February 03, 2010 08:41pm
The drip, drip bad news for the IPCC continues. This Times of London piece has Greenpeace calling for Rajendra Pachauri’s head. Greenpeace!
But that’s not what’s notable in the story. To me, It’s Pachauri’s utter obliviousness to the quicksand that is swallowing him. Here he is asserting his gravitas:
My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [[to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.
Yeah, and Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972. Not that I’m comparing Pachauri’s mistakes to Tricky Dick’s sins. The point is, in public life, new information about a person sometimes comes to light that casts you in a new light. Or shreds your credibility. (And that can happen more by the way you handle those revelations, which I think is the case with Pachauri.) I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that John Edwards was a very viable presidential candidate. It wasn’t that long ago that Tiger Woods was…oh, you get the point.
The only way Pachauri claws out of the quicksand is if he changes his tune and stops sounding like a peevish victim. He’s got to man up and show some contrition. So far, it seems pretty clear that’s not about to happen.
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Category:
IPCC,
climate change
February 03, 2010 12:42pm
Via the International Institute for Strategic Studies, this is a pretty interesting take on the recent Bin Laden/climate change episode:
Late last week, Osama Bin Laden came out with a new audiotape accusing the US for causing climate change. He says: “Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury – the phenomenon is an actual fact.” The following statement could as easily have been spoken by Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, or other anti-capatalists:
One of the themes that ran through the Copenhagen Conference was the global divide between rich and poor, north and south. As many studies have borne out, climate change will do greater harm to the poorest countries. Because these countries also have the least responsibility for historical emissions, they feel they yet again being harmed by forces beyond their control. This theme links climate change to a series of other grievances that the poor world holds against the rich, like agricultural protectionism, globalization, colonialism, and others.
What goes unmentioned in this post is how these grievances are likely to be magnified if future climate negotiations circumvent the UN, which is what may end up happening post Copenhagen. (Of course, developing countries such as China and India would be among the exclusive players, because they are among the world’s major emitters, but somehow I don’t think that’ll keep the world’s “poorest countries” from feeling dissed and doubly aggrieved.)
Regardless, for those of us who had trouble fathoming the purpose of Bin Laden’s opining on climate change, perhaps he was test driving a future AQ talking point against the West. This is what I think can be inferred from the last part of that International Institute for Strategic Studies post:
For the last several years, when analysts have discussed the security threats of climate change, we’ve talked about it “as an accelerant of instability or conflict” or as a new competition over scarce energy, water, or food resources. Perhaps we should now begin to look at it as a new area of grievance between the rich and the poor. If droughts in Sudan are blamed on global warming, and Sudanese blame the US for the emissions that caused global warming, then a logical next step would be for the Sudanese to engage in action that would cause the US to stop emitting. Potential actions could include taking oil company workers hostage or even direct acts of terrorism. A good way to defuse this animosity would be for the rich world to fully engage in a global climate treaty that is seen as fair, equitable, and just around the world.
Something to keep in mind if global climate talks get taken out of the UN framework.
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Category:
climate change,
climate security
February 03, 2010 09:26am
Dwight Garner in today’s NYT:
I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.
Science journalism at its finest, is what I’m hearing about this highly anticipated book.
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Category:
science journalism
February 03, 2010 01:21am
I just don’t understand why academic anthropologists are so viscerally opposed to the Pentagon’s Human Terrain program. If injecting cultural sensitivity into the military can defuse tensions and reduce conflict in a war zone, isn’t that a good thing? I can appreciate the ethical concerns, but from what little I’ve followed on this, it seems that the profession’s leading body isn’t interested in working with the military to address those concerns. (There are also operational shortcomings but that’s another issue.)
The question Danger Room posed a few months back still stands unanswered:
Are there any conditions under which anthropologists can work with the military?
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Category:
Anthropology
