ceedee’s posterous

Have a look at this cutting I found from the Wall Street Journal, 2nd March:

Market has encountered resistance since hitting new highs Tuesday, natural in view of the sweeping rally up to then. Previous pauses in early Jan. and mid-Feb. were followed by renewed rallying; evidence this is a similar period of consolidation seen in pattern of declining volume on recessions, indicating line of least resistance remains upward.

With the Dow today on 10,500 and the FTSE around 5,500, are we moving onwards and upwards towards a recovery?

Nope! The date line on that cutting was 2nd March 1931. That’s about the same length of time after the Wall Street Crash as we are now from the crisis of September 2008.

At the start of 1933, just two years on from that optimistic Wall Street Journal market view the Dow would be one quarter the value it was in ‘31.

That was the same year that the Chancellor of a new UK National Government, Philip Snowden, produced an emergency budget which imposed severe cuts in public spending and wages. Public sector wages and unemployment pay were cut by 10%. Income Tax was raised by 11%. By 1933 unemployment had risen by 150% and exports were down 50%.

What is on offer to the British public in the coming General Election? First, the Conservatives are not advocating a replay of the Eighties. No, Osborne boasts that ‘the cuts will be worse that those of Margaret Thatcher’. It will start with an emergency budget.

Labour on the other hand advocates a steady fiscal tightening to placate the markets; an earlier rather than later introduction of consolidation to remove the structural deficit and a handing over of the baton from the public to the private sector.

But this is exactly what Japan did in the early 1990’s when they ended their economic stimuli too soon. As the chart below, courtesy of Mike Shedlock, shows over the last twenty years Japan has choked off four or five nascent recoveries when political will crumbled.

The Nikkei peaked in 1990 at 38.9k. Property prices had risen by 50% in the previous four years. A year later the Nikkei fell to 20.2k only to rebound 35% during the next four months to 27.3k, which is very similar to our position today.

Over the next year the Nikkei halved to 14.2k and today, twenty years later, it is at the dark depths of 10.25k. What you are looking at in this chart is not a double dip recession but a six (and counting) dip recession! That would mean for us a FTSE level of 2050 in the year 2028 (and Japan had its export performance to help out). A thirty five year old today would have to work ‘til they were 75 or 80 to fund a sufficient pension.

And what does Japan tell us about property prices over a period of persistent demand deflation? Since 1991, property prices in Japan have halved. Not with a dramatic single-year fall, but with a steady decline over those 20 years. No-one would say that housing was exactly affordable at the moment but the social and economic consequences of a twenty year decline in house prices would be a mighty big problem for a lot of people.

There are fears that inflation is just around the corner. The prices of imports and commodities may be rising, and prices generally may be up 5%, but wage increases are far behind. People will just cut back. That is what they did when commodities rose in 2007, which may have started the rot in the first place. A round of price inflation can’t take root unless it is accompanied by wage inflation. Unemployment is taking care of that eventuality.

Demand deflation remains the greatest threat, and ordinary people (that is those who are not in the Westminster Village and neighbouring Commentariat or down in the City) sense this. It is expressed in their private fears about jobs, about wages, about pensions, about their homes. This shows in the polls.

Last week’s Channel 4 New’s YouGov poll of 60 Con/Lab marginals is revealing and should be a clarion call to radicals. It asked respondents what Gordon Brown could do to improve their opinion of him. Taking more radical steps to protect people from the economic crisis, at 44%, was the most popular answer.

On the state of the economy, only a minority (29%) blamed the government for causing the problems, but they think the government’s reaction has been ineffective or counter-productive. Only 12% think that the actions Gordon Brown has taken, or is planning, will improve matters. 24% think they will make things worse. 75% think the government are out of touch with how the economic problems are hitting ordinary people.

In Conservative seats the swing to them is far less than in Labour areas. It is among their previous core vote that the sense that ‘something more radical must be done’ is most pronounced.

Some amongst the Liberal Democrats have been saying that the cuts must come, sooner rather than later. You get the feeling that these people wouldn’t mind being part of a Coalition or even a National Government helping to enable those cuts, taking those ‘tough’ decisions.

Some Labour supporters are openly saying that this would be a good election to lose. That it would be better to let the Conservatives get on with the unpleasant task of cutting expenditure.

To both sets I ask, could this country’s already precarious community relations cope with a Japanese style period of continuing deflation, a doubling of long term unemployment and persistent fall in home values? What role would the far right seize? How long would free trade survive? Quo Europe? How would even the arms-length mutualism of the present welfare state survive declining tax revenues and rising demands on benefits, heath care costs and security?

Some argue that the Conservatives won’t go through with their tough talk. We cannot leave this to chance.

Some say that the Liberal Democrats could moderate Conservative economic policy. The risks are too great.

Some say that there is no alternative, that we have tried extraordinary monetary creation. But QE was devised by bankers to support the banking sector and the stock market in the hope that this support would spill across into the rest of the economy. It hasn’t. Companies may have raised £42 billion in new share capital, but they have cut investment by £45 billion.

