215.7 - Footnote: Nuclear weapons are not things of the past

Footnote: Nuclear weapons are not things of the past

As a footnote, this is why all that talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not just a history lesson.

According to the Arms Control Association, as of July 2015:

- The United States has 1,597 strategic nuclear warheads deployed plus another 2,800 in reserve along with a tactical (short-range) nuclear arsenal of about 500 warheads.

- Russia has 1,582 strategic warheads deployed and several thousand non-deployed strategic warheads. It also has approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads.

- France has 290 deployed warheads.

- China has about 250 total warheads.

- United Kingdom has about 120 strategic warheads, of which 40 are deployed at sea at any given time. The total stockpile is up to 225 weapons.

- India has 90-110 nuclear warheads.

- Israel has somewhere between 80 and 100 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200.

- Pakistan holds between 100 and 120 nuclear warheads.

- North Korea is estimated to have 6-8 plutonium-based warheads.

Nuclear weapons are very real, continue to be very real, and the threat continues to be very real. We have been comforted some over the past years by the fact that the arsenals of the two biggest nuclear powers - the US and Russia - have been significantly reduced as the result of negotiations. But what we don't hear is how the present-day weapons are more efficient, more accurate, in every way "better" than those in those old massive arsenals of a few decades ago, how today's weapons, those designed and built since the 1980s, are, as one person put it, "more for use than deterrence."

What's more, the threat is not only that of a deliberate attack. A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists from April reports that "Erroneous or ambiguous warnings from U.S. or Russian early warning sensors of an incoming nuclear attack are relatively common" and there have been literally dozens of what the group calls "near misses" over the years.

Despite that, about half of US nuclear forces remain always on hair-trigger alert, capable of being launched within minutes of the decision to do so, the same high alert status they have been on since the height of the cold war.

And with the US having just sabotaged a conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in order to shield Israel from a call for a nuclear-weapons free zone in the Middle East, I will say that no, the issue of nuclear weapons is not passe, not something in the past, not something we can ignore, not something we can pretend is limited to our fantasies and paranoia about "the Iranian bomb."

Nuclear weapons are very real, continue to be very real, and the threat they present continues to be very real. And the anniversaries of the only times they have been used in warfare is a good time to be reminded of that.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/04/Close%20Calls%20with%20Nuclear%20Weapons.pdf
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/hair-trigger-alert/close-calls#.VcGUjPmRaVE
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/01/Hair-Trigger%20FAQ.pdf
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/06/2089-outrage-of-week-us-sabotages.html

Warms your heart, Part One

So yesterday another one of those global meetings about global warming began, this one at a resort in Cancun, Mexico because of course you can't expect all these important people to meet any place less than 5-star.

This meeting, however, is just a bit different: Instead of the grand pronouncements of sweeping optimism about how some incredibly significant new agreement was in the making, this one seems to be starting from the idea that real progress on a final, binding international agreement to actually control greenhouse gas emissions is going nowhere. Talk has turned to

debating how to mobilize money to cope with what's coming — as temperatures climb, ice melts, seas rise and the climate that nurtured man shifts in unpredictable ways.

That is, the focus has shifted from prevention to mitigation and the hope is not for agreements or solutions but for "incremental progress" on side issues such as establishing accounting rules both for "fast-start finance" aid promised to poor countries to help with mitigation and for nations such as China and India to report on their efforts to slow their emissions growth (not, note, to reduce emissions but to reduce their rate of growth).

This is going on even as the evidence that global warming is not only real but that its effects are already visible just keeps growing.

- In August, NOAA reported on Arctic sea ice, which had reached its minimum extent for the year. That extent was 22% below the 1979-2000 average and the 14th consecutive August with below-average sea ice extent. In September the sea ice extent was the third smallest in the last 30 years; the three smallest September extents have come in the last four years. Tens of thousands of walruses came ashore in northwest Alaska because the sea ice they normally rest just wasn't there.

The agency's annual Arctic Report Card, based on the work of 69 researchers in eight countries, reported that temperatures in the Arctic had been running over 7⁰F. (over 4⁰C.) above normal for the first nine months of 2010. It also said that glaciers and ice caps in the region continued to lose mass an an increasing rate, the temperature in permafrost is rising, and Greenland was experiencing record temperatures and continued ice and glacier loss. It said a "return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely."

