October 11, 2005
Getting Angry at the Weather
I like to consider myself relatively rational, and not prone to outbursts of anger at natural weather events.
But torrential rains and hail in Muzaffarabad is just too much. Grrr.
Posted by zeynep at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2005
From Katrina to Kashmir: Lost Lessons from the Medians and the Lydians
The terrible quake in Kashmir appears to have killed tens of thousands of people. Such calamities are in one sense natural: the Indian tectonic plate is pushing north right at the Himalayas.
However, just like Katrina, this too will disporportionately kill the poor, who live in substandard housing with lesser materials, and it will kill proportionately more people compared to a rich country because building codes and materials are worse in general.
In other words, a 7.6 quake in San Francisco or Tokyo would claim far, far fewer victims and that's another price people pay for living in the third world, or being dirt-poor and black in New Orleans. (The 1989 quake San Francisco killed 62 people, most of them in a single spot where an overpass collapsed. Of course, that quake was much less powerful, measuring 7.1 in the Richter scale, which is logarithmic and not linear -- I believe that's about 31 percent the power of this one. Still, the number of victims is always strikingly disporportionate between the rich and the poor).
Here's another question. There were muliple reports that Al Qaeda sympathizers around the world had called Katrina a sign of "wrath of God" on the United States. So, what does that make a quake in the muslim-controlled Kashmir, right at the beginning of Ramadan at that? (While we in the United States are not much aware of this, the status of Kashmir is a big issue in the Muslim world, especially among the would-be-jihadis and their sympathizers. It probalby ranks right after Iraq and Palestine.)
Maybe, just maybe, this devastation will spur a movement towards peace. Unfortunately, it's also possible that now the Hindu-fundamentalists will call this a wrath of God on the muslims and feel empowered until, oh, a typhoon, tsunami or an earthqake hits some part of India. And the jihadis just might conclude this earthquake is a sign they are not fighting hard enough.
One wonders what it would take: a hurricane, interrupted by an earthquake followed by a Tsunami with intermittent fires and/or hail? Wouldn't a nice, long eclipse do, as it did for the Medians and the Lydians?
Posted by zeynep at 08:56 AM | Comments (3)
July 11, 2005
You Can't Sink a Rainbow
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the sinking of Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship that was bombed by the French intelligence service, with the personal authorization of French president Francois Mitterand -- according to latest revelations:
In its Sunday-Monday edition, daily Le Monde published extracts of a 23-page, handwritten account by Adm. Pierre Lacoste, the former head of DGSE spy agency, in which he says that Mitterrand authorized the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's port.The ship was preparing for a protest at sea against French nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific when the explosion ripped open its hull and the vessel sank. Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira died.
The account was published for Sunday's 20-year anniversary of the July 10, 1985, sinking of the ship. Hundreds of people gathered across France to commemorate the sinking and pay tribute to Pereira.
The ship was mined in an Auckland port -- incidentally, the government of New Zealand called the attack the first terrorist incident in the country. (I really would like to know if the indigenous people of New Zealand believe that to be the first...)
Many people gathered in Paris to commemorate the anniversary, dressed in colors of the rainbow. The commemorators formed a peace sign in front of the Eiffel Tower and unfurled a banner expressing their determination:
The most telling sign of nature's own determination, perhaps the only hope we have against our incredible, growing destructive capacity, however, was Rainbow Warrior herself, now an "artificial" reef, and a home to many at the bottom of the sea:
So maybe there is hope, if not for necessarily for us. But today is a day of many anniversaries, and hope is not the word that comes to mind when I think of Fatima Budic, whose 14 year old son was killed ten years ago in Srebrenica, and whose 16 year old son and husband have never been found.
How long before "never again" becomes nothing more than an ad slogan for this or that product?
