frankhagan.com

Jake Tapper, the ABC News Senior White House Correspondent, reports that Secretary Clinton will announce the administration’s new policy toward the government of Sudan. And that policy is controversial:

U.S. officials acknowledge the reaction from human rights groups has been mixed. Officials from the groups largely agree with the Obama administration’s goals to implement the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the civil war and, among other provisions, provides for a Southern Sudanese referendum in 2011; and to negotiate a peace treaty that will end the crisis in Darfur and allow the Sudanese people to return to their homes.

Their concern is that history suggests that the government of Sudan responds only to pressure, and they worry President Obama’s Special Envoy to the Sudan, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration (ret.) has been reluctant to apply that pressure.

The situation in Darfur is, by every measure, a human tragedy. But American efforts have been ineffectual. Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, noted in July 2004:

With Secretary of State Colin Powell’s recent visit to Sudan and the Pentagon moving troops into neighboring Chad to assess the situation, some form of intervention appears likely.

Preble goes on to criticize the use of American forces unilaterally in such cases, and describes all the proposed solutions as inadequate. Now, five years later, we know that the American military did not intervene, but he still seems prescient on at least that last point.

There is sure to be hand wringing about Darfur, and those stricken with “Obama Derangement Syndrome” will cry “appeasement!” once again. But foreign policy is often messy, and finding solutions is tough. In this case, we have five years of failed attempts to stop the wholesale rape and murder of millions. We have failed. Perhaps a new approach is necessary.

I will express my doubts that “engaging” with a mass murderer wanted for war crimes is the proper thing to do. It may be immoral. But life often gives us choices between two bad things, and we must decide which is less bad than the other.

The Obama Administration has embarked on several initiatives to change the way American foreign policy is perceived around the world. World leaders have praised the new approach. Conservatives view most of these initiatives skeptically, but there is a certain rationale behind many of the changes. For instance, liberals and libertarians have shared the view that calling attention to specific Al Qaeda leaders only enhances their reputation and serves as a powerful recruiting tool. De-emphasis on the “war on terror” rhetoric seems intended to reduce that attention.

The thing that matters, of course, is whether these new approaches work. Conservatives would do well to avoid the temptation to criticize the new approach in Darfur prematurely. While it does remind us of the old claim that conservative administrations were too quick to embrace right-wing dictators like Marcos in the Phillipines and the Shah of Iran, in the end it is pragmatism that must win out. If the strategy works in Darfur, Secretary Clinton and President Obama will deserve the credit.

Cross-posted to Donklephant.

Politics Barack Obama, Dufar, Hillary Clinton

Along with the head scratching regarding President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize came quite a few humorous quips. Including from the President himself:

After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!” And then Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.” So it’s good to have kids to keep things in perspective.

The President reflected the general feeling that the Nobel Peace Prize award was, at best, premature. He chose to turn the attention to the country itself, and the hopes and dreams of all people. Good on you, Mr. President.

But look closely at the text of the speech. The President recognizes another fact, that the Nobel Committee awarded this prize on the eve of the decision to expand the war in Afghanistan:

And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the commander in chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies.

Ego is one of the core character traits of any world leader, and some have noted that our President is in possession of one himself, to put it mildly.

His frustration with a single media outlet that does not genuflect at the altar of his personality, Fox News Network, leads to a public spat, crossing a line not even the ego-mania of President Nixon would breach: shooting downhill. Fox News can only benefit from the attention, and gain even more viewers as they realize only one media outlet is catching the attention of the administration.

His speeches are peppered with self references, and his “World Apology Tour” found him apologizing on our behalf. Yet, I don’t recall that he ever apologized for saying the Cambridge Police Department “acted stupidly”, even though his subsequent actions showed he knew he blew it. Ego gets in the way of many things with our leaders. And the Nobel Committee knows that.

Can a man who accepts the Nobel Peace Prize live with the diminished reputation as the only winner to immediately escalate a war, sending tens of thousands of troops into harm’s way?

The Nobel Committee sent the Peace Prize in a box large enough to house our President. Mr. Obama’s immediate response indicates that perhaps he won’t climb into the box. Let’s hope not.

Cross posted to Donklephant

Politics Afghanistan, Nobel Peace Prize, obama

Drudge evidently linked to a BBC post regarding the cooling trend seen by many climate experts, a trend that could last up to 30 years. It flies in the face of the more strident global warming advocates, but really doesn’t change much among the scientists studying the phenomenon.

Cooling and warming trends exist throughout history. So the question is if the overall impact of increased CO2 and equivalents is toward overall warming. If yes, then man made global warming is something we have to address. But the new information, if true, gives us more time to do that.

Damian Thompson at the UK-based Telegraph, blogs about the BBC’s “about face” on the issue of global warming by correspondent Paul Hudson:

Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans.

See Paul Hudson’s original article on the BBC. Hudson recounts studies showing that ocean temperature fluctuation seems to have more to do with decadal temperature fluctuations than previously thought.

Thompson notes the controversy is heating up, with The Great Beyond blog at Nature dissing two of the experts originally quoted by the BBC as dyed-in-the-wool skeptics. The intent of attacking these two experts seems to call the entire BBC post into question. But Nature ignores the quote from Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), a well-respected scientist who is not a skeptic and who claims we may be in for 10 to 20 years of cooling, not warming:

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world’s top climate modellers.

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

Nature and other “true believers” would do well to not stand in the way of true scientific inquiry. Skepticism is good, as it should turn people back to their climate models to prove the other guy wrong. But I’m not sure selective quoting and throwing what is, in essence, a hissy fit is productive.

Hissy fits aside, it appears to me that the correct climate model will be the one that most accurately predicts what will happen. If cooling continues, then we need a climate model that accurately predicts that.

Climate climate change, global warming

As a global climate change agnostic, I often find myself disagreeing with most of the polarized views on the subject. I don’t embrace every criticism of either side as another chink in its armor, and I don’t celebrate error, omission and claims of outright deception. Science is often messy, more akin to making sausage from scratch than assembling automobiles in a modern factory.

So my reaction to the latest “hockey stick” kerfluffle I blogged about in Climate Change Change was bit different: I’m glad that it looks like the warming trend may not be as severe as we first feared. If true, it means that we have time to prepare humanity for the changes, and incorporate the twin goals of American energy independence and sound environmental policy.

It was a pleasure to find Thomas Fuller’s comments that more closely align with my own beliefs. In his excellent San Francisco Examiner post How global warming looks without the various versions of the Hockey Stick, Fuller sums up the controversy from the same perspective I have:

. . . McIntyre’s work leads to the strong suggestion that the warming experienced since 1880 and more emphatically between 1975 and 1998 is real, but not unprecedented. These global mean surface temperatures have been seen, during the Medieval Warming Period and the Roman Warming Period. As those periods of warming occurred without the benefit of human contributions of CO2, it removes some (not all) of the urgency from the arguments about global warming.

This, if true, is an unmitigated blessing, as it will allow us to plan for a future that has hope for the developing world and does not require us to throw the circuit breaker on energy consumption in the developed world. It does not mean we can ignore the issue–we do need to ‘decarbonize’ our way of life, and the sooner the better. But we can, if McIntyre is right, do it at a pace that allows time for adjustment, and continue to fund solutions to other problems as well.

I’m past caring about motives–if Briffa is wrong, let’s find out fast. Let’s find out even faster if he’s right. Whatever political or economic imperatives have been pushing this line of thinking, they need to be either verified or falsified now. If global warming will raise the temperature of this planet by 2 degrees Celsius over the course of this century, it will be a problem. But it’s a vastly different problem than the global warming of 7 to 9 degrees suggested by those who have been most alarmed.

Bravo, Mr. Fuller!

Climate Briffa, global warming, hockey sticks

UPDATE: RealClimate’s snarky response to the issue is here, and Keith Briffa, the original researcher, has responded in a much more professional way here.

The Register has reported on what appears to be at best a horrible mistake. Some are calling it a deliberate misrepresentation. In a development sure to rock the established view of climate modeling, it has been revealed that some of the data relied on for climate models is unreliable. The impact? It calls into question many of the assumptions regarding 20th century global warming. If the 20th century isn’t warmer, then human-induced global warming is simply not supported by scientific evidence.

One popular proxy for having temperature measurements of the past centuries is to compare tree ring growth. Its a sophisticated and complex issue to weed out the impact of other environmental factors, but scientists agree the process is a valid method. But one of the most popular series — named Yamal, for the area in Siberia where the trees are located — has to be re-examined:

At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open – and Yamal’s mystery is no more.

From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.

Cherry picking the samples to fit a preconceived idea is not new; it can happen purposefully or by simple “selection bias”, where a preconception exists but isn’t apparent to the researcher. We can admit the cherry picking or selection bias has happened without casting aspersions.

The deconstruction is the work of Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit.org, a very technical site. While the Register’s accounting of the controversy is brief and easy to read, following it on ClimateAudit.org might be daunting. We are in luck, however, as the Bishop Hill Blog has a more detailed, yet easily comprehended recap of the entire controversy, with this summation:

McIntyre therefore prepared a revised dataset, replacing Briffa’s selected 12 cores with the 34 from Khadyta River. The revised chronology was simply staggering. The sharp uptick in the series at the end of the twentieth century had vanished, leaving a twentieth century apparently without a significant trend. The blade of the Yamal hockey stick, used in so many of those temperature reconstructions that the IPCC said validated Michael Mann’s work, was gone.

The history of science is replete with this kind of controversy. What we are seeing is the scientific method at work. As often happens, hypothesis becomes consensus, then someone like McIntyre challenges the established wisdom and the consensus must give way. It usually does so noisily, with great emotion and resistance. But give way it must.

Climate climate change, Scientific Method