Guam, Marianas brace for massive US military redeployment
RT | November 23, 2015
Thousands of American military personnel are expected to arrive in the Mariana Islands over the next several years, as part of the US strategic “pivot” to East Asia. Many will come from Okinawa, Japan, where many local residents want US bases closed.
Military facilities in Guam, the archipelago’s largest island and a US possession since 1898, have been reinforced and updated in anticipation of almost 5,000 Marines, as well as new aircraft, submarines and patrol boats. The infrastructure upgrades will “elevate the tiny Pacific island into a maritime strategic hub, a key element laid out by the Pentagon in the Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy,” according to the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes.
“We have two 11,000-foot concrete runways, both rebuilt within the last 10 years,” Steven Wolborsky, director of plans, program and readiness at the Andersen Air Force Base told Stars and Stripes, adding that roughly 19 million pounds of explosives are now stored across the facility’s 4,400 acres.
“We have enough parking for more than 155 aircraft, with a robust in-ground refueling infrastructure,” Wolborsky added. “We have the largest capacity of jet fuel in the Air Force at 66 million gallons ‒ coupled with an equal amount down south with the Navy.”
The construction has been driven primarily by the plan to move thousands of Marines to Guam from Okinawa, Captain Alfred Anderson, the base commander, said. The redeployment is expected by 2023 or so.
More than a third of the estimated $8.7 billion cost of building the new facilities for the Marines is being funded by Japan, according to McClatchy reporter Adam Ashton. The Japanese residents of Okinawa have complained for years about the impact of US military presence, ranging from drugs, alcoholism, and sexual abuse to environmental damage.
Originally the Pentagon envisioned a shift of 8,600 Marines and some 9,000 dependents from Okinawa, raising alarm among some residents of Guam that their island, with an area of only 212 square miles (549 km sq.) and a population of 160,000, would be overwhelmed.
Pressure from the activists representing the native Chamorro people, organized in a group called We Are Guahan, compelled the Pentagon to trim that number down to 4,800. Two thirds of that number would be there on rotation, without their families, reducing the pressure on the island even further.
The activists are not resting on their laurels, however, and are pressing on against the Pentagon’s plans to install firing ranges on the islands of Tinian and Pagan. The new facilities are supposed to integrate with the US Navy’s underwater training range in the nearby Mariana Trench.
While Guam is an unincorporated US territory, Pagan and Tinian belong to the Northern Mariana Islands Commonwealth, a US possession with the same status as Puerto Rico.
The island of Pagan is uninhabited at the moment, although the island’s inhabitants still make claims to the land after they were forced to evacuate due to volcanic eruptions in 1981. Tinian has an area of 39 square miles (101 km sq.) and just over 3,000 residents. US Marines seized the island from a Japanese garrison after a weeklong battle in July 1944. A year later, the massive airbase built on the island was used to launch the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Joining the residents in opposition to the Marine firing range plan is Alter City Group, a Chinese company based in Macau that wanted to invest $500 million to build a casino complex on Tinian. The firing range would “significantly alter the island as we know it in dramatically irreparable ways,” and impose burdens on the island both “significant and unsustainable,” the ACG said in a statement, as quoted by McClatchy.
Some political and business leaders in Guam, however, fear the military may drop its plans altogether if the Marines are barred from using Tinian and Pagan for live-fire exercises. They have established the Guam-US Security Alliance to push for the military buildup.
“This is so big that people are going to have to learn to get along,” John Thomas Brown, director of the Alliance, told McClatchy. “It can be done. It should be done. Time is wasting.”
Most of Guam’s income comes from Japanese tourism, followed by US military spending.
Delivery of S-300 air defence systems to Tehran begins – ambassador
RT | November 23, 2015
The delivery of Russian S-300 anti-missile rocket systems to Iran has started, Iran’s ambassador to Moscow said in an interview. Iran is getting one of the latest versions of the air defence complex.
The delivery is underway, ambassador Mehdi Sanaei told Persian-language daily, Etemaad, as cited by Tasnim news agency.
The news was not welcome in Washington, with US State Department spokesman Mark Toner reiterating the US stance on the issue in a briefing on Monday.
“We made clear time and again our objections to any sale of the S-300 missile system to Iran,” Toner told reporters.
