“Rotten” sea ice? – Not even in Denmark
Watts Up With That
December 14, 2009
There’s plenty of stories about how Arctic sea ice is now “rotten”. There’s darn few that talk about yearly comparisons or what other scientific outlets are saying about the claim.
As many WUWT readers know, 2007 was the minimum year of summer extent in sea ice, a year that is routinely held up as a cause for alarm. Another cause for alarm has been the “decline of multi-year sea ice”. Most recently we’ve gotten claims of “rotten ice” in the news media. That “rotten” ice is “duping the satellites” they say. This all from one fellow, Dr. David Barber on a ship that took a short expedition in the Arctic and observed what he called “rotten ice”. Here’s Dr. Barber using the poster child for sea ice loss in a presentation.
David Barber hypes polar bears – Image from University of Manitoba files
Seems that his “rotten” message resonated, even the media in Alaska (who can observe sea ice on their own) are saying it: New study: Arctic ice is rotten (Anchorage Daily News)
Over at the Greenbang Blog, they say that: ‘Rotten’ sea ice creates false impression of Arctic recovery
They cite:
Satellite data in 2008 and 2009 appeared to indicate that Arctic sea ice cover had started to grow again after reaching a record low, leading some to claim that global warming was reversing. However, University of Manitoba researcher David Barber found that wasn’t the case after he viewed the ice firsthand this September from an ice breaker travelling through the southern Beaufort Sea.
What the satellites had identified as thick, multiyear ice, it turned out, was in fact thin, “rotten” ice, Barber and his colleagues discovered.
This apparently was the conclusion from watching Dr. Barber’s YouTube video:
You can read Barber’s study here (Word DOC file)
So if the satellites are “duped” into seeing more ice than actually exists, then 2007 ice must have been really, really, rotten:
From Cryosphere today – click to enlarge
Compare for yourself, here.
Looks like it has firmed up since then. So no matter how you spin it, there has indeed been improvement in sea ice in 2007. Going from “really, really rotten” in 2007 to simply “rotten” Arctic sea ice in 2009 is definitely an improvement.
One other note, if this “rotten ice” problem and satellite duping proposed by Dr. Barber is in fact real, I’d fully expect that the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) would make some sort of announcement or post a caveat about it on the “Arctic Sea Ice News and analysis” web page where they present the satellite data. I couldn’t find anything on that page about “rotten ice” or satellite data being inaccurate.
Looking further, I used a Google search for “rotten” within NSIDC’s web site (available from their search tool in the upper right of their web page) reveals no recent documents or web pages using that word. Odd.
OK maybe Cryosphere Today? Nope nothing there either.
JAXA’s sea ice page? Their News page? Not a peep.
Nansen’s Arctic ROOS sea ice page? Or their news page? All quiet on the Arctic front.
Maybe the Danish Meteorological Institute (in Copenhagen no less) sea ice page? Surely, something must be “rotten” in Denmark, no? Alas, they don’t mention it either.
Gosh, the Arctic ice is rotten, the satellites are duped, and none of the major scientific organzations that track sea ice have anything to say about it?
It seems Dr. Barber’s conclusions are being left out in the cold by his peers.
Obama’s block to Middle East peace
(Bush: We agree to everything that “Israel” agrees to!-Obama: We DON’T agree except what “Israel” agree to!!!) by Jalal Al Rifa’i
A just and peaceful solution to the protracted Palestinian-Israeli conflict is only possible when the US ceases to block every attempt made towards it.
The long-held assumption is that a just resolution is one that would be consistent with international and humanitarian laws and which would enjoy the largest possible consensus worldwide.
A consensus is indeed at hand and has been for decades – it is one that recognises the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories as illegal and immoral, that unconditionally acknowledges the illegality of all Jewish settlements in occupied Palestine and the transfer of Israeli settlers to inhabit unlawfully acquired Palestinian land.
Strangely enough, despite its very cautious phraseology, the US recognises these facts.
But then why is Barack Obama proving not only incapable of achieving what should be a practicable feat but also going so far as to hinder the efforts of other parties to simply recognise Palestinian rights or pinpoint Israeli injustices?
A recent proposal presented by Sweden, the current holder of the rotating European Union presidency, called on EU members to recognise an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
The proposal was watered down to a mere communiqué, issued by EU foreign ministers on December 8, which calls for the division of Jerusalem to serve as “the future capital of the two states.”
Naturally, Israel rejected the statement. But so did the United States.
“We are aware of the EU statement, but our position on Jerusalem is clear,” declared Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs PJ Crowley. “We believe that is a final-status issue. This is best addressed inside a formal negotiation among the parties directly.”
The US knows well that Israel is neither keen on “direct” nor indirect negotiations and is deliberately prejudicing any possible just solution with its continuing colonisation of occupied east Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
Israel’s right-wing extremist government is not bashful about its true intentions and Obama is not ignorant of the prospects of a “direct” negotiation between those with the bulldozers, the tanks and big guns based in Tel Aviv and those with dismal press releases based in Ramallah.
But it’s not just the rare EU initiatives that are being summarily dismissed by the US.
All initiatives, whether by individual states, regional groups or through international forums such as the United Nations are rejected, derided and at times suspected of anti-semitism.