Some say that the gilt markets won’t buy anymore gilts. But what is stopping us paying for government commissioned investment, intellectual and physical, by issuing cheques on the Government’s account at the Bank of England – direct money creation, direct demand stimulation operating through ordinary people and not through bonus loving financial intermediaries?

The answer is ‘nothing but the fear of politicians who want to behave like bankers and bankers who want to behave like politicians’.

Our fight is always and everywhere against those who would use deflation and unemployment to achieve power and protect their own interests.

Our fight is always and everywhere to help people take and use power so that they are free from domination; be it the domination of arbitrary decisions or the domination suffered by the hardest pressed, by the un-informed and by the dependent that rises during economic decline.

The paramount task for Liberal Democrats is therefore to avert an Osborne Budget. The society it would lead to, the unemployment and dereliction it would create would wreck lives, tear families apart, divide communities and confiscate freedoms and opportunities from the many to the few.

The second task is to ensure that fiscal and monetary policy after the election continues to stimulate economic activity in the short term by compensating for insufficient private investment, replacing depleted demand with the necessary public led and commissioned investment in infrastructure projects, small and large, physical and intellectual, that will provide longer term economic activity, opportunities and capacities.

And in Birmingham this weekend we should declare loudly and persistently that this is our stance now and after the election – whatever the result – so that they know what they get with their vote and they know where we stand if the Commons is balanced.

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”

Wise words from Molly, the "economics speaker for the green party" (here writing on her own behalf)

I'm struggling to understand what has happened with the Icesave debacle. It seems to me a fairly open-and-shut case. A bunch of naive but self-interested investors, egged on by internet and media commentators who made their living from touting risky financial ventures, put their money into banks outside our national jurisdiction. It is the first rule of money that the higher the return the higher the risk. Their gamble did not pay off and they lost their money.

This much makes sense. The bit I find hard to follow is why anybody who did not take the same risk, who did not enjoy the same returns, who invested their own money closer to home, perhaps in a secure, mutual savings institution now has to contribute to recompensing the high-risk investors for their loss. How is this different from innocent bystanders having to club together to repay a drunken gambler for a misguided punt on the National?

Now let's look at it from the Icelandic side. The ordinary people of Iceland have no doubt going about their ordinary business - catching fish, wallowing in hot pools, enjoying mud massages applied by lowly paid Baltic workers, whatever they get up to to keep themselves sane through the long dark winters. They had no democratic control over the activities of their Viking raiders, who sucked massive amounts of capital into their country from the unstable global economy. Anybody daft enough to invest anything significant in a company apparently domiciled in such a minute and wind-blown volcanic island was surely due for a catastrophic fall at some point.

But now these same self-respecting Icelanders are expected to put their hands in their pockets to compensate foreign governments whose foreign citizens made bad choices. And this is no small amount of compensation. If you add together the £2.3bn. offered to the UK government in the latest negotiations and the £1bn. offered to the Dutch and divide the total by Iceland's tiny 300,000 population you soon realise that every pensioner, worker, and child has to find £11,000 to support this compensation. I wonder how many of the individual investors in the UK and Netherlands lost so much.

The prime lesson from the past two years of credit crisis has been that the gains have been privatised while the losses remain with the public. The Icelandic public are rebelling against this law; we should do the same.

The US wants to deny that Turkey's slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 was genocide. But the evidence is there, in a hilltop orphanage near Beirut

The unmarked grave at Antoura for the bones that were found there in 1993

It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children, Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children – between three and 15 years old – who lived in the crowded dormitory of this ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.

Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese hilltop village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic, appalling tale of brutality against small and defenceless children whose families had already been murdered by Turkish forces at the height of the First World War, some of whom were to recall how they were forced to grind up and eat the skeletons of their dead fellow child orphans in order to survive starvation.

Jemal Pasha, one of the architects of the 1915 genocide, and – alas – Turkey's first feminist, Halide Edip Adivar, helped to run this orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names, forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to speak Armenian. The Antoura Lazarist college priests have recorded how its original Lazarist teachers were expelled by the Turks and how Jemal Pasha presented himself at the front door with his German bodyguard after a muezzin began calling for Muslim prayers once the statue of the Virgin Mary had been taken from the belfry.

Hitherto, the argument that Armenians suffered a genocide has rested on the deliberate nature of the slaughter. But Article II of the 1951 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide specifically states that the definition of genocide – "to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" – includes "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group". This is exactly what the Turks did in Lebanon. Photographs still exist of hundreds of near-naked Armenian children performing physical exercises in the college grounds. One even shows Jemal Pasha standing on the steps in 1916, next to the young and beautiful Halide Adivar who – after some reluctance – agreed to run the orphanage.

