The murders of cartoonists who made fun of Islam and of Jews shopping for their Sabbath meals by Islamists in Paris last week have galvanized the world. A galvanized world is always dangerous. Galvanized people can do careless things. It is in the extreme and emotion-laden moments that distance and coolness are most required. I am tempted to howl in rage. It is not my place to do so. My job is to try to dissect the event, place it in context and try to understand what has happened and why. From that, after the rage cools, plans for action can be made. Rage has its place, but actions must be taken with discipline and thought.
I have found that in thinking about things geopolitically, I can cool my own rage and find, if not meaning, at least explanation for events such as these. As it happens, my new book will be published on Jan. 27. Titled Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, it is about the unfolding failure of the great European experiment, the European Union, and the resurgence of European nationalism. It discusses the re-emerging borderlands and flashpoints of Europe and raises the possibility that Europe's attempt to abolish conflict will fail. I mention this book because one chapter is on the Mediterranean borderland and the very old conflict between Islam and Christianity. Obviously this is a matter I have given some thought to, and I will draw on Flashpoints to begin making sense of the murderers and murdered, when I think of things in this way.
For much of the Cold War,
George Orwell’s novel 1984 eclipsed Aldous Huxley’s
earlier work Brave New World. Orwell’s book, published in
1949, seemed to many readers the more apt dystopia for understanding the
challenge of totalitarianism, since it could be said to capture the essential
character of the regimes on the other side of the Iron Curtain. With the Cold
War now long over, and with that era’s public preoccupation with space,
military technology, and the physical sciences redirected toward the biological
and behavioral sciences and their potential to reshape human beings and
society, Huxley’s dark tale has seemed “relevant” again. This is a judgment
that would not have surprised its author. Huxley’s latest biographer, Nicholas Murray, explains that when Orwell
sent Huxley an early copy of 1984,
Huxley wrote back to say “that he had enjoyed it but believed his book [Brave New World] was better
prophecy,” with its portrait of a gentler but more effective totalitarianism
than Orwell’s “boot smashing down on the face.”
Though
Huxley clearly intended his 1932 book as a dystopia, Murray reports that the
novel was “popular with American college students in the 1950s” for its
portents of sexual liberation, and that the contemporary French novelist Michel
Houellebecq, in the words of one of his characters, treats Brave New World as “exactly the
sort of world we’re trying to create, the world we want to live in.” Murray
himself, whose strong suit is Huxley’s personal life rather than his literary
production, plays up the respects in which the novel is a “critique of modern
consumerism.” To be sure, there are the planned obsolescence of consumer goods,
the conditioned desire for empty recreations, and the replacement of God with
the shade of Henry Ford. But this is superficial. A more penetrating view was
taken by Rebecca West, who in a 1932 review of the book in the Daily Telegraph called it “the
most serious religious work written for some years,” and remarked that in one
pivotal scene Huxley had “rewritten in terms of our age the chapter called ‘The
Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers
Karamazov.” (West’s comparison was discussed at length in these pages in
Caitrin Nicol’s essay “Brave New World at 75,” Spring 2007.)
But an even
more telling comparison can be made — that Brave New World is a modern counterpart to the “city in
speech” built by Socrates and his young interlocutors in Plato’s Republic. Whether Huxley saw the
similarities himself is far from clear. In neither the “Foreword” added to the
1946 edition nor his lengthy 1958 essay Brave New World Revisited, which is published together with the
novel in some editions, does he indicate any
consciousness of a parallel. Nor do his Complete Essays (published 2000 – 2002)
shed light on this. His biographer Murray mentions no such connection in
Huxley’s mind either; nor does his earlier biographer Sybille Bedford. Yet it may not be necessary
to confirm any precise authorial intention on Huxley’s part to imitate Plato.
Whereas Huxley’s other novels are largely forgotten today by the general
public, and his later visits to the themes of Brave New World are those of a crank whose imaginative
gifts have deserted him, in writing his greatest work he seems to have been in
the grip of an idea larger than himself. Plato’s Socrates tells us in the Apology that when he “went to the poets” to “ask them thoroughly what they
meant” in their greatest poems, he found to his surprise that “almost everyone
present, so to speak, would have spoken better than the poets did about the
poetry that they themselves had made.” For as Socrates said (not without some
biting irony) in Plato’s Ion, “all the good epic poets
speak all their fine poems not from art but by being inspired and possessed,
and it is the same for the good lyric poets.” Perhaps during the mere four
months it took Huxley to write Brave
New World, he was “possessed” in this way and remained forever
unconscious of his debt to Plato.