This is a continuation of a terrible legacy that goes back decades. The reason such a redundant policy is being highlighted now is because Obama promised change and pledged to lead a new decisive course, led by a gentler and more sensible US.
But shouldn’t the US, in desperately trying to maintain its role as a world leader and to preserve its economic and strategic interests in the Middle East, embark on the frequently promised new course – not for the sake of Palestine and the Arabs but its own?
Israeli newspaper Haaretz suggests an answer, one that many of us have already recognised long prior to Obama’s presidency.
“In the case of Obama’s government in particular, every criticism against Israel made by a potential government appointee has become a catalyst for debate about whether appointing ‘another leftist’ offers proof that Obama does not truly support Israel,” wrote Natasha Mozgovaya on December 4.
Haaretz highlighted several cases in point, among them the intense war led by the pro-Israel lobby in Washington against Chas Freeman, a widely respected US official nominated by the Obama administration months ago to chair the National Intelligence Council.
He dared to voice a guarded critique of US foreign policy in the Middle East and became a victim of the worst possible vilification campaign, forcing him to concede the nomination.
Other examples include Robert Malley, a US political adviser who wished to believe that his country’s national interests took priority over Israel’s.
He was let go even before the Obama presidency began.
More, the Israeli lobby is not happy over the appointment of former Republican senator Chuck Hagel as an intelligence aide.
According to Haaretz, “Republican Jews have … protested Hagel’s appointment, citing an incident in 2004 when Hagel refused to sign a letter calling on then president George Bush to speak about Iran’s nuclear programme at the G8 summit that year.”
Stephen M Walt, a Harvard University professor and co-author of the widely read The Israel Lobby And US Foreign Policy, recently wrote that “groups in the lobby target public servants like Freeman, Hagel … because they want to make sure that no-one with even a mildly independent view on Middle East affairs gets appointed.
“By making an example of them, they seek to discourage independent-minded people from expressing their views openly, lest doing so derail their own career prospects later on.”
Luckily, neither Walt nor numerous other independent-minded US citizens like him are afraid to speak their mind to safeguard the independence and integrity of their country.
This should always be the case.
For the time being, don’t be surprised when you hear that the US continues to block the path to peace in the Middle East. At least now you know why.
Why is Democracy Now shielding “war for oil” against reality?
By M. Idrees – 12/15/09
In its headlines for December 14, Democracy Now followed the report on Blair’s confession about his committment to regime change in Iraq regardless of the absence of WMDs, with this:
Iraq Signs Oil Deals with 10 Foreign Companies
Blair’s comments come just as Iraq has signed a series of major oil deals. A two-day auction ended Saturday with ten foreign companies winning access to Iraq’s massive reserves. The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell won the rights to the Manjoon oilfield near Basra, one of the world’s largest. The US-based Exxon Mobil and Occidental Petroleum also submitted winning bids.
The wording is careful: it appears to suggest a connection between what Blair said and the Iraqi oil contracts. The war in other words was for oil. That is a remrkable conclusion to draw from news about an auction in which US companies were the big losers (hence DN’s careful choice of the words ‘foreign companies’). Unless Democracy Now is suggesting that the US waged a war for Russia, Norway and China — biggest winners in the auction — it is not clear why it continues to insist on the discredited “war for oil” argument? Why is it so difficult to admit who actually conceived the war?
But some could argue that this may be a mere reflection of the changing balance of power: that US oil majors are unable to secure contracts doesn’t necessarilty mean that the war wasn’t for oil.
Consider this excerpt from the news report about the auction:
The 10 deals the Iraqi Oil Ministry reached with foreign oil companies suggest that China, Russia, and European oil firms are poised to play a major role in refurbishing Iraq’s oil industry, crippled by decades of war and sanctions.
American companies walked away with stakes in just two of the 10 auctioned fields. Seven American companies had paid to participate in the second auction, which began Friday. The only one that submitted a bid lost. Two American companies reached deals for fields auctioned in June.
The meager representation of American oil giants in Iraq’s opening oil industry surprised analysts.
“Iraq finally opened its doors after six years of war, and instead of U.S. companies, you have Asians and Europeans leading the way,” said Ruba Husari, the editor of Iraq Oil Forum, an online news outlet. “It will be a long time before anything else will be on offer in Iraq.”
Concerns over security, underscored by massive coordinated bombings Tuesday, and political instability as the U.S. military withdraws, likely kept American oil companies from venturing more forcefully in Iraq, which has the world’s third-largest proven crude reserves, analysts said.
Now compare it to this piece by Anthony Sampson from December 2002:
While Washington hawks depict a war against Iraq as achieving security of oil supplies, Western oil companies are worried about the short-term danger and the supposed long-term benefits of intervention…
Oil companies dread having supplies interrupted by burning oilfields, saboteurs and chaotic conditions. And any attempt to redraw the frontiers could increase the dangers in both Iran and Iraq, as rivals seek to regain territory.
I hope you get my drift? So much for ‘war for oil’.
Ethanol-powered vehicles generate more ozone than gas-powered ones
December 14, 2009
Ethanol, often promoted as a clean-burning, renewable fuel that could help wean the nation from oil, would likely worsen health problems caused by ozone, compared with gasoline, especially in winter, according to a new study led by Stanford researchers.
