Category Archives: United States

Climate Change, Economic, Global warming, Government, Politics, Science, Society, United Nations, United States

US National Climate Assessment…

(From the archives) Originally posted on January 13, 2013 by markdowe

CLIMATE ASSESSMENT

Now no one can deny that the world is getting warmer. Last week’s report by America’s National Climate Assessment reveals the full horror of what’s happening to our planet

The draft version of the US National Climate Assessment, released on Friday, makes remarkable reading – not just for Americans but for all humanity. Put together by a special panel of more than 240 scientists, the federally commissioned report reveals that the US is already reeling under the impact of global warming. Heatwaves, droughts, floods, intense downpours, rising sea levels and melting glaciers are now causing widespread havoc and are having an impact on a wide range of fronts including health services, infrastructure, water supply, agriculture, transport and flood defences.

Nor is there any doubt about the cause of these rising temperatures. “It is due primarily to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuel,” the report states. As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere soar, temperatures rise and chaos ensues. Air pollution intensifies, wildfires increase, insect-borne diseases spread, confrontations over water rights become more violent and storm surges rise. This is the near future for America and for the rest of the world. Earth is set to become a hotter, drier, unhealthier, more uncomfortable, dangerous and more disaster-prone place in coming years.

The language used in this exhaustive, carefully researched investigation is also worthy of comment. It includes the word “threat” or variations 198 times and versions of the word “disrupt” another 120 times. After poring over the 1,146 pages of the assessment, readers will be under no illusions about what is happening to our planet. The robustness of its rhetoric is especially striking because it contrasts so noticeably with the debate – or to be precise, lack of debate – on climate change that occurred during last year’s presidential campaigning.

Neither President Obama nor his opponent, Mitt Romney, made more than a cursory mention of the issue, despite the fact that it now affects just about every aspect of existence on our planet today. As the assessment makes clear, global warming is not just about polar bears. It is about the lives of people today and about those of future generations.

A three-month period for public comment will now follow last week’s publication of the draft assessment. The US National Academy of Sciences will also review the document before a final version is published later this year. The ensuing debate promises to be an intriguing and important one. The US is the world’s greatest economy and a massive emitter of greenhouse gases. Until its political masters act, the planet has no chance of halting global warming or curtailing rising sea levels or dealing with the increasing acidification of our oceans or coping with the melting of Earth’s icecaps.

Given the vehemence of opposition in the US to the suggestion that climate change is manmade, we should not be too hopeful of immediate action. Most of the Republican Party believes the concept is a liberal hoax – along with an array of rich and powerful industrial foundations and corporations. A bitter struggle lies ahead.

From this perspective, it might be tempting to sneer at the US over its response to the challenge of climate change. Britain has little to be smug about, however, a point that was demonstrated last week by media coverage of the Met Office’s updated forecast of likely global warming over the next five years. In revising downwards, albeit slightly, its previous expectation for temperature rises from now until 2017, the Met Office found itself at the midst of a PR shambles. In their dozens, climate change sceptics charged forwards to claim this data showed that global warming has stopped, a completely misleading suggestion that was not properly challenged by journalists.

In fact, the Met Office’s figures indicate that most of the years between 2013 and 2017 will be hotter than those of the hottest year on record. More to the point, British forecasters still stand by their longer-term projections that anticipate there will be significant warming over the course of the century.

The fact that this message was lost on the public suggests climate change denial is becoming entrenched in the UK, or that our media have become complacent about the issue, or both. Whatever the answer, there is little cause for cheer. Both sides of the Atlantic are dithering over global warming. Yet the issue is real, as the US climate assessment emphasises. In making that clear, the report should be welcomed.

The unaffordable cost of climate change delay…

If there was ever a case of fiddling while Rome burns, then the sadly dilatory global response to the threat from climate change is surely it. Even as weather patterns become measurably more extreme the world over; even as the polar ice caps melt back ever further each summer, opening up newly navigable shipping lanes; even as average global temperatures continue their inexorable rise; still, attempts to forge an international consensus make only glacially slow progress. Yet, the longer we take to act, the more unaffordable remedial action becomes.

The most recent foot-dragging was at the UN talks in Doha, which concluded last month. The hope was that the 18th conference on the Convention on Climate Change, attended by nearly 200 countries, would agree rules for an updated treaty – to be signed by 2015 and come into force in 2020 – to impose legally-binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on all countries of the world for the first time. But for all the blustering commendations from politicians accompanying the 11th-hour “Doha Climate Gateway”, the outcome was disappointing.