Posted by zeynep at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2005
Liberating the Environment
Sanctions, depleted uranium, our lack of interest in guarding nuclear and chemical plants after the war have all taken a major toll on the environment in Iraq:
AMMAN (Reuters) - Iraq's environmental problems - among world's worst - range from a looted nuclear site which needs cleaning up to sabotaged oil pipelines, a U.N. official said on Thursday."An improvement is almost impossible in these security conditions. Chemicals are seeping into groundwater and the situation is becoming worse and creating additional health problems," said Pekka Haavisto, Iraq task force chairman at the United Nations Environmental Programme.
"Iraq is the worst case we have assessed and is difficult to compare. After the Balkan War we could immediately intervene for protection, such as the river Danube, but not in Iraq," Haavisto, a former Finnish environment minister, said on a visit to Jordan to meet with Iraqi officials.
Lack of spare parts and Iraq's inability to maintain pollution standards during two previous wars and more than a decade of crushing sanctions have damaged the environment, including the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where most of Iraq's sewage flows untreated.
The situation became worse after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, in which depleted uranium munitions were used against Iraq for the second time and postwar looting and burning of the once formidable infrastructure caused massive spills and toxic plumes, Haavisto said.
"The bombing and war carried a cost but the looting cost the environment more, such as in the Dora refinery or Tuwaitha nuclear storage," Haavisto said.
"There has not been proper cleanup and only assessment work at some of these sites. Very little has changed and Iraqi teams are in the process of getting in some of these locations."
The U.N. official was referring to the 56 square km (22 sq mile) Tuwaitha complex south of Baghdad where 3,000 barrels that stored nuclear compounds were looted.
In the Dora depot on the edge of Baghdad, 5,000 barrels of chemicals, including tetra ethylene lead, were spilled burned or stolen, a U.N. survey showed.
Contaminated sites near the water supply also include a 200 square km (77 sq mile) military industrial complex, torched or looted cement factories and fertilizer plants, of which Iraq was one of the world's largest producers, and oil spills.
This is the kind of damage generations of Iraqi children will suffer from long after this is all over.
I guess I should say if this is ever over.
But, oh, wait. This is all Saddam Hussein's fault. Nothing to do with us.
Posted by zeynep at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2005
Earth Day
Today's Earth Day.
Where to begin? Global warming? Resource depletion? Air quality? Mercury in the food chain? Melting of the polar caps?
Most everything is getting drastically and rapidly worse. It's a bit like what Einstein is to have said about the fourth world war: "It will be fought with sticks and stones." We will either have an effective, dramatic global environmental movement soon, or there won't be much left to fight over.
Posted by zeynep at 06:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 25, 2005
The Virtues of Sensationalist Scaremongering
Let me continue from theme of the last post. I do understand Sean's comment that media tends to sensationalize scientific news. But the real problem is that we have dearth of trustworthy sources. It's hard to relax when experts tell us, relax, they're looking into it. I say let's be sensationalist scaremongerers until such time that enough scared people act to fight off, and reverse, the political pressure on science to be mindful of profits rather than life.
Take this example from the ongoing arthiritis drug scandal:
Ten of the 32 government drug advisers who last week endorsed continued marketing of the huge-selling pain pills Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx have consulted in recent years for the drugs' makers, according to disclosures in medical journals and other public records.If the 10 advisers had not cast their votes, the committee would have voted 12 to 8 that Bextra should be withdrawn and 14 to 8 that Vioxx should not return to the market. The 10 advisers with company ties voted 9 to 1 to keep Bextra on the market and 9 to 1 for Vioxx's return.
In other words, the drugs would have remained off the market had the people with financial ties to the drug companies been recused from the panel. Defenders of the panel's composition argue that it's impossible to be in a position of expertise about such drugs unless one has been involved at some point with the drug companies.
At best, this means there are no independent experts out there.
Add this to the nugget buried later in the story that "Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx have never been proved in clinical trials to cure pain any better than ibuprofen or more than a dozen other, older pain pills," you see the serious problem here. And Ellen and Bob's comments from the last post do add to the case for concern. But even without more evidence for concern, here's our bigger problem. If the authorities and public health officials told us there was nothing to worry about, how could we evaluate their trustworthiness?