The Structure
of Huxley’s World State
From the first paragraph of the
novel, we learn the motto of the World State of Huxley’s imagination:
“Community, Identity, Stability.” This brings to mind Socrates’ question to
Glaucon in The Republic:
“Have we any greater evil for a city than what splits it and makes it many
instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it
one?” Socrates and Glaucon agree that “that city [is] best governed which is
most like a single human being.” In the same vein, the individual in the World
State is “just a cell in the social body.” As for stability, described by one
of Huxley’s chief characters as “the primal and the ultimate need,” this is
something Socrates cannot guarantee regarding his city in speech: he tells his
young friends that their city is “so composed” as to be “hard to be moved,” but
that “since for everything that has come into being there is decay,” even it
will not “remain for all time.” At the end of Brave New World, we have no reason to believe that Huxley’s
World Controllers have not conquered the problem of decay. They appear to have
achieved a perfectly static perfect justice. But then, unlike the rulers in
Socrates’ city — unlike Socrates himself — they have wholly mastered a science
that is (in Socrates’ words) “sovereign of better and worse begettings.” For
the need to conquer human nature by eugenics is only the most obvious matter
where Plato and Huxley meet on common ground. (All quotations from the Republic in this essay are drawn
from Allan Bloom’s translation.)
The
necessity of eugenics is driven by another principle the two polities have in
common: “one man, one art.” Each cell in the social body has its peculiar work
to do. As Plato’s Socrates divides his city into three classes — the golden
guardians, the silver auxiliaries, and the iron or bronze farmers and artisans
— Huxley’s World State has the five classes of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and
Epsilon. Socrates recognizes that he cannot keep his classes differentiated —
hence he cannot keep the city stable — without keeping a “careful ... watch”
over the children born to the parents in each class, transferring up and down
the social scale those children who are better fitted to be reared in another
class than the one into which they were born. Ultimately, with respect to the
gold class, Socrates opts for a concerted eugenics program that involves the
destruction of marriage and the family and the concealment of every child’s
peculiar parentage, with childrearing handed over to a common nursery.
But Huxley
does Socrates one better. The World State has completely severed sexual
intercourse from procreation. No more viviparous reproduction; instead, the
Hatchery and Conditioning Centre has taken over the whole work of producing
each generation of citizens. Babies are made there on the assembly line by
strictly selected in vitro fertilization
and gestation, and their conditioning for their role in life begun even before
they are “decanted.” Special lines of “plus” and “minus” models of each class
are manufactured, from “Alpha-Plus” to “Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.” Descending
to even more particularity, they are prepared for their precise adult jobs by
doses of chemicals, exposure to heat and cold and other stimuli, and — after
decanting — by early-childhood conditioning to like or dislike objects like
books and flowers or experiences like darkness or sunshine. But will not the
State need many workers identically made to do certain low-class jobs requiring
mass manpower? That is solved in part by Bokanovsky’s Process, a method akin to in vitro cloning that can
produce as many as ninety-six copies of a single embryo.
In Plato’s
city, the sexes are generally equal in their participation in public life and
work — but not quite. As Glaucon says to Socrates, they will assign “everything
in common” to both sexes, “except that we use the females as weaker and the
males as stronger.” Soon thereafter they agree that while there is no art
“practiced by human beings in which the class of men doesn’t excel that of
women,” yet because there is “no practice relevant to the government of a city
that is peculiar to woman,” and “the natures are scattered alike among both”
sexes, the women must be educated as the men are and assigned the same duties.
Socrates blithely leads Glaucon to neglect even the possibility that there is
an art of mothering, and to agree to the joint exercise of the sexes, naked, in
their gymnastic training. Conditioning over time, they say, will accustom the
male and female guardians to this immodesty. Somehow love of the city will be
all they think of when they see what would normally be other objects of their
affection.
So also in
Huxley’s book, the sexes are in almost entire equality with one another. If
with the banishment of viviparous reproduction the word “mother” is now an
obscenity, why not? And yet, the equality is not quite complete — we never hear
of a female World Controller or other high official. But the bad joke of
Socrates’ naked unisex gymnastics is retold in Huxley’s early conditioning of
both sexes to treat intercourse as play. Children at the Conditioning Centre,
“naked in the warm June sunshine,” engage in “ordinary erotic play.” No need to
restrain the natural sexual urges and channel them for eugenic purposes, as
Socrates had to do. With reproduction cordoned off from sex — with every woman
who is not hormonally engineered to be a sterile “freemartin” always going
about equipped with her “Malthusian belt” of contraceptives, and strategically
located Abortion Centres ready in case of accident — a wholly indiscriminate
recreational sexuality can be unleashed, indeed encouraged, in both sexes.