Ozone production from both gasoline and E85, a blend of gasoline and ethanol that is 85 percent ethanol, is greater in warm sunny weather than during the cold weather and short days of winter, because heat and sunlight contribute to ozone formation. But E85 produces different byproducts of combustion than gasoline and generates substantially more aldehydes, which are precursors to ozone.
“What we found is that at the warmer temperatures, with E85, there is a slight increase in ozone compared to what gasoline would produce,” said Diana Ginnebaugh, a doctoral candidate in civil and environmental engineering, who worked on the study. She will present the results of the study on Tuesday, Dec. 15, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. “But even a slight increase is a concern, especially in a place like Los Angeles, because you already have episodes of high ozone that you have to be concerned about, so you don’t want any increase.”
But it was at colder temperatures, below freezing, that it appeared the health impacts of E85 would be felt most strongly.
“We found a pretty substantial increase in ozone production from E85 at cold temperatures, relative to gasoline when emissions and atmospheric chemistry alone were considered,” Ginnebaugh said. Although ozone is generally lower under cold-temperature winter conditions, “If you switched to E85, suddenly you could have a place like Denver exceeding ozone health-effects limits and then they would have a health concern that they don’t have now.”
The problem with cold weather emissions arises because the catalytic converters used on vehicles have to warm up before they reach full efficiency. So until they get warm, a larger proportion of pollutants escapes from the tailpipe into the air.
There are other pollutants that would increase in the atmosphere from burning E85 instead of gasoline, some of which are irritants to eyes, throats and lungs, and can also damage crops, but the aldehydes are the biggest contributors to ozone production, as well as being carcinogenic.
Ginnebaugh worked with Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering, using vehicle emissions data from some earlier studies and applying it to the Los Angeles area to model the likely output of pollutants from vehicles.
Because E85 is only now beginning to be used in mass-produced vehicles, the researchers projected for the year 2020, when more “flex fuel” vehicles, which can run on E85, will likely be in use. They estimated that vehicle emissions would be about 60 percent less than today, because automotive technology will likely continue to become cleaner over time. They investigated two scenarios, one that had all the vehicles running on E85 and another in which the vehicles all ran on gasoline.
Running a widely used, complex model involving over 13,000 chemical reactions, they did repeated simulations at different ambient temperatures for the two scenarios, each time simulating a 48-hour period. They used the average ozone concentrations during each of those periods for comparison.
They found that at warm temperatures, from freezing up to 41 degrees Celsius (give F conversion), in bright sunlight, E85 raised the concentration of ozone in the air by up to 7 parts per billion more than produced by gasoline. At cold temperatures, from freezing down to minus 37 degrees Celsius, they found E85 raised ozone concentrations by up to 39 parts per billion more than gasoline.
“What we are saying with these results is that you see an increase,” Ginnebaugh said. “We are not saying that this is the exact magnitude you are going to get in a given urban area, because it is really going to vary from city to city depending on a lot of other factors such as the amount of natural vegetation, traffic levels, and local weather patterns.”
Ginnebaugh said the results of the study represent a preliminary analysis of the impact of E85. More data from studies of the emissions of flex fuel vehicles at various temperatures would help refine the estimates, she said.
Source: Stanford University
Palestinian Man Prevented By Jewish Municipality From Building On His Own Land
December 15, 2009 03:23 – by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News
Aadel Suad, a Palestinian resident of the town of Mitzpe Ramon in southern Israel, has been prevented for twelve years from building on his own land, and continues to live in a temporary shack with his family.
When Suad first applied for a permit to build a home in 1997, he says a senior official told him “Don’t waste your time. We’ll keep you waiting for 30 years.”
He said that they made the reason very clear: they do not want Palestinians in their otherwise all-Jewish town.
According to Suad, “”We didn’t invade the plot and we didn’t take over the land. My grandfather has been here since the Turks. We have a land registry document proving ownership of three acres.”
The Israeli town of Mitzpe Ramon was founded in 1979 on formerly Palestinian land. Most of the former Palestinian residents were displaced, but Aadel Suad managed to hold onto the land that had been in his family for generations. The new municipality then redefined his land as a ‘development area’, and split his plot into two parts.
He was allowed to remain on his land with his family, but prevented him from building a home. The municipality repeatedly attempted to push him off his land and into another area of southern Israel, but he refused to accept the illegal confiscation of his land.
Now, after finally receiving his construction permit in 2007, he has again been refused the ability to build on his land, with the excuse that there is no sewage line in the area.
Suad told reporters of the most recent denial, “It’s clear that the threat I heard in 1997 is coming true. They don’t want us here. But I’ll keep fighting until my children and I live on our private land.”
The Nobel War Prize
Obama didn’t apologize for being a wartime president receiving a peace prize in Oslo—he laid the groundwork for battle, and outdid Bush in arguing for American supremacy.
by Thaddeus Russell
December 11, 2009
Much was made about the irony of awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a president overseeing one war while escalating another. But with breathtaking boldness, in his speech accepting the award, Barack Obama marched past the irony and into a declaration of war on much of the rest of the world.