Posted by zeynep at 03:42 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
February 24, 2005
Rocket Fuel in Mother's Milk
A toxic chemical used in rocket fuel was found in virtually every sample taken in a new study of nursing mothers' milk, but researchers said it is too early to know whether the perchlorate levels are dangerous....
Perchlorate has been linked to thyroid ailments, and is considered particularly dangerous to children. It has been found in drinking water supplies in 35 states and also in vegetables. While the chemical occurs naturally, the National Academy of Sciences has said most of the contamination is from its use in rocket fuels, fireworks and explosives.
Contamination is especially widespread in California because of the many current and former defense and space program sites in the state.
According to public health advocates, perchlorate is in the water that supplies more than 16 million Californians. It has also been found in the Colorado River, the major source of drinking water and irrigation in Southern California and Arizona.
But don't worry. No undue alarm.
However, the milk study shouldn't raise "undue alarm" because the seriousness of its findings is unclear, said Ed Urbansky, a former Environmental Protection Agency chemist who has published several papers on perchlorate. He was not involved with the study."It's very difficult to determine what the findings might be other than to know it might be in so many milk samples," he said. "It's important not to raise undue alarm over the significance of the finding.
"We shouldn't be running through the streets screaming and not drinking milk because of this."
Don't scream. Don't run through the streets. Don't be alarmed.
It's only rocket fuel in milk.
Posted by zeynep at 05:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 10, 2005
Cheery Thought for the Day
Maybe I should call it "Cheery Thought for the Century":
Last year was the fourth warmest since systematic temperature measurements began around the world in the 19th century, NASA scientists said yesterday.Particularly high temperatures were measured over Alaska, the Caspian Sea region of Europe and the Antarctic Peninsula, while the United States was unusually cool. But the global average continued a 30-year rise that is "due primarily to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," said Dr. James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan.
The main source of such gases is smokestack and tailpipe emissions from burning coal and oil.
The highest global average was measured in 1998, when temperatures were raised by a strong cycle of El Niño in the Pacific Ocean; 2002 and 2003 were second and third warmest.
Dr. Hansen said a weak Niño pattern was likely to make 2005 at least the second warmest year and could push it beyond 1998 and set a record.
Actually, millenium is a better order of magnitude than a century since this current warming spike does not just pertain to the last century:
The unusual nature of the recent warming was corroborated separately yesterday by a new analysis of 2,000 years of indirect temperature records in tree rings, stalagmites, seabed layers, and other evidence from around the Northern Hemisphere.That study, published in the journal Nature, found that previous peaks of warming, particularly during medieval times about 1,000 years ago, were as warm as the 20th-century average but that no spikes in the last 2,000 years matched the warming since 1990.
More and more this is feeling like watching a not-too-good horror flick. You know what's coming... It's only going to get worse. And it would take a long time for things to start getting better even if we stopped and reversed everything we were doing wrong right now.
"2004 deadliest earthquake year in five centuries," says another deadline. Stop! Don't Check Out the Sound Coming from the Basement! Don't Go Down Those Stairs! Don't Open That Door!
Posted by zeynep at 09:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 20, 2004
Cheap oil is not good for us
If bandits broke into your house, destroyed your furniture, garden, and roof, beat you up, and then shamelessly proceeded to auction off precious items left to you from your great-grandparents, which you had hoped to pass on to your children, would you be yelling “cheaper, cheaper, you’re selling them for too high”? And fight with your spouse about who can get them to sell it for cheaper?
That’s the functional equivalent of the dominant debate on the oil prices.
It’s almost surreal to watch the stories in the evening news about politicians trading barbs on who can bring oil prices lower, dotted with “man at the gas pump complaining about the oil prices” interviews.