Paramount
for maintaining the basic structure of both Huxley’s World State and Plato’s
city are their educational regimes. Socrates has his “noble lie” — a false tale
about the creation of the city and its people that, if believed to be true, would
guarantee citizens’ loyalty to the city and at the same time contentedness
about their fixed place in it — all shored up by a strict censorship of poetry
to inculcate the most politically unifying opinions. Similarly, the World State
has its regime of “hypnopædia” (sleep teaching), in which nocturnal repetitions
of moral maxims drone into the ears of the children until their conditioned
responses to virtually every social situation are automatic. Like Socrates’
citizens who are schooled that they are “brothers and born of the earth” but
fashioned by “the god” with the different metals in their natures, Huxley’s are
taught over and over that “every one belongs to every one else,” that “all men
are physico-chemically equal,” yet steadily conditioned to be unthinkingly
content with their own station in life: “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta....
Oh no, I don’t want
to play with Delta children.”
As they grow
up, the children of the World State “learn to take dying as a matter of
course,” undergoing “death conditioning” from an early age on field trips to
the Hospital for the Dying, where men and women of sixty go to end lives that
have been productive and pleasurable to the very end — sixty apparently being
the upper limit at which all the powers of work and play can go on undimmed.
Socrates too insists that his city’s young charges must “be told things that
will make them fear death least,” so that “a decent man” will believe that for
his fallen comrade “being dead is not a terrible thing.” But Socrates’ aim is
to inculcate courage among warriors, a virtue of which there is no need in the
World State, the scene of universal peace. Where there are no enemies, there is
no need of soldiers, hence no need of physical courage in the face of violent
death. Death comes peacefully, by prearrangement at a fixed age, in the World
State. But the mystery of death is still frightening in itself, and so a kind
of moral courage is still required, in the form (as Socrates puts it) of an
“opinion produced by law through education about what — and what sort of thing
— is terrible.”
The Mastery of Eros
The ideal society needs more
than political organization and proper education toward love of the state; it
also requires that citizens’ private pleasures be rightly directed. Socrates
defines moderation as “a certain kind of order and mastery of certain kinds of
pleasures and desires.” Later in the Republic, he argues that there are three kinds of pleasures,
corresponding to “three primary classes of human beings ...: wisdom-loving,
victory-loving, gain-loving.” This describes a clear hierarchy of pleasures and
of people. In Brave New World,
this hierarchy is flattened (with the possible exception of the World
Controllers, about whom more anon). All the World State’s citizens appear to be
gain-loving, seekers of the lowest pleasures. They play Obstacle Golf (their
sports are as close as they come to being victory-loving); they go to
full-sensory movie theaters, the “feelies” (in Huxley’s day the “talkies” were
still new); they flit about in their helicopters from one empty entertainment
to another. In the case of Alphas, for whom this endless round of pleasures
might begin to pall, it is especially important that they conform to “their
duty to be infantile, even against their inclination,” that they be adults at
work and children at play. Perverse though it may be, this too is a certain
kind of mastery of desire.
“Bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos
are applauding the European Central Bank’s announcement of quantitative easing. Some said they were pleased
the ECB’s plan, to buy about €60 billion a month in government bonds, is larger
than expected. “It was positive and it was needed,” said Francisco Gonzalez,
chairman of Spain’s BBVA. “Having said that, governments have to keep with
reforms for the plan to meet its purpose,” he added.”
The ECB surprised markets today by unveiling a
slightly larger than expected “QE” program. Yesterday’s leak of the decision
referred to money printing to the tune of €50 billion per month, so the actual
announcement of a €60 billion per month program was seen as a “positive
surprise”. Just think about this for a moment. The charlatans running the
central bank announce that they will make a grandiose effort to debase their
confetti currency even further by printing a huge amount of additional money
every month, and this is greeted as a “positive surprise” and is “applauded by bankers”.
It should be glaringly obvious by now that the lunatics are running the asylum.
The Charlatans of Inflationism
We know of a number of people who will be
pleased (and will probably begin to cry for even more money printing shortly) –
among them is Martin Wolf at the Financial Times. This breeding
ground of hoary inflationism has been regaling its readers with long discredited
(but quite popular) economic balderdash for several years already. Just prior
to the ECB announcement, Mr. Wolf wrote the umpteenth editorial exhorting central
bankers to print as much money as possible. In his opening salvo, he commented
on the SNB’s wise, if belated, decision to finally stop printing unlimited
amounts of Swiss francs to shore up the failing euro. Needless to say, this
decision did not please Mr. Wolf.
