Author Archives: markdowe1

Climate Change, Economic, G7, Government, Politics, United Nations

G7 summit: The communiqué indicates an agreement in striving for a low carbon economy…

G7 SUMMIT

At the summit on June 8 the group of seven leaders agreed to wean their economies off carbon fuels and supported a global goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they stopped short of agreeing their own immediate binding targets.

In a communiqué after their two-day summit in Bavaria, the G7 leaders endorsed the need for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions at the upper end, ranging from 40 to 70% by 2050 (and using 2010 as a basis). The range was recommended by the IPCC, the United Nations’ climate-change panel.

The leaders also backed a global target for limiting the rise in average global temperatures to two degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

The communiqué read: ‘We commit to doing our part to achieve a low-carbon global economy in the long-term, including developing and deploying innovative technologies striving for a transformation of the energy sectors by 2050, and invite all countries to join us in this endeavour.’

The G7 host, Angela Merkel of Germany, who was once dubbed the ‘climate chancellor’, had hoped to revitalise her environmental credentials by getting the G7 nations to agree specific emission goals ahead of the United Nations climate conference in Paris at the end of the year.

Whilst the leaders stopped short of agreeing any such immediate binding targets for their economies, green lobby groups nonetheless welcomed the direction of their agreements.

A statement given by WWF Global Climate and Energy Initiative, said: ‘They’ve given important political signals, but they could have done more, particularly by making concrete national commitments for immediate action… We had hoped for more commitments on what they would do right now.’

The Europeans had pressed their G7 partners to sign up to legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Russia Sanctions

A firm stance was taken on Russia and its involvement in the Ukraine conflict. Merkel said the G7 countries were ready, if necessary, to strengthen sanctions against Russia.

The leaders want Russia and Ukraine to comply with a February 12 ceasefire agreed in the Belarus capital Minsk that largely halted fighting in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces.

Mrs Merkel said: ‘We are also ready, should the situation escalate, which we don’t want, to strengthen sanctions if the situation makes that necessary, but we believe we should do everything to move forward the political process of Minsk.’

The communiqué specifically addresses the issue, and the leaders said they expected Russia to stop its support for separatist forces in Ukraine and by implementing the Minsk agreements in full. The sanctions, they said, ‘can be rolled back when Russia meets these commitments.’

Greece

The Greek debt crisis was discussed by the leaders as a group and also in bilateral meetings during the summit at the foot of Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze.

Mrs Merkel said there was not much time left for a debt deal to keep Greece in the Eurozone and that Europe was prepared to show solidarity if Athens implemented economic reforms:

‘We want Greece to remain part of the euro zone but we take the clear position that solidarity with Greece requires that Greece makes proposals and implements reforms.’

‘There isn’t much time left. Everyone is working intensively… Every day counts now,” Mrs Merkel said.

Greece’s leftist government last week rejected proposals for a cash-for-reforms deal put forward by European lenders and the International Monetary Fund, but has yet to put forward its own alternative to unlock aid funds that expire at the end of June.

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Climate Change, Government, National Security, Politics, Society

The societal, cultural and geopolitical impacts of climate change…

CLIMATE CHANGE

CLIMATE CHANGE has been synonymous with polar bears and deforestation, but these days climatologists are paying more attention to people.

For many years now, climate change studies have tended to focus and rely on numbers-heavy charts and complex models to report on phenomena such as shrinking polar caps, melting glaciers and permafrost, caribou, the declining populations of reindeer and seal, as well as rising sea levels from Nigeria to the Maldives to the South Pacific.

In recent times, however, ethnographers, think tanks and sociologists have begun looking more closely at the social and cultural impacts of climate change on indigenous communities. Studies have been published on subjects including the Wauja people in Brazil (who have been impacted by the shrinking Amazon rain forest and industrialisation), Sami reindeer-herding communities across a warmer northern Scandinavia, as well as how the Bantu- and Khoisan-speaking tribes in the Kalahari Basin of sub-Saharan Africa have been affected. Of particular interest are the subsistence communities in Bangladesh and Malaysia whose coastal settlements are at continued risk of flooding from typhoons, monsoons and higher sea levels. Such research reflects a growing realisation in academic and policy circles that cultures and societies tied to nature have multigenerational knowledge that gives them special insight into changes in nature and the environment.

In the last decade or so, it has suddenly become apparent that the impact on people is really important and should be more than just an afterthought. There is undoubtedly an increasing realisation that climate change is more than a scientific artefact.

In 2014, Earth had its hottest year since weather record-keeping began 135 years ago. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998, with nine of the total in the 21st century, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Recent studies show changes happening more quickly than predicted. The highly credible journal Science reported in March that the southern Antarctic ice sheet suddenly began losing its mass in 2009 at a steady and fast rate.

There is also growing interest in the geopolitical effects of climate change. The Brookings Institute, for example, estimates that for every percentage point rise in average temperature and drop in average rainfall, violent conflict between neighbouring states rises 4 percent, while violent conflict between groups within states climbs 14 percent. Scholars foresee, too, new shipping routes opening up as the Arctic ice cap shrinks still further, potentially leading to military conflicts. Russia, for instance, planted a flag on the seabed below the North Pole in 2007 and has some 4,300 miles of Arctic coastline.

In violence-plagued northern Mali, a desiccated landscape of dust and mud huts where the average rainfall is a third less than it was nearly two decades ago, scholars recently blamed a climate-change induced drought for fuelling conflict between Tuareg separatist rebels (who need water and grass for their cattle herds), as well as government-backed forces. In March, the National Academy of Sciences published a peer-reviewed study stating that ‘there is evidence that the 2007-2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria.’ This was a devastating drought that led to widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families towards urban centres. Some studies suggest climate change will produce permanent refugees.

Last October the Pentagon published a report which said: ‘Climate change poses immediate risks to national security.’ Chuck Hagel, then defence secretary, referred to climate change as being a “threat multiplier” that could exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases and armed insurgencies. And President Barack Obama picked up that thread in May, telling graduating cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that climate change ‘constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security’ as well as invoking how those threats will impact on how the U.S. military defends its country.

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Arts, Books

Book Review: Abattoir Blues by Peter Robinson

ABATTOIR BLUES

Sometimes the difference between fiction and reality is paper-thin. Peter Robinson’s Abattoir Blues is a clear example of this. Robinson writes an excellent novel you’ll want to read in as few sittings as possible.

Sometimes the difference between fiction and reality is paper-thin. Peter Robinson’s Abattoir Blues is a clear example of this. Robinson writes an excellent novel you’ll want to read in as few sittings as possible.

THE STORY BEGINS with DCI Banks going straight to his office from the airport on his return from holiday. This isn’t because of his ubiquitous work ethic as a dedicated senior police officer, avid and hardworking as he is, but more to do with that he can’t resist the ‘lure of a bloody crime scene’, as well as being happy to escape his messy private life.

Since his marital breakdown to Sharon, Banks has had a few other partners in his life, including the Italian woman whose parents he has just travelled abroad to meet. But while she seems noncommittal, he needn’t worry. Another interesting prospect will soon come his way.

Back at work, DCI Banks quickly reaffirms his effectiveness as leader of the homicide and major crimes team in West Yorkshire. Abbattoir Blues is another example of Peter Robinson who proves his outstanding expertise as a crime writer as he cleverly takes the reader through the intricacies of a complex plot.

Two young men are reported missing, and after some painstaking police work prove that the youths are linked in a major homicide crime. Bloodstains are found in a disused airfield hangar by Peaches the dog as she runs away from her master, Terry Gilchrist, who has a slight disability from an injury sustained in the Iraq war whilst serving as a soldier in the army. A caravan belonging to one of the youths is also burned to the ground. Things quickly become much more sinister.

Then a retired and successful fund manager finds that his £100,000 tractor has been stolen. There is the suspicion that he might be pursuing an insurance payment, or that the wayward son of the nearby farmer looking after the property in his absence might have been involved.

This case is being supervised by the permanently grumpy DI Annie Cabbot, whose ill humour and staid approach stems from the serious injury following a shooting she sustained in a previous case.

The author creates a storyline where Banks is in the habit of reviewing cases with his team. This is a very effective device for keeping the reader abreast of the story, and keeps the reader guessing as to what might happen next: ‘We’ve got a stolen tractor, two young men we’d like to find and talk to and the makings of a suspicious death at an abandoned airfield.’ The idiosyncrasies of the story are by no means obvious that these events are linked to a single major crime.

Robinson deserves huge credit for his meticulous approach and how a police operation of this nature might unfold. Sometimes the difference between fiction and reality is paper-thin. Peter Robinson’s Abattoir Blues is a clear example of this.

That summary holds good until the various themes are brought together by a fatal accident on a country road. The van involved was collecting animal parts from farms to take them to an abattoir when it skewered out of control and careered over the edge of a cliff-face. Following a search by police, the van also contains human remains. The various incidents hitherto are now linked and forged into a single case.

Unfortunately, though, the task of touring the many abattoirs to find the source of the remains goes to the team’s vegetarian, who finds it demanding and difficult to deal with. Others in the team have issues too. The hapless DC Dougal Wilson is the spitting image of Harry Potter and always becoming the butt of the joke, both with fellow officers and members of the public.

Gradually, a list of suspects emerges. One of them is Malcolm Hackett who has changed his name to Montague Havers, to become less ‘comprehensive school’ and ‘more Eton’. His links to the financial world and to the former trader turned farmer who had his tractor stolen helps to unravel a case that has many twist and turns before it is finally solved. Deceit and deception, unabridged differences in the background of the story’s main character, and the subtle nature by which Robinson writes all add to an excellent novel you’ll want to read in as few sittings as possible.

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