Before he died in 1989, Karnig Panian – who was six years old when he arrived at Antoura in 1916 – recorded in Armenian how his own name was changed and how he was given a number, 551, as his identity. "At every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans, when the Turkish flag was lowered, 'Long Live General Pasha!' was recited. That was the first part of the ceremony. Then it was time for punishment for the wrongdoers of the day. They beat us with the falakha [a rod used to beat the soles of the feet], and the top-rank punishment was for speaking Armenian."

Panian described how, after cruel treatment or through physical weakness, many children died. They were buried behind the old college chapel. "At night, the jackals and wild dogs would dig them up and throw their bones here and there ... at night, kids would run out to the nearby forest to get apples or any fruits they could find – and their feet would hit bones. They would take these bones back to their rooms and secretly grind them to make soup, or mix them with grain so they could eat them as there was not enough food at the orphanage. They were eating the bones of their dead friends."

Using college records, Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Lazarite Antoura college, wrote in the school's magazine in 1947 that "the Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab or Turkish names. Their new names always kept the initials of the names in which they were baptised. Thus Haroutioun Nadjarian was given the name Hamed Nazih, Boghos Merdanian became Bekir Mohamed, to Sarkis Safarian was given the name Safouad Sulieman."

Lebanese-born Armenian-American electrical engineer Missak Kelechian researches Armenian history as a hobby and hunted down a privately printed and very rare 1918 report by an American Red Cross officer, Major Stephen Trowbridge, who arrived at the Antoura college after its liberation by British and French troops and who spoke to the surviving orphans. His much earlier account entirely supports that of Father Joppin's 1949 research.

"Every vestige, and as far as possible every memory, of the children's Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. Turkish names were assigned and the children were compelled to undergo the rites prescribed by Islamic law and tradition ... Not a word of Armenian or Kurdish was allowed. The teachers and overseers were carefully trained to impress Turkish ideas and customs upon the lives of the children and to catechize [sic] them regularly on ... the prestige of the Turkish race."

Halide Adivar, later to be lauded by The New York Times as "the Turkish Joan of Arc" – a description that Armenians obviously questioned – was born in Constantinople in 1884 and attended an American college in the Ottoman capital. She was twice married and wrote nine novels – even Trowbridge was to admit that she was "a lady of remarkable literary ability" – and served as a woman officer in Mustafa Ataturk's Turkish army of liberation after the First World War. She later lived in both Britain and France.

And it was Kelechian yet again who found Adivar's long-forgotten and self-serving memoirs, published in New York in 1926, in which she recalls how Jemal Pasha, commander of the Turkish 4th Army in Damascus, toured Antoura orphanage with her. "I said: 'You have been as good to Armenians as it is possible to be in these hard days. Why do you allow Armenian children to be called by Moslim [sic] names? It looks like turning the Armenians into Moslims, and history some day will revenge it on the coming generation of Turks.' 'You are an idealist,' he answered gravely and like all idealists lack a sense of reality ... This is a Moslem orphanage and only Moslem orphans are allowed.'" According to Adivar, Jemal Pasha said that he "cannot bear to see them die in the streets" and promised they would go "back to their people" after the war.

Adivar says she told the general that: "I will never have anything to do with such an orphanage" but claims that Jemal Pasha replied: "You will if you see them in misery and suffering, you will go to them and not think for a moment about their names and religion." Which is exactly what she did.

Later in the war, however, Adivar spoke to Talaat Pasha, the architect of the 20th century's first holocaust, and recalled how he almost lost his temper when discussing the Armenian "deportations" (as she put it), saying: "Look here, Halide ... I have a heart as good as yours, and it keeps me awake at night to think of the human suffering. But that is a personal thing, and I am here on this earth to think of my people and not of my sensibilities ... There was an equal number of Turks and Moslems massacred during the [1912] Balkan war, yet the world kept a criminal silence. I have the conviction that as long as a nation does the best for its own interests, and succeeds, the world admires it and thinks it moral. I am ready to die for what I have done, and I know that I shall die for it."

The suffering of which Talaat Pasha spoke so chillingly was all too evident to Trowbridge when he himself met the orphans of Antoura. Many had seen their parents murdered and their sisters raped. Levon, who came from Malgara, was driven from his home with his sisters aged 12 and 14. The girls were taken by Kurds – allied to the Turks – as "concubines" and the boy was tortured and starved, Trowbridge records. He was eventually forced by his captors into the Antoura orphanage.

Ten-year-old Takhouhi – her name means "queen" in Armenian and she was from a rich background – from Rodosto on the Sea of Marmara was put with her family on a freight train to Konia. Two of her two brothers died in the truck, both parents caught typhus – they died in the arms of Takhouhi and her oldest brother in Aleppo – and she was eventually taken from him by a Turkish officer, given the Muslim name of Muzeyyan and ended up in Antoura. When Trowbridge suggested that he would try to find someone in Rodosto and return her family's property to her, he said she replied: "I don't want any of those things if I cannot find my brother again." Her brother was later reported to have died in Damascus.