“These are exciting times in European central banking. Last
Thursday the Swiss National Bank suddenly terminated its successful
peg to the euro. This week the European Central Bank is expected to
announce its program of quantitative easing. The SNB has embraced
the risk of deflation from which the ECB wishes to escape.
"In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long- term prediction of future climate states is not possible"
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Third Assessment Report (2001), section 14.2.2.2, p. 774
(emphasis added)
The above sentence went missing from subsequent IPCC reports. Apparently it was once part of the 'consensus' though. Even though it has disappeared, it nevertheless inadvertently blurted out the truth. A famous 'Climate-gate' e-mail dialog follows below:
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005:
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has, but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009:
“Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.”
Dr Kevin Trenberth – CRU emails – 2009:
“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of global warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can’t.”
Well, it has been more than 15 years of 'no warming' now. Time to get worried? You betcha. A new paper by the above mentioned Dr. Trenberth acknowledges the importance of the so-called Pacific Decadal Oscillation in determining relatively short term warming and cooling cycles ('short term' meaning decades in this case). But the so-called 'skeptics' have pointed to this for a very long time. More about the paper can be found here.
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Keep in mind that in the mid 1970s, the 'scientific consensus' was worried about global cooling and an imminent new ice age – click to enlarge.
A recent article in 'Nature' discusses the 'case of the missing heat' and what progress is being made in explaining away the fact that none of the models predicting global warming by CO2 forcing can account for the observed reality. As a reminder, here is the difference between the model predictions and what has actually happened:
The predictions of Hansen's climate model presented to the US Congress in 1988, versus the reality (source: climatesense-norpag) – click to enlarge.
However, instead of simply admitting that the models may be wrong, the heat is held to be 'hiding out' in the oceans. It is apparently widely hoped that it will return in time to save careers and grants. From Nature:
“Now, as the global-warming hiatus enters its sixteenth year, scientists are at last making headway in the case of the missing heat. Some have pointed to the Sun, volcanoes and even pollution from China as potential culprits, but recent studies suggest that the oceans are key to explaining the anomaly. The latest suspect is the El Niño of 1997–98, which pumped prodigious quantities of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere — perhaps enough to tip the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since.
“The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. According to this theory, the tropical Pacific should snap out of its prolonged cold spell in the coming years.“Eventually,” Trenberth says, “it will switch back in the other direction.”
Translation: 'please dear Lord, let it switch back as soon as possible' or: the warming check is in the mail. That is however perhaps less likely than thought (see further below why). If one looks at the chart of the PDO above, a common sense question immediately springs to mind: why was the warming trend prior to 1940 almost identical to that between 1976 and 1998, when obviously, CO2 emissions at the time cannot have been a major factor? This is not explained anywhere. Could it be that natural climate variability is actually the major factor in driving both warming and cooling phases and that CO2 emissions by humans are in fact a negligible input?
Interesting is also the following comment by another climate researcher cited in the Nature article:
…none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases, and that future warming might not be as strong as is feared. Others say that this conclusion goes against the long-term temperature trends, as well as palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.”
(emphasis added)
Does that mean that if there is no warming for another century, their vaunted 'models' will still not be proved wrong? If that is so, then the science is guaranteed to only 'advance one funeral at a time' as the saying goes. By the way, the differentiation between 'skeptics' and 'scientists' is an insult to the many skeptics who are in fact scientists (and whose ranks are set to swell in our opinion).
Temperature anomaly vs. atmospheric CO2 over the past 11,000 years (data gathered by examination of ice cores)- click to enlarge.
Several 'skeptics' are naturally pointing out that their work is suddenly 'integrated' into the 'consensus' with not a word being mentioned of the ridicule and opposition they had to endure for so long. For instance, here are Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt:
“It took a while, but ocean cycles have finally been adopted by the IPCC as an important climate factor. With John Fasullo, Kevin Trenberth has written in a new paper appearing in the journal Earth’s Future that the warming pause taking place since 1998 indeed may have something to do with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Also even Trenberth’s pal Stefan Rahmstorf suddenly thinks it’s a good possibility [...]
-
In 2012 when we brought up the PDO as one of the triggers for the 1976-1998 warming in our “Die kalte Sonne” book and proposed ocean cycles as a sort of pulse generator for temperature cycles on a decadal scale, we were met with fierce resistance from the German climate science establishment. Now less than 2 years later, “Die kalte Sonne” finds itself as mainstream science.”
