom of google.com, by recalling an old article describing inflation that wasn't the fault of some central bank, and by simply asserting his own a priori beliefs. After all, he reasons, why bother to use a tower or ram or even a ladder to assail something that mere wind ought to topple? In fine, Mr. Porter falls victim to the tempting but evidently mistaken assumption that he surely knows more about money than the average right-wing nut.