Trowbridge records many other tragedies from the children he found at Antoura, commenting acidly that Halide "and Djemal [sic] Pasha delighted in having their photographs taken on the steps of the orphanage ... posing as the leaders of Ottoman modernism. Did they realise what the outside world would think of those photographs?" According to Trowbridge's account, only 669 of the children finally survived, 456 of them Armenian, 184 of them Kurds, along with 29 Syrians. Talaat Pasha did indeed die for his sins. He was assassinated by an Armenian in Berlin in 1922 – his body was later returned to Turkey on the express orders of Adolf Hitler. Jemal Pasha was murdered in the Turkish town of Tiflis. Halide Edip Adivar lived in England until 1939 when she returned to Turkey, became a professor of English literature, was elected to the Turkish parliament and died in 1964 at the age of 80.

It was only in 1993 that the bones of the children were discovered, when the Lazarite Fathers dug the foundations for new classrooms. What was left of the remains were moved respectfully to the little cemetery where the college's priests lie buried and put in a single, deep grave. Kelechian helped me over a 5ft wall to look at this place of sadness, shaded by tall trees. Neither name-plate nor headstone marks their mass grave.

The majority of the UK's import emissions are released in rapidly industrialising parts of the developing world such as China. Photograph: Stringer Shanghai/Reuters

 

 

Britain's demand for imported goods is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions abroad than any other European country, according to a new study published today.

 

The report shows that 253m tonnes of carbon dioxide are released overseas each year in the manufacture of products bound for UK shores, the equivalent of 4.3 tonnes per person. The average Briton's carbon footprint is 9.7 tonnes, not including emissions from goods.

 

Only the US and Japan have higher emissions linked to their imports, at 699m tonnes and 284m tonnes of carbon dioxide per year respectively, the study found.

 

The majority of the emissions are released in rapidly industrialising parts of the developing world, such as China and India.

 

The study, by scientists at the Carnegie Institute of Washington in California, highlights the unresolved issue of responsibility for carbon dioxide that is released to make products for foreign markets.

 

Under the Kyoto protocol, emission targets apply to the country where the gases are produced. But China has so far resisted binding emissions targets, as it does not accept responsibility for emissions associated with making goods that are exported to wealthy nations.

 

Previous studies, by the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research last year and Oxford University in 2007, have found that the UK is "outsourcing" much of its carbon emissions for the manufacture of goods to China.

 

For this study, Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira used published data on international trade from 2004 to build up a picture of how goods moved between 113 countries or regions and 57 industrial sectors, including machinery, vehicles, chemicals and food. By allocating carbon emissions to products and sources, they calculated the net emissions linked to countries imports and exports.

 

"Instead of looking at carbon dioxide emissions only in terms of what is released inside our borders, we also looked at the amount of carbon dioxide released during the production of the things that we consume," said Caldeira.

 

Over one-third of the carbon emissions linked to goods used in many European countries were actually released in developing countries, the study shows. Imports to Germany and France were responsible for 233m tonnes and 170m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions abroad respectively. Switzerland "outsourced" more than half of its carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

"Just like the electricity you use in your home, we found that products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan and the US cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China," said Davis. Nearly one-quarter of China's annual carbon dioxide emissions, some 1.4bn tonnes, come from the manufacture of products and services that are ultimately exported, the report adds.

 

 

 

Jan Minx, an expert in environmental economics at the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York, said the study's system of attributing emissions - based on which country's consumption causes emissions rather than the country where the emissions are released - can help identify when international agreements to cut greenhouse gas emissions are being undermined. Some countries, the UK included, are increasingly becoming service-based economies, but they still import goods from countries that rely heavily on fossil fuels and have no binding emissions targets. "It's not intentional, but it can have a detrimental effect on international agreements," Minx said.

 

Obliging countries to cut carbon emissions beyond their national borders is fraught with political and practical difficulties, but this should not stop import-related emissions being taken into consideration in negotiations to cut emissions, Minx said. "It's most feasible for a country to reduce emissions on their own territory, but this kind of accounting system can provide extra information for policymakers," he added.

 

Adopting such an accounting system for greenhouse gas emissions could be fairer to developing countries, such as China and India, which rely heavily on fossil fuels to manufacture products for wealthy foreigners, the researchers said.

 

"Apart from an opportunity to inform effective climate policy, consumption-based accounting of emissions provides grounding for ethical arguments that the most developed countries - as the primary beneficiaries of emissions and with greater ability to pay - should lead the global mitigation effort," the authors write.

Once more we have to forget the Armenian Holocaust – the first of the 20th century – in order to appease the Turks. Bill Clinton did it.

George W Bush spinelessly caved in to the Turkish generals. And now our favourite Nobel prize winner – another brave president who promised to acknowledge the Armenian genocide if he was elected and then declined to do so – went whinging and whining to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington and pleaded with them not to tell the truth about the savage rape and murder of 1.5 million Armenian civilians by the Turks in 1915. Good for the committee that it did not give in. But it will do no good.

Sure, the Turkish ambassador has been recalled from Washington in a huff. But equally certain is that there will be no vote on the genocide by the full House of Representatives. And if there is, there'll never be a vote in the Senate. Obama will help see to that. The man who wanted change doesn't want change on the little matter of a genocide that led directly to the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews.

The events in Washington prove a few things. The Armenian American community have a more powerful and wealthier lobby than ever before. More seriously – for the Turks – is that this year Turkey did not have the Israeli lobby behind it. In the past, Israel, which disgracefully claims that the Armenian Holocaust was not a genocide, has supported its close ally Turkey. But this year, Israel and Turkey have fallen out and the Israelis are still miffed at Turkey's condemnation of the bloodbath in Gaza.

The Turks sent their generals to bully Bush last time round. This time, the Turkish Foreign Minister warned that "Turkish-US ties are going through a very important phase in which they need strategic co-operation at the highest level in their history." The message is simple. Acknowledge the genocide, and the US will lose its airbases in Turkey and the Turkish roads its military convoys use into Iraq.

The fact, unfortunately, is that these roads are the very highways down which the Armenians were sent on their death marches in 1915. That's not mentioned, of course. Our faithful Turkish ally might even pack up its support for the US in Afghanistan, where they are helping fight "Obama's war". But Robert Gates is still in Washington to remind congressmen what he said last year; that America needed "those roads and so on". Well, let's just hope the American troops don't halt their convoys and dig in the fields around those roads in the coming years. The skeletons are still there in their tens of thousands.

One wonders what would happen if Germany suddenly decided that the Nazi Holocaust was not a genocide. Would Chancellor Merkel get away with it? Would Obama lobby that Germany should be allowed to get away with such an obscenity? Perhaps it's worth remembering that in 1939, Hitler asked his generals – before setting off into Poland to murder the millions of Jews in eastern Europe – a simple question: "Who now remembers the Armenians?" Well, Hitler got the answer he would have wanted from Obama this week.

A British court issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni on war crimes charges but withdrew it on finding she had cancelled a planned trip to Britain. Photograph: Gil Cohen Magen/Reuters

Changes in the law to remove the threat of foreign politicians becoming victims of "politically motivated" war crime arrests every time they visit Britain have been postponed until after the general election. The justice secretary, Jack Straw, said the decision to delay immediate legislation had been taken because the government recognised it was a controversial issue that involved the long-standing right of private prosecution.

The Israeli government said it was disappointed, but pro-Palestinian MPs said Straw was right to reject its pressure for rushed changes to British law.

Expectations that a change in the law was imminent were raised yesterday by a signed article by Gordon Brown in the Daily Telegraph which backed proposals to end the current system under which magistrates are obliged to consider applications for an arrest warrant for crimes under international law presented by a private individual.

"The only question for me is whether our purpose is best served by a process where an arrest warrant for the gravest crimes can be issued on the slightest evidence," wrote Brown. "As we have seen, there is now significant danger of such a provision being exploited by politically-motivated organisations and individuals."

Ministers say they want the right to prosecute in such "universal jurisdiction" cases to be restricted to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), where they involve offences committed outside Britain, by people who are not British nationals.

This will raise the bar for such arrest warrants to be issued, as the CPS will have to consider whether there is a realistic likelihood of a successful prosecution. But when the statement was made by Straw to MPs he disclosed that change will not happen before the general election: "Rather than legislating now, we are going to seek views on the proposals we are minded to make."

A short consultation will now take place involving the Commons justice committee, with a closing date of 6 April.

As the change will require primary legislation, this is too late for any move before the general election.

The Conservatives said they will vote to back a new law, but more than 110 backbench MPs have signed an early day motion opposing the change.

The former Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, cancelled a trip to London earlier this year after an arrest warrant was issued by Westminster magistrates for alleged crimes committed during last year's military operation in Gaza. The former US secretary of state, Colin Powell, has also expressed alarm about his possible arrest in Britain.

Israel welcomed the intention to change the law, but was concerned about further delays after having been promised by the government that it would be fast-tracked.

Ron Prosor, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, said: "The engine is finally being revved up.

"However, we are wary that this legislation could end up getting stuck in the crawler lane, or perhaps run out of fuel. Hopefully, the coming weeks will see action materialise from intention."

MP Richard Burden, chairman of the British-Palestine parliamentary group, said: "I am pleased that the government recognises the need to properly consider any proposed changes."

The report claims that cocaine production is destroying large swathes of the Colombian rainforest. Photograph: Ricardo Mazalan/AP

The home affairs select committee (HASC) yesterday published its report on the cocaine trade, and what a woeful job they have done. It is hard to believe that this committee was the same one that in 2002 called for the government the government to initiate talks at the UN level to discuss "alternatives ways – including the possibility of legalisation and regulation – to tackle the global drugs dilemma". The current report lacks evidence, contradicts current expert thinking and, frankly, panders to a "tough on drugs" stance that by their own admission does not work.

There are a number of serious problems with the report itself, but from Release's position it is important that two points in particular are addressed.

Firstly, the environmental costing in the report is truly disingenuous. The report in its summary boldly states: "For each gram of cocaine consumed, 4 sq m of tropical forest is destroyed." The HASC points to the submission from the Colombian government that if consumers were made aware of how their drug money was used "they would not only rethink their cocaine habit but actively support the eradication of coca crops from Colombia".

Release has previously pointed out that the environmental argument that cocaine use and production are destroying large swathes of the rainforest is a distorted view. The damage caused to the rainforest is a direct result of the decision to use crop eradication as a method of tackling the production of coca. Sebastian Saville, executive director at Release, was recently invited as part of an international delegation to witness the spraying of crops through aerial fumigation in Colombia. He saw first-hand the devastation caused by spraying poisonous herbicides, ones that would not be tolerated for use in the US or EU, in an attempt by the Colombian government, supported by the US, to destroy coca. In reality, this aerial fumigation causes long-term damage to the land – destroying both coca and other vegetation – making it impossible to grow any crop for a number of years. This forces farmers to move further into the rainforest to locate new land and also to avoid detection by the government.

If HASC want this issue to be taken seriously, then it should have presented all the facts and evidence on this matter. Our colleagues at Transnational Institute have done some great work in this area. It is also worth watching the documentary film Shovelling Water where one can actually see the disastrous effects of this futile political gesture.

Secondly, the position taken by the committee in respect of the role of sentencing is frankly ridiculous. The HASC criticises the length of custodial sentences, stating that 47 months for the supply or intent to supply cocaine "may be tending to leniency". This is at direct odds with the opinion of the Sentencing Advisory Panel (SAP), which last year highlighted that current sentencing for offences involving drugs was disproportionate when considering other more serious offences such as violent offences.

The SAP consultation paper compared the average sentence for importation and exportation of drugs (84 months) with a number of other offences including death by dangerous driving (44 months), GBH with intent to wound (50.1 months) and rape (79.7 months) – it is shocking that a violent sexual attack is treated less seriously than drug trafficking. Furthermore, SAP identified that the evidence shows lengthy sentences have little deterrent effect, especially considering the profits to be made from drug dealing. It is surprising, considering the level of academic and legal expertise on the Sentencing Advisory Panel, that HASC in their report paid no attention to the consultation paper on sentencing for drug offences.

Finally, and continuing on the sentencing issue, the HASC stated that: "We strongly believe that, if custodial sentences are handed down to cocaine users, they should be sufficiently long to ensure that the user can complete a treatment programme in prison." There are so many things flawed about this statement but, most importantly, to suggest that one of the considerations of sentencing should be the completion of a treatment programme is frankly outrageous – people who need treatment for health problems should not be in prison, and that should have been the recommendation.

It is time that politicians realised the futility of pursuing the current strategy of prohibition – a strategy that has serious and harmful consequences for the whole of society. A proper debate must be had by the public, the media and politicians about how best to regulate and control all drugs. The HASC report dismisses the notion of legal regulation (which it incorrectly refers to as decriminalisation) but gives no good reason as to why this model should not be given serious consideration.

Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle.  Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH₄ [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is  is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).  Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below).  No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

The new Science study, led by University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is “Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf” (subs. req’d).  The must-read National Science Foundation press release (click here), warns “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”  The NSF is normally a very staid organization.  If they are worried, everybody should be.

It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm.

Note:  As part of the Climate Science Project, I’m making this post as definitive as I can by including other recent scientific findings on the tundra.  Please add other relevant links in the comments.

The lead author, Natalia Shakhova, explains the new findings in this video:

NSF explains:

“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”

Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.

“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”

Shakhova notes that the Earth’s geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During the Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.

“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”

Last August I discussed findings by German and British scientists “that more than 250 plumes of bubbles of methane gas are rising from the seabed of the West Spitsbergen continental margin in the Arctic, in a depth range of 150 to 400 metres” (see “So many amplifying methane feedbacks, so little time to stop them all” and figure on right).

A lead researcher of that work said, “Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started.”

But the situation in the ESAS is far, far more dicey, as NSF explains:

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn’t have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.

“The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times,” Shakhova said. “The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”

And we also know that a key trigger for accelerated warming in the Arctic region is the loss of sea ice.

A 2008 study by leading tundra experts found “Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss.” The lead author is David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), whom I interviewed for my book and interviewed again via e-mail in 2008. The study’s ominous conclusion:

We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland….

In other words, a continuation of the recent trend in sea ice loss may triple Arctic warming, causing large emissions in carbon dioxide and methane from the tundra this century.

Oh, and the Arctic warming could lead to another feedback according to a 2008 Science article:  “Continuation of current trends in shrub and tree expansion could further amplify this atmospheric heating 2-7 times.”  The point is that if you convert a white landscape to a boreal forest, the surface suddenly starts collecting a lot more solar energy (see “Tundra 3: Forests and fires foster feedbacks“).