Liberal pundits John Nichols of The Nation and Joe Klein of Time praised Obama’s speech for being “exceptionally well-reasoned and appropriately humble” and for its “intellectually rigorous and morally lucid” qualities. Writing for The Daily Beast, Peter Beinart offered a fuller commendation by arguing that it rejected what he calls the Bush administration’s “moral chauvinism” and “self-righteousness” in foreign relations. According to Beinart, while the previous foreign-policy makers believed that they were instructing “our moral inferiors on how to behave,” Obama in his speech declared “that we are not inherently better than anyone else.”
Yet Obama’s central argument was precisely that national, religious, and “tribal” cultures which do not uphold the values of Americans (and some Europeans) are not only inferior to ours but also must be transformed—by any means necessary. Obama audaciously rejected not only the pacifism of Gandhi and his own purported role model, Martin Luther King, Jr., but also the concept that war is justified only in self-defense. And though some commentators have praised Obama for what they see as his commitment to multilateralism, his speech was as strident a call for American primacy in international relations as anything delivered by his predecessor.
Obama scolded those who hold “a reflexive suspicion of America” and gave primary credit to the United States rather than “international institutions” for saving the world from communism, fascism, and economic crisis. In a line that could have been delivered by any member of the infamously unilateralist Bush foreign policy team, Obama admonished his European audience that “the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”
Significantly, Obama defended his escalation in Afghanistan on “the recognized principle of self-defense” but then pledged to go “beyond self-defense”—with armed intervention when necessary—anywhere “the inherent rights and dignity of every individual” are denied. Establishing that a just use of military action “extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor,” Obama asserted his belief that “force can be justified on humanitarian grounds.”
The president then named several violators of “inherent rights”—Iran, Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and The Democratic Republic of Congo—and warned that “there must be consequences” if diplomacy fails to reform them. Those rights, which include the freedom of speech and assembly, the right of people to “worship as they please,” and the right to democracy are, according to Obama, not only natural and God-given but also “universal aspirations.” Speaking for the seven billion inhabitants of the earth, he proclaimed that “we’re all basically seeking the same things.”
Obama dismissed the claim made in “some countries” that such statements are tantamount to cultural imperialism by calling it a “false suggestion that these are somehow Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation’s development.”
But where did those principles originate? Obama cited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. Yet representatives from only 48 of the world’s nearly 200 nations voted for the declaration, and it was written not by God or Mother Nature but by a Canadian law professor named Peter Humphrey.
More importantly, the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration and the idea that they are inherent were invented in a particular time, in particular places, and by very particular human beings—specifically, during the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe and America, by wealthy, powerful, white, male philosophers and politicians like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. The idea that there are natural or God-given rights to speech, assembly, worship, and the vote simply did not exist before then. Moreover, were one to account for all the public statements and popular movements for the president’s idea of inherent rights over the last four centuries and even in recent decades, they would constitute only a tiny percentage of the earth’s population.
Polls taken in the contemporary Middle East, for example, show that an overwhelming majority reject at least one of Obama’s “universal aspirations.”
At the end of the speech the president went even farther in claiming grounds for military intervention, adding that “a just peace includes not only civil and political rights—it must encompass economic security and opportunity” as well as “swift and forceful action” against climate change. He ominously asserted that economic development “rarely takes root without security” and that “military leaders in my own country” believe that “our common security hangs in the balance” so long as climate change is not swiftly and forcefully addressed.
In a crowning irony, Obama attacked the believers of absolute, universal truth for “the murder of innocents.” No “Holy War”, he said, “can ever be a just war.” For “if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint—no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one’s own faith.” Such total adherence to belief is “incompatible with the concept of peace.”
Given Obama’s orders as commander-in-chief, their deadly consequences for civilians and U.S. soldiers, and his justifications for them, one might say, indeed.
Thaddeus Russell has taught history, philosophy, and American Studies at Columbia University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College, and the New School for Social Research.
Zionist hawk calls for “tough diplomacy” toward Iran
Press TV – December 15, 2009
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has called for “tough diplomacy” and “tough sanctions” to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment activities.
“We still believe it’s time for diplomacy, probably tough diplomacy, there is a need for tough sanctions, preferably based on Chapter 7 of the (UN) Charter,” Barack told reporters at a press conference in Vienna on Monday.
Iran faces pressure to stop enriching uranium, with the major powers claiming its civilian nuclear program is cover for a nuclear weapons program.
Along with the major powers, Israel — the only player in the Middle East with a nuclear arsenal — accuses Iran of trying to produce a nuclear weapon and maintains that a “nuclear Iran” is the prime existential threat to its security. Under such a pretext, it has threatened Iran with a military option.
However, unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have never found evidence that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted.
In addition, Iran has called for the total eradication of all weapons of mass destruction.
Livni cancels UK appearance fearing arrest warrant for war crimes
By Adam Horowitz on December 14, 2009
Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni canceled a visit to Britain this weekend over fears pro-Palestinian lawyers would seek to have her arrested.
Ms Livni had been due to speak at Sunday’s JNF Vision 2010 conference in Hendon, north-west London. She had also been expected to meet Prime Minister Gordon Brown for private talks.
But she pulled out of the trip for fear of lawyers obtaining an arrest warrant.
International law experts from the Israeli Foreign and Justice ministries have also advised Israeli officials to avoid Spain, Belgium and Norway, out of fear of similar “universal jurisdiction” arrest warrants for war crimes.
