In a day of historical importance in the history of Australian Party political history, prominent members of the Federal Opposition have resigned their frontbench positions over the issue of the Emissions Trading Policy.

The leading figures here are Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott. Malcolm Turnbull has stood his ground insisting that a contemporary political party must have a policy consistent with the findings of climate science. “Saying we are not going to do anything about climate change is irresponsible.” The expectation now that there will be another vote for the leadership of the Party.

So what is going on here? Firstly, people who draw their information from different sources have different understandings of the world it seems. If this is true, this phenomena is exactly what is happening in the US, indicating that Australia is like the US. I notice the violence connotations employed in some blog comments, which strikes me as both disturbing and undemocratic. I find it astonishing that the political players in the Liberal Party would take this course, and clearly Malcolm Turnbull has taken a stand within the Party as well as in public on climate change. I see in the players something of a rerun of the Republic Referenda politics.

The political reality is a a function of the electoral system and the party base. The numbers will matter, but it may be that some are going to be left without a major party to support. Whatever else might be said it is clear that this is not the way that a political party should rebuild and reposition while undergoing the long night of opposition. I suppose that philosophical/ideological differences have proven the rock on which the development of policy has foundered, and it is particularly interesting it is over the issue of the science of climate.

I will be interested in what the polls have to say.

Guy Rundle at Crikey, before the latest development had the following analysis:

But now politics has re-divided. The hitherto small information/cultural producer class has become a force in its own right, cutting across old economic class divisions and old affiliations. You can see this in a whole lot of processes – the way in a seat like Higgins for example, one can anticipate a lot of people who would vote Liberal in a Liberal-Labor stoush, flowing to the Greens, even with an, erm, interesting candidate like Clive Hamilton.

Socialism in its 20th century form is over, and the question is no longer framed by private-public, worker-company divisions. Increasingly the divisions is between knowledge frameworks – people inside the new global economy, often working mainly with information, who see the world in terms of systems, networks, processes, global entities, as part of a single humanity on the one hand, and those tending to be in the old world of more local, parochial, and fixed ideas of morality, work and social order.

Farmers, sections of the old middle class, the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ etc – people increasingly excluded from the cultural and financial mainstream.

That division now runs smack down the middle of the Liberal Party, which is why the party is on the verge of ceasing to exist as anything other than a shell – and leading to the real possibility of real recombination of the non-Labor forces.

Faced with such dilemmas, parties are lucky if they get people who are smart, resourceful and agile, such as David Cameron or Barack Obama.

The Libs have Malcolm Turnbull and Nick Minchin.

Turnbull simply lacks the political skills to solve this – he’s the equivalent of a colour-blind interior decorator. It was simply a category error for him to imagine he could reshape the party, and lead it at this juncture, a mistake about himself.

Minchin is smarter, and a better politician – and delusional, seeing a fundamentally new politics of humanity and nature through the prism of the Cold War. Whether that is simply because of his limits as a thinker, or a Lear-like self-indulgence at the end of a career matters less than his great error about what he’s doing.

He thinks he’s preserving the conservative core of the party, even at the price of going backwards in election ’10. In fact, he is trapping it in a loop, whereby the marginal and excluded increasingly determine its direction, until it becomes unsellable to the mainstream of 21st century Australia.

At which point even the Liberal Party will realise that it’s dead.

The description of Malcolm Turnbull as “the colour-blind interior decorator” may be spot on.

I wonder whether the analysis of the underlying process is superficial, as it is superior to the usual disconnect between events, processes and embedded systems. My sense, influenced by John Ralston Saul (which I struggle to understand) is that corporative thinking dominates the political landscape.

Fun and games all round it seems.