In fairness, there was some progress. The existing Kyoto protocol was extended and discussions about the technicalities of the future treaty’s negotiating procedure were determined. But the thorniest issues – how, for example, to share the cost of mitigating climate change between developed and developing countries – are no nearer to resolution.

If there were any remaining doubts as to the need for concerted and swift action, however, the latest draft US National Climate Assessment, published on Friday, puts paid to them. The Washington-commissioned analysis makes clear that America is already feeling the impact of global warming; infrastructure, water supplies, crops and coastal geographies are being noticeably affected, it says, while heatwaves, downpours, floods and droughts are all both more common and more extreme. The 240-strong panel of experts also explicitly state, contrary to Republican lore, that rising temperatures are “due primarily to human activities”.

It can only be hoped that the findings will galvanise the world’s second-largest carbon emitter into action at last. But although President Obama has brought in a smattering of regulations on greenhouse gases, and his energy strategy ultimately aims to wean the US off foreign oil, explicit references to climate change are still few and far between in Washington, and most Republicans refuse to acknowledge any link between human activity and a changing climate. With America central to any meaningful follow-up UN treaty, the tone of the three-month consultation on the Climate Assessment has far-reaching implications.

Evidence is growing, however, that the UN timetable is insufficiently ambitious. Waiting until 2020 rather than pressing ahead now will add £3 trillion to the price tag for corrective measures such as renewable power sources, according to leading climate scientist Dr Keywan Riahi. Seven more years of delay also steadily erodes the probability that the rise in global temperature can be kept below the 2C level at which the consequences become devastatingly destabilising.

As economic malaise leaves the case for environmental policies harder to make, and international efforts lose their gloss, climate change is slipping off the agenda. We cannot afford for it to do so. As the US report says: “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.” There is, then, no more time to waste.

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Britain, Iraq, Islamic State, Middle East, Syria, United States

Western support must include arming the Kurds. More from the West is needed…

ISLAMIC STATE

It was Respect MP, George Galloway, who said that the west must ‘strengthen the Kurdish fighters, who are doing a good job of fighting IS’. Mr Galloway gave that view during a House of Commons debate on Iraq last month.

It isn’t a contradiction to be anti-war and left-wing at the same time as being pro-Kurd and in favour of supporting and arming the Kurds. Many people have been long-standing opponents of western-led military interventions in the Muslim-majority world. All campaigns from Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 to Libya in 2011, have resulted in civilian bloodshed and terrorist blowback. Many are not pacifist, either. To somehow hide and pretend that the response to those who carry out beheadings of the self-styled Islamic State need not involve an element of brute military force is either ludicrously naïve or disgracefully disingenuous.

And so too is the lazy obsession with airstrikes. General David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, has repeatedly called for ‘boots on the ground’ and says that: ‘Wars, historically, have never been won by air power alone.’

Another foreign military occupation of Iraq – or, for that matter Syria – would be wholly disastrous. Further bloodshed would ensue, with yet more blowback. There are, however, secular and Sunni boots on the ground that the west should be backing against the jihadists of IS. There are Kurdish fighters not just in northern Iraq, where the peshmerga have fended off IS attempts to bring Erbil and Kirkuk under its terror-inspired caliphate, but also in northern Syria, where the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Kurds’ Democratic Union Party (PYD) have been heroically holding off IS in the importantly strategic town of Kobani for more than a month now.

These Kurdish units, which include all-women militias, have to all intents and purposes become the last line of defence against the genocidal fanatics of IS. But, while, in Mr Galloway’s words, they are doing a ‘good job’, they can’t do it alone. IS are equipped with US-made tanks seized in Iraq following the desertion of whole units of the Iraqi army in the face of IS threats. Progressives in the west, which should also include those of the anti-war variety, need to get behind the Kurds. A loud public voice needs to be heard. We should do so because we owe them. Kurds constitute the biggest stateless minority in the world, with a population of some 30 million, divided mainly between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. They have been bombed in Turkey, executed in Iran, gassed in Iraq and besieged in Syria. Not to mention how they have been repeatedly betrayed by the west.

The Kurds are worth fighting for. Take northern Syria. Here the three autonomous and Kurdish-majority provinces of Rojava have avoided the worst excesses of the civil war. They have engaged in what can only be described as a remarkable democratic experiment, ceding power to popular assemblies and also to women’s and youth councils. Why would any progressive want to stand and watch the revolutionary Kurds of Kobani to fall to the murderous thugs of IS?