That trend is occurring now, as seen in these two photos from a recent ScienceNews article, “Boreal forests shift north.”

“Upper photo taken in 1962 shows tundra-dominated mountain slope in Siberian Urals. A 2004 photo of the same site, below, shows conifers were setting up dense stand of forest.”

Another major study warns that the warming-driven northward march of vegetation poses yet another threat to the tundra:  “Greater fire activity will likely accompany temperature-related increases in shrub-dominated tundra predicted for the 21^st century and beyond.”  The concern is not so much the direct emissions from burning tundra, but the albedo change.

And all that warming would cause massive melting of the tundra and faster emissions release. That must be avoided at all cost, since the tundra feedback, coupled with the climate-carbon-cycle feedbacks that the IPCC models, could easily take us to the unmitigated catastrophe of 1000 ppm.

The good news is that a 2009 NOAA-led study found “Near-zero CH₄ growth in the Arctic during 2008 suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH₄ hydrates” (see “Is it just too damn late?“)

The bad news is we clearly are on very thin ice.  Literally.

Lawrence revised and updated his 2005 analysis of tundra loss under different emissions scenarios (after some scientists criticized the original work) in this 2008 study, “Sensitivity of a model projection of near-surface permafrost degradation to soil column depth and representation of soil organic matter” (subs. req’d).  The updated analysis still found: “the warming is enough to drive near-surface permafrost extent sharply down by 2100.”

I had asked Lawrence if it was still reasonable to keep using this figure in my presentation, since it is so much easier to understand than the figures in his new paper.

He said, “Using the old figure is still fine as long as one mentions the caveats that permafrost is probably degrading a bit too rapidly in the original.

So I will certainly use that caveat, though, of course, I will also caveat the caveat by saying the slightly slower rate of permafrost degradation does not include Lawrence’s new analysis on the accelerated warming of the permafrost due to sea ice loss (or, for that matter, the accelerated warming of the permafrost due to faster shrub encroachment).

Note that the “B1″ scenario stabilizes CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm — and the near-surface permafrost permafrost (down to 11 feet) plummets from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million.  If concentrations hit 850 ppm in 2100 (A2), permafrost would shrink to just 800,000 square miles.

And while these projections were done with one of the world’s most sophisticated climate system models, the calculations do not include the feedback effect of the released carbon from the permafrost. That is to say, the CO2 concentrations in the model rise only as a result of direct emissions from humans, with no extra emissions counted from soils or tundra. Thus they are conservative numbers–or overestimates–of how much CO2 concentrations have to rise to trigger irreversible melting.

In short, the would-be point of atmospheric stabilization, 550 ppm isn’t stable at all — it is past the point of no return. We must stay well below 450 ppm to save the tundra and hence the climate.  The new research underscores that conclusion, especially since the planet will keep warming (slowly) for decades even once we slash emissions to near zero.

And that means we must begin a staggering amount of clean energy deployment as soon as possible (see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution“).

Wake up media and politicians who are being duped by the anti-science disinformers into thinking there is any serious doubt about the catastrophe we face on our current path of unrestricted emissions!

UPDATE:  WWF’s Nick Sundt points out:

A report released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Abrupt Climate Change, said in December 2008 (during the Bush Administration) that warming in the Arctic could cause sea levels to rise substantially beyond scientists’ previous predictions and could result in massive releases of methane.  The report said that the “rapid release to the atmosphere of methane trapped in permafrost and on continental margins” was among “four types of abrupt change in the paleoclimatic record that stand out as being so rapid and large in their impact that if they were to recur, they would pose clear risks to society in terms of our ability to adapt.”

When a dog soils the carpet, some folk believe that if you press his nose in it you can teach him not to repeat the offence. I was never one for that approach with my golden retriever, Melpomene. Certainly, it does not appear to work with government ministers.

After rubbing the government's nose in its torture cover-up in the case of Binyam Mohamed, we gave the government a chance to come clean this week in the case of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a man I met last week in Lahore, Pakistan. Madni was rendered through Diego Garcia to 92 days of particularly gruesome torture in Egypt, followed by time in Bagram and Guantánamo, before being belatedly cleared of any crime and sent home.

The British, sad to say, were again mixed up in all this. We suggested last August that they simply admit it.

In December, a lawyer for the government said they had sought high and low for anything relevant. He denied, in unambiguous terms, that there was any evidence that should be disclosed regarding this misconduct:

"The defendant, having given the most anxious scrutiny to the conduct of these searches and to their results, is satisfied that neither [the law] nor the defendant's duty of candour requires the disclosure to the court in these proceedings of anything that has emerged from those searches."

A hearing was set for the case on 4 March 2010. At 5:21pm on 3 March, after the close of business, the government changed its tune. The government now admitted to the court that it was in "possession of documents which have a bearing … on whether any British or American authorities were mixed up in wrongdoing …"

In plain English, this means that there may be – as usual – a smoking gun that will prove highly embarrassing to David Miliband.