They also mention an interesting comment made by Julia Slingo of the Met Office at a Royal Society meeting last year. She was playing 'devil's advocate' (the 'devil' being all those who say the climate models are crap, i.e., the 'deniers') and asked a well known alarmist a question he ultimately couldn't answer:
“At a Royal Society meeting in 2013, Julia Slingo of the Met office played devil’s advocate and posed the following question to Prof. Jochen Marotzke of the German Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, see the 42:46 markroyalsociety.org/marotzke.mp3:
“…it’s a great presentation about 15 years being irrelevant, but I think, some of us might say if you look at the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and it’s timescale that it appears to work, it could be 30 years, and therefore I think, you know, we are still not out of the woods yet on this one.… If you do think it’s internal variability, and you say we do think the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a key component of this, and it’s now in it’s particular phase, but was previously in the opposite phase, could you not therefore explain the accelerated warming of the 80s and 90s as being driven by the other phase of natural variability?”
Simplifying Slingo’s incoherence: “If the current cooling is due to the negative PDO phase, then wouldn’t the warming of the 80s and 90s be a result of the positive PDO phase back then?”
Marotzke answers after much incoherence of his own:
“Um…I guess I’m not sure.”
These people make no sense at all. They are sure it’s the oceans’ cold phase gobbling up heat when temperatures fail to rise. But when temperatures increase, they just can’t be sure that the oceans are involved at all, and insist they would not bet much money on it. Of course it just can’t work only one way. Marotzke is delivering only what would call unadulterated absurd science.”
(emphasis added to Ms. Slingo's query)
What does 'we're not out of the woods' really mean? That they are scared they have exaggerated and are, as one commentator at Anthony Watts' site remarked 'in need of an exit strategy'?
The Problem of Modeling the Future of a Complex System
The big problem is that the climate models that are at the root of the 'catastrophic anthropogenic global warming' forecasts are trying to do something that is literally impossible. Below is a video of a presentation by Christopher Essex, Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and former director of its Theoretical Physics program. Now, one thing we can expect Professor Essex to know a thing or two about are the mathematics behind the modeling, and this is what the presentation focuses on. It is done in a way that makes it possible even for a layperson to easily discern what the problems of these models are, and that in fact, these problems are insurmountable, at least at present.
As an aside, Professor Essex is of course both a 'skeptic' and a scientist, and he is far from alone. For instance, we would like to point readers to a 2009 paper he co-authored with eight other scholars (and which has been reviewed by 50 others) entitled 'Critical Topics in Global Warming'. The introduction tells us a little bit about the so-called 'consensus':
“The issue of global warming is the subject of two parallel debates: one scientific, focused on the analyses of complex and conflicting data; the other political, addressing what is the proper response of government to a hypothetical risk. Proponents of an immediate and sweeping regulatory response insist that the scientific debate has long been settled. But a fair reading of the science, as presented in the Fraser Institute's Independent Summary for Policymakers (ISPM), proves otherwise. The supplements to that report go deeper into some of the key topics and provide even more evidence that popularized notions about the causes and consequences of global warming are more fiction than fact.”
When looking at the presentation below, it becomes crystal clear why the science, especially with regard to climate models, simply cannot be regarded as 'settled':
“Believing 6 Impossible Things Before Breakfast and Climate Modeling”, by Christopher Essex
The 'Quiet Sun'
Now a few remarks on why the 'missing heat' may well go on missing for a good while yet. Below is an excerpt from arecent article published by the BCC regarding the activity of the sun, which has declined to its lowest in at least a century. Scientists are baffled by this behavior – something highly unusual is evidently happening:
“I've been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I've never seen anything quite like this," says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless. "If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive… you've got to go back about 100 years," he says.
This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity. It has reached its solar maximum, the point in its 11-year cycle where activity is at a peak. This giant ball of plasma should be peppered with sunspots, exploding with flares and spewing out huge clouds of charged particles into space in the form of coronal mass ejections.
But apart from the odd event, like some recent solar flares, it has been very quiet. And this damp squib of a maximum follows a solar minimum – the period when the Sun's activity troughs – that was longer and lower than scientists expected.
"It's completely taken me and many other solar scientists by surprise," says Dr Lucie Green, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. The drop off in activity is happening surprisingly quickly, and scientists are now watching closely to see if it will continue to plummet.
