GOP's inexorable slide

This graph from the Iowa Futures Market shows how betters are rating the Democrats' versus the Republicans' chances at the White House in '08. The red line represents the GOP, the blue line the Dems, and the numbers on the Y axis more or less correspond to the percent chance that this market judges each party has of winning the Presidency.

To be honest, I am shocked that the market rates the GOP's chances so highly. I'm guessing the only reason why the GOP is deemed to have any chance at all is because the Dems may nominated Hillary.

Coping with Climate Change: Australia

The Economist's description of the drought in the Murray-Darling basin (Australia's largest) provides a harbinger of how global warming will force painful accomodations:

The Murray-Darling's troubles are likely to worsen. As Australia's population continues to grow so does demand for water in the cities and for the crops that grow in the river basin. Meanwhile, global warming appears to be heating the basin up and drying it out. Although few scientists are confident that they can ascribe any individual event—including today's drought—to global warming, most agree that droughts like the present one will become more common.

Many of the world's rivers, including the Colorado in America, China's Yellow river and the Tagus, which flows through Spain and Portugal, are suffering a similar plight. As the world warms up, hundreds of millions of people will face the same ecological crisis as the residents of the Murray-Darling basin. As water levels dwindle, rows about how supplies should be used are turning farmers against city-dwellers and pitching environmentalists against politicians. Australia has a strong economy, a well-funded bureaucracy and robust political institutions. If it is struggling to respond to this crisis, imagine how drought will tear apart other, less prepared parts of the world.

Droughts have long plagued the Murray-Darling. The region is afflicted by a periodic weather pattern known as El Niño. At irregular intervals of two to seven years, the waters of the central Pacific warm up, heralding inclement weather throughout the southern hemisphere. Torrential rains flood the coast of Peru, while south-eastern Australia wilts in drought. The duration of these episodes is as unpredictable as their arrival. They can range from a few months to several years. As a result, the flow of the Darling, the longest tributary of the Murray, varies wildly, from as little as 0.04% of the long-term average to as much as 911%. Although the most recent El Niño ended earlier this year, it has left the soils in the basin so dry and the groundwater so depleted that the Murray-Darling's flow continues to fall, despite normal levels of rainfall over the past few months.

Read the whole thing to see how Australia is renegotiating all the last two centuries' social compromises about water--something that will need to happen everywhere as climate changes.

MC Rove

Disturbing:

George Bush, Manly Man

George Bush pays $275 a pop to get his face made up for public appearances.

Mitigating climate risk: alternative energy sources

Although his data is a bit dated, Caltech chemist Nate Lewis provides a compelling, bottoms-up analysis of the potential of non-carbon energy sources as a way of mitigating climate change. The main takeaway is that we're not going to get much done developing non-carbon energy sources until we price in the environmental externalities of carbon-based energy sources. In short, we need a carbon tax, bad.

Hat tip: EF.

USA Ethics: A new twist

Debra Yang, who as the US Attorney in Los Angeles was leading a corruption probe into the affairs of Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), resigned last October. The main framing of this story, so far, has to do with the fact that White House Counsel Harriet Miers apparently was threatening to can Yang, presumably to shut down the investigation of a GOP lawmaker.

But what really jumped out at me about this story is the circumstances under which Yang actually ended up departing. According to The Hill, "she was lured away by a $1.5 million-plus offer to become a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher LLP, which is defending Lewis in the probe" (emphasis added).

What a brilliant, precedent-setting idea: if some USA is investigating you on a corruption charge, you hire an expensive law firm, and arrange to have them hire away the prosecuting attorney. If you can't beat 'em, co-opt 'em....

Terrifying Weather

In today's Times, my friend Tad Homer-Dixon breaks down the security threat posed by climate change.

Blowback from the collapse of the modernist project

John Hagedorn has an important article that explains how the collapse of the social modernist project of development is at the root of today's "global gangs." Money:

Unlike the expansion of the state in the earlier industrial era, in the global era the state has retreated in the face of instantaneous financial flows and neoliberal monetary policy, while emphasizing punitive policies toward marginalized communities. Gangs and other groups of armed young men occupy the vacuum created by the retreat of the social welfare policies of the state....

Although the collapse of socialism and demoralization of left-wing forces have been replaced by new social movements that show promise for social change, in some places institutionalized gangs and other groups of armed youth have moved into the vacuum created by the demise of the left. These groups are cynical about politics and looking desperately for a better life today, not tomorrow. For them, the promises of modernity have proven to be illusory. Gangs are one price we pay for the failure of the modern project.

The collapse (or rather, the willful assassination) of the dream of social modernism continues to produce all sorts of unexpected blowback.

Armenian genocide

Matt Welch in today's LA Times argues that the United States, in particular the President in his annual April 24 address on "Man's Inhumanity to Man," should refer to the slaughter of Armenians as a genocide. A couple months ago, I argued that such a vote was a purely symbolic act that threatened to undermine real American interests in the Middle East.

Welch, however, suggests a way in which not using the G-word may in fact harm our real interests. Welch quotes the most recent U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John Marshall Evans:

"In the real world," Evans told a packed Beverly Hilton hall of diaspora Armenians in February, "when an official policy diverges wildly from what the broad public believes is self-evident, that policy ceases to command respect."

Evans, a career, keep-your-head-down foreign service type, surveyed the available literature on the events of 1915-23 before taking the Armenian post in September 2004 and concluded that the U.S. position of avoiding the word "genocide" diverged so wildly from the historical consensus that it undermined Washington's moral authority.

This is in principle a reasonable argument. However, it embeds two assumption, first, that the United States should be pursuing the so-called moral project that Bush claims to be pursuing in the Middle East, and second, that in fact Bush has any moral authority that can be undermined. I would strongly question both those assumptions. Welch's conflation of "Bush" with "Washington" doesn't make me very happy, either.

Malawi: Case study of a country at risk from climate change

Malawi is a medium-sized, landlocked country in Southern Africa. It's not the kind of place where the impact of climate change will take place in the form of telegenic catastrophes of massive storms or huge floods. Rather, climate change is steadily forcing incremental changes that the local social, economic, and political systems largely lack the capacity to adapt to, as this report based on a study by Action Aid International makes clear:

Farmers are increasingly concerned about the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security. "Food availability has been an issue over the years since the disasters began. Much as we have experienced floods in those days, the impact was somehow not as severe. As time went by, there has been a drop in crop production due to frequent flooding and droughts," said a farmer in Salima district.

Malawi's experiences are often traced back to the 1991/92 drought in southern Africa, which affected over six million people. Since then, the report noted, the severity of disasters has escalated.

In other words, the headline events which climate change are far less likely to be weather-related than they are to be stories about hunger, about social strife, about unemployment, about rising death rates from HIV (Malawi's adult HIV rate is estimated at 14%), and so on. Climate change risks tipping these stressed systems into full-blown collapse. The report lays bare how the different stressed subsystems impacted by climate change--natural, political, social, and economic--all interact to create multiple negative feedback loops:

There has also been a noticeable increase in diseases, such as malaria, cholera and dysentery, associated with changes in rainfall patterns, creating health challenges that are particularly affecting women farmers. "We now travel longer distances to fetch water, and spend most of the time in health centres instead of working in our fields," the report quoted a female farmer as saying....

Poor land use and deforestation are also serious concerns among people in Salima and Nsanje. Farmers are aware that these activities result in more floods and droughts, but are not empowered to intervene. Many pointed fingers at the role of tobacco estates in felling trees in their neighbourhood....

The increasing food insecurity caused by climate change has also limited the number of casual jobs available on commercial farms. In the past, nearby small-scale sugar and tea plantations were sources of employment for many people in Nsanje. However, farmers say that flood-induced migration means that there are now many more people seeking work on the plantations than there are jobs available.

Some mitigation plans are being considered, but it's probably not nearly enough:

The Malawians are considering enhancing food security by developing community-based storage systems for seed and food, and enhancing the resilience of food production systems to erratic rainfall by promoting the sustainable production of maize and vegetables in wetlands and catchment areas.

However, Action Aid said the implementation of NAPA faced capacity constraints at district level, and a lack of coordination among sectors. "In addressing adaptation challenges, it is imperative that a multisectoral approach is taken, beginning at the community level with the smallholder farmers who are directly affected by climate change. These farmers need skills, knowledge and access to credit for the addressing short- and long-term needs of diversifying from maize into other crops."

Aid agencies and the Malawian government have been considering providing drought insurance to smallholder farmers. The Commodity Risk Management Group (CRMG) of the World Bank developed an objective indicator that could be used as a proxy measure of the exposure of Malawi's maize production to drought, but it was poorly linked to crop yields, according to the FAO, which was now working on the idea.

A Trillion Dollar Risk?

The GAO says the U.S. government faces at least a $919 billion liability under a worst-case scenario of flood and crop losses due to global warming.

Global Warming to Shorten Our Days

Global warming is literally going to shorten our days, according to a recent study:

As water warms, it expands, causing sea level rise. Felix Landerer of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and his colleagues used a computer model to find out what effect this expansion will have on the distribution of water around the globe....

Two factors mean that this tends to move water's mass away from the equator and towards the poles. First, the depths of the North Atlantic should warm more quickly than depths elsewhere, thanks to a current there that carries water down from the surface. So the expansion and movement of water is strongest there. Second, a quirk of our planet's geography means that the continental shelf's surface area happens to be larger at high latitudes than around the equator.

Having more mass at the poles, which is closer to Earth's axis of rotation, will make the planet spin faster.

But not to worry: the shortening will be by only 0.12 milliseconds over the next 200 years, according to Landerer.

2007 Pulitzer for Photography

Amazing photo series of a single mom caring for her dying ten year old son. About as anguishing as anything I've ever seen.

Pornography : English :: Communism : French

Classic Gopnik:

Pornography was to British writers of the fifties what the Communist Party was to French writers of the time: they didn’t entirely approve of it, but felt that being attached to it would keep them from being seen as mere intellectuals.

From a different article in the same issue of the New Yorker, I also enjoyed this line:

When it comes to architecture and design, most of this new Beijing looks like some provincial official's dream of modernization.

That's because the new Beijing in fact is some provincial official's dream of modernization. See for example, this, or this, or this.

Global Warming goes to the Security Council

The Guardian today explains the point of Britain's decision to refer climate change to the U.N. Security Council:

The entire point of the exercise [is] to reframe the way people think about this problem. There's good, pragmatic reasoning behind that. The glum reality is that governments tend to take security threats more seriously than any other kind. Just think of what Washington has spent on the "war on terror". If George Bush gets his latest budget through Congress, he will have spent $750bn of American taxpayers' money on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a little over five years. Environmentalists drool when they imagine what they could have done with a fraction of that money. Even a quarter of the total, say a meagre $200bn, could have paid for enormous strides towards a low carbon economy. It could, for instance, have paid to transform the way we generate electricity, by capturing carbon and storing it in the ground, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.

It's a sad but true statement that this country will only get serious about something as big as climate change when we decide to couch it in terms of war. This in fact explains all the "War on X" rhetoric that pops repeatedly in American political discourse (and always in capital letters): The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, The War on Terror, etc. You'll know this country's finally getting serious about universal health care when some president declares "War on Uninsurance," or some such....

HIV and Climate Change: Diplomatic Equivalent?

In referring climate change to the Security Council today, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett cited as a precedent the Security Council's decision in 2000 to take up the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a security issue, arguing that, "We want to see the same thing happen with climate change, that it comes from the fringes into the mainstream." She then goes on to quote Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, whose economy depends on hydropower from a reservoir that is already depleted by drought, as calling climate change "an act of aggression by the rich against the poor." She glosses Museveni's statement by noting that, "He is one of the first leaders to see this problem in security terms. He will not be the last."

In fact, the Museveni quote underscores how the decision to refer climate change to the Security Council breaks very different, indeed radically different, diplomatic ground from the Security Council's uptake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The HIV epidemic undoubtedly represents a grave security risk for many countries. But the epidemic is not something that one country can be credibly construed as having imposed on or done to another. By contrast, the risks associated with climate change can and perhaps rightly should be seen as an (passive-)aggressive act by one party against another. No one can see the HIV epidemic as an act of war, but given what we now know about climate change, carbon emissions can in some sense be seen as an act of war.

Whatever the moral validity of viewing climate change in these sort of perpetrator-victim terms, as a matter of diplomatic protocol I question the wisdom of any Foreign Minister endorsing the view that what her country is doing constitutes "an act of aggression" -- and indeed implying that her country's main allies are also engaging in such aggression. Obviously we urgently need to address the problem of global warming. But in strict diplomatic terms, an admission like this could provide a precedent for poor countries expressing their demands for change in terms of a rhetoric of political violence. And that's hardly useful.

Fifty years of climate change wisdom

Check out this video from 1958 about anthropogenic climate change. Part of a series of educational films produced by Bell Telephone Company in the 50s and 60s, it was directed by Frank Capra and voice-overed by Mel Blanc. Amazing:

Hat tip: MO.

What kinds of security impacts will climate change produce?

The LA Times has an article that is somewhat skeptical about the climate change/security nexus. This skepticism comes in the form of quotes from two experts, both commenting on the Center for Naval Analysis's just-released report on how climate change poses a "threat multiplier" for national security:

Other experts who were not involved in the report said national security concerns, though real, were probably not the most significant threats posed by global warming.

"Everything's a national security issue these days," said Scott Barrett, director of the International Policy Program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "It's a bit of a marketing ploy."

[snip!]

"Global warming's impacts on natural resources and climate systems may create the fiercest battle our world has ever seen," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the newly formed House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Markey will introduce legislation to fund climate change planning by the Department of Defense.

Those battles may force the demise of weak governments in the developing world, creating power vacuums for terrorist groups to exploit, the report found.

Deteriorating conditions in Africa and the Middle East could prompt a wave of migration to Europe. As a result, the report said, some of America's most dependable allies could find themselves too distracted to participate in international coalitions or other efforts aimed at preventing regional conflicts.

Other experts called those risks unlikely. Climate change will certainly lead to more failed states, but it is not clear that the result would be an increase in terrorism, said Steve Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley.

The Sept. 11 hijackers "came from Saudi Arabia, not the floodplains of Bangladesh," he said.

He also downplayed the notion that migration spurred by climate change would be an important factor in U.S.-European relations.

But Weber agreed with the report's authors that the opening of shipping channels through the now-frozen Arctic could become a significant source of conflict.

"There aren't well-specified and agreed-on rules as to who owns what," he said. Russia, which has lots of land above the Arctic Circle, and China, which does not, could have very different views about how to address access to new waterways there. "There could be some pretty big fights over that," he said.

Full disclosure: I've got a bit of a dog in this fight, since Steve Weber and I have collaborated professionally on the topic of climate change and security. The article here positions him as something of skeptic on the connections between climate change and security. But I think a more accurate account of Weber's position is that he is trying to shift some of the emphases of the report. Construed narrowly, I agree with Weber's comments.

For example, it's not clear to me that migration spurred by climate change would be an important factor in U.S.-European relations. On the other hand, it is much more likely to be a factor in, say, US-Mexican relations. (The reporter just asked the wrong question.) Likewise, I agree with Weber that the security threat associated with climate change is not primarily terrorism-related. The direct security impacts of climate change are much more likely to be (a) humanitarian catastrophes; and (b) resource competition between states. These latter may in turn produce an environment more conducive to terrorism, but that's a second-order (or, actually, fifth order) effect.

What exactly are the security threats associated with climate change? With a nod to our friends over at ARC, I would suggest that it might be useful to identify four categories of security risks associated climate change.

First are the direct impacts of climate change on the military. These are the primary focus of the CNA report: how will climate change directly effect our military forces in terms both of capacity and of new demands? On the one hand, if it's hotter and drier in places where we fight, what does that mean for supply? What kinds of diseases should our medics be prepared to deal with in various regions? On the other hand, might new areas and regions become objects of military contestation (e.g. the Arctic), and what does that imply for military requirements?

Second, how will states or their institutions be threatened as a direct result of climate change -- e.g. flooding that destroys a national capital? Will there be borders that cannot be defended? These threats are real but I would argue relatively remote in time, compared to the next two categories of threat.

Third are climate change-related threats to the well-being of civilian populations. Starting in the nineteenth century, modern states increasingly defined themselves around their ability not just to defend their borders and maintain civil order, but also by their ability to deliver basic services to the population, notably public health and various other kinds of "social welfare." Even though states have in many cases backed off the notion that they should be the sole providers of these services, instead choosing to outsource these services to private sector companies or nonprofits, citizens of modern states still look to the state to ensure the delivery of these services, and a failure to do so is likely to compromise the ability of a state to command the allegiance of its citizens. There is considerable evidence that climate change will severely stress many countries' ability to provide this kind of population security. The BRICS may be particularly vulnerable on this count, since their rising geopolitical status may increase citizen demand for these services just as climate change begins to compromise the ability to deliver these services. "Population security" is perhaps the key form of security that will be threatened by climate change.

Fourth, are the climate change-related threats to critical infrastructure, notably electricity generation and distribution, telecommunications, water supply, food production and distribution, heating and cooling, and transportation systems. The impact of climate change on these systems varies a lot, with agriculture and water supplies particularly vulnerable. The key analytical point about these systems, however, is not necessarily that they are directly vulnerable to climate change, but rather that these are the systems that provide a society and a country with the resiliency for dealing with any kind of major shock, be it weather-related, military, or economic. The countries that are already weak in these dimensions of security are the ones that are least likely to be able to deal with the inevitably non-linear climate shocks. Looking at the countries that are already weak across multiple vital systems therefore provides the best clue for divining which countries are most vulnerable to climate change. The form that this vulnerability will take is likely to be humanitarian disaster, however.

Public health & climate change

WHO on global warming and public health:

The health impacts of global climate change will depend not only on the biological consequences of this change but also on the overall vulnerability of societies and populations. In high-income countries, which are more likely to be located on the temperature-sensitive edge of disease-transmission, public health measures are sufficiently effective to prevent diseases like malaria from reemerging even when rising temperatures support the survival of vectors. In contrast, in many low-income countries in tropical climates, already in the midst of transmission zones, public health infrastructures are often much weaker, and the increasing vogue for cutting back on government expenditure means this is unlikely to change soon. How these countries cope with the relationship between climate change and disease transmission, therefore, may be more dependent on long-standing challenges for the public health system than on climate change per se.

Moreover, as poor countries face the consequences climate change, they are likely to have to deal with multiple catastrophes simultaneously: shortfalls in agricultural production, destruction of infrastructure during storms and flooding, ecosystems collapsing, mass migration and refugees, and so on.

Countries will have to figure out which problems to prioritize. General investments in preventive public health, already on the chopping block today, are unlikely to rank as high priorities, compared to efforts to deal with the more visible and acute crises that climate change may provoke, such as storm recovery and breakdowns in civil order.

An added wrinkle in this analysis is the fact that many of the organizations charged with providing the vital services that offer societal resiliency to climate change -- such as water delivery, health care, education, mass communications, etc -- are no longer being run by the state, but are de facto or de jure being outsourced, either to for-profit companies or to nonprofits. This decentralization of delivery over vital services, while celebrated for its ability to deliver efficiency gains, will also greatly increase coordination and control challenges in the face of acute climate-change-related crises. Having excess or "surge" capacity may not be economically efficient, but it is often a requirement for effectiveness in the face of crisis.

And there's every reason to believe that the crises will in fact be severe, and nonlinear, as the same paragraph goes on to explain:

There continues to be a debate on the relative vulnerability of populations, with the UN reporting that lower-income countries would be worst hit by the predicted rises in global temperatures during the next century. Others argue that population responses to ecological changes are usually non-linear, leading to a sudden deterioration or improvement in infection control once a threshold is crossed.

Predictive mapping of climate-related conflict

The Wilson Center last month sponsored a very interesting discussion about how climate change (and resource scarcity more generally) may cause social and political conflict. In the discussion Marc Levy and Charles Vörösmarty discuss their effort to map the regions where climate change may lead to conflict:

[The project] overlay[s] geospatial information with demographic and conflict data to assess the connections between environmental factors—particularly shocks to water supply—and conflict. The researchers hypothesize that the links connecting environmental scarcity and conflict are found between groups at the local—not the state—level, and that changes in availability and distribution of local resources, and the context in which scarcity occurs, are the true indicators of increased risk of environmental conflict....

Looking at the local level, Levy and Vörösmarty's team discovered that changes in rainfall patterns can contribute to conflict indirectly through economic shocks. Increased scientific understanding of the water cycle and more accurate models now allow researchers to compare the amount of surface water available for human consumption with actual consumption data to identify potential sources of conflict. Additionally, overlaying demographic data with other datasets—such as water extraction, climate variance, and land cover change—allows researchers to identify particularly vulnerable regions.

Using data-overlay maps, Vörösmarty pointed to potential "hospots" where conflict could occur, such as regions that are severely overdrawing their water resources to produce and export food, and those where climate change may increase rainfall variability. Such maps, which reveal the relationships between vulnerable societies and water (or other resources), may provide information that can be applied to management and policy decisions, he noted: "We take these kinds of maps and our estimates of local water supply and we combine them and make a series of calculations that now are beginning to embed the human perspective. So instead of just talking about the excess water…we can talk about how much of that runoff supports how many people and how many times those people use and reuse that water supply and impart pollution signatures into the mix."