Haaretz reports that an arrest warrant for Livni was in fact issued for her role in last winter’s Israeli attack on Gaza. Although Livni’s office has said she canceled her appearance due to “a scheduling conflict,” they also said that “the opposition leader was proud of all the decisions she made as foreign minister during the Gaza war.”
No freeze on Palestinian suffering
Seth Freedman | guardian.co.uk
14 December 2009
Within minutes of our arrival in Tuwani, in the south Hebron hills of the West Bank, an army Jeep rolled into the village and shattered the mid-morning tranquillity. “We’re turning this place into a closed military zone,” announced the stern-faced commander to anyone within earshot. Brandishing his rifle in one hand and a military document in the other, he proceeded to explain that “I decide who can be here and who can’t, and anyone who isn’t a resident has to leave immediately”.
That meant us – me, my friend and our three guides from the Villages Group – as well as the other activists who maintain a permanent presence in Tuwani assisting the locals in their struggle to survive. The timing of the closure was no accident: earlier in the morning NGO workers and locals had taken part in a solidarity march to highlight the hardships suffered by the village children who run the gauntlet of the neighbouring settlement every time they walk to and from their school.
Anything the activists could do the soldiers could do better, it seemed. “The IDF [Israel Defence Forces] don’t like us coming to support the residents of Tuwani,” said one volunteer, “so they make it their mission to make everyone’s lives uncomfortable as a result.”
The shutdown of the village and the surrounding farmland was only the latest in a long line of attempts by the Israeli authorities to break the will of the Palestinians living in the area. As we drove out of Tuwani, we were shown the stump of an electricity pylon sawn down by the army after attempts by villagers to connect themselves to the national grid. Elsewhere, dirt mounds and locked gates stopped locals driving to the nearby city of Ya’ta, thus preventing them taking their produce to sell at market, and severely impairing their economic prospects.
Thanks to the army’s exclusion orders, we were forced to walk a treacherous and convoluted route through the rocky scrubland to visit communities living in even deeper seclusion beyond Tuwani. In Tu’ba, the cave-dwelling residents of the village are under no illusion about what the future holds for them, despite all the hype surrounding the much-vaunted settlement freeze.
“The freeze will have no effect round here,” the father of the household told us bitterly. Our guide expanded on the theme, telling us that the “real freeze is on Palestinian construction: 95% of Palestinian applications for building permits in Area C are denied by the civil administration, and for communities in this area they are not allowed to build above ground whatsoever”.
Those people living in caves are, it seems, tolerated by the authorities while they remain underground, but as soon as they put their heads above the surface and attempt to build rudimentary shacks and outhouses, demolition orders are served and the army are quick to enforce the letter of the law with gusto.
Meanwhile, in the neighbouring settlements of Carmel and Ma’on, building work was going on in earnest, and defiant banners on bus stops and fence posts declared the settlers’ intention to “smash the freeze”, and denounced the incumbent government as traitors to the Zionist cause. While government inspectors have been attacked during their attempts to bring settlement construction to a halt, the full force of the settlers’ wrath has – as ever – been meted out against the Palestinians.
The sickening desecration of a mosque on Friday in the village of Yasuf, near Nablus, appears to be the opening salvo in the settlers’ latest battle to force the government to back down over the building freeze, and those we met in the south Hebron hills were wary of similar reprisal attacks being carried out against their communities. “Our children are still attacked on a regular basis,” one local told us, “as well as our shepherds and farmers. Even if we call the police, we know justice will never be done, and the situation is only getting worse now that the settlers are furious about Netanyahu’s decision.”
Ehud Krinis, one of the Villages Group activists, believes that the freeze is “just an act” on the part of the government; having worked in the area for almost eight years and seen the settlers’ above-the-law behaviour first hand, he maintains “there is no effective force that can stop the settlers building more. In fact, as we can see in Susiya and elsewhere, the settlers simply see the freeze as a challenge to construct [at an even faster rate], which is what will happen over the next 10 months.”
As we sat with the head of the Bedouin clan living in Um al-Kheir – a collection of tumble-down tents and shacks literally touching the perimeter fence of the Carmel settlement – the mood of resignation engulfing the encampment’s residents was suffocating. We were shown aerial photos of Um al-Kheir’s gradual demise over the past 30 years, a situation attributable to the encroachment of the settlers and the military on to their ancestral land. It was clear that for those forced to endure the humiliation and hardship on a daily basis, the politicians’ upbeat talk was at best cheap, and at worst a flagrant denial of the facts.
For those Palestinians living under military rule, coupled with indiscriminate and incessant settler attacks against them, their children and their flocks, there is no end in sight to the suffering. While the world might have been convinced that the worm is about to turn in the Israeli political arena, a quick glance at the fevered construction still taking place in the settlements, the oppressive military activity against the Palestinian villagers and the overarching penury in which the Palestinians are forced to subsist should give onlookers food for thought about the true situation on the ground.
Freeze or no freeze, the future looks no brighter for the Palestinian locals today than it has during any of the bitter years and decades gone by.
Bilin activist: “Words are not enough”
Iyad Burnat and Jody McIntyre writing from Bilin, occupied West Bank, Live from Palestine, 14 December 2009
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| Iyad Burnat being arrested by Israeli soldiers at a demonstration in Bilin. (Haitham al-Katib) |
The following is Palestinian nonviolent resistance activist Iyad Burnat’s story as told to The Electronic Intifada contributor Jody McIntyre:
My name is Iyad Burnat. I am 37 years old, married with four children. I am the head of the Bilin Popular Committee.