"It could mean a very, very inactive star, it would feel like the Sun is asleep… a very dormant ball of gas at the centre of our Solar System," explains Dr Green.
This, though, would certainly not be the first time this has happened. During the latter half of the 17th Century, the Sun went through an extremely quiet phase – a period called the Maunder Minimum. Historical records reveal that sunspots virtually disappeared during this time.
Dr Green says: "There is a very strong hint that the Sun is acting in the same way now as it did in the run-up to the Maunder Minimum." Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics, from the University of Reading, thinks there is a significant chance that the Sun could become increasingly quiet.
An analysis of ice-cores, which hold a long-term record of solar activity, suggests the decline in activity is the fastest that has been seen in 10,000 years. "It's an unusually rapid decline," explains Prof Lockwood."We estimate that within about 40 years or so there is a 10% to 20% – nearer 20% – probability that we'll be back in Maunder Minimum conditions."
The era of solar inactivity in the 17th Century coincided with a period of bitterly cold winters in Europe. Londoners enjoyed frost fairs on the Thames after it froze over, snow cover across the continent increased, the Baltic Sea iced over – the conditions were so harsh, some describe it as a mini-Ice Age.
(emphasis added)
The article naturally goes on to point out that according to the IPCC, the effect of CO2 emissions tops every other influence on the climate (no wonder, as CO2 emissions can be taxed. Try taxing the sun!), although the odd men out who think the sun is far more important are mentioned in passing. But not to worry! At worst we will miss the 'polar lights' henceforth. Somehow this doesn't feel very reassuring – after all, if the Maunder minimum was irrelevant to the climate, then why was there a 'little ice age'?
Admittedly, it remains an open question how important the sun's activity is to the climate – after all, if a complex system like the earth's climate cannot be successfully modeled, this holds for the past as well as for the future. It is not possible to state apodictically that the Maunder minimum 'produced' the little ice age. Intuitively though, we tend to think that the sun is indeed an important factor. On a geological time scale, the last major ice age happened only a very short time ago, and we know that there have been vast variations in average temperatures over large time scales. In fact, it is only because we live in a warming cycle on these large time scales (an 'inter-glacial period') that human civilization as we know it exists at all. Try to imagine feeding more than 7 billion people with the planet a full 8 to 10 degrees Celsius colder and with a large part of its landmass covered in ice.
Of course that is certainly not an imminent problem, but looking at the regularity with which glacial and inter-glacial periods occur, it seems obvious that it will become a problem one day. We happen to think that even a 'mini ice age' could be quite a nuisance. It would definitely make life a lot more uncomfortable in the Northern hemisphere. Currently there is no certainty what precisely the main cause of ice ages is, but cycles related to the sun (specifically the Milankovitch cycles, which describe changes in earth's orbit around the sun) are undoubtedly playing a role.
Temperatures plus CO2 and dust concentration in the atmosphere over the past 400,000 odd years via the Vostok ice core data (and yes, CO2 tends to follow temperature, it doesn't lead; presumably there are feedback loops at work though, with higher CO2 concentration and temperature reinforcing each other during the up and downswings)- click to enlarge.
What is slightly worrisome about the above chart is that the very cold periods tend to have a much longer duration than the warm periods, which seem to have a tendency to produce short-lived spike highs. In fact, the behavior of the long term temperature chart looks very similar to the price charts of a number of commodities.
Conclusion:
The backtracking has begun – as a first step, 'climate skeptics' see their work suddenly integrated into the mainstream. However, we are not yet at the point where the models are rejected or the greenhouse gas-centric AGW theory is truly abandoned. Instead we're now in the 'how can we keep saying we are right while we're obviously wrong' phase. A lot is at stake after all: scientific reputations, but most importantly, a lot of money.
Policymakers don't want to hear that there is no problem, because that would close off a major source of tax revenues as well as what is currently a major avenue for crony capitalism and pork barrel spending through the subsidization of uneconomic 'green energy' schemes. Entire vast bureaucracies depend on AGW as well, and there is no alternative promotion in sight yet that could replace this sheer inexhaustible and vast fount of tax payer funded non-activity. So now the hope is that the heat is 'hiding out' deep in the oceans and ready to return at the drop of a hat (or rather, a turn of the trade winds). That may however not happen. What then?
The
first was the apocalyptic barbarism, the destruction of 3,000 innocent lives.
The second was the pummeling of the New York City skyline, the greatest thing
yet conceived by human minds and constructed by human hands, as outrageous as
if a few thousand years ago someone had blown up the pyramids.