The contention is now held that climate scientists have cooked the books, even as the climate heats over the long term. It turns out the stolen emails have fingered the scientists as dishonest fiddlers of the figures even as the substantive case remains – so a big political win here for the delusionists and their amoral, corporatist public relations marinated special interest manipulators. Still, if one accepts how the Australian Labor Government is prepared to go to support strategically incompetent coal shovellers exporting carbon emissions for off shore destinations, I imagine principally, but not exclusively China, I wonder why they bother. There is an argument for not pulling the plug on any industry, especially because employees are especially vulnerable, but at the same time the coal industry should have pulled its head out of the sand at least twenty years ago, and with any kind of business competence, other than short term greed should have behaved better.

Who knows what is happening with the Opposition, other than they having some form of cage fight over Emissions Trading Scheme. All that can be said with confidence is that Malcolm Turnbull emerged confident, assertive and remains the Leader for the night. It seems to have been a long day of brawling, scheduled to resume tomorrow. I can’t wait. There is a rumour, apparently promoted by the man himself, that Kevin Andrews in a fit of public service decided to nominate himself as the putative leader. What happened to Joe Hockey, and to Wilson Tuckey?

Yesterday was the second anniversary of the Rudd Labor Government, and must have been one of immense satisfaction. Who knows whether the delusionists in the Opposition, who opposed the Government climate legislation were principled or crazy, but for the moment, and for how long no one knows, the option of the double dissolution (possibly in this case triple dissolution) can be held back in reserve for another day.

Sinclair Davidson, stood his ground at the crease, refusing a drinks break, declared Turnbull clean bowled and suggested:

I would have thought that any cap and trade system would need to await the outcome of the various enquiries into the ClimateGate scandal. We now know the science isn’t settled, we now know the scientists can’t explain the difference between their computer models and reality (from the Tim Flannery interview) and so the argument for immediate action is undermined. This imposing a burden on future generations is simply oppourtunistic – that’s not what they said when the government blew the budget and went into debt.

Notwithstanding, Ben Eltham in Crikey delivered some reverse swing:

One of the biggest problems for contrarian commentators on climate change is getting to grips with the complexity of the subject, buttressed as it is by a vast weight of scientific evidence. Davidson, who trained in economics, appears to have only the sketchiest understanding of climate science, which is perhaps why he was prepared to write in Crikey yesterday that “it is clear, however, that statements suggesting ‘the science is settled’ can no longer be sustained” — a statement nearly identical to recent comments by arch-denialists Nick Minchin and Barnaby Joyce.

Sorry, but the science is settled, and Professor Davidson should know that. Any way you parse it, the existing scientific record overwhelmingly supports a consensus about human-caused global warming.

SJ makes the point at John Quiggin’s Monday Message Board that “the science is never settled” thus cutting through a gordian knot that needed slicing – think the revolution in physics taking place from the middle of the nineteenth century with the contributions of Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr and Feynmann to take an unrepresentative sample.

*****Meantime, whatever they say in baseball, Gavin Schmidt continues to hit them out the ground at Real Climate.
In The Guardian, via Cataillaxy, George Monbiot delivers an mea culpa of sorts. He writes:

It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

Those climate scientists are so inept not being public relations hacks.

Still the reaction in the United States is truly revealing, as it always is these days. Caroline Davies and Suzanne Goldenberg report in The Guardian:

Among the last citadels of climate change deniers – the radio host Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Senator James Inhofe – the emails were touted as evidence of a worldwide scientific conspiracy. Inhoffe said. “They cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.”

Limbaugh said: “I’ve instinctively known this from the get-go, from 20 years ago! The whole thing is made up, and the reason I know it is because liberals are behind it! When they’re pushing something, folks, it’s always bogus. “

Just weird.

Luckily in that country of the mind they have other things to think about, such as the state of the health care and the war in Afghanistan which as in Iraq they are aiming to buy a civil war so that the Afghans can kill each other rather than the invaders.

In some of these issues their consequences might be considered, and the actors might assume an actions informed by a sense of responsibility for those consequences, but that would be too much to expect.

Tomorrow morning is another day:

I expect that Larvatus Prodeo will be following developments as they emerge from the halls of Federal Parliament.

UPDATE:
Ho-hum. Big surprise, via Larvatus Prodeo. Malcolm survives 48-35. Let the comments flood on disunity and stalking horses. One year out from the next Federal Election the Liberals are not looking in good shape.

Questions: Why are not the “conservatives” the conservationists? So what frames the conservative mind?

John Quiggin comments on the manipulation of public opinion:

The leading delusionists are former tobacco lobbyists who have combined the FUD techniques of the tobacco wars with techniques picked up from the creationists. The idea of these criminals giving anybody lectures on ethics is ludicrous.

UPDATE: 26 November 2009

In a day of historical importance in the history of Australian Party political history, prominent members of the Federal Opposition have resigned their frontbench positions over the issue of the Emissions Trading Policy. The leading figures here are Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott. Malcolm Turnbull has stood his ground insisting that a contemporary political party must have a policy consistent with the findings of climate science. “Saying we are not going to do anything about climate change is irresponsible.” The expectation now that there will be another vote for the leadership of the Party.

Since 2006, the East Antarctic icesheet has shown a test loss of ice according to  a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Texas.

The researchers have been studying ocean-icesheet in Antartica interaction for the past seven years using satellite data. The ice sheet was thought to be more stable than the smaller West Antarctic icesheet.

Conclusions from the research are consistent with global warming and rising global sea levels. ABC News quotes Dr Roland Warner:

“This is confirming the sorts of things that one would expect in a warming world and the fact that this Antarctic system is not in some exact equilibrium at the moment, is in fact losing ice into the ocean, is an indication that things are changing,” he said. “That’s contributing to half a millimetre of sea level rise per year.”

Sea levels are expected to rise by about 3 millimeters per year. The data for the study was obtained by using twin satellites which “detect mass flows in the ocean by measuring changes in the Earth’s gravity field”. 

The satellite data will be supplemented by on the ground observations.  The ABC report quotes Dr Warner:

“The Totten Glacier and the enormous catchment area it has south is the subject of a big Australian field program to measure accurately the geometry and the character of the ice,” he said.

“We will be able to make more reliable computer models to project what might happen in the future.”

How is it possible to measure with any reliability a 3 millimeter rise in global sea level? There must be a conspiracy. I am expecting more email hacking. Sea level rise is one effect of global warming, and the expectation would be that melting of the Antarctic ice will increase.

ELSEWHERE:

There is more information about this topic in the comment thread on another post by Brian at Larvatus Prodeo.

The US Justice Department announced on 13 November that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants would be indicted for the events of 11 September 2001.

If found guilty, as expected, the death penalty would be invoked. That is the rub at least as far as the German Government is concerned. Deutsche Welle reports:

Germany, which does not have a death penalty, provided evidence for the trial on the condition that it could not be used to support a death sentence. Several members of the al Qaeda cell that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 were previously based in the northern German city of Hamburg.

“In this case we will observe very closely that the given assurances are kept,” Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.

However it was unclear exactly how evidence from Germany would be distinguished from evidence procured from elsewhere.

The defense lawyer for one of the accused, Ramzi Binalshibh, said that a conviction of his client would “scarcely be possible without evidence from Germany.”

The jury in this case will not be peers. The accused have, it can be assumed, being subject to torture and incarceration without charge. And the purpose of the trial is not justice but retribution, vengeance. The murder of Saddam Hussein was also orchestrated by a trial process.

Somehow they seem to have climbed down from the shining light on the hill, with the last person turning off the light, and now it seems we have a nation drunk on violence in the gutter unable to look either at the stars or the mirror – I am thinking of the unaccounted murders of the drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, not to mention the aerial bombings of Iraq.

Now we have  ”climategate” – the definitive proof, or so the story goes, that climate scientists have been cooking the books.

The BBC reports:

The e-mail system of one of the world’s leading climate research units has been breached by hackers.

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.
A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.

An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.
“We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,” the spokesman stated.
“Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.

“This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.
“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry.”

Researchers at CRU, one of the world’s leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change, played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is considered to be the most authoritative report of its kind.

So what is to be made of the emails? Why were they hacked? Who did it? Do they significantly discredit the weight of published, vetted scientific research? What conclusions if any can be drawn from this material?

According to Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, writing in The Guardian:

For the past few years, a small group of climate change ’sceptics’ have been poring over scientific journal papers that report historical trends in temperatures from around the world, as recorded by directly by thermometers and other instruments, and by ‘proxies’, such as tree rings. Their primary objective has been to seek out evidence that global warming has been invented by climate researchers who fake their data.

Why would either party to this now sordid tale wish to do what is alleged?

The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy of Sciences to carry out an investigation, concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.

The ’sceptics’ believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy’s other conclusion that “surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence”.

More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.

The self proclaimed climate warming deniers have to prove that carbon dioxide, and for that matter methane, are not increasing in volume in the Earth’s atmosphere, and that they are not greenhouse gases.

ELSEWHERE:

The climate scientists are liars story is continued, with more expertise in other places:

Kevin Grandia at Desmog.com

Brian, as expected, is on the case at Larvatus Prodeo.

Real Climate is onto the CRU Hack as well.

So what was the point of the hacking? The challenge that the “skeptics” or “delusionists” should take up, is not to engage in argumentum ad hominen but to produce evidence that global warming and climate consequences are not taking place and implied from the continuing emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The argument based on bad faith and deception is juvenile. In other words the delusionists would have to understand the Earth’s climate system better than the climate scientist who on the balance of the evidence think that the Earth is cooking, with all that implies, some of which we may be witnessing around us. The alternative evidence, as welcome as it would be, is highly unlikely to be the case.

Sinclair Davidson sets out the case against the climate scientists based on what was written in private emails (Refer Comments for Professor Davidson’s clarification). More argumentum ad hominem, i.e. This does not seem to me to either scientific argument or meeting the standard of probative evidence. The science has to be judged on the published evidence, not the unedifying back talk in the back channels.

Kevin Drum thinks that the climate scientists have been remarkably restrained.

Tim Flannery is interviewed on Lateline.

December is soon upon us, and with the outbreak of bushfires, the living is not easy for those affected.

Sasha refused to go out today. She heard the thunder, and I followed her judgment, as she was right when we did experience lightning. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Time to turn around:

To follow another path:

Sometimes there is an upgraded track:

With the famiilar places

And sometimes we see a horse:

So as Spring bounds from us, why not follow the Sun?

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The photo arrangements are made possible by Picasa

Somethings appear very wrong with the US military, the great enforcer of the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

Violence incarnate and wrapped in pitiless steel cannot separate itself from human consequences. The problem is more for the army than the air force, with the advantage of distance and collateral murder. The murder of the drone attacks in Afghanistan goes unremarked, while that of those who flew civilian planes into buildings is expected to produce convictions, despite torture, and revenge. So much for the standard of justice. Pathetic.

The trauma of the industrial warfare, and its carnage, has been a problem for the tough guy image of the Empire’s servants. The culture of denial is beginning to break down. Robert C. Koehler notes, via Common Dreams:

Frankly, in my more than 25 years of clinical practice, I’ve never seen such immense emotional suffering and psychological brokenness.” This is what whistleblower psychiatrist Kernan Manion wrote recently to President Obama about his experience counseling Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, as reported by Salon.

In September, Manion, having been told to “cease and desist all further correspondence with the government,” was fired by the Navy for his urgent, outspoken communiqués about the mental-health minefield the military has on its hands. Two months later, of course, the issue of PTSD was blown into the national headlines by the massacre at Fort Hood. And a day after that, according to Salon, the body of a Marine was found at Camp Lejeune and a fellow Marine was arrested for the murder.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder becomes more explicable when we learn something -perhaps an untypical case – of the circumstances of the killing as from this disturbing account, quoting Robert C. Koehler:

Here’s how it looks before the humanity intrudes: “One morning, a few months before leaving, I was manning a machine-gun security post. I saw a Humvee come through the gate towing a blue mini-pickup. As they approached closer, I saw that the truck was riddled with bullets and shrapnel – full of dead insurgents, decapitated corpses. I’ll never forget this. A very young PFC in the back of the truck lifted a decapitated head. ‘We really f—ed these guys up, didn’t we?’ Other soldiers were celebrating on top of the bodies. (The dead were) mostly teenage boys from the local community.”

These words of Iraq War vet Jeffrey Smith were just a small shard of the four days of horrific testimony about this war – about the racism and cultural ignorance of our occupation, about the inhumanity of military culture, about America’s official disregard for human life – given by vets at the Winter Soldier gathering a year and a half ago in Silver Spring, Md.

Phil Stewart. reporting for Reuters notes that the US army suicide rate is almost double the rate for the US population as a whole, despite home foreclosures and high rates of unemployment. General Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff, at a Pentagon briefing observed:

. . . cautioned against generalizing about the causes of the suicides, or assuming links to combat stress on forces stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said the causes were still unclear and noted that roughly a third of the soldiers who took their own lives had never been deployed abroad.

The Army recently revealed that about one in five lower rank soldiers suffered mental health problems like depression.

The latest data and this month’s shooting spree at a base in Fort Hood, Texas attributed to an Army psychiatrist have raised new questions about the effects of combat stress and the state of the military’s mental health system.

Could it be that the boot camp dehumanization of people is sufficient to cause severe mental distress even before the victims get to the killing fields where the real fun is to be had?

It turns out that nonviolence when practices in a principled way has the advantage that while people die there suffering is not without purpose in illuminating the truth of the practice of the violent, dehumanizing and exploiting systems. Cruel systems are likely to leave their victims, in this case the veterans, to their own resources and self medication.

POSTSCRIPT:

It is true, for example, that Chalmers Johnson refers to “an empire of bases”. The bases are the infrastructure that support the reach of “threat power”, and threat power needs to be demonstrated to show it efficacy. The US did not take too much goading before launching indiscriminate and illegal invasions and occupations. R B Cheney used to recount the aggravations; the attack on the barracks in Beirut, the East African embassies, and the USS Cole.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as the first two resource wars of the 21st century. Now as ABC News Online reports, the US has turned its attention to the Arctic Ocean resources made conveniently available by global warming and atmospheric pollution. At least the Pentagon as it absorbs an increasing portion of the budget can show some positive outcomes in terms of scarce resources controlled or stolen.

The problem for soldiers is that generally people do not understand what has happened to them, including their immediate families. It was the case for those who returned from previous wars. Although I do not have  the evidence it seems likely that something significant has changed, and I suspect it might have something to do with training. Cultural shock is another factor that might add to constant insecurity. No doubt there are better explanations elsewhere, and I suspect that organizational denial might be at work.

William R Polk has a guest post at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, and he is far better informed. He writes in part:

Then there are the casualties: we have so far lost about a thousand — or a quarter as many as in Iraq. Casualties we can count, but the number of seriously wounded keeps growing because many of the effects of exposure to modern weapons do not show up until later. We have no reliable figures yet on Afghanistan. In Iraq at least 100,000 of the one and a half million soldiers who served there suffered severe psychological damage and about 300,000 have reported post-traumatic stress disorder and a similar number have suffered brain injuries. Crassly put, these “walking wounded” will not only be unable fully to contribute to American society but will be a burden on it for many years to come. It has been estimated that dealing with a brain-injured soldier over his remaining life will cost about $5 million. Cancer, from exposure to depleted uranium is, only now coming into full effect. All in all, it is sobering to calculate that 40 percent of the soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf war – which lasted only a hundred hours – are receiving disability payments. Inevitably, more “boots on the ground” will lead to more beds in hospitals.