It’s an open secret that oil is limited and will run out sooner or later, no matter what we pretend. It’s a bit like the truth of death: most people live as if they don’t believe it. Applying induction to human history, we can easily conclude that human thinking isn’t induction friendly -- and that may well be our undoing.
Currently, almost all profits stemming from the increase in oil prices are pocketed by huge corporations and tyrannical regimes, who often do very little to spread the wealth around except in a few democratic countries like Venezuela and, in a few semi-corporatist states like Iran and Iraq in the past. Millions of Nigerians continue to live in dire poverty in the oil-rich Niger Delta; millions of Pakistani, Bengali and other immigrants from poor countries around the world toil under semi-slavery conditions in the oil-rich Gulf countries. Remember the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled en masse from Kuwait after the first Gulf War? Without an audible peep from the world community, who would surely protest if 400,000 white people were collectively punished and suddenly expelled from the country of their employment, with no due process and no rights? (Kuwaitis claimed that Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. I wonder how it feels to admit that Saddam Hussein’s brutality is preferable to yours?)
In contrast to these private profits, almost all the real costs of oil production are public. After 15 years, Exxon Valdez still hasn’t paid damages for the Alaska spill -- it keeps running circles around the $5 billion verdict, modest considering the damage, with its army of lawyers. Back at the ranch, 1,200 of the plaintiffs have passed away and, unfortunately, sea otters and fish don’t yet have standing in human courts. Oil corporations have a sordid history of supporting some of the most brutal regimes and that is not a coincidence. Extractive industries, almost by nature, require suppressing the local population because of the inevitable damage they do the local environment and also because they create a large booty to be shared --especially large if you don’t have to pay the pesky natives-- and thus attract the greediest and the most vicious.
Even under the current scenario of private profits and public costs, high oil prices are good for us because such pressures force people to choose more efficient vehicles and give impetus to the search for alternative energy sources. In fact, that’s why oil prices will come down. OPEC knows full well too high prices will inevitably cause alternative sources to be promoted.
Of course, a just society would not let the poorest pay the highest cost for the oil prices and would subsidize reasonable and unavoidable living costs during the transition to sane energy sources -- and penalize their wasteful use. Why should a hummer owner pay the same price for gas as a hybrid owner? It’s like using high taxes and levies on cigarettes to pay for lung cancer treatment. It’s good because it cuts down on smoking, especially among teenagers who are the most vulnerable and most price-sensitive segment of smokers, and limits private profits made at the expense of such public detriment.
And last but not least, oil is part of earth’s wealth. It should benefit first and foremost the people who live in oil rich regions, since they have to put up with the conditions of its production, and then be used very judiciously with the awareness that it’s part of the inheritance of future generations.
$40 a barrel? Higher the better.
Posted by zeynep at 09:16 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 30, 2002
Theme Song for 21st Century Famines
This article was written during a period of unprecedented coverage of the ongoing famine six African countries -- except most of the coverage implied that the famine was somehow primarily the result of Mugabe's actions in Zimbabwe.
“The situation in Zimbabwe hit you guys hard, I suppose” said my neighbor to the young woman who had just sauntered out of the customs area at the airport. She was from Malawi, he was trying to make small talk about the famine ravaging her country. She was resignedly nodding till he mentioned Zimbabwe.
With a puzzled look, she squinted in his direction: “What?”
As usual, we hear a lot about the side issue and almost nothing about the fundamental questions: hence the puzzling remark.
She probably didn't know that a good chunk of the media coverage in the United States regarding the famine that threatens six Southern African states and 12 million people concentrated on the fact that Zimbabwe’s government is trying to oust couple thousand white farmers from the most of the productive lands, most of which they control as a legacy of the white supremacist colonial rule. The truth is that this is but a side issue; the evictions haven’t helped the harvest; however, the hard reality is that rainfalls are down 75 percent in Zimbabwe. And Zimbabwe is but one country threatened by the famine.
While it is true that this famine, as with most famines, is the result of a combination of bad weather and bad policies, the real tragic story is that both the bad policy and the bad weather were severely exacerbated by the rich world.