Earlier this month Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan announced Tehran is going to get Russian air defence systems by the end of the year, which in Iran ends on March 20, 2016.
Brigadier General Dehghan stressed that a major batch of the hardware is going to be delivered in less than two months’ time.
“Iran has bought as many S-300 air defense systems as it needs,” Dehghan said, adding that Iranian operators of S-300 system are being trained in Russia.
The initial S-300 contract between Moscow and Tehran was signed in 2007 and implied the delivery of five S-300 squadrons worth $US 800 million.
In 2010 the contract was put on hold by then-President Dmitry Medvedev due to the UN imposing sanctions on Iran. In return, Iran lodged a $4 billion lawsuit at an international court in Geneva against Russia’s arms export agency Rosoboronexport.
In April 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin repealed the ban. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented on the decision, saying Moscow’s voluntary embargo on S-300 deliveries was no longer necessary due to the progress in talks on Iran’s nuclear program.
In October, Iran’s Defense Ministry confirmed Moscow’s readiness to deliver the S-300 system under an agreement signed between the two countries.
Sergey Chemezov, the head of the Russian state-owned high-tech giant Rostec, said that the new contract came into force on November 9.
Iran has bought Russia’s most well-known air defense systems in one of its latest versions S-300PMU-2 Favorite, TASS reported earlier this month during the Dubai Airshow 2015.
The last time Russia supplied S-300 systems abroad was in 2010, when 15 squadrons were delivered to China.
Israeli Woman Stabbed in Retaliation for Killing of Palestinian Girl
Al-Manar | November 23, 2015
A Palestinian man stabbed and killed an Israeli woman on Sunday, after occupation police and settlers shot and ran over a Palestinian girl on the same day.
The attack took place near the so-called Gush Etzion block of settlements south of al-Quds.
The Palestinian attacker was shot dead by occupation forces afterwards, Israeli police said. He was identified as Issam Thawabteh, 34, from Beit Fajjar near Bethlehem.
The Israeli woman was stabbed in retaliation for the brutal killing of a 16-year-old Palestinian girl who was shot and run over by occupation police and Zionist settlers earlier on Sunday.
Also on Sunday another Palestinian was shot dead by occupation police, who claimed he was attempting a stabbing attack against occupation forces.
Guardian admits its cowardice over Paris
By Jonathon Cook | The Blog From Nazareth | November 23, 2015
From the horse’s mouth: For fear of upsetting readers, the paper silenced any commentary in the first days after the Paris attacks that might have suggested there was a causal relationship between western foreign policy in the Middle East and those events.
Instead, writes the Guardian reader’s editor Chris Elliott, the paper waited several days before giving some limited space to that viewpoint:
On the Opinion pages, one factor taken into consideration was timing – judging when readers would be willing to engage with an idea that in the first 24 hours after the attacks may have jarred. The idea that these horrific attacks have causes and that one of those causes may be the west’s policies is something that in the immediate aftermath might inspire anger. Three days later, it’s a point of view that should be heard.
In other words, the liberal Guardian held off offering a counter-narrative about the attacks, and a deeply plausible one at that, until popular opinion had hardened into a consensus manipulated by the rightwing media: “the terrorists hate us for our freedoms”, “we need to bomb them even harder”, “Islam is a religion of hatred” etc.
Excluding legitimate analyses of profoundly important events like those in Paris when they are most needed is not responsible, careful journalism. It is dangerous cowardice. It is most definitely not a politically neutral position. It provides room for hatred and bigotry to take root, and allows political elites to exploit those debased emotions to justify and advance their own, invariably destructive foreign policy agendas.
In the paragraph above, Elliott happily concedes that this is the default position of mainstream liberal media like the Guardian.
South Korea Holds Live-Fire Drill Near Disputed Border With North
Sputnik – 23.11.2015
South Korea conducted artillery exercises on Monday near a disputed Yellow Sea border with North Korea, despite Pyongyang’s promise to retaliate for the drill, media reported.
According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, live-fire artillery drills were conducted near the front-line islands of the inter-Korean maritime border.
On the eve of the artillery exercises Pyongyang warned Seoul that it would retaliate if South Korea dropped shells in North Korean territorial waters.