Another reason, too, is because of Turkey’s reluctance to do anything. The ghastly crisis unfolding in Islamic State could have been an opportunity for Turkey, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to build a new long-term alliance with his country’s embittered Kurdish minority against the brutal and barbarous extremism of IS. The PYD in Syria, however, is an offshoot of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been locked in a violent conflict with Ankara over Kurdish autonomy since 1984. Mr Erdogan took the decision to seal Turkey’s border with Syria, but this gave the green light to IS militants to seize Kobani and massacre its PKK-affiliated populace. It then bombed PKK positions in southern Turkey for the first time since the group agreed to participate in a peace process in March 2013.

At a briefing on 4 October, Mr Erdogan said that for Turkey the PKK was the equivalent of IS. Other than shamelessly echoing the mantra of Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that ‘Hamas is Isis, Isis is Hamas’, a clear irony emerges because if the PKK had been deemed the same as IS Turkey would have done a lot more to help. The Turkish-Syrian border hasn’t been closed to IS fighters, only to PKK fighters. On 20 October, Turkey finally agreed to allow Kurdish fighters to cross the border into Syria, but only Kurds from Iraq and not from Turkey – and not with heavy weaponry either, which has been the main request of the YBG fighters in Kobani.

It would seem that Turkey doesn’t care whether Kobani falls to the jihadists. The Turkish government insists it won’t be bullied by anyone and rejects world opinion as to how it should be acting to help. But to balance the argument it’s fair to say that western governments have never lifted a finger either to help Turkey’s Kurds – or, by extension, Syria’s. As is gaining evermore traction, these are the wrong sort of Kurds – the victims of a NATO ally, rather than a horde of jihadists. Look no further than the interpretation of the language: Kurds in Turkey are deemed ‘terrorists’, but Kurds in Iraq are associated as being ‘freedom fighters’. No one is quite yet sure about the present status of the Iranian Kurds.

Progressives, then, need to get behind the Kurds, especially those Kurds in Kobani. There is a danger, of course, that their struggle will be co-opted by western governments, particularly by those governments which often shape outcomes in the Middle East to suit their own interests. Progressives do not have an alternative stance to pursue given how squeezed the Kurds are between Bashar al-Assad, Erdogan and IS.

In the words of an old Kurdish proverb: ‘Freedom is never given but taken.’

 

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Britain, Iraq, Islamic State, NATO, Syria, Turkey, United States

Turkey: why isn’t it doing anything to curb the advances of Islamic State?

THE LACK OF TURKISH ACTION

Almost 200,000 people have been forced to flee and abandon their homes, joining 1.5 million Syrian refugees already in Turkey.

Poorly equipped Kurdish fighters – men, women and children – have tried in vain with AK-47 assault rifles to hold back the maniacal hordes of Islamic State fighters. The terrorists are armed with modern, heavy-grade American weapons.

IS now has a clear grip on at least a third of the Syrian Kurdish stronghold of Kobani on the border with Turkey.

U.S. and Arab warplanes and drones have been targeting IS positions, but to little avail. U.S. General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accepts the town could fall, leaving its remaining citizens facing rape, murder and torture at the hands of the barbarians besieging it.

All the while, just a few hundred yards over the border, Turkish troops look on. As IS fighters stalk the deserted streets of the town, Turkish tanks in clear sight of the calamity stand idle.

Turkey’s inaction as Kobani falls has provoked worldwide fury. Kurdish expats have taken to the streets throughout the country, and at least 19 people are known to have died in violent clashes against the government’s troops and police.

Washington has ‘voiced concern’ about Turkey’s reluctance to engage IS, even though it has its own parliament’s approval to do so.

Less diplomatically, a U.S. State Department official reportedly told the New York Times: ‘This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from its border.’

It does, indeed, seem outrageous that Turkey, the second-largest land power in NATO with 290,000 troops, and a candidate for EU membership, is doing nothing to prevent a massacre on its doorstep. Why does it view the prospect of IS’s dreaded black banner fluttering over a town near its border with such apparent equanimity?

The main reason – and it is a very simple one – is that Turkey abhors the 1.3million Syrian Kurds more than it hates IS.

Turkey is home to some 15million Kurds – about 20 per cent of its population – many of who are locked in a violent secessionist battle with the Turkish government.

What Turkey really fears is that the Syrian Kurds will establish their own state on the Turkey/Syria border, which could prove deeply destabilising in a country with such a large Kurdish population. Anything – even IS – that weakens the Syrian Kurds reduces that threat.