I started my life in jail at 17, during the first intifada, a popular uprising amongst ordinary Palestinians. It was not the first time I participated in nonviolent resistance. I have always believed that this is the way to end the occupation. But as the intifada clearly showed, the Israeli military does not understand let alone sympathize with such methods.
One night, the Israeli army surrounded my home, and took my father from his bed to come and knock on my door. They told him that because I was a child, they just wanted to speak to me for five minutes. Some of the soldiers were dressed in civilian clothes, and they grabbed me as soon as I opened the door.
That five minutes became two years, in the worst place in the world — Naqab prison [in the Negev desert]. I spent the first 20 days in solitary confinement. I was kept in a room I could only stand up in, with terrible food and no showers, and during the night in a room I could lie down in but had a hole in the roof, at a time when it was raining and snowing. Every day the soldiers were beating me, and every night they would bang on the door so that I couldn’t sleep. The whole time, they were also asking me if I had thrown stones and what political party I belonged to, so in the end I admitted that I had, at some point, thrown stones. By the end of those 20 days, I smelled like an animal.
The jail was extremely bad. In the winter, water leaked from every corner, and in the summer it was unbearably hot. After six months inside, I got the first visit from my mother. My family left their home in Bilin at 3am, and didn’t return until late the next night, just to see me for 30 minutes. We couldn’t even shake hands because of the walls which separated us. She told me that my grandmother had died.
After two years in the Naqab prison, I was released, and given the new “green” ID, handed out after the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). At the time, people with green IDs were not allowed to travel and were essentially under house arrest. Even now, Palestinians with green IDs are forbidden from traveling to Jerusalem, our capital.
In 2005, we began our nonviolent demonstrations in Bilin against Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank and the illegal settlements that have been built on our land. We practice nonviolent methods as a way of resisting, such as tying ourselves to our olive trees when they were due to be bulldozed and uprooted by the Israeli military. For the last five years, we have succeeded in sending our message to the whole world, to tell the people that Israel’s wall is not for security, but it is an apartheid wall built only to steal our land for the purpose of expanding illegal Israeli settlements.
On 4 September 2007, we had a major breakthrough. The Israeli high court made a decision ordering that the army remove the wall from the land of Bilin. Despite this, the Israeli military refused to heed the decision of the court, and instead resorted to violence in an attempt to crush our peaceful struggle. During our nonviolent demonstrations, they beat us with batons, fill the air with tear gas and sewage water, throw sound grenades, and shoot us with a range of projectiles, from lethal high-velocity tear gas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets, to live ammunition. Over 1,000 people have been injured, more than 200 arrested, and one close friend of mine, Bassem Abu Rahme, has been killed.
The Israeli authorities want to stop us because they are afraid of our model of nonviolent resistance, and fear that the world is waking up to the reality of this situation.
During one demonstration, we had marched to the wall as usual, and Israeli forces immediately began shooting tear gas and rubber bullets. I was caught in the crossfire and started to suffer from severe tear gas inhalation. When I stopped running to allow the doctors to treat me, I saw two soldiers approaching. They told me that I was under arrest, and that they had photos of me throwing stones.
They put me on the other side of the wall, near the military base permanently stationed on our land, and the commanding officer came over with a photo in his hand. He asked me who the man in the photo was, but I didn’t recognize him. He said that if I told him where the man lived he would release me, but I couldn’t. So he told me that in the courts he would claim that it was me, and took me away.
After spending eight days in Ofer prison, I was finally taken into court. The moment the judge saw the photo he said it wasn’t me, and that the prosecution had another 24 hours to bring additional evidence. When they couldn’t, I was ordered to pay 4,000 shekels ($1,060) bail for my release. I told my lawyer that I would not pay one penny, and after one day I was back at home with my family.
During the last five years, the Israeli military has invaded my house many times. The worst thing is that I cannot look at the faces of my children because I am afraid that if I describe their fearful expressions I will start to cry. I want my children to see that I am strong in front of the army. The soldiers don’t seem to care whether Palestinians are adults or children — they start to kick the doors, throw the children outside, and ransack their bedrooms. If my children see their father being beaten by soldiers — I cannot describe how difficult this is.
But I have taught them that every time I am arrested you must continue this struggle, even if I am killed you must continue. I have told them not to be afraid, because we are on the side of justice, and we must return to our land.
None of the kids in the village can sleep anymore, because of the night raids during the last five years. The Israeli military invade the village in the early hours, shooting sound grenades in the streets and tear gas into people’s homes. Six months ago, the most recent wave of these night raids began and the soldiers invaded almost every night. They relaunched a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the people of Bilin, in an attempt to arrest all the people who participate in our nonviolent demonstrations and subject the rest of our residents to a constant state of terror. Since this most recent wave of night raids begun, we haven’t slept a single night.
I remember after one of our demonstrations, I came home and read in the news that US President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I started to go crazy! The Americans are still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Palestine is still under occupation. We haven’t seen any change, so I wondered why they didn’t give the prize to George W. Bush, when he was in power.
I am so sorry Mr. Bush — you worked so hard for eight years, killing children, starting wars around the world, and supporting the Israeli occupation of our land, and they gave the prize to another man! And you got a pair of shoes instead? That is a real injustice.
We are a simple people, and more than anything we want to see peace, but before there is peace there must be justice, and we must have our freedom. We are not against Jews or Israelis, but we are against the occupation.
One of the important elements of our struggle is the international volunteers who come to stay in the village. They are our messengers to the outside world, and it is so important for them to tell our story in their own countries, in order to counter the strength of Israeli propaganda in the mainstream media.
But words are not enough. We need people to be taking direct action, both here, and in their own countries against the embassies and governments who support this occupation.
Jody McIntyre is a journalist from the United Kingdom, currently living in the occupied West Bank village of Bilin. Jody has cerebral palsy, and travels in a wheelchair. He writes a blog for Ctrl.Alt.Shift, entitled “Life on Wheels,” which can be found at www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk. He can be reached at jody.mcintyre AT gmail DOT com.
ClimateGate: A closer look at some of the ‘tricks’ by the email authors
David Rose | Mail Online | December 13, 2009
The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’. As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.
Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts. In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’.
Keith Briffa from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which plays a key role in forming IPCC assessments, urged caution, warning that when it came to historical climate records, there was no new data, only the ‘same old evidence’ that had been around for years.
‘Let us not try to over-egg the pudding,’ he wrote in an email to an IPCC colleague in September 2006. ‘True, there have been many different techniques used to aggregate and scale data – but the efficacy of these is still far from established.’
But when the ‘warmest for 1,300 years’ claim was published in 2007 in the IPCC’s fourth report, the doubters kept silent.
It is only now that their concerns have started to emerge from the thousands of pages of ‘Warmergate’ emails leaked last month from the CRU’s computers, along with references to performing a ‘trick’ to ‘hide’ temperature decline and instructions to resist all efforts by the CRU’s critics to use the Freedom of Information Act to check the unit’s data and conclusions.
Last week, as an official inquiry by the former civil servant Sir Muir Russell began, I tried to assess Warmergate’s wider significance.
The CRU’s supporters insisted it was limited. ‘In the long term, it will make very little difference to the scientific consensus, and to the way politicians respond to it,’ Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s Pro-Vice Chancellor and a former CRU director, told me. ‘I am certain that the science is rock solid.’
He admitted that his CRU colleagues had sometimes used ‘injudicious phrases’, but that was because they kept on being ‘diverted’ from their work by those who wished to scrutinise it. ‘It’s understandable that sometimes people get frustrated,’ he said.
The only lesson the affair had for him was that ‘we have got to get better in terms of explanation. Some scientists still find it quite it difficult to communicate with the public.’
Others, however, were less optimistic. Roger Pielke, Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, could in no sense be described as a climate change sceptic, let alone a ‘denier’.
‘Human-caused climate change is real, and I’m a strong advocate for action,’ he said. ‘But I’m also a strong advocate for integrity in science.’
Pielke’s verdict on the scandal is damning.
‘These emails open up the possibility that big scientific questions we’ve regarded as settled may need another look. They reveal that some of these scientists saw themselves not as neutral investigators but as warriors engaged in battle with the so-called sceptics.
‘They have lost a lot of credibility and as far as their being leading spokespeople on this issue of huge public importance, there is no going back.’
Climate science is complicated, and often the only way to make sense of raw data is through sophisticated statistical computer programs. The consequence is that most lay individuals – politicians and members of the public alike – have little choice but to take the assurances of scientists such as Davies on trust.
He and other ‘global warmists’ often insist that when it comes to the IPCC’s main conclusions – that the Earth is in a period of potentially catastrophic warming and that the main culprit is man-made greenhouse gas emission – no serious scientist dissents from the conventional view.
Hence, perhaps, Gordon Brown’s recent comment that those who disagree are ‘behind-the-times, antiscience, flat-Earth climate sceptics’.
In fact, there is a large body of highly-respected academic experts who fiercely contest this thesis: people such as Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a disillusioned former IPCC member, and Dr Tom Segalstad, head of geology at Oslo University, who has stated that ‘most leading geologists throughout the world know that the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible’.
These dissenters focus their criticisms on the IPCC’s analysis of the way the atmosphere works and the models it uses to predict the future.
However, Warmergate strikes at something more fundamental – the science that justifies the basic assumption that the present warming really is unprecedented, at least in the past few thousand years.
Take the now-notorious email that the CRU’s currently suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, sent to his IPCC colleagues on November 16, 1999, when he wrote he had ‘just completed Mike’s Nature trick’ and had so managed to ‘hide the decline’.
The CRU’s supporters have protested bitterly about the attention paid to this message. In the course of an extraordinary BBC interview in which he called an American critic an ‘****hole’ live on air, Jones’s colleague Professor Andrew Watson insisted that the fuss was completely unjustified, because all Jones had been talking about was ‘tweaking a diagram’.
Davies told me that the email had been ‘taken out of context’ adding: ‘One definition of the word “trick” is “the best way of doing something”. What Phil did was standard practice and the facts are out there in the peer-reviewed literature.’
However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling. Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.
There is a widespread misconception that the ‘decline’ Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998, which probably was the hottest year for a long time. In fact, its subject was more technical – and much more significant.
It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram.
It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report – the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century.
There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick. Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.
Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ – measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates.
However, different proxies give very different results.
For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.
Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD – yet the Earth still warmed.
Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America – who is now also the subject of an official investigation –was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.
Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’
Another British scientist – Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.
Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] – I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’
Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.
According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed – but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.
This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ – as simple as it was deceptive.
All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase. On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated – but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.
Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. ‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’
Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick.
But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’. On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines.
By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms. McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph. ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’
Yet even this, Pielke told me, may not ultimately be the biggest consequence of Warmergate.
Some of the most controversial leaked emails concern attempts by Jones and his colleagues to avoid disclosure of the CRU’s temperature database – its vast library of readings from more than 1,000 weather stations around the world, the ultimate resource that records how temperatures have changed.
In one email from 2005, Jones warned Mann not to leave such data lying around on searchable websites, because ‘you never know who is trawling them’.
Critics such as McIntyre had been ‘after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone’.
Yesterday Davies said that, contrary to some reports, none of this data has in fact been deleted. But in the wake of the scandal, its reliability too is up for grabs.
The problem is that, just like tree rings or ice cores, readings from thermometers or electronic ‘thermistors’ are open to interpretation.
The sites of weather stations that were once open countryside become built up areas, so trapping heat, and the type of equipment used changes over time. The result is what climate scientists call ‘inhomogeneities’ – anomalies between readings that need to be ‘adjusted’.
But can we trust the way such ‘adjustments’ are made?
Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia.
This suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been ‘adjusted’ in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount: without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.
In 2007, McIntyre examined records across America. He found that between 1999 and 2007, the US equivalent of the Met Office had changed the way it adjusted old data.
The result was to make the Thirties seem cooler, and the years since 1990 much warmer. Previously, the warmest year since records began in America had been 1934.
Now, in line with CRU and IPCC orthodoxy, it was 1998.
At the CRU, said Davies, some stations’ readings were adjusted by unit and in such cases, raw and adjusted data could be compared. But in about 90 per cent of cases, the adjustment was carried out in the countries that collected the data, and the CRU would not know exactly how this had been done.
Davies said: ‘All I can say is that the process is careful and considered. To get the details, the best way would be to go the various national meteorological services.’
The consequences of that, Stott said, may be explosive. ‘If you take Darwin, the gap between the two just looks too big. If that applies elsewhere, it’s going to get really interesting. It’s no longer going to be good enough for the Met Office and CRU to put the data out there.
‘To know we can trust it, we’ve got to know what adjustments have been made, and why.’
Last week, at the Copenhagen climate summit, the Met Office said that the Nineties have been the warmest decade in history. Depending on how the data has been adjusted, Stott said, that statement may not be true.
Pielke agreed. ‘After Climategate, the surface temperature record is being called into question.’ To experts such as McIntyre and Pielke, perhaps the most baffling thing has been the near-unanimity over global warming in the world’s mainstream media – a unanimity much greater than that found among scientists.
In part, this is the result of strongarm tactics.
For example, last year the BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin made substantial changes to an article on the corporation website that asked why global warming seemed to have stalled since 1998 – caving in to direct pressure from a climate change activist, Jo Abbess.
‘Personally, I think it is highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics who continually promote the idea that “global warming finished in 1998” when that is so patently not true,’ she told him in an email.
After a brief exchange, he complied and sent a final note: ‘Have a look in ten minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.’
Afterwards, Abbess boasted on her website: ‘Climate Changers, Remember to challenge any piece of media that seems like it’s been subject to spin or scepticism. Here’s my go for today. The BBC actually changed an article I requested a correction for.’
Last week, Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois, sent a still cruder threat to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, accusing him of ‘gutter reportage’, and warning: ‘The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists … I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’
But in the wake of Warmergate, such threats – and the readiness to bow to them – may become rarer.
‘A year ago, if a reporter called me, all I got was questions about why I’m trying to deny climate change and am threatening the future of the planet,’ said Professor Ross McKitrick of Guelph University near Toronto, a long-time collaborator with McIntyre.
‘Now, I’m getting questions about how they did the hockey stick and the problems with the data. Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.’
Russian secret service agents admitted yesterday that the hacked ‘Warmergate’ emails were uploaded on a Siberian internet server, but strenuously denied a clandestine state-sponsored operation to wreck the Copenhagen summit.
The FSB – formerly the KGB – confirmed that thousands of messages to and from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were distributed to the world from the city of Tomsk, as revealed by The Mail on Sunday last week.
Now, it has emerged that IT experts specialising in hacking techniques were brought in by the Russian authorities following this newspaper’s exposure of the Tomsk link. They have gathered evidence about how and where the operation was carried out, although they are not prepared to say at this stage who they think was responsible.
A Russian intelligence source claimed the FSB had new information which could cast light on who was behind the elaborate operation.
‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’ he said. ‘The emails were uploaded to the Tomsk server but we are sure this was done from outside Russia.’
The Kremlin’s top climate change official, Alexander Bedritsky, denied the Russian government was involved in breaking into the CRU’s computer system.
‘You can post information on a computer from any other country. It is nonsense to blame Russia,’ he said.
Aletho News 