Catching up - privacy/secrecy

This is not going to really be analysis, more a compilation of items I've collected of late that I have not taken the opportunity to post. They are in no particular order of date or importance.

- This is old, but still important. Back in January 2009, the government issued a grand jury subpoena to the online news site Indymedia.us demanding "all IP traffic to and from" the site for a particular date, including "IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information." That is, the feds wanted any available identifying information about everyone who visited the site that day (which is beyond what the law allows) and they also ordered the site's proprietor to keep the demand secret (which is also beyond what the law allows). At one point, she was threatened with prosecution for obstruction of justice if she revealed the subpoena.

Fortunately, instead of meekly submitting the proprietor went to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which shot the whole thing down and forced the government to back off. The point remains, however, how many other such subpoenas have gone out and have been complied with - including keeping them secret - because the recipients didn't realize they had an option or just weren't interested in trying?

- Speaking of "how many times," you may know that all cell phones sold now have a GPS capability so if you dial 911 from an unknown location, rescuers can find you. What you may not know is that Sprint has set up a web interface for law enforcement agencies, which can then locate any Sprint customer in real time knowing only their phone number.

In its first year of operation, the system processed eight million such requests covering thousands of customers.

- Last month, the Supreme Court heard a case testing the limits of immunity from suits for prosecutors. The case involves Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee, who spent 25 years in prison for killing a cop in Council Bluffs, Iowa - until evidence long hidden in police files resulted in them being freed.

The principal witness against the two at their trial had earlier fingered two other men, one of whom, it turned out, was in prison at the time of the crime. The "witness" also got the site of the shooting wrong and gave three different accounts of the type of gun used. And he failed a polygraph.

Police and prosecutors knew all this and more - including evidence pointing to a different suspect - but still prosecuted Harrington and McGhee. Notably, the other suspect was white and the two men are black.

In 2003, the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the convictions, calling the star witness a "liar and perjurer." All the prosecution witnesses have recanted.

McGhee agreed to a plea deal in exchange for time served; Harrington refused and all charges were dropped. Under Iowa law, there is no practical way for the men to obtain compensation for those 25 years, so they sued prosecutors and police in federal court for violation of constitutional rights.

Prosecutors typically are shielded from suits for what they do at trial, for fear that they would be subjected to a flood of lawsuits by anyone they ever got convicted. But the prosecutors in the murder case, who are the defendants in this suit, are claiming far more: They are claiming that protection also covers the investigation and the filing of charges before any trial, that prosecutors are absolutely immune from any suit, period.

Even if a prosecutor files charges against a person knowing that there is no evidence of his guilt, says [Stephen] Sanders[, the defendents' lawyer], "that's an absolutely immunized activity."

What they are arguing - and I mean literally and in so many words - is that "there is no freestanding right not to be framed."

That well deserves the description "shocks the conscience." If it doesn't strike you that way, I invite you to imagine what it would/could mean if SCOTUS agrees.

- Under the "It's way too late to be surprised" heading comes news that Barack Obama has convinced Congress to extend key components of the Patriot Act which are set to expire at the end of the year. These are the same provisions he opposed before those powers were his, not someone else's.

The three provisions in question 1)allow warrantless wiretapping of phones and emails, 2)authorize seizure of private records from credit reporting companies, banks, internet service providers, and libraries, and 3)loosen the meaning of what constitutes "material support" to terrorists.

In 2005, then-Senator Obama called such provisions "just plain wrong" and "a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document." Now they're vitally important, as Obama gulps down another plateful of the steaming pile Shrub left behind.

- The wealthy enclave of Tiburon, California has decided to

become the first U.S. city to install cameras to photograph the license plates of every car that enters and leaves town.

"I think it makes the community safe," Michael Cronin, Tiburon's police chief said....

So would installing surveillance cameras in every room of every home, Chief. Is that next?

- As I'm sure you know so I'm just going to mention it in passing, the Obama administration flip-flopped about releasing photos of detainee abuse at Guantánamo and resisted a Court of Appeals ruling calling for the release. More recently, Congress passed a law the end of October allowing Defense Secretary Gates to withhold the photos, an authority he used two weeks later. On November 30, SCOTUS reversed the Appeals Court and ordered it to reconsider its ruling in light of the new law.

- Speaking of that fabled Obama administration transparency and accountability, after a two-year court battle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was finally able to obtain

thousands of pages of records detailing behind-the-scenes negotiations between government agencies and Congress about providing immunity for telecoms involved in illegal government surveillance.

They were released as a result of a suit filed in 2007, when Congress first debated granting immunity to the telcoms doing the government's illegal dirty work of unchecked surveillance of Americans' phone and internet communications. EFF filed an FOIA request information about communications between the DOJ, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Congress, and the telcoms.

The Shrub gang stonewalled and so, initially, did the O-crowd. But now it has released "a significant portion" of the records while declaring it will try to block the release of more - including, significantly, the names of the telcoms involved in lobbying for immunity.

"This case isn't over yet - there's still more information about the extensive lobbying campaign by the telecoms that helped them get immunity last year," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "The government continues to hide important documents from the public."