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Turkey has, for 30-years, fought a brutal war against the far-Left militant Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), until a fragile ceasefire was declared in 2013. In those blood-soaked decades, 40,000 people were killed in vicious fighting that involved suicide bombers on the terrorist PKK side, the flattening of Kurdish villages on the other – and widespread allegations of torture on both.

What makes Turkey particularly reluctant to defend the Syrian Kurds in Kobani is that they are allied to the PKK, and committed to Kurdish homeland. This explains why Turkish border guards have been stopping PKK militia and other Kurdish fighters from joining their Syrian kinsmen in Kobani to fight IS.

And why, in contrast, they turned a blind eye to foreign jihadis flying into Turkey to take the long bus journey over the border to Syria – not to mention the 3,000 Turks who have joined IS after being recruited in rundown provincial towns.

Turkey’s response to IS was certainly complicated by the terrorists’ seizure of 49 Turkish hostages in Syria. But rather than refuse to negotiate, the Turks exchanged them for 180 imprisoned IS sympathisers.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made it plain he sees no moral difference between the Kurds in Kobani and IS.

In a briefing, Mr Erdogan said: ‘It is wrong to view them differently; we need to deal with them jointly.’

One diplomat who is involved in attempting to build the anti-IS alliance says Erdogan hates the Syrian Kurds. What is more, the diplomat said, is that ‘he thinks they’re worse than IS.’

Elsewhere, the EU’s counter-terrorism co-ordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, said: ‘The Syrian Kurds are a big concern for Erdogan because he is not done with the PKK.’

Both the EU and the U.S. has designated the PKK as a terrorist organisation. The irony is that the West is now implicitly relying on PKK fighters to relieve Kobani. And the fact is that, until IS came along, the Syrian Kurds were getting ever closer to their dreams of an autonomous state.

In the chaos of the Syrian civil war, they had declared their own statelet, calling it ‘Rojava’, which straddled Syria’s northern border with Turkey like a series of cantons.

An embattled President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, locked in a lethal war with IS, tolerated this arrangement, which put Kobani right in the centre of the statelet. Little wonder IS considers the town to be of such strategic significance.

The Syrian Kurds have taken their lead from Kurds in northern Iraq, who have established their own thriving and virtually autonomous regime in an oil-rich region now known as Iraqi Kurdistan.

The difference, however, is that Turkey does not see the Iraqi Kurds – who will have nothing to do with the PKK – as a threat. Ankara invested heavily in the region and has become increasingly dependent on Kurdistan’s oil and gas to fuel its own growth.

In contrast, Turkey fears that any concession to the Syrian Kurds will fuel demands from its own restive Kurdish population for autonomy.

On top of all of this, you have the autocratic and self-determined nature of Erdogan who, in a move reminiscent of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, appointed himself president this summer after serving 12-years as prime minister.

No Turkish leader since the death in 1938 of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, has invested himself with such power as Erdogan. But whereas Ataturk wanted to distance Turkey from its religious heritage, turning it into a power player in modern Europe, Erdogan has very different ideas.

As part of his general conservative push, Erdogan has been trying to re-orientate the country away from the decadent West and towards the Arab world, which the Ottoman Turks ruled for centuries.

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With his ambition to revive Turkey’s once-great power status, Erdogan has allied the country not only with the conservative Sunni Muslims of Saudi Arabia, but with the Muslim Brotherhood regime of former President Morsi in Egypt, and with the Sunni militant Palestinian group Hamas.

In doing so, he destroyed Turkey’s good relations with Israel, a staunch ally of the Kurds.

Relations with the newly-elected military regime in Egypt are grim, too. Erdogan’s emotional pull towards Sunni Arabs means he is implacably opposed to Syria’s President Assad, who is an ally of Shia Iran, and explains why he is so keen to back Assad’s enemies, even if it means backing IS.

That is why he is telling the U.S. that only if America extends its intervention in Syria to toppling Assad will he then move to help the Kurds in Kobani.

Erdogan will drive a very hard bargain before he contemplates any military action, not least because the Turks realise that while Western intervention comes and goes in the Middle East, Turkish intervention in Syria could involve the country in an intractable war that lasts decades.

Yet, this is a NATO country which the West hopes will put men on the ground to repulse IS. Some hope that is. For as well as supporting the terrorists, Turkey has been allowing British jihadis to cross its borders, while simultaneously claiming its desire to join the anti-IS coalition.

At this terrifying moment and juncture when IS appears to be unstoppable, it’s tragic for the West that Turkey is the country that holds most of the cards.

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