And the
third was the way this atrocity allowed Western progressives to externalize the
threat to our values. To treat the withering of the Western Enlightenment as
something brought about by bearded foreigners who seem to have been time-warped
from the 7th century.
That
third terrible thing about that terrible day might prove to be 9/11’s most
toxic legacy. For not only did those plane-weaponizing madmen end lives and
take down metal, glass, and concrete structures—they also helped to warp
politics itself, inciting onetime critical thinkers to ditch the thought in
favor of simplistically reciting that they, like an exotic virus, are
destroying our values.
With
9/11, Westerners of a liberal, democratic bent seemed finally to find an answer
to that most troubling question: “Who killed the Enlightenment?”
It was
Islamists. Outsiders. Extremists under the spell of faraway death cults. If we
in the actual West bear any bit of responsibility, apparently it’s only insofar
as we have “appeased Islamism”—that is, facilitated them, the
destroyers of liberal values. Sadly—tragically—this is the wrong answer to the
question of who killed the Enlightenment, and we’ll pay a high price for
answering incorrectly.
Putting the
'organized' in organized crime, necessary for Argentina's efficient
distribution of illegal drugs
By Jorge Ossona
In Argentina's big
cities, drug-dealing operates in complex equivalents of distribution
'chains.' And yet as unstable and chaotic a world as it is, the illicit
sale of narcotics may be ordered along two or three basic principles.
Cocaine trafficking
constitutes the crux of activities that flow through an established hierarchy,
from the top supplier to local-level "tips" (punteros) — your
neighborhood dealer. These should not be confused with the classic political
"dealer," drug dealers being in a different category even if both
types recognize and interact with each other.
The dealer must
inevitably have detailed information about everything happening in his or her
territory, in order to formulate the widest range of solutions. Politicians
usually tolerate local dealers — the "tips" — because they know they
are running franchise operations conceded by the police and sections of the
communal power structure. At the same time, members of their families or local
supporters — indeed themselves — might very well be consumers, which is reason
enough for interactive circuits to emerge between these two references of local
life.
People merely
perceive them differently in the neighborhood. Regardless of his or her style,
the politician is considered a positive and universal mediator in the face of
individual and collective emergencies, while the drug dealer is both feared and despised, being judged a
"merchant of death."
Cracks and
soldiers
In all
neighborhoods there is a varying number of youth gangs including boys and girls
who work and study, and "lazy" types — the familiarly termed
"ni-nis" neither working nor studying — always party to a range of
offenses. They consume considerable amounts of beer and wine at street parties,
or other alcoholic beverages "blended" variously with mind-altering
substances that circulate in a little-studied market.
The most
compulsive of these, the "cracks" (fisura), are also
small-time dealers.
Some of these can
become "tips" or neighborhood dealers, for which they will need arms
and vehicles — mainly motorbikes — and backers or garantors higher up in the
drug hierarchy.
They must also
have a parental structure that will give them the rationale they lack, through
division of labor and a fixed domicile guarded by "soldiers." These
youngsters' temerity is fed by showing off their cars, motorbikes,
expensive phones and sophisticated weapons. Their group would eventually need an
emblematic name that somehow expresses its "ethics" and the
"destiny" it must live out without hypocrisy.
Above neighborhood
gangs are the "wholesalers," a more silent level of suppliers who
managed at some point to move up the difficult cursus honorum of
drug dealing. Personal references are more important at this level than your
family or group. The quantities sold here are greater than those of the
neighborhood, so the only people arriving at the wholesaler's home are envoys
of neighborhood dealers who are customers.
Cocaine is at the
heart of the chain, but a dealer at this level can also sell marijuana
independently, usually provided by Paraguayan dealers. Wholesalers have a
defined jurisdiction and specific subordinates, with exclusive relationships
that cannot be bypassed without breaking the professinoal "code."
Drugs and politics
Then there is the large-scale distributor, who confers the
"seal" or label to the entire chain, and imposes minimum standards of
quality on what neighborhood dealers sell in his or her name. The third-level
trafficker's reputation and competitiveness are at stake in the neighborhood.
Every week the entire chain pays those monies agreed on, with which they will
pay their next-level Peruvian, Bolivian or Colombian suppliers
living in luxury districts, but also "taxes" owed to the State in the
zone where their franchise operates.
Situated in a
comfortable position between the second and third levels is a middleman or
"reference" (referente), a strategic figure ensuring that the
entire chain functions. The "reference" handles total, gross
quantities coming in from the third-level distributor and monies paid in by
neighborhood "wholesalers." The middle man is the one who pays off
the corrupt police "street chief" with what is referred to as the
"toll charge."