Carbon dioxide emissions have risen since 2002 in ways not anticipated, suggesting that average global temperatures will rise by 6 degrees Celsius.

The dangerous threshold was judged to be 2C rise. The levels of CO2 have increased  threefold from 200o to what was the case from 1990. There is evidence that the natural carbon sinks of the Earth cannot absorb further gas emissions, with catastrophic implications for the biosphere.

Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy in The Independent provide the detail:

The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise – which would be much higher nearer the poles – would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilisation.

We are headed for it, the scientists said, because the carbon dioxide emissions from industry, transport and deforestation which are responsible for warming the atmosphere have increased dramatically since 2002, in a way which no one anticipated, and are now running at treble the annual rate of the 1990s.

This means that the most extreme scenario envisaged in the last report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, is now the one for which society is set, according to the 31 researchers from seven countries involved in the Global Carbon Project.
Although the 6C rise and its potential disastrous effects have been speculated upon before, this is the first time that scientists have said that society is now on a path to meet it.

It cannot come too soon, to judge by the results of the Global Carbon Project study, led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, which found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available.

On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010.

In total, CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased by 41 per cent between 1990 and 2008, yet global emissions in 1990 are the reference level set by the Kyoto Protocol, which countries are trying to fall below in terms of their own emissions.

The 6C rise now being anticipated is in stark contrast to the C rise at which all international climate policy, including that of Britain and the EU, hopes to stabilise the warming – two degrees being seen as the threshold of climate change which is dangerous for society and the natural world.

The study by Professor Le Quéré and her team, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, envisages a far higher figure. “We’re at the top end of the IPCC scenario,” she said.

. . .  Meanwhile, the scientists have for the first time detected a failure of the Earth’s natural ability to absorb man-made carbon dioxide released into the air.

They found significant evidence that more man-made CO2 is staying in the atmosphere to exacerbate the greenhouse effect because the natural “carbon sinks” that have absorbed it over previous decades on land and sea are beginning to fail, possibly as a result of rising global temperatures.

The amount of CO2 that has remained in the atmosphere as a result has increased from about 40 per cent in 1990 to 45 per cent in 2008. This suggests that the sinks are beginning to fail, they said.

Professor Le Quéré emphasised that there are still many uncertainties over carbon sinks, such as the ability of the oceans to absorb dissolved CO2, but all the evidence suggests that there is now a cycle of “positive feedbacks”, whereby rising carbon dioxide emissions are leading to rising temperatures and a corresponding rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Our understanding at the moment in the computer models we have used – and they are state of the art – suggests that carbon-cycle climate feedback has already kicked in,” she said.

“These models, if you project them on into the century, show quite large feedbacks, with climate amplifying global warming by between 5 per cent and 30 per cent. There are still large uncertainties, but this is carbon-cycle climate feedback that has already started,” she said.

The study also found that, for the first time since the 1960s, the burning of coal has overtaken the burning of oil as the major source of carbon-dioxide emissions produced by fossil fuels.

Much of this coal was burned by China in producing goods sold to the West – the scientists estimate that 45 per cent of Chinese emissions resulted from making products traded overseas.

. . . If two degrees is generally accepted as the threshold of dangerous climate change, it is clear that a rise of six degrees in global average temperatures must be very dangerous indeed, writes Michael McCarthy. Just how dangerous was signalled in 2007 by the science writer Mark Lynas, who combed all the available scientific research to construct a picture of a world with temperatures three times higher than the danger limit.

His verdict was that a rise in temperatures of this magnitude “would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe”.

He said: “It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.”

Very few species could adapt in time to the abruptness of the transition, he suggested. “With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean.

“As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges.

In blunt terms, once the facts are absorbed, is that the levels of carbon dioxide emissions have to be drastically reduced. So what is the real problem here? In the absence of the determination to change our course, if not the intelligence of the dangers that lie ahead, do we just blindly sail on like the Titanic?