That would be us.
It often seems that God perennially deals a bad hand to Africa. Remember Ethiopia in the eighties? The massive famine that came at the end of an almost ten year drought, the images of starving, wide-eyed, swollen-bellied children with the accompanying tune of “We are the World, We Are the Children”?
The song should be remade: “We Own the World, We Ignore the Children.”
It’s turning out that the Africa’s ‘bad luck’ is us.
Some scientists now believe that the Ethiopian drought in the eighties may have been triggered by “tiny particles of sulfur dioxide spewed by factories and power plants thousands of miles away in North America, Europe and Asia.”
In other words, pollution from industrial nations.
The current drought cycle is also quite likely aggravated by global warming and the general change in climate patterns due to human activities. In the report released last year by United Nations Environment Program, “Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” UNEP scientists predicted that, in terms of droughts, southern Africa would be one of the hardest hit areas from global warming and industrial pollution. The report talked of a ‘century of hunger’ and predicted that ‘lack of rain, warmer temperatures and increases in evaporation could reduce yields by a third or more in these areas.’
Africa's share of the global population is 14 percent but it's responsible for only 3.2 percent of global CO2 emission.
It gets worse.
Probably unbeknownst to my neighbor in the airport, Malawi, under the ‘advice’ of IMF, World Bank and other international lenders and donors, was forced to cut fertilizer and maize subsidies to its millions of subsistence farmers. The lack of subsidies made it hard for poor farmers to buy fertilizer and seeds -- and subsistence farmers constitute almost 70 percent of Malawi’s population. Meanwhile, back at the ranch in the rich world, farmers are heavily subsidized. The 2002 Farm Bill in the United States will provide $190 billion in new subsidy money over the next 10 years to US farmers, which constitute only two percent of the population -- and most of that money will go to the wealthy, corporate agribusinesses. European Union too heavily subsidizes its own farmers.
None of that for Malawi.
And, as Challis McDonough of Voice Of America reported, most farmers in Malawi could not borrow the money to buy fertilizer and seed since the interest rate on loans from commercial banks were incredibly high, about 55 percent.
My neighbor in the airport waiting lounge was probably also not aware that just two year ago, Malawi had a bumper crop and wanted to keep a chunk of in its strategic grain reserves to guard against famines.
The insolence.
Countries such as Malawi do not get to make their own policy, with the best interests of their people in mind. This little country with an annual per capita income less than $200 and a life expectancy of 38 (yes, thirty eight, 3-8 as in two times nineteen) already owes $1.5 billion, about 90 percent of its GDP, to various financiers.
Malawi’s President Muluzi gave an interview he gave to BBC on April 9th, 2002. In the interview, Muluzi explained that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “insisted that, since Malawi had a surplus [of maize] and the (government's) National Food Reserve Agency had this huge loan, they had to sell the maize to repay the commercial banks.” The ‘huge loan’ had been taken to establish the reserve. Its repayment meant that the maize in the reserve was sold off. Why was this done at all, you might ask. I didn’t do the research, I don’t know. However, I do know that a familiar pattern is well established with IMF bail-outs and loans and Heavily Indebted Poor Country initiatives and what not -- quite likely, some bank in New York, Paris, London Zurich or Tokyo made some money from the transaction itself with commission, interest, consulting fees...
So, onward, they starve.
This is the weekend of IMF / World Bank protests in DC. One of the key demands is ‘to cancel all impoverished country debt to the World Bank and IMF.’ IMF and the World Bank as well as most governments of the rich world are opposed to what they call debt forgiveness, mostly claiming that it breeds irresponsibility. They have come up with various schemes that are supposed to provide some debt relief while providing accountability -- most of these schemes have so far required that these countries take on fresh debt.
I, too have a proposal about debt forgiveness: let’s cancel the debt and hope they find it in their hearts to forgive us.
Posted by zeynep at 09:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack