Israel’s ‘delegitimization’ a threat to her security
And the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict into a religious war.
American Thinker Blog
Lame Duck Threat to Bailout Union Pensions
-By Warner Todd Huston
Connie Hair has an informative piece at Human Events about what Democrats are hoping to do in the next few weeks in this lame duck session by pushing another big union bailout.
In October, Sen. Tom Harkin (D, Iowa) heard witnesses advancing the “Guaranteed Retirement Account” (GRA) idea authored by left-wing activist and purported “labor economist” Theresa Guilarducci.
As an aside, Guilarducci being called an “economist” is an hilarious conceit. She is nothing of the kind but is merely a big labor activist disguising herself as an “economist.”
Anyway, the Democrats would love to slip this budget busting nonsense past the American people in this zombie congress. Here is how Hair defines the policy:
In a nutshell, under the GRA system government would seize private 401(k) accounts, setting up an additional 5% mandatory payroll tax to dole out a “fair” pension to everyone using that confiscated money coupled with the mandated contributions. This would, of course, be a sister government ponzi scheme working in tandem with Social Security, the primary purpose being to give big government politicians additional taxpayer funds to raid to pay for their out-of-control spending.
Pro-marketeers are worried that this dead-man-walking congress will try to attach this thing to another bill in order to push it through at the last second quite despite what voters want.
Of course this is yet one more big government boondoggle meant to pay off unions for spending millions on electing Democrats and little else. It certainly makes no common sense or economic sense.
The sooner these people get out of Washington the better.
Deficit Report Fails Panel Vote, But Job-Killing Threat Remains
The job-killing, Social Security, corporate-tax-lowering report unveiled Wednesday and backed by some of the members of federal deficit commission failed to get enough votes from the panel’s 18 members today to send the recommendations to Congress.
But, warns AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, “this debate has just begun” and many of the recommendations are likely to surface in other forms. The report, approved by 11 of panel’s members, represented:
the outcome of eight months of negotiations among Washington insiders. They reflect little sense of the everyday reality of working Americans, who are looking for leadership and guts from their elected officials.
True political courage would take on the powerful and the wealthy, and ask them to pay their fair share to bring our fiscal situation back into balance—not cut the top tax rate for the wealthy and for corporations.
He also says, “True courage would end the tax breaks for companies that offshore good jobs—not revamp our tax code to reward outsourcing.” Trumka says three alternate proposals offer plausible plans to “bring the budget deficit under control”:
without jeopardizing our recovery, without asking the middle class to pick up the tab, and without deep cuts in the programs our seniors rely on.
The proposals were developed by Our Fiscal Security, commission member Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future.
Today’s unemployment report that saw the jobless rate in November jump to 9.8 percent highlights yet again that Congress must focus on the urgent jobs deficit, says Trumka.
We need to extend unemployment insurance, invest in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and green technologies and end tax breaks that send American jobs overseas.
US & World Economy: Threat Posed By Private Global Bankers
After writing my earlier post, I came across an article in Bloomberg offering more clarity on this complex issue of Federal Reserve disclosures that affects the security and economy not only of the USA but the global community.
“The Federal Reserve withheld details on individual securities pledged as collateral by recipients of $ 885 billion in central bank loans, denying taxpayers a measure of the risks they faced from its emergency aid.”
The data from the Federal Reserve audit is full of frightening revelations about U.S. economic policy and those who implement it. When Wall Street went off the rails in the fall of 2008, policymakers told the public we had a certain kind of problem, knowing all along that the actual nature of the problem was very different—and far more severe.
The Christian Science Monitor states: “Federal Reserve’s ‘astounding’ report: We loaned banks trillions”. “Critics of the Federal Reserve are poring over the data, seeking red flags regarding potential improprieties. And Congress has asked its Government Accountability Office to sift through the numbers and offer its own analysis.” More here..
The real security threat, internal or external, to the USA may not come from Osama bin Laden or WikiLeaks. The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says banks are undermining the rule of law in America and bad mortgages still fester. In 2009 Stiglitz had advocated nationalization of US banks.
Yesterday, under the compromise contained in the Dodd-Frank Act, the US Federal Reserve Board released details of who borrowed what from its various emergency programmes from December 1st 2007 to July 21st 2010. This prompted a strong response: America is Held Hostage By Global Private Bankers, stated a blog.
“Washington is owned by the private global banking cartel that owns Wall Street. International law does not apply to this criminal cartel. They stole trillions of dollars from the American people with help from corrupt politicians over a stretch of many decades, culminating in the government bailout in 2008, and they have not been held accountable.” More here…
The Fed, in compliance with orders from Congress, today named recipients of $ 3.3 trillion in emergency aid. Among them were U.S. branches of overseas banks, including Switzerland’s UBS AG; corporations such as General Electric Co. and McDonald’s Corp.; and investors like Pacific Investment Management Co. and computer executive Michael Dell. More here…
The Economist states: “The biggest banks tended to be the biggest borrowers. The data are a bit tricky to interpret: each loan is reported separately even when it represents the rollover of a maturing loan. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase all borrowed at least $ 15 billion each via the Fed’s Term Auction Facility; the total outstanding at any one moment exceeded $ 45 billion in the case of Bank of America and Wells Fargo, according to Bloomberg.
“One of the more intriguing revelations is how much support the Fed gave to Europe’s banks: an American unit of Belgium’s Dexia had at least $ 14 billion outstanding at one point; RBS Citizens, a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland, at least $ 14.5 billion, and Bank of Scotland (part of Lloyds), $ 12 billion. Is it a coincidence that the parents of all these banks had to be bailed out by their host governments? (The European Central Bank was also far and away the largest users of dollar swap lines from the Fed, at one point borrowing $ 171 billion. It then lent those dollars to euro-zone banks.)
“Investment banks also became big borrowers when the discount window was opened to them. Bear Stearns borrowed up to $ 28 billion (no surprise there) as it fended off collapse in March of 2008. But the others did not borrow in size until that fall. Lehman borrowed $ 28 billion the day of its bankruptcy. (Why it didn’t borrow sooner is a bit puzzling. Was it too scared of looking like it needed the help? And should the Fed have lent to a dealer whose holding company had just sought bankruptcy protection?) Merrill Lynch borrowed up to $ 33 billion, Morgan Stanley $ 47 billion, and Goldman Sachs $ 18 billion.”
In this context, it is interesting that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed a fresh “megaleak” will target a major US bank “early next year,” according to an interview published on Monday.
Speaking to Forbes magazine, Assange said that he was ready to unleash tens of thousands of documents that could “take down a bank or two.” Comparing the documents to the emails that exposed Enron’s dealings amid its collapse, the controversial Australian said an existing “big US bank” was the subject of a pending data dump. More here…
Is Mike Pence the big threat to Palin in the primaries?
Hmmm.
Matt Lewis wonders. Though Pence says he won’t decide on whether or not to run for president until next year, conservative leaders I spoke to were equally as bullish on Pence. Chris Chocola, president of the powerful fiscally conservative Club for Growth tells me Pence may benefit from being less well known, and less of […]
Is Mike Pence the big threat to Palin in the primaries?
Hmmm.
Matt Lewis wonders. Though Pence says he won’t decide on whether or not to run for president until next year, conservative leaders I spoke to were equally as bullish on Pence. Chris Chocola, president of the powerful fiscally conservative Club for Growth tells me Pence may benefit from being less well known, and less of […]
US Democracy: Private Global Bankers A Threat?
The real security threat, internal or external, to the USA may not come from Osama bin Laden or WikiLeaks. The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says banks are undermining the rule of law in America and bad mortgages still fester. In 2009 Stiglitz had advocated nationalization of US banks.
Yesterday, under the compromise contained in the Dodd-Frank Act, the US Federal Reserve Board released details of who borrowed what from its various emergency programmes from December 1st 2007 to July 21st 2010. This prompted a strong response: America is Held Hostage By Global Private Bankers, stated a blog.
“Washington is owned by the private global banking cartel that owns Wall Street. International law does not apply to this criminal cartel. They stole trillions of dollars from the American people with help from corrupt politicians over a stretch of many decades, culminating in the government bailout in 2008, and they have not been held accountable.” More here…
The Fed, in compliance with orders from Congress, today named recipients of $ 3.3 trillion in emergency aid. Among them were U.S. branches of overseas banks, including Switzerland’s UBS AG; corporations such as General Electric Co. and McDonald’s Corp.; and investors like Pacific Investment Management Co. and computer executive Michael Dell. More here…
The Economist states: “The biggest banks tended to be the biggest borrowers. The data are a bit tricky to interpret: each loan is reported separately even when it represents the rollover of a maturing loan. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase all borrowed at least $ 15 billion each via the Fed’s Term Auction Facility; the total outstanding at any one moment exceeded $ 45 billion in the case of Bank of America and Wells Fargo, according to Bloomberg.
“One of the more intriguing revelations is how much support the Fed gave to Europe’s banks: an American unit of Belgium’s Dexia had at least $ 14 billion outstanding at one point; RBS Citizens, a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland, at least $ 14.5 billion, and Bank of Scotland (part of Lloyds), $ 12 billion. Is it a coincidence that the parents of all these banks had to be bailed out by their host governments? (The European Central Bank was also far and away the largest users of dollar swap lines from the Fed, at one point borrowing $ 171 billion. It then lent those dollars to euro-zone banks.)
“Investment banks also became big borrowers when the discount window was opened to them. Bear Stearns borrowed up to $ 28 billion (no surprise there) as it fended off collapse in March of 2008. But the others did not borrow in size until that fall. Lehman borrowed $ 28 billion the day of its bankruptcy. (Why it didn’t borrow sooner is a bit puzzling. Was it too scared of looking like it needed the help? And should the Fed have lent to a dealer whose holding company had just sought bankruptcy protection?) Merrill Lynch borrowed up to $ 33 billion, Morgan Stanley $ 47 billion, and Goldman Sachs $ 18 billion.”
In this context, it is interesting that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed a fresh “megaleak” will target a major US bank “early next year,” according to an interview published on Monday.
Speaking to Forbes magazine, Assange said that he was ready to unleash tens of thousands of documents that could “take down a bank or two.” Comparing the documents to the emails that exposed Enron’s dealings amid its collapse, the controversial Australian said an existing “big US bank” was the subject of a pending data dump. More here…
Pentagon: DADT Repeal Would Pose No Threat To Military Readiness
The long-awaited Pentagon report on repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell seems to put to rest the final arguments being advanced by those who would continue to bar gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military:
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has concluded that allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the United States armed forces presents a low risk to the military’s effectiveness, even at a time of war, and that 70 percent of service members believe that the impact of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law would be either positive, mixed or of no consequence at all.
In an exhaustive nine-month study on the effects of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 17-year-old policy that requires service members to keep their sexual orientation secret or face discharge, the authors concluded that while in the short run a repeal would likely bring about “some limited and isolated disruption to unit cohesion and retention,” it could be mitigated by effective leadership.
The report, by Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s chief counsel, and Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the United States Army in Europe, also found that much of the concern in the armed forces about openly gay service members was driven by misperceptions and stereotypes. Leaving aside those with moral and religious objections to homosexuality, the authors said that the concerns were “exaggerated and not consistent with the reported experiences of many service members.”
At a news conference on Tuesday announcing the release of the report, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that repeal “would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted.”
Nonetheless, he said that there were higher levels of “discomfort” about repealing the law among those in the combat branches of the military, and that “those findings remain a source of concern to the service chiefs and to me.” He said the concerns were not insurmountable, but that implementing any repeal should be done carefully and with more preparation of the military’s combat forces.
At the same time, Mr. Gates said it was a “matter of urgency” that the lame-duck Senate vote in the next weeks to repeal the law. If not, he said there would be a fight in the courts and the possibility that the repeal would be “imposed immediately by judicial fiat.”
Not surprisingly, there are some differences among the service branches regarding attitudes toward DADT repeal:
In a survey of 115,000 service members, the report found distinct differences among the service branches. While 30 percent predicted repeal would have some negative effects, some 40 to 60 percent of the Marine Corps and those in some combat specialties said it would be negative.
The report also found that a majority — 69 percent — believed they had already worked with a gay man or woman, and of those the vast majority — 92 percent — reported that the unit’s ability to work together was very good, good or “neither good nor poor.”
In the most strongly worded section of the report, the authors concluded that while their mandate was to assess the impact of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — and not whether it should be repealed — they had done just that.
“We are both convinced that our military can do this, even during this time of war,” Mr. Johnson and General Ham wrote. “We do not underestimate the challenges in implementing a change in the law, but neither should we underestimate the ability of our extraordinarily dedicated service men and women to adapt to such change and continue to provide our nation with the military capability to accomplish any mission.”
Where we go from here is unclear. Several Senators have said they want to hold hearings on the report, and Senator Lindsay Graham recently said that DADT repeal is “going nowhere” in the current lame duck session. Nonetheless, as I noted earlier this month, there’s at least some indication that there may be enough votes in the Senate to defeat cloture on the Defense
Authorization Bill with DADT repeal attached.
While there isn’t much time for the Senate to act, a switch of only three votes from September’s cloture vote would be enough to invoke cloture and defeat the filibuster attempt that will apparently be led by John McCain. Nonetheless, the strong words today from Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen in support of repeal and urging the Senate to pass DADT repeal and let it become law may just be enough to convince at least three Senators to cross the lines and vote in favor of cloture. Based on the conclusions of this report, that’s certainly what they should do.
Here’s a copy of the report:
Pentagon Report On DADT Repeal
WikiLeaks Documents Amplify Concerns About Iran’s Military Threat
The illegal revelation of more than 250,000 State Department documents last weekend by the WikiLeaks organization is a damaging setback for U.S. foreign policy that will strain relations with important U.S. allies, undermine U.S. national security interests, and complicate international cooperation on many issues, including the war on terrorism.
This third installment of stolen documents follows previous WikiLeaks document dumps on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like the two previous actions, this reckless release of the diplomatic cables erodes trust in the U.S. government and puts at risk American diplomats, military personnel, and intelligence professionals, as well as the foreign officials and activists that they interacted with in the course of their duties.
One of the most startling revelations to come out of the sordid WikiLeaks affair is that secret U.S. intelligence assessments concluded that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that are much more capable than the ballistic missiles Iran was previously known to possess. According to a February 2010 diplomatic cable, Tehran received 19 BM-25 missiles from North Korea that were based on a Russian design for a submarine-launched missile. The BM-25 missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, are estimated to have a range of up to 2,000 miles, which would give Tehran the ability to strike at Moscow and other European capitals. The maximum range of Iran’s previously known ballistic missiles was thought to be 1,200 miles.
This news indicates that Iran has secretly engaged in more extensive military cooperation with North Korea’s isolated regime than was previously known. It may also mean that the extent of nuclear cooperation between the two rogue regimes has been much deeper than previously suspected.
The leaked cables are also full of expressions of concern from Arab leaders alarmed about Iran’s nuclear program. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged U.S. officials to “cut off the head of the snake.” Another cable quotes the king as warning that if Iran developed nuclear weapons, “everyone in the region would do the same, including Saudi Arabia.” Bahrain’s ruler, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, argued “forcefully for taking action to terminate [Iran’s] nuclear program by whatever means necessary” and maintained that “the danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.”
The WikiLeaks documents also contained candid and sometimes unflattering assessments of foreign leaders that are sure to ruffle feathers in many foreign capitals: British Prime Minister David Cameron was described as a political lightweight; French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was reported to be “an emperor with no clothes” who has a “thin-skinned and authoritarian personal style”; Afghan President Hamid Karzai was said to “float along on paranoia” and was dismissed as “an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts.”
The exposure of these candid cables undermines U.S. diplomatic efforts on a wide range of issues. Effective diplomacy requires building mutual trust with foreign leaders and maintaining the confidentiality of information shared about global issues, negotiations, and policy debates. The WikiLeaks revelations will put a chill on future diplomatic interactions because foreign officials will be more reluctant to speak frankly for fear of seeing their words publicized in future leaks. Such concerns will not only constrain diplomacy and information-sharing between the U.S. and other governments; it could spill over to limit information-sharing within the U.S. government.
It is extremely unfortunate that international efforts to defeat terrorism, prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and build stable democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been compromised by the criminal disclosure of thousands of documents with no apparent purpose but to embarrass and undermine the U.S. government.
The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.
Israel’s Imminent Threat
Have they told us they will launch a war against Iran by Christmas? My take on the latest Wikileaks dump here.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Farmer in the Times: “Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life.” – “The country must get serious about climate-change legislation and making real changes in our daily lives to reduce carbon emissions. The future of our nation’s food supply hangs in the balance. “
THE news from this Midwestern farm is not good. The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt. For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.
So begins a poignant, must-read NY Times op-ed, “An Almanac of Extreme Weather,” by Jack Hedin a Minnesota farmer. The NYT actually has three op-eds to usher in international climate talks in Cancún, which start Monday.
ClimateProgress will cover Cancún over the next two weeks, including onsite blogging in the final week from CAP attendees, even though little actual climate progress is expected.