- In October

[t]he government's National Climate Data Center reported Monday that the January-September period is tied with 1998 for the warmest first nine months on record.

- Also in October, a new study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that

[t]he United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades.... [W]arming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been observed in modern times.

Using an ensemble of 22 computer climate models and a comprehensive index of drought conditions, as well as analyses of previously published studies, the paper finds most of the Western Hemisphere, along with large parts of Eurasia, Africa, and Australia, may be at threat of extreme drought this century.

- NOAA maintains a list of 11 indicators of climate change, chosen because "we would unambiguously expect them to increase or decrease if the world were warming." Seven would be expected to increase, four to decrease. All 11 clearly show evidence of warming

Well, just last week there came a twelfth:

A first-of-its-kind NASA study is finding nice cool lakes are heating up — even faster than air.

Two NASA scientists used satellite data to look at 104 large inland lakes around the world and found that on average they have warmed 2 degrees (1.1 degree Celsius) since 1985. That's about two-and-a-half times the increase in global temperatures in the same time period.

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver called the data "another brick in the wall." What some of the folks gathered at Cancun need is a brick to the head.

I should have done this yesterday

But I suppose then I couldn't report on what happened.

Yesterday, Saturday, marked 50 days before the opening of the world climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is scheduled to run from December 7 to December 18. To mark the day, there were protests around the world, many of them centering on the theme of "350," referring to 350 parts per million. That is the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere below which climate scientists say we must remain to avoid the worst aspects of global warming.

Grist reported on several of the protests, including ones in Sydney, Berlin, Jakarta, Madrid, and Istanbul. The article also noted some creative expressions of concern: In Paris, protesters set their alarm clocks and mobile phones to ring at 12:18 pm, to refer to the end of the summit on December 18. There were two actions in London, one by "The Eye" and one across the Thames, where some 100 musicians gathered outside Parliament and used their trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and clarinets to play an F note (with a frequency of 350 Hz) for 350 seconds. And in Beirut, many of the protesters wore snorkels, saying this wouldn't be the first time the city was submerged but the first time the cause wasn't earthquakes.

NPR described

what 350.org founder Bill McKibben called a global game of Scrabble, [in which] groups in Australia, Ecuador, India, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Denmark each spelled out one of the numbers in 350. Hundreds gathered in New York City's Times Square and watched slideshows of the other events on giant screens.

Photos also came in of people forming one of the numbers at places ranging from on the beach at Catia La Mar north of Caracas, Venezuela, to at the Dead Sea, in Jordan, in Israel, and in the Palestinian Territories. Altogether, 350.org says, there were over 5,200 events in 181 countries.

But as exciting and invigorating as such an outpouring of concern and conviction is, there is still a big and in some ways steepening hill to climb. Writing at Grist, Jonathan Hiskes says "it’s hard not to be troubled" by the results of a recent Pew Research Center poll, which found, quoting Hiskes,

a significant drop in the number of Americans who believe global warming is happening, is human-caused, and is a serious problem.

The poll found that only 57 percent of respondents believe that “the earth is getting warmer,” compared with 71 percent in April 2008. Pew has asked similar sets of questions six times since June 2006 and has never found such a dramatic rise in skepticism.

Those who believe warming is caused by human activity (burning fossil fuels) wavered between 41 and 50 percent in the first five polls. This fall, the figure dropped to 36 percent.

Those who consider global warming a “very serious problem” ranged between 41 and 47 percent in the first five polls. This fall, the figure fell to 35 percent.

Hiskes suggests several "unsatisfying" possible explanations for the results (and David Roberts, also at Grist, wonders how seriously to take them), but I think he misses the obvious one: Pew asked if there is "solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades." For the past few years, it hasn't been getting warmer. Temperatures have been pretty stable, even dropping a bit, in a cooling trend driven by a shift in ocean currents that may conceal the effect of anthropogenic warming for a decade or even longer. As a result, there has been more than enough triumphant trumpeting among the reichwing about "So where's the global warming, huh?" to have penetrated the understanding of the issue among the general public. (This is precisely why some climatologists are urging that a greater focus be placed on the long-term nature of the warming.)

Which is deeply unfortunate, because - as I have, I'm sure you know, said many times before - not only is global warming real and a serious threat to the future, its effects are already being seen.

For one example, the UN's International Labor Organization (ILO) has launched a project in the Philippines aimed at mitigating the impact changing weather patterns generated by global warming are already having on the local economy.