The government's appeal will be heard before the Court of Appeals in January.

- It's not all bad news on the privacy/secrecy front. In early November, a federal district court ruled that

patients and scientists can challenge patents on human genes in court, allowing a lawsuit challenging patents on two human genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer to move forward.

The practice of patenting human genes has become disturbingly widespread. About 20% of all human genes are patented, including genes associated with Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy, colon cancer, asthma, and many other illnesses. That often means, as it does mean in the particular case at hand, that only the patent-holder can perform diagnostic tests on the genes; even looking at them without consent is claimed to be a violation of the patent. That monopolistic control of a diagnostic tool not only enables charging sky-high rates, it makes getting a second opinion legally impossible.

The idea of patenting genes, which clearly are "products of nature" specifically excluded in patent law, is not only legally absurd, it is morally offensive and frankly creepy to boot. The suit, filed by the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation, a non-profit affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, challenges the whole notion of gene patenting, and so could have far-reaching effects. So it's a very good thing that the defendants' attempts to get it dismissed failed.

- But getting back to the bad news, with the arrival of devices placed in all new cars that monitor and log driver behavior, privacy advocates worry about their intrusive nature. Automakers and others of course dismiss the concerns. But consider:

Jim Kobus, a communications manager at OnStar, says that the system cannot track any vehicle's location until a customer makes contact by his or her own volition ... or the system detects a blowout or crash.

"The only area where that would change is in the event you report the vehicle stolen. We make sure there's a valid police report and then we begin the process to track the vehicle. ...

At the request of law enforcement, OnStar can remotely slow down a vehicle or halt its operation.

Hold it. But that means you can track the vehicle's location without the driver initiating contact: Surely no thief is going to press the button. And you can control the car, make it slow down or stop. You're saying you can't but all you really mean is that normally you don't.

Referring to the data recorder in cars, GM spokesman Alan Adler says "We don't do anything with that data ourselves."

"In the case of a crash, it doesn't say where you were, or which street you were on. It records only certain pieces of data; it's a tool in reconstructing crashes."

Adler explains that drivers have little choice but to drive with the system intact. "To get rid of the system then you have to get rid of airbags, and it's illegal to drive without airbags."

In other words, it records info police and/or your insurance company can use against you and was specifically designed to make it impossible to remove.

Next there's Josh Huber of Inthinc, who says his company's Tiwi system

"monitors the speed of the car and also aggressive driving, accelerating or braking too hard, and whether the seatbelt is on. If the driver is going above the limit it will alert the driver.

"The notifications are automatically put on a database on our website and a parent can access that database or have it sent by alerts on their phone."

So that information is made available to people other than the driver; it's part of the very idea. And it's not only parents, it's the manager(s) of the database - and anyone who gets the password.

Jeff Harvey, also at Inthinc, says the information collected about a driver's habits is used to calculate a score based on the number of "violations" over a certain number of miles, and their severity.

That score, Harvey says, is kept for up to a year, but again is only accessible to the owner of the vehicle, who can choose to share that information with insurance companies should they choose.

Oh, right, like that will be voluntary once the insurer knows you have such a device installed.

Harvey adds that in the event of a stolen vehicle, the owner can log onto Inthinc's website and see where their car is, and can work independently with police for its recovery.

Which means, yet another time, that you can track to car's location. And that was the question. Not if you routinely do, but if you can. So let everyone driving a late-model car know: You can be tracked everywhere you go. It doesn't mean you are, but there is no question but that you can be.

- Finally for this round, have you seen the signs all over airports about how you have to show ID to get on a plane?

It's not true.

Nope. Not true. You do not need to show an ID to fly from one state to another. You may (and very likely will) get extra screening if you don't show ID, but it is not actually required under either law or TSA regulations or guidelines.

Surprised? So are, it seems, the TSA team in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who arrested frequent flyer Phil Mocek after he refused to produce ID when trying to board a plane on November 16. He was charged with "concealing identity, disorderly conduct, refusing to obey an officer, and criminal trespass” and held on $1,000 bail. His traveling companion was detained and banned from the airport for 24 hours after attempting to film the arrest.

In fairness and on the upside, Mocek has been doing this for a few years and while he has been subjected to increased scrutiny, before this occasion he has always been able to get on the plane. But the existence of those lying signs are still a pisser.

Footnote: It's not just us. In the UK, whenever someone is arrested, a DNA sample is taken. Under guidelines established by the ruling Labour Party, police can keep those samples on file forever, even if the person is never charged with, much less convicted of, any crime. As a result, the British government has created the world's largest DNA database.

Recently, a report from the Human Genetics Commission charged that police are regularly arresting people just to get their DNA samples. What's more, there is clear racial bias in the practice:

While about eight percent of the British population is now listed on the DNA database, more than three-quarters of young black males, aged 18 to 35, are listed. ...

[T]he reported crime rate in Britain has been falling since 2004, but during that time arrests have been increasing at a rate of four to six percent per year. The Nature magazine blog reports that there are nearly six million people on Britain's DNA database, out of a total population of 62 million. Of those, 980,000[, over 16%,] are estimated to have never been charged with a crime.