This is taken to
the commissioner who sends a portion of the booty onto a "communal
godfather" who may be at the summit of the political pyramid. This last
circuit almost always involves a territory's secretive political
"dealers," who also negotiate with police the protection to be given
for other crimes committed in their zone of influence.
The
West's double failure, incapable of building a common strategy, is a sign of a
now 'post-American' region.
By Dominique Moisi
Bashar al-Assad is still in power in Damascus and al-Qaeda's black flag was
recently waving above Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq. Not only has the process of
fragmentation in Syria now spilled over to
Iraq, but these two realities also share a common cause that could be
summarized into a simple phrase: the failure of the West.
The capture, even though temporary, of the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi by
Sunni militias claiming links to al-Qaeda, is a strong and even humiliating
symbol of the failure of the policies the United States carried out
in Iraq. A little more than a decade after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's
regime - and after hundreds of thousands of deaths on the Iraqi side and more than
5,000 on the American side - we can only lament a sad conclusion: All that for
this!
In Syria, the same admission of failure is emerging. Assad and his loyal
allies - Russia and Iran - have actually emerged
stronger from their confrontation with the West. Civilian massacres, including
with chemical weapons, did not change anything. The regime is holding tight,
despite losing control of important parts of its territory, thanks to its
allies' support and, most importantly, the weakness of its opponents and those
who support them.
In reality, from the Middle East to Africa, the entire idea of outside
intervention is being challenged in a widely post-American region. How and when
can one intervene appropriately? At which point does not intervening become, to
quote the French diplomat Talleyrand following the assassination of the Duke of
Enghien in 1804, "worse than a crime, a mistake?"
When is intervention necessary? "Humanitarian emergency" is a
very elastic concept. Is the fate of Syrian civilians less tragic than that of
Libyans? Why intervene in Somalia in 1992 and
not inSudan? The decision to intervene
reveals, in part, selective emotions that can also correspond to certain
sensitivities or, in a more mundane way, to certain best interests of the
moment.
Intervention becomes more probable when it follows the success of some
other action; or, on the contrary, a decision to abstain that led to massacre
and remorse. The tragedy of the African Great Lakes in 1994 - not to mention
the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995 - certainly contributed to the West's
decision to intervene in Kosovo in 1999. In reality, the intervention of a
given country at a given time is typically driven by multiple factors: the
existence of an interventionist culture, a sense of urgency, a minimum of
empathy towards the country or the cause justifying the intervention, and, of
course, the existence of resources that are considered, rightly or wrongly,
sufficient and well-adapted.
A French example
But more than "when," it is a question of "how" - the
two being often inextricably linked. Intervening alone can have many benefits,
including the rapidity of execution, which often leads to efficient operations.
The French army was not unhappy to end up alone in Mali. On the other hand, although
it can slow down the operations schedule, forming a coalition gives the
intervention more legitimacy, and helps share the costs and risks between the
various operators.
It is likely that France, which after the Mali
operation has engaged in the Central African Republic in a much more uncertain
conflict, would now prefer having some support - for reasons related to costs
and resources as well as geopolitics. No one wants to share success, but no one
wants to end up alone in a potential deadlock either.
America's failure - in Iraq and in Syria - should be considered the West's
failure as a whole, even though Washington's share of responsibility is
unquestionably the largest.
Failure is generally the result of the interaction between three main
factors that are almost always the same: arrogance, ignorance and indifference.
Arrogance leads to overestimating one's capacities and to underestimating the
enemy's capacity for resistance. It is all too easy to win the war but lose the
peace.
"Democracy in Baghdad will lead to peace in Jerusalem," a slogan
of the American neo-conservatives, took a disastrous turn in Iraq.
Arrogance is almost always the result of ignorance. What do we know about
the cultures and histories of the populations we want to save from chaos and
dictators? Yesterday's colonial officers, who drew lines in the sand to create
the borders of the new empires and states, turned their nose up at the local
religious and tribal complexities. Today, the situation may be worse still.
Sheer ignorance prevails.
Finally, there is the sin of indifference. Of course, the ISIL (Islamic
State in Iraq and the Levant) is worrying Washington, thus leading to closer
ties between the U.S. and Iran regarding Iraq. But the starting point was, in
Syria, the U.S.'s refusal to take its responsibilities.
The result is clear: a double defeat, strategic and ethical, for the West.
Washington has brought a resounding diplomatic victory to Moscow and has
allowed Bashar al-Assad to stay in power.
.jpg)