For another, Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says that we are already seeing "environmental refugees."

Our early twenty-first century civilization is being squeezed between advancing deserts and rising seas. Measured by the biologically productive land area that can support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by population growth, are now also fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and may soon be affected by the projected rise in sea level. As overpumping depletes aquifers, millions more are forced to relocate in search of water.

As one point of evidence, he cites a 2006 UN conference that predicted that desertification in sub-Saharan Africa could drive up to 60 million people from the region and into North Africa and Europe by 2020.

In the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, various people and organizations have tried to stress the urgency of the matter. A report by leading physicians from 17 nations published simultaneously in the UK's two leading health journals, the British Medical Journal and The Lancet, last month, declared that "a global health catastrophe" faces us in the absence of effective action.

Calling on medical practitioners everywhere to put pressure on politicians in advance of the meeting, the doctors say that the world's poorest people will be hit first by the health effects of global warming, but add that "no one will be spared". ...

Malaria, dengue fever and other tropical diseases would increase, the study predicted, spelling out how rising temperatures will cause health crises in half a dozen areas: there will be increased problems with food supplies, clean water and sanitation, especially in developing countries. Meanwhile, the migration of peoples will combine with extreme weather events such as hurricanes and severe floods to make for disastrous conditions in human settlements.

Such a future faces us, they said, if the politicians at Copenhagen are "indecisive" or "weak."

More recently, just a few days ago the leaders of 18 US scientific societies wrote a letter to the Senate

to state the consensus scientific view [of climate change].

Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science. Moreover, there is strong evidence that ongoing climate change will have broad impacts on society, including the global economy and on the environment. For the United States, climate change impacts include sea level rise for coastal states, greater threats of extreme weather events, and increased risk of regional water scarcity, urban heat waves, western wildfires, and the disturbance of biological systems throughout the country. The severity of climate change impacts is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades.

The words about human activities were given an exclamation point by work recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Current global warming seems to be unlike any other in the past, which were the outcome of natural processes, says new evidence unearthed by geologists.

Sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo (UB) geologists from a remote Arctic lake are unlike those seen during previous warming episodes. Researchers found that dramatic changes began occurring in unprecedented ways after the midpoint of the 20th century.

"The sediments till the mid-20th century were not all that different from previous warming intervals," said Jason P. Briner, assistant geology professor at the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "But after that things really changed. And the change is unprecedented."

The sediments are considered unique because they contain rare paleoclimate information about the past 200,000 years, providing a far longer record than most other sediments in the glaciated portion of the Arctic, which only reveals clues to the past 10,000 years.

Note that they made no claim about the degree or intensity of warming in those earlier eras as compared to now. What they did say is that the present warming is fundamentally different from anything that has been seen since modern humans appeared on Earth. It is not a natural phenomenon. It is us. We are doing it.

So why are we futzing around? Why are we hearing things like Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen saying things are moving too slowly for an agreement to be reached in Copenhagen? Why is it that Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice can tell the Toronto Globe & Mail (Canada) say he's not hopeful for an agreement at the meeting without generating howls of protest? How can it be that Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has to say it's “unrealistic” to expect a treaty to come out of the summit and the best Obama adviser John Podesta can offer is that there may be some kind of accord to lead to a treaty, that is, the nations could maybe agree to agree - sometime later?

Well, one reason is the idiotic, perverse, Alphonse and Gaston routine in which the nations of the world are engaging.

Canada, for example, is insisting it should have a "less aggressive" target for emission reductions than Europe or Japan because its population is growing faster and its industrial structure is energy-intensive. It's also refusing to release a plan

until there is more clarity on how the United States intends to proceed in global climate-change talks in Copenhagen in December, and on what an international treaty would look like.

It's also demanding that emerging economies such as China and India agree to binding caps on their emissions - while those two nations have taken a united stand of pledging to reduce the rate of growth of their emissions, but not to cap them. They in turn insist that the developed nations, particularly the United States, the world's second largest producer of greenhouse gases (behind China) must act first. But lacking a commitment from developing nations, the chances of getting climate protection legislation through the Congress are dim.

So Canada says it won't act until China and India agree to cap their emissions, who refuse to do so and say the US must act first, and the US refuses to act until after China and India do.

Meanwhile, European Union has said it would reduce emissions by 30 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 - if other developed countries accept similar reductions.