Current artillery drills coincide with the 5th anniversary of North Korea’s attack on South Korean front-line Yeonpyeong Island that left two soldiers and two civilians dead. Pyongyang announced at the time that it had been provoked by similar live-fire drills in the area.
The United Nations named the Yeonpyeong exchange one of the most serious incidents since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The two countries, still legally at war since that time, have only an armistice in place following the collapse of peace treaty negotiations.
Global gas demand to grow 32% by 2040 – Putin
RT | November 23, 2015
World demand for gas is growing faster than any other energy source, and will grow by a third in the next 25 years, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The growing demand opens up great opportunities for increasing production and exports of gas. At the same time, it’s a major challenge, because there’s a need to dramatically accelerate the development of new deposits, modernize the refining capacities, expand gas transportation infrastructure, bring into operation additional pipelines and make new LNG routes”, said Putin at a Gas Exporting Countries Forum in Tehran on Monday.
According to Putin, Russia seeks to increase its gas output by 40 percent by 2035, reaching 885 billion cubic meters. One of the biggest tasks ahead of Russia is to boost the supplies of gas to China, India and other Asian countries from the current 6 percent to 30 percent, said Putin. Kremlin also intends to triple the LNG supplies. He added that Russia would be able to deal with all these tasks.
During his visit, Putin is meeting with Iranian leaders. He’s talked to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei about energy cooperation, Syria and other key issues. Putin’s also meeting Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani.
Argentina’s New President Poised to Roll Back Gains for Multipolar World
Sputnik – November 23, 2015
On Sunday, Argentina held a runoff vote to pick its next president, resulting in a narrow victory for conservative Let’s Change coalition candidate Mauricio Macri over his center-left Front for Victory coalition opponent, Daniel Scioli. The question on everybody’s mind now is: what should Argentinians, and the world, expect from the new government?
An estimated 80% of Argentina’s 32 million eligible voters went to the polls on Sunday to elect their next president, in a runoff vote between the two leading candidates from the first round of voting, held in late October. With 51.5% of the votes cast in favor of conservative candidate Mauricio Macri, the favorite of the country’s big business and private media, the country is set for a hard right turn.In the run up to the election, analysts in both Latin America and across the loose global coalition of countries opposed to a unipolar world order had worryingly suggested that a Macri victory would result in a rollback to the policies pursued by Buenos Aires over the past decade aimed at challenging US hegemony, both in the region and around the world.
Daniel Scioli, the candidate of the Peronist, center-left Front for Victory electoral alliance, had promised to continue outgoing President Cristina Fernandez’ center-left-oriented politics domestically, and to pursue an independent foreign policy course abroad.
Throughout Fernandez’ tenure (she was elected in 2007) and that of her late husband, Nestor Kirchner (elected in 2003), Argentina had aligned itself with the string of left-wing Latin American governments emerging in the region in the early 2000s, while pushing for new economic and political ties with the BRICS countries, including Russia and China. Now, with Macri’s victory, the country’s multipolar outlook is under threat.
At the moment, Russian-Argentinian political and economic ties are believed to be at historic highs, characterized by the Russian ambassador to Buenos Aires as “excellent” and “extremely constructive and trusting.” Earlier this year, ahead of Fernandez’ official state visit to Moscow in April, Argentina’s Ambassador to Russia, Pablo Anselmo Tettamanti, went so far as to describe relations to be at the highest levels they have ever been in the countries’ 130-year-long history of bilateral relations.
During her visit to Russia, President Fernandez met with President Vladimir Putin, signing over 20 memorandums on economic cooperation, said to amount to an “all-encompassing strategic partnership.”
The agreements included joint projects on the development of hydroelectric, nuclear and fossil-based energy in Argentina, including the construction of the sixth bloc at the Atucha nuclear power plant, along with a $2 billion memorandum on the construction of a new hydroelectric dam. Meanwhile, Russian energy giant Gazprom signed a memorandum on the exploration and development of gas fields with Argentine state gas company YPF, a deal amounting to $1 billion in investments. Russian company Uralmash was also tapped to build a plant manufacturing oil extraction equipment, amounting to an additional $1.9 billion in investments.
In the course of the visit, the two sides promised to conduct consultations on the use of each other’s national currencies for trade, pledging to increase cooperation in the military-technical sphere, accelerating construction of the GLONASS satellite navigation systems, and negotiating on the prospects of increasing bilateral food trade (presently amounting to about $1.3 billion).In the sphere of political cooperation, President Fernandez voiced her support for Moscow’s position that the situation in Ukraine could only be resolved by peaceful means, with the Russian president, for his part, pledging support for “Argentina’s striving for direct talks with Britain to achieve prompt resolution to the Mavinas [Falklands] Islands dispute.”
Visiting Moscow in July, Argentinian Vice President Amado Boudou emphasized that Argentina’s diplomatic moves toward improving relations with Russia were based on the fact that the two countries “share a very strong position with a common vision of the need for a multipolar world to ensure the existence of an inclusive and autonomous policy.”
Now, following Macri’s election victory, Argentina’s strategy of promoting regional integration in Latin America, and a multipolar world order, may be coming to an end. With Mexican economist Ariel Noyola Rodriguez suggesting only months ago that the Russian-Argentinian partnership signaled “Washington’s incapacity to sabotage the construction of a multipolar world,” it seems that the analyst may have spoken too soon.
With Fernandez (and her husband before her) becoming a major thorn in Washington’s side, the latter unhappy over the Peronists’ efforts to extract the country and the region from its subservient position in the US’s so-called ‘backyard’, the election of Macri, who promised to immediately improve relations with Washington, must come as a welcome change.
The conservative politican has already hinted that he would give less weight to Mercosur –the South American trade bloc aimed at ensuring regional economic integration and development, and shift the country’s diplomacy away from close cooperation with the leftist governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil.
And while his victory may not nullify the economic and other cooperation agreements reached with Russia, China, and other BRICS countries over the past decade, it does threaten Buenos Aires’ general trajectory of development –the country’s moves toward regional integration and a multipolar world independent of Washington’s influence.
For the Argentinian People: A Return to Neoliberalism?
As far as the Argentinian people are concerned, Macri’s victory is feared by his critics to mark a throwback to neoliberal dogmas which plagued the country prior to Kirchner’s 2003 election victory.
For their part, the British and American business press couldn’t help but gloat in the moment, with Financial Times suggesting it was “the beginning of a new political era for South America’s second-largest economy,” and The Wall Street Journal trash-talking Fernandez and her party, and suggesting that her economic policies, “uncivil rants against her political opponents, and a substantial loss of judicial independence and press freedom during kirchnerismo” contributed to Scioli’s defeat. Bloomberg Business, naturally, focused on the election’s effects on the markets, finding it crucial to point out that “in anticipation of a Macri victory, bond yields fell to an eight-year low and the local stock market rallied to a record high.”
But not everyone is convinced that this ‘new political era’ will bring positive changes, at least for ordinary Argentinians. In the run up to the voite, Scioli and his supporters warned that Macri’s proposals, which promised a return to neoliberal economic policies, would amount to “savage capitalism,” eroding social welfare and creating an economy which catered to a wealthy minority.
It’s worth recalling that before the Kirchners, Argentina was viewed as a textbook example of a developing country enveloped by the so-called Washington Consensus, a set of neoliberal economic dogmas which resulted in extremely high unemployment (over 25% in 2003), high poverty rates (nearly 55%), and a high Gini index.Under Kirchner and Fernandez, the country pursued social and economic policies that amounted to the creation of a mixed Keynesian economy, promoting government intervention where necessary, support for medium and small businesses, and a push for export growth via regional economic integration.
According to pan-Latin American news channel Telesur, these efforts resulted in the reduction of unemployment to 6.6% in 2015 (with 5 million jobs created over the past ten years), the reduction of poverty from over 50% to 6.5%, the creation of 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses, a major industrialization drive via the Industrial Parks National Program, increases in the share of GDP spent on education and pensions (from 3.6% and 4.1% in 2003 to 6.5% and 7.7% of GDP in 2013, respectively), and the near doubling of public investment, all the while reducing the national debt from 166% of GDP in 2003 to 41%.
In the areas of social policies, Kirchner and Fernandez began a comprehensive reform of the country’s justice system (making the Supreme Court independent), while annulling the ‘laws of pardon’ which gave immunity to the leaders of the country’s military dictatorship of 1976-1983 accused of crimes against humanity. The country also became the first in Latin America, and the tenth in the world, to pass equal marriage laws, in 2010.
Now, these gains, which came at a cost of high inflation (offset to an extent by annual negotiations between unions, employers and employees on adjusting wages) are under threat, with Macri’s critics saying his policies (including tax cuts, social spending cuts, and privatization schemes) will favor big business and the country’s oligarchs, sidelining the problems of social inequality, and reverting the country to its 90s’ era social and economic malaise.
Critics have also pointed to Macri’s promises of beginning negotiations with the predatory ‘vulture fund‘ creditors that rejected the debt restructuring which took place following the country’s default in 2002, giving an indication not only of his upcoming domestic economic policy, but also his possible subservience to the Western-dominated economic institutions which Argentina rejected under the Kirchners.Ultimately, only time will tell whether Argentina’s new government will continue to pursue policies based on economic and political pragmatism which have brought Buenos Aires closer to those countries looking to challenge global unipolarity (with some analysts already suggesting that they will).
As far as Argentina itself is concerned, it remains unclear how a return to the neoliberalism which devastated the country’s economy in the early 2000s will do it any good. As Russian social media users commenting on the election results lamented, it seems that too many Argentinians have forgotten the neoliberal catastrophe and ‘de-sovereignization’ of the 90s, processes which Russians themselves know all too well.
Cheap Gas Is Killing Nuclear Power, and the Outlook is Grim
Nuclear’s greatest hope may be the ‘Clean Power Plan’
By Thomas Overton – POWER magazine– 11/17/2015
Another month, another premature nuclear plant retirement.
About two weeks ago, Entergy finally threw in the towel on the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Scriba, N.Y., a move that came as a surprise to exactly no one who has been paying attention to the merchant nuclear business in the U.S. the past few years. FitzPatrick joined the long-troubled Pilgrim plant in Plymouth, Mass., which Entergy gave up on in October, and Vermont Yankee, which it shut down in late 2014.
Since the end of 2012, the U.S. has lost an astonishing eight nuclear reactors to premature retirements: Kewaunee, San Onofre (2), Crystal River, and Vermont Yankee (all now shut down); FitzPatrick (retiring in late 2016); and Pilgrim and Oyster Creek (both retiring in 2019, well ahead of their planned lifetimes).
Several other reactors are on life support. Exelon’s R. E. Ginna plant in Ontario, N.Y., has been fighting to secure a rate support agreement that would keep it running a few more years, while the company’s Quad Cities and Byron plants got a reprieve after they unexpectedly cleared PJM auctions this fall. Industry observers see anywhere from five to 10 other plants as being at risk of premature retirement.
Death Knell?
What’s remarkable about this trend is how it’s come about not from government pressure or mandates as in Germany or Japan—where nuclear is also in retreat—but from pure market pressures. In mid-2013, I wrote a post asking, “Is Cheap Gas Killing Nuclear Power?” Two years later, I’m prepared to answer that question in the affirmative.
In the case of Pilgrim, FitzPatrick, and Vermont Yankee, Entergy specifically named wholesale power prices driven to record low levels by cheap shale gas as one factor in its decisions. As my colleague Kennedy Maize has noted, observers now strongly suspect that Entergy is planning to exit the merchant nuclear business altogether—because it’s clearly become a big money-loser.
If you look at the list of retired and most at-risk plants, one common element jumps out immediately. Most of them exist in deregulated markets where power prices are largely set by the price of natural gas: ISO-New England (Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim), New York ISO (FitzPatrick and Ginna), and PJM (Oyster Creek, Byron, and Quad Cities). The other two plants, San Onofre and Crystal River, operated in more regulated markets, and while both were retired because of mechanical defects that were too expensive to repair, competition from gas-fired generation factored into both decisions to some degree.
Since 2012, when the problems for merchant nuclear really began, natural gas spot prices have stayed below $4/MMBtu except for a brief period last year, when a bitterly cold winter led to low stocks that pushed things up for a few months.
Since then, prices have fallen consistently, flirting with sub-$2 levels this fall. With gas in storage hitting a record high at the end of this year’s injection season, a repeat of 2014 seems unlikely. Meanwhile, gas production hit another record high in August at 81.3 Bcf/day. None of this, according to Energy Information Administration projections, seems likely to change in the short term, as production stubbornly continues climbing ahead of demand growth.
