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A couple of items on global warming. First Debra Saunders.
… — Enough with the worst-case scenarios. Al Gore has a penchant for repeating the most dire predictions on global warming – and not always accurately. As the Times of London reported last week, Gore told a Copenhagen audience, that according to a Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, “there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
Except Maslowski told the Times he had no idea where Gore got that idea. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Polls show Americans are cooling on global warming. It could be that voters don’t buy into the all-bad scenarios predicted by Gore and company.
More surprising than Saunders, is a piece by Alexander Cockburn in The Nation, one of the most obnoxiously liberal magazines in the country.
The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.
Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. Coolers transmuted into Warmers, and it became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.
Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker. …
Spengler covers events in Central and South Asia.
History speaks of a Pax Romana, a Pax Britannica, and a Pax Americana – but no other namable eras of sustained peace, for the simple reason cited by Henry Kissinger: nothing maintains peace except hegemony and the balance of power. The balancing act always fails, though, as it did in Europe in 1914, and as it will in Central and South Asia precisely a century later. The result will be suppurating instability in the region during the next two years and a slow but deadly drift toward great-power animosity. Those who wanted an end to US hegemony will get what they wished for. But they won’t like it.
“No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” US President Barack Obama told the United Nations on September 23. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” Having renounced hegemony as well as the balance of power, Obama by year-end chose to prop up the power balance in the region with additional American and allied soldiers in Afghanistan. Obama chose the least popular as well as the least effective alternative. The US president’s apparent fecklessness reflects the gravity of the strategic problems in the region.
There is one great parallel, but also one great difference, between the Balkans on the eve of World War I and the witch’s cauldron comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and contiguous territory. The failure of the region’s most populous state – in that case the Ottoman Empire, in this case Pakistan – makes shambles out of the power balance, leaving the initiative in the hands of irredentist radicals who threaten to tug their sponsors among the great powers along behind them. But in 1914, both France and Germany thought it more advantageous to fight sooner rather than later. No matter how great the provocation, both India and China want to postpone any major conflict. The problem is that they may promote minor ones. …
… The Obama administration has antagonized India in the hope of mollifying Pakistani irredentism, just as it has antagonized Israel with the dubious argument that if Israel makes concessions to the divided, ineffectual Palestine Authority, it will be able to mollify Iran. Nothing will assuage the Palestinians, who are failed before coming a state, nor the Pakistanis, whose failure is ineluctable.
As I argued in Asia Times Online on October 20 (When the cat’s away, the mice kill each other), the net effect of America’s fecklessness is to give the Russian Empire an opportunity to stretch a hand out of the geopolitical grave and grasp a last, great opportunity. Russia faces a slow demographic death, but it remains a great power in terms of military technology: its surface-to-air missile systems are as good as anything American can field, and its newest system, the as yet undeployed S-500, may be better, according to a senior American aviation executive. …
Christopher Hitchens draws our attention to South Central Asia also.
… This will continue to get nastier and more corrupt and degrading until we recognize that our long-term ally in Asia is not Pakistan but India. And India is not a country sizzling with self-pity and self-loathing, because it was never one of our colonies or clients. We don’t have to send New Delhi 15 different envoys a month, partly to placate and partly to hector, because the relationship with India isn’t based on hysteria and envy. Alas, though, we send hardly any envoys at all to the world’s largest secular and multicultural democracy, and the country itself gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Nothing will change until this changes.
One reason the Pakistani army coddles the Taliban in Afghanistan is because it has recently been told that the United States will not be deploying there in strength for very much longer. Who can blame them for basing their future plans on this supposition and continuing to dig in for a war with India that we are helping them to prepare for? Meanwhile, though, it is the Afghans who get the lectures about how they need to shape up. “Lots of luck in your senior year” was the breezy way in which the vice president phrased his message to Kabul as I watched. (I wonder how that translates into Pushtun.) Speed the day when the Pakistanis are publicly addressed in the same tones and told that the support they so much despise is finally being withdrawn.
Jimmy Carter’s grandson is running for state legislative office in Georgia. The district encompasses many Jews. Jimmy is now making nice to them. Is there anybody more disgusting than him? Jonah Goldberg has the story in a Corner post.