"Please, after you." "Oh, no no no, by all means, after you." "No, you first." "No, you first!" And around it goes, all of them concerned with short-term economic (and political) self-interest and nationalistic ego to the detriment of the long-term interests of their own societies.

You want to see just how dumb the governments of the world can be? That Globe & Mail article says that Ottawa is defending its climate goals by saying the 2020 target represents a 26% reduction from 1990 emission levels on a per-capita basis, after adjusting for population growth, and the targets are “comparable” to more aggressive ones because they will be just as costly to achieve.

"Per capita basis" doesn't mean shit to the climate! "Comparable costs" doesn't mean shit to the climate! What the climate cares about is the total output of greenhouse gases. And as long as we continue as we have been, pumping them out faster than the environment can dispose of them, we continue to build our own coffins. Might there be some short-term economic or political disadvantage to saying "We're not waiting for anyone else, we're going to do the best we can, right now?" Yes, absolutely. The question is, how much of your future, how much of your society's future, how much of the human future, are you willing to sacrifice to avoid that cost?

The answer we're getting right now is - let's just say - not encouraging.

Footnote: On the other hand, for whatever encouragement it does bring, it's wise to recall that those US poll numbers from Pew Research do not reflect worldwide thinking. A worldwide poll commissioned by The Guardian (UK) and released the end of July, found broad popular support for action on climate change.

The survey sampled the opinions of over 18,000 people in 19 countries, asking them if they wanted their own government to make climate change a top priority. Overall, 73% said yes.

The results of the poll as graphed at this link are a little hard to understand so I'll explain: People were asked to rate, on a scale of 0 to 10, how high a priority dealing with climate change is for their government. They were then asked to rate how high a priority it should be. There are two notable takeaways from this:

One is that, as DeSmogBlog notes, the US is an outlier: On making it a top priority, it came in at 4.71. Only one other nation (the Palestinian Territories) came in under 5 and only one more (Iraq) came in under 6. Which, considering the importance of the US in the whole negotiation and how it almost single-handedly undermined Kyoto by its self-centered, pig-headed resistance to cooperation, is certainly not good news.

However, even here there is a silver or at least a silver-plated lining in the second takeaway: In every one of the 19 countries, including the US, people said it should be a higher priority for their government than it is.

Take what you can get and carry on. 'Cause if you don't - we are so screwed.

The Olympic spirit

For better or for worse, it was likely inevitable that dissidents in China would use the occasion of the Olympic games to move aggressively on behalf of their causes, the better being the hope of gaining the attention of the world at a time more eyes would be on China, the worse being increased bloodshed. The BBC says that

[u]nidentified attackers have killed 16 policemen in an attack on a border post in China's restive Muslim region of Xinjiang, state media report.

The attackers drove up to the post at Kashgar and threw two grenades, which also wounded 16 members of the border patrol armed police division.

Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said that attackers used a dump truck to break into the police post Sunday evening, US time.

Xinjiang is home to the Muslim Uighur (also Uyghur) people, who for some time have been subjected to "a crushing campaign of religious repression" according to Human Rights Watch, a campaign that gained both strength and cribbed legitimacy after 9/11, when the Chinese government could present the repression as past of the "worldwide campaign against terrorism."

Still, resistance continues. In April, Chinese officials had to admit that they were facing ethnic unrest in the region. As many as 500 Uighurs had demonstrated in Hotan on March 23, the New York Times reported. The government accused the protesters of "splittism" and while some local sources said the demonstrators called for independence, others said the protest was against cultural restrictions, such as a ban on Islamic scarves.

This is not to say that the long campaign waged by Uighur separatists has not included or at the very least claimed acts of terrorism: A group called the Turkestan Islamic Party claimed responsibility for three explosions on buses, one in Shanghai in May and two more two weeks ago in Yunnan province, that killed a total of five people. Chinese officials denied there was any connection to terrorism, but so far as I've been able to find, have offered no alternative explanation for the explosions.

The Turkestan Islamic Party also has released a video in which it threatens the Olympics, due to start Friday. It can be expected that the Chinese government, having used the War on Terror^{(c)(reg.)(pat.pend.)} as a handy excuse to repress the Uighurs, will now use the "threat to the Olympics" born of the very failure of that effort to redouble its attempts to oppress them into passive submission to their gradual disappearance.

I finally have an excuse to say this: Developing....