The vision of a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society seems to be disappearing up the smoke stack.

So what positive, constructive actions are we now continuing with and taking?

What does the US get from the financial and military backing of Israel?  In the other case it abundantly clear that the native Palestinians have been dealt ongoing injustice and dispossession.

Jason Koutsoukis reports in The Sydney Morning Herald, Benjamin Nethanyahu as saying that Israel was prepared to make generous concessions for peace, but if the Palestinians declared a separate state, following the Israeli example, Israel threatens to take unilateral action by pulling the plug on previous agreements.

According to the report by AFP, in The Raw Story, the US Government is singing from the same song sheet as the Israeli Government:

The United States voiced opposition Monday to unilateral Palestinian moves to seek recognition for an independent state, saying negotiations with Israel were the best way forward.

A State Department spokesman reiterated US commitment to a future Palestinian state but poured cold water on an initiative to ask the United Nations Security Council to recognize a state unilaterally.

“We support the creation of a Palestinian state that is contiguous…. We are convinced that has to be achieved through negotiations between two parties,” said spokesman Ian Kelly.

Chris Hedges put the counter view. Firstly he observes the historical situation:

The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the result of Israel’s 42-year refusal to implement a two-state solution, leaves the Palestinians no option but to unilaterally declare an independent state. Israel acted unilaterally when it announced independence in 1948. It is the Palestinians’ turn. It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Georgia. And it will work in Palestine. There are 192 member states in the United Nations and as many as 150 would recognize the state of Palestine, creating a diplomatic nightmare for Israel and its lonely ally the United States. Israel will face worldwide censure if it attempts to crush the independent state by force and very likely be subjected to the kind of divestment campaigns and boycotts that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa.

It is astonishing that the people that suffered the Holocaust have in their turn engaged in systematic cruelty toward another set of people. Chris Hedges notes:

The Israelis have orchestrated acute misery and poverty in the Palestinian territories over the past two decades in an effort to subdue and ethnically cleanse the captive population. They have reduced Palestinians, many of whom now live on less than $2 a day, to a subsistence level. They have created squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli soldiers, who ring these ghettos, have the ability to instantly shut off food, medicine and goods to perpetuate the misery. Israel, when the Palestinians grow restive, drops 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs and artillery shells-as they did a year ago in Gaza-on the concrete hovels that pack neighborhoods. The Israeli objective is to turn the Palestinian territories into a hell on earth. This policy has, however, swollen the ranks of radical Islamists in the occupied territories and throughout the Middle East.

Nobody has to look very far to see an important contributing factor to asymmetrical conflict and more generally to the cause of terrorism. In this case the fundamental issue is the failure of national states due to perceived advantage and use of threat power and violence to acknowledge justice and to institutionalize injustice through the existing state system, including the UN Security Council.

In the meantime, while the international players did nothing but talk, a new truck convoy is planned to set out for Gaza on 5 December .

ELSEWHERE:

The  EU has decided not to support a Palestinian State.

Ray McGovern supports the conclusion reached here in the context of the proposed trials in the US of those suspected of been associated with the attacks on 11 September, over eight years ago.

BBC reports continuing settlement building in East Jerusalem.

The blue screen of death intervened with the usual Friday Night Dog pictures, so this might be the occasion to throw some together, showing if nothing else the powers of recovery.

Here is the evidence that Sasha and Dexter go out last week, and probably enjoyed themselves:

Along the way we met a blue tongue lizard, and perhaps that was a  portent for the blue screen experience:

Some experiences are not as bad as they might seem at the time, and not in a relative sense to others. Joan Baez sings “Johnny I hardly knew ye”

As usual acknowledgement is made to Picasa for supplying the means to arrange the photos.

And probably this week, Friday Ark has long since sailed into the sunset. Then again nothing ventured, nothing gained.