One of the NYT op-eds is so misleading I’ll have to set the record straight later, but for now let me excerpt the Hedin piece, in which a farmer out-reports most of the U.S. media, with a seldom-told story that will ultimately be the much-retold story of the century, but needs to be heard now while there is still time to act:
My family and I produce vegetables, hay and grain on 250 acres in one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. While our farm is not large by modern standards, its roots are deep in this region; my great-grandfather homesteaded about 80 miles from here in the late 1800s.
He passed on a keen sensitivity to climate. His memoirs, self-published in the wake of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, describe tornadoes, droughts and other extreme weather. But even he would be surprised by the erratic weather we have experienced in the last decade.
In August 2007, a series of storms produced a breathtaking 23 inches of rain in 36 hours. The flooding that followed essentially erased our farm from the map. Fields were swamped under churning waters, which in places left a foot or more of debris and silt in their wake. Cornstalks were wrapped around bridge railings 10 feet above normal stream levels. We found butternut squashes from our farm two miles downstream, stranded in sapling branches five feet above the ground. A hillside of mature trees collapsed and slid hundreds of feet into a field below.
The machine shop on our farm was inundated with two feet of filthy runoff. When the water was finally gone, every tool, machine and surface was bathed in a toxic mix of used motor oil and rancid mud.
Our farm was able to stay in business only after receiving grants and low-interest private and government loans. Having experienced lesser floods in 2004 and 2005, my family and I decided the only prudent action would be to use the money to move over the winter to better, drier ground eight miles away.
This move proved prescient: in June 2008 torrential rains and flash flooding returned. The federal government declared the second natural disaster in less than a year for the region. Hundreds of acres of our neighbors’ cornfields were again underwater and had to be replanted. Earthmovers spent days regrading a 280-acre field just across the road from our new home. Had we remained at the old place, we would have lost a season’s worth of crops before they were a quarter grown.
The 2010 growing season has again been extraordinarily wet. The more than 20 inches of rain that I measured in my rain gauge in June and July disrupted nearly every operation on our farm. We managed to do a bare minimum of field preparation, planting and cultivating through midsummer, thanks only to the well-drained soils beneath our new home.
But in two weeks in July, moisture-fueled disease swept through a three-acre onion field, reducing tens of thousands of pounds of healthy onions to mush. With rain falling several times a week and our tractors sitting idle, weeds took over a seven-acre field of carrots, requiring many times the normal amount of hand labor to control. Crop losses topped $ 100,000 by mid-August.
The most recent onslaught was a pair of heavy storms in late September that dropped 8.2 inches of rain. Representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency again toured the area, and another federal disaster declaration was narrowly averted. But evidence of the loss was everywhere: debris piled up in unharvested cornfields, large washouts in fields recently stripped of pumpkins or soybeans, harvesting equipment again sitting idle.
My great-grandfather recognized that weather is never perfect for agriculture for an entire season; a full chapter of his memoir is dedicated to this observation. In his 60 years of farming he wrote that only one season, his final crop of 1937, had close to ideal weather. Like all other farmers of his time and ours, he learned to cope with significant, ill-timed fluctuations in temperature and precipitation.
But at least here in the Midwest, weather fluctuations have been more significant during my time than in his, the Dust Bowl notwithstanding. The weather in our area has become demonstrably more hostile to agriculture, and all signs are that this trend will continue. Minnesota’s state climatologist, Jim Zandlo, has concluded that no fewer than three “thousand-year rains” have occurred in the past seven years in our part of the state. And a University of Minnesota meteorologist, Mark Seeley, has found that summer storms in the region over the past two decades have been more intense and more geographically focused than at any time on record.
I can’t find the Zandlo or Seeley statements online, so if anyone can direct me to them, please post links in the comments.
No two farms have the same experience with the weather, and some people will contend that ours is an anomaly, that many corn and bean farms in our area have done well over the same period. But heavy summer weather causes harm to farm fields that is not easily seen or quantified, like nutrient leaching, organic-matter depletion and erosion. As climate change accelerates these trends, losses will likely mount proportionately, and across the board. How long can we continue to borrow from the “topsoil bank,” as torrential rains force us to make ever more frequent “withdrawals”?
Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life. A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather. We can’t charge enough for our crops in good years to cover losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones. We can’t continue to move to better, drier ground. No new field drainage scheme will help us as atmospheric carbon concentrations edge up to 400 parts per million; hardware and technology alone can’t solve problems of this magnitude.
To make things worse, I see fewer acres in our area now planted with erosion-preventing techniques, like perennial contour strips, than there were a decade ago. I believe that federal agriculture policy is largely responsible, because it rewards the quantity of acres planted rather than the quality of practices employed.
But blaming the government isn’t sufficient. All farmers have an interest in adopting better farming techniques. I believe that we also have an obligation to do so, for the sake of future generations. If global climate change is a product of human use of fossil fuels — and I believe it is — then our farm is a big part of the problem. We burn thousands of gallons of diesel fuel a year in our 10 tractors, undermining the very foundation of our subsistence every time we cultivate a field or put up a bale of hay.
I accept responsibility for my complicity in this, but I also stand ready to accept the challenge of the future, to make serious changes in how I conduct business to produce less carbon. I don’t see that I have a choice, if I am to hope that the farm will be around for my own great-grandchildren.
But my farm, and my neighbors’ farms, can contribute only so much. Americans need to see our experience as a call for national action. The country must get serious about climate-change legislation and making real changes in our daily lives to reduce carbon emissions. The future of our nation’s food supply hangs in the balance.
Hear! Hear!
Here are two posts on the connection between human-caused global warming and superstorms that have been devastating the nation and the world during what is likely to be the hottest year on record:
“Given the association of extreme weather and climate events with rising global temperature, the expectation of new record high temperatures in 2012 also suggests that the frequency and magnitude of extreme events could reach a high level in 2012. Extreme events include not only high temperatures, but also indirect effects of a warming atmosphere including the impact of higher temperature on extreme rainfall and droughts. The greater water vapor content of a warmer atmosphere allows larger rainfall anomalies and provides the fuel for stronger storms driven by latent heat.”
“I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”
The past 12 months have been the hottest on record, according to NASA. So perhaps it isn’t completely surprising that we are seeing these record-smashing deluges. But the number of these beyond-extreme events just in the United States alone ought to make people take notice:
- Coastal North Carolina’s suffered its second 500-year rainfall in 11 years
- We had Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge aka Nashville’s ‘Katrina’.
- Capital Climate wrote about Oklahoma City Paralyzed By Flash Floods.
- The Northeast was hit by record global-warming-type deluge (a piece which has links to the scientific literature).
- Weather Channel expert Stu Ostro discussed Georgia’s record-smashing global-warming-type deluge: “Nevertheless, there’s a straightforward connection in the way the changing climate “set the table” for what happened this September in Atlanta and elsewhere. It behooves us to understand not only theoretical expected increases in heavy precipitation (via relatively slow/linear changes in temperatures, evaporation, and atmospheric moisture) but also how changing circulation patterns are already squeezing out that moisture in extreme doses and affecting weather in other ways.”
And, of course, another part of the world has been even more devastated by deluges and flooding, albeit while receiving only moderate attention in this country (see Juan Cole: The media’s failure to cover “the great Pakistani deluge” is “itself a security threat” to America).
And then there was the devastation to Russia, a country that always thought it was going to benefit from climate change:
- Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”
- Russian Meteorological Center: “There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”
This is all one big coincidence for the anti-science disinformers. But for the rest of us, the really scary part is that we’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half-century. We are on track to warm nearly 10 times that this century (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F ).
In short, we ain’t seen nothing yet!
Related Post:
Winning climate messages combine dire scientific threat with solutions for a just world
Last week I explained how the media blew the story of UC Berkeley study on climate messaging. The study found the best message is also the most science-based: Doing nothing risks “many devastating consequences” but “much of the technology we need already exists.” We just need to deploy it already!
Brad Johnson has more analysis of the study’s findings, which were almost the reverse of what was reported.
New psychological research finds that dire messages about the threat of global warming will strengthen people’s acceptance of climate science when combined with solutions, which is the approach taken by leading climate activists. For some people, their response to dire messages is strongly dependent on whether hope is offered. The research, by University of California Berkeley psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg, investigated the application of “just world belief” theory to how people interpret the threat of global warming. Unfortunately, the press release announcing the study — to be published next year in Psychological Science — gave a confusing portrayal of the study’s results, leading some prominent climate journalists to draw incorrect conclusions from their research.
Just-world-belief theory, first developed by Melvin Lerner in 1965, studies the concept that “people need to believe in a just world” — i.e. “good things happen to good people” — “thus, evidence that the world is not just is threatening, and people have a number of strategies for reducing such threats.” Experimental research has found since then that there are systematic ways of identifying the level of someone’s belief in a just world (or at least that is how the results of a standard questionnaire are interpreted), and those results are strongly correlated with their response to various situations that involve injustice and justice — from how victims are perceived to how people cope with traumatic events.
Willer and Feinberg have hypothesized that belief in a just world influences people’s understanding of climate change, in part because the concept of a planet tilting toward devastation due to human action could come into conflict with the perception of an inherently stable, just world. Their paper explores two different experiments involving just world belief that can also be understood as straightforward focus-group message testing — which is how the research was presented in their press release, and how most climate journalists reported on the work.
The messages tested in their first experiment began with an accurate portrayal of the dire nature of the science: “many devastating consequences,” “a major heat wave that killed at least 35,000 people,” “much of Florida, California, Texas, and Hawaii” could disappear under rising seas. They then concluded with one of two alternative endings, with opinions from fictitious scientists — a hopeless, fatalistic conclusion (“Science Can’t Help”), and a hopeful, empowering one (“How To Fight Global Warming”). They tested how these messages affected participants’ degree of skepticism about the threat of climate change.
Skepticism among participants who had a low belief in a just world declined similarly for both conclusions — they responded to the dire scientific threat alone. However, participants who had a high belief in a just world responded very differently depending on the conclusion. Given a hopeful conclusion, skepticism plummeted among those with a high belief in a just world. Given the hopeless conclusion, skepticism shot up by a similar amount:
RESPONSE TO DIRE CLIMATE SCIENCE MESSAGE
In the second experiment in the paper, the researchers primed participants toward thinking about the world as either just or injust, then exposed them to two public service announcements from EDF in 2007 that make a strong emotional appeal, one with a train accelerating toward a child and the other with children “ticking”. They were able to mirror the results of the first study, finding that priming on “justice” made respondents reject the message of the PSAs.
In short, the researchers found that the approach taken by leading climate messengers such as Al Gore (“An Inconvenient Truth”), Van Jones (“The Green Collar Economy”), and Bill McKibben (350.org) of combining scientific urgency with solution-oriented hopefulness should be successful, and particularly powerful with people who believe strongly in an inherently just world. That audience includes a significant proportion of conservatives and religiously observant people. Another example of the dire-plus-hope message is Harmony, the new book and film from the Prince of Wales and Tck Tck Tck:
However, the conclusions of the research have been somewhat misleadingly presented. In particular, the researchers repeatedly call the hopeless conclusion “dire,” implying that the text about the effects of global warming was not dire (it was). But “dire” simply means desperately urgent or implying horror — not fatalistic, apocalyptic, or hopeless. The scientific text they gave all participants in their first experiment was in fact extremely dire, discussing the devastation from wildfires, drought, sea level rise, hurricanes, and heat waves.
In part because of the misleading presentation in the paper and the press release, journalists like the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, NY Times’ Andy Revkin (who apparently rejects the science that significant climate impacts are already being felt in the United States), Greener World Media’s Adam Aston, Discovery News’s Kieran Mulvaney, and social scientist Matthew Nisbet misinterpreted the results.
– Brad Johnson, in a WonkRoom cross-post.
Related Posts:
- A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice
- An introduction to the core climate solutions
- Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost
Oregon jihad car bomb plot: “The threat was very real”
“Since I was 15 I thought about all this…It’s gonna be a fireworks show … a spectacular show,” said Mohamed Osman Mohamud as he plotted “violent jihad.”
More on this story. “Feds: Somali-born teen plotted car-bombing in Ore.,” by William McCall for Associated Press, November 27 (thanks to JCB):
PORTLAND, Ore. – Federal agents in a sting operation arrested a Somali-born teenager just as he tried blowing up a van he believed was loaded with explosives at a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, authorities said.
The bomb was an elaborate fake supplied by the agents and the public was never in danger, authorities said.
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested at 5:40 p.m. Friday just after he dialed a cell phone that he thought would set off the blast but instead brought federal agents and police swooping down on him.
Yelling “Allahu Akbar!” — Arabic for “God is great!” — Mohamud tried to kick agents and police after he was taken into custody, according to prosecutors.
“The threat was very real,” said Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon. “Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,” [sic]…
It said Mohamud was warned several times about the seriousness of his plan, that women and children could be killed, and that he could back out, but he told agents: “Since I was 15 I thought about all this;” and “It’s gonna be a fireworks show … a spectacular show.”
Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen living in Corvallis, was charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. A court appearance was set for Monday. Few details were available about him late Friday. […]
U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton released federal court documents to The Associated Press and the Oregonian newspaper that show the sting operation began in June after an undercover agent learned that Mohamud had been in regular e-mail contact with an “unindicted associate” in Pakistan’s northwest, a frontier region where al-Qaida and Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents are strong.
The two used coded language in which the FBI believes Mohamud discussed traveling to Pakistan to prepare for “violent jihad,” the documents said….
An undercover agent met with him a month later in Portland, where they “discussed violent jihad,” according to the court documents….
“This defendant’s chilling determination is a stark reminder that there are people — even here in Oregon — who are determined to kill Americans,” Holton said….
Yes, there are “people” who are “determined to kill Americans,” even “here in Oregon”! If only there were some way to figure out who they are, or where they might congregate!
TURKEY VOWS REACTION TO ISRAEL THREAT
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Ankara is prepared to react to any potential Israeli offensive against Lebanon.
Erdogan described Israel as full of “uncertainties” and said, “It is not definite what it will do.” He further warned of the prospects of such hostilities, Turkey’s state Anatolia news agency (AA) reported on Thursday.
“Does (Israel) think it can enter Lebanon with the most modern aircraft and tanks to kill women and children, and destroy schools and hospitals, and then expect us to remain silent?” AFP quoted him as saying in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
The Turkish leader is currently on a two-day visit to the country aimed at strengthening the bilateral ties and voicing support for Beirut in the face of a volatile international situation.
“We will not be silent and we will support justice by all means available to us.”
Ankara has opposed the last round of Tel Aviv’s offensives on southern Lebanon, which killed around 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians in 2006.
“In the event of war, the citizens of Israel will also be losers,” the Turkish leader warned.
The Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah, which defeated Israel in the 33-day hostilities and headed off Tel Aviv’s offensives on the country in 2000, has vowed to respond with determination to any future Israel-launched warfare.
The resistance movement has publicly announced that it has the capability to hit targets deep inside Israel and to strike Israeli Navy vessels even before they reach the Lebanese waters.
The Middle East is passing through a sensitive period, Erdogan said, and called for “unity and integrity” among regional countries.
He insisted that Israel “must realize that if there is peace and security in the region, it will also benefit.”
HN/ZHD/AKM
Chicago: Muslim gets two years in prison for bomb threat to Jewish school
“Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews…” — Qur’an 5:82
But he was depressed, you see. “Man gets two years in prison for bomb threat,” by Andy Grimm for the Chicago Tribune, November 24 (thanks to Mary):
A West Rogers Park man was sentenced Wednesday to 25 months in prison for mailing a letter threatening to blow up a Jewish high school.
A half-dozen friends and neighbors testified that Mohammad Alkaramla, 25, was a peaceful man with many friends in his multiethnic neighborhood until his estranged wife moved to Jordan with their son. The caring man known to friends as “Mo” then became depressed and feared Middle East strife would make life dangerous for his son, they said.
Of course. The first thing a peaceful, caring man will do when he starts having domestic trouble is mail off a bomb threat to a Jewish school. It could happen to anyone!
Alkaramla, who was born in Jordan, mailed a letter in late 2008 to the Ida Crown Jewish Academy, threatening to plant a bomb there if Israel didn’t withdraw troops from the Gaza Strip within two weeks, said his father, Tawiq Alkaramla.
“He knows all people are the same,” his father said to U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer. “He went crazy like with stress. … He thinks Gaza is by Jordan. All he knows is what he sees on the TV.”
At a bench trial in July, Pallmeyer found Mohammad Alkaramla guilty of a single count of making threats against the school. Investigators traced his fingerprints and a stamp on the letter to his home. They found he had searched for targets on the Internet in the days before the letter was mailed.
“Will Give You until 01.15.2009 to back OFF from Gaza in Palestine or will set our explosive in your areas,” the letter said in part.
Alkaramla, who has been in custody since July, briefly read from a written statement.
“I realize I was in a downfall of my life, thinking of myself,” he said of the decision to make the threat. “I regret and am deeply sorry for all my troubles.”…