So what did the government propose to do about it? Perhaps reveal this evidence to Madni and the British public, make a formal apology, and set rules in place to ensure that we are never again mixed up in a kidnapping that leads to the torture chamber?

Sadly, no. First, the government suggested that the trial of the case should begin on 7 June. That conveniently falls four days after the deadline for a general election.

Second, the government came up with a novel wheeze for keeping the material as far from the public view as possible. Under the current – already Orwellian – procedure, Madni would have his own special advocate who could see the materials but could not speak to him. Rather than this, the government wanted to appoint a "friend of the court" to see the evidence, and allow nobody from Madni's team to see it at all.

Third, the government decided that we should insulate politicians from the inevitable embarrassment that arises when torture evidence is ordered disclosed. Rather than requiring Miliband to certify that he has produced all the relevant evidence, and file a certificate explaining why it needs to be kept secret, we are told that the foreign secretary need do nothing. Instead, we should rely on the director of the Secret Intelligence Service to produce only such evidence as he – the spook – thinks "necessary" to the court's resolution of the issues.

The current government, which once trumpeted the Freedom of Information Act, has lost the plot. Torture is terrible, but the systematic cover-up of criminal wrongdoing is a far greater threat to the fabric of our nation. Rather than learn a lesson from Binyam Mohamed, the government seems intent on soiling the carpet some more. One can only hope that the judges are well-versed in obedience training.

Cory writes:

Since I posted yesterday about the UK LibDem Peers' introduction of a pro-web-censorship amendment to the Digital Economy Bill, the Peers have withdrawn their proposal and entered a revised one jointly with Conservative Lords.

Unfortunately, this amendment is even worse in some ways. In a posting on Liberal Democratic Voice, Lord Clement-Jones explains that his amendment is intended to attack "web-lockers," such as YouSendIt and RapidShare:

The Digital Economy Bill, as currently drafted, only deals with a certain type of copyright infringement, namely peer-to-peer file sharing. Around 35% of all online copyright infringement takes place on non peer-to-peer sites and services. Particular threats concern "cyberlockers" which are hosted abroad.

There are websites which consistently infringe copyright, many of them based outside the UK in countries such as Russia and beyond the jurisdiction of the UK courts. Many of these websites refuse to stop supplying access to illegal content.

It is a result of this situation that the Liberal Democrats have tabled an amendment in the Lords which has the support of the Conservatives that enables the High Court to grant an injunction requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to sites.

The idea that web-lockers should be blocked nationwide by court order is a bad idea:

1. Web-lockers are useful for more than piracy. I routinely use web-lockers for my own business and personal affairs. When I need to send a large video of my daughter playing to my parents, a web-locker is the simplest way of doing this. Web-lockers are also a vital part of how I produce my audiobooks and podcasts, since they allow me to privately share large pre-release audio-files with readers, editors and publishers. Web-lockers are also how I communicate with my attorneys and accountants for transmission of sensitive documents, such as scans of my passport and bills.

2. The reason web-lockers are useful for piracy is because they support privacy. The entertainment industry's principle objection to web-lockers is that their contents are private, and cannot be readily survielled by copyright enforcement tools. When I send a video of my daughter in the bath to her grandparents, the only people who can download that video are the people who have access to the private URL for the locker. This is the same mechanism that infringers use to avoid detection: upload an infringing file and share the URL with friends. You can't fix the web-locker problem without attacking the right of Internet users to privately share large files with one another.

3. The establishment of a national blocklist is itself a bad idea. Creating a facility whereby ISPs can be compelled to block entire websites is a bad idea on its face. The security problems raised by such a facility are grave (a hijacker could use it to block the BBC, or Parliament, or Google), and the temptation to extend this facility for use in other civil actions, (say, libel) will be great. Also, as my friend Lilian Edwards has pointed out, the LibDem proposal does not stipulate how long sites must be blocked for, nor what the procedure is for unblocking them.

4. There is no evidence that this will work. Dedicated infringers have shown a willingness and capability to use technologies such as proxies to evade firewalls. These proxies -- many of them legitimate businesses at home and abroad -- are cheap and easy to use, and make it trivial to evade ISP-level filtering. However, "good guys" (small traders, individuals wishing to share private material with friends and family) should not have to bear the expense and difficulty of evading the Great Firewall of Britain to do legitimate business on the net.

5. This is bad for the nation. The only country to enact anti-web-locker legislation to date is South Korea, which brought in a similar measure to the LibDem proposal as a condition of its Free Trade Agreement with the USA, whose IP chapter focused largely on locking down the Korean Internet. In the time since the US-Korea FTA, Korea has slipped badly in the global league tables for ICT competitiveness, going from being a worldwide leader in technology to an also-ran.

I have sent a version of these comments to both of the LibDem peers using ORG's Write to Them links. I hope you'll get in touch with them, too. This is a grave blunder for the supposed "party of liberty," especially on the eve of a national election.