Where is nuclear still viable? That’s best answered by looking at the three states where a total of five nuclear plants are under construction: Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The common denominator there is clear. All three projects are being built in tightly regulated markets where the utility building them enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly and the ability to recover costs in advance of operation.
Killing Nuclear
The problem for nuclear is that momentum in the electricity markets over the past couple of decades has been toward flexibility and competition and away from monopolies and subsidies.
At the state level, attempts by Exelon and others to secure changes in the law to provide greater support for nuclear have been given the cold shoulder, while solar advocates are prying open previously closed markets like the Carolinas and Florida. Despite the challenges for merchant nuclear plants, no states are even considering an exit from problematic wholesale power markets, and independent system operators like PJM have shown no interest in rigging the game for nuclear either.
At the federal level, the Production Tax Credit and Investment Tax Credit, which provided enormous support for renewable generation, appear on their way out one way or another. The odds that the current Congress might pass some sort of nuclear production credit (an idea I mentioned in my 2013 post) would seem to be close to zero.
Nuclear’s greatest hope may be the Clean Power Plan (CPP)—which was revised in its final form to give more credit to nuclear generation—but that is far from a done deal. Even if the Democrats retain control of the White House in 2016, control of Congress is another matter, and the Supreme Court could still throw out or handicap the CPP on a variety of grounds.
Cheap gas is not going away. Greater state-level regulatory support seems highly unlikely. Even if the CPP survives in its current form, it won’t substantially change the economics of merchant nuclear.
The impending loss of nuclear generation presents a problem for a variety of reasons. Loss of generation diversity is never a good thing, and the loss of low-carbon electricity will complicate efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But the solution remains elusive.
—Thomas W. Overton, JD is a POWER associate editor (@thomas_overton, @POWERmagazine).
BBC: Inform, Educate And Confuse
Global Warming Policy Forum – 18/11/15
It was with a sense of optimism tinged with experience that I sat down to listen to BBC Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin’s first of his three part series on the climate timed to coincide with forthcoming Paris talks. I know how such programmes are put together, how interviews are solicited, conducted, edited and juxtaposed to form a narrative. I also know the subjectivity involved.
At the start we get an American politician who doesn’t believe that mankind has any influence on the climate and who is also a creationist. Her inclusion concatenated climate change “sceptism” with a denial of evolution. There was no need to have her in the programme at its start except to place in the listener’s minds such an association, which was not shared by anyone else in the programme.
Near the beginning of the programme Roger Harrabin said; “Out and out rejection of climate science has mostly passed.” This is a straw man. In reality, only a very few rejected climate science, and they were regarded by most who took an interest in climate science as being eccentric, irrelevant and wrong. Their importance was often exaggerated as many in the media paraded them as being representative of the “sceptic” movement. For many years anyone who was regarded as having non-mainstream views (often arbitrarily judged) was obliged to go through the ritual of admitting that the world has warmed, that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and that mankind was responsible for the carbon dioxide increase, despite these being commonly accepted and not part of the real debate. A few years ago the presenter on a BBC TV programme introduced Lord Lawson and added that for the purposes of the discussion they are all assuming that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas! Thankfully that loaded question had been assigned to the past until Roger Harrabin’s programme that is when Matt Ridley went through this credo.
Matt Ridley is described as a lukewarmer in that he favours the lower end of estimate of transient climate response, TCR (1.5°C – 4.0°C). There is nothing unusual in holding that view as it is held by many “mainstream” climate scientists. So much so that the IPCC reduced the lower bound of TCR from 2.0°C to 1.5°C in response to debates about TCR in the scientific and “sceptic” community.
Later in the programme another contributor introduced another illogical twist. She said she prefers “lukewarmist to climate denial,” as if there was a choice between the two. The implication is that deniers have become lukewarmists which is absurd. Roger Harrabin says Ridley now finds himself inside the IPCC’s big tent but misses the point that it was the IPCC that changed. Interesting isn’t it, Matt Ridley is still a lukewarmer, and not acknowledged as being within the mainstream even when Ridley’s views agree with the IPCC (the epitome of “mainstream” science opinion and “consensus”). Being a “sceptic” or a “lukewarmer” seems to be more about where you come from than the scientific views you hold.
Stubborn, Simplistic
It was also said that the debate about climate science has moved on from the stubborn and simplistic and onto what to do about it. Again, this is incorrect. The main motivation for scientists and “sceptics” is to find out what is exactly going on, and as we find out more we realise that some of we thought was wrong and that there is so much more we don’t know. For example, today we have a different view of decadal climatic variations compared to forced variations than we did a decade ago, and improving our understanding of such variations is essential to contemplating what to do. If anyone thinks the debate has been “stubborn and simplistic” they are mistaken.
Then we have a nice example of doublespeak. A professor states an opinion about climate science and then says there is too much uncertainty to decide if his opinion is correct! Another point is that lukewarmers do not, as a whole, say that the “pause” in annual average surface temperature is because we exaggerated the heating effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Another contributor was irked by the “media focus” on the “pause.” Presumably she is also somewhat irritated by those scientists who are constantly coming up with explanations for it, more than 35 at my last count, most of which are unreported by the media. She adds that she always knew it would rise in fits and starts so perhaps the real problem was that there was not enough media focus on this in the 1990′s when the world warmed fairly rapidly!
Then we have reference to the loss of sea ice in the Arctic referring to the 2007 low. Perhaps the contributor and the programme’s editor is unaware with what has been happening to Arctic ice cover in the past few years?
Roger Harrabin then talks of those suffering from extreme weather events after the 1°C increase already experienced. This is a controversial area in the journals but is also a subject on which the IPCC has already proclaimed: There is no increase in extreme weather events as a result of climate change.
Roger Harrabin concluded the programme by saying that the world’s warming is largely driven by humans. Yet the IPCC AR5 says; “It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.”
The observed warming since 1950 is about half of the warming observed since pre-industrial times so without mentioning timescales Roger Harrabin’s statement is misleading. It seems that one can refer to post-1950 or pre-industrial periods without qualification to get a good quote.
Thus at the end Roger Harrabin abandons mainstream science and consensus altogether in a programme supposed to be about the science of climate change. Overall the broadcast was an intellectual shambles. It is a rewriting of history worthy of the reporting of the war between Oceania and Eurasia.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
Climate talks in Paris: India to stay firm on use of coal
By Amitabh Sinha | The Indian Express | November 19, 2015
While India has embarked on an ambitious renewable energy pathway, coal is likely to remain its primary source of energy for the next couple of decades at least.
India will not agree to any proposal at the climate change negotiations that will seek to restrict the use of coal as a source of energy in the near term, a key member of the country’s negotiating team said on Wednesday.
More than 190 countries will gather in Paris later this month for a two-week annual climate change conference that is expected to deliver a global agreement this year.
“We cannot agree to any proposal that will restrict our ability to generate energy from coal or inhibit our efforts to ensure energy access to all our people in an accelerated manner,” Ajay Mathur, director general of Bureau of Energy Efficiency, told The Indian Express.
While India has embarked on an ambitious renewable energy pathway, coal is likely to remain its primary source of energy for the next couple of decades at least.
In a recent projection, the government had said it hoped to bring down its dependence on coal for electricity production from the current 61 per cent to 57 per cent by 2031-32. By that year, the contribution of renewable energy — solar, wind and biogas — in total electricity generation was projected to grow to 29 per cent from the current 12 per cent.
“There is no looking away from it. Coal is going to remain India’s primary source of electricity generation for some time. We cannot agree to anything that restrains us from using coal,” he said.
Mathur said that in Paris, India will ask for a more stringent international mechanism to ensure that the developed countries deliver on the commitments they have made to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In the last few months, countries have submitted their climate action plans — steps that they intend to take to deal with climate change — up to the year 2032. There is debate over the mechanism to be adopted to assess whether all the actions are consistent with the objective of keeping the rise of global average temperatures within 2 degree celsius compared to pre-industrial times.
The climate change negotiations accept a principle of differentiation in the responsibilities of developed and developing countries in dealing with climate change. Mathur said this differentiation must extend to the compliance process as well.
“The assessment of the developed countries’ actions must be subjected to a stronger review as compared to other countries,” Mathur said.