Labour has proposed a change to allow the DNA of innocent people to be removed from the database after six years, but as sometimes happens, the right is more attuned to privacy: The Conservative Party says the DNA of innocent people shouldn't be in the database at all except if they were charged with violent or sexual offenses.

That doesn't go far enough for me; "not guilty" should mean "not guilty." Still, it is clearly better than Labour's stand.

We interrupt our catching up for a quick question

Five high-ranking executives at AIG have threatened to quit if they are required by federal regulators to take a significant pay cut.

And this should concern us exactly how?

Catching up: Afghanistan

This is something I've neglected for far too long, so bear with me. Let's start from the fact that, unlike some who are Shocked! Shocked, I tell you! that Barack "War is necessary for peace" Obama escalated in Afghanistan, I'm not: It's exactly what he said he would do.

Well, okay, not exactly. Rather more, in fact.

In July 2008, in a New York Times op-ed, he said he would deploy "at least two additional combat brigades" to Afghanistan. A brigade is about 3,000-5,000 soldiers, so candidate Obama was proposing to increase troop strength by 6,000 to 10,000.

In February, President Obama sent 17,000 and then another 4,000. And now it's 30,000 more. So by the time this escalation is completed sometime next year, and assuming there will be no more, Obama will have sent about 51,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan - somewhere between five and eight times what he said he would do and doubling the number of troops in country. Even allowing for the political weasel phrase "at least," that's a hell of a lot more than he proposed.

However, that doesn't change the fact that in that same July op-ed he promised to "accomplish the mission" in Afghanistan and "to finish the job," the latter of which phrases he used again on November 24 during his trip to India:

During a joint press conference with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today, President Obama addressed his upcoming announcement on his Afghanistan troops decision. ...

After eight years, some of those years in which we did not have either the resources or the strategy, to get the job done, it is my intention to finish the job[, he said].

The day after the election, I wrote that

I strongly suspect that in a while a lot of people are going to be very disappointed in Barack Obama. While opponents will be surprised to discover he's not nearly as bad as they'd been lead to believe (Louis Farrakhan is not going to be heading up any cabinet department), supporters are going to be dismayed to discover that he's not nearly as good as they had lead themselves to believe, that the soaring rhetoric will not produce soaring policies and that there was far more hope in the words than there will be in the deeds.

Okay, I was wrong about the opponents' ability to recognize reality, but not about the supporters. But, as I said a couple of weeks before the election and I don't know how many times since,

Barack Obama is not a peace candidate. He's just a "I knew Iraq was a dumb idea" candidate. ... He's a reliable, accepts-the-common-wisdom, centrist who can be counted on to strive to continue the Pax Americana,

a judgment I think his Nobel prize acceptance speech confirmed: It eagerly embraced the mythology of the US having spent the "last six decades" spending "blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms" to "underwrite global security," "promote peace and prosperity," and "enable democracy to take hold," all for reasons completely unrelated to "impos[ing] our will" but only because "we seek a better future" for all the "children and grandchildren" of the world. It's as if Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Bay of Pigs, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada, the Gulf of Sidra, Lebanon, "the former Yugoslavia," Libya, Iraq (twice) - I'm sure I'm forgetting some as well as leaving aside the "indirect" cases such as Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, and East Timor - it's like they never happened.

Oh, and Afghanistan. Right. Afghanistan.

So getting back to that, while I'm distressed and disappointed at the decision to escalate - especially since there was just a brief, flickering, moment when it looked like the decision just might possibly go the other way, a brief moment when there was talk of pushback within the administration against the demands of the generals - I can't say I'm in any way surprised, much less shocked.

What it does mean, though, is that this is now Barack Obama's war. Whether you consider it his Iraq or his Vietnam, it is his war. And it's possible that it will frame and define his presidency, as Iraq did Bush's, as Vietnam did Johnson's. The parallels are chilling.

For one example, this a war in support of the government of Hamid Karzai - a bogus president, who retained his office in an "election" in which one-third of his votes were fake (and the Deputy Special Representative to the UN mission in Kabul was ordered by his superior to conceal evidence of fraud even from the Afghan election commission) and a "runoff" which never happened after his only opponent withdrew, claiming fraud made victory impossible. And, let it be noted, it was an election which the White House claimed would "significantly factor into their strategic review" about strategy and troop levels - but which apparently didn't.

A war in support of a government that even Nancy Pelosi calls an "unworthy partner" undeserving of increased support; one so rife, so rancid, with corruption that according to the annual Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International, only Somalia is worse. A government so fragile that its president had to be inaugurated in a capital turned by authorities into

all but a ghost town, with police shutting down streets and ordering citizens to stay home.

A government with so little control outside Kabul that the Taliban has in nearly all provinces established a shadow government, one whose members

"are running the country now," said Khalid Pashtoon, a legislator from the southern province of Kandahar who has close ties to Karzai. "They're an important part of the chaos."

A shadow government that for all its cruelties and failings, people are turning to for solutions to their problems, preferring that to the corruption and ineptitude of the Karzai regime. A regime without the support of its own people.

It is a war not only supporting a corrupt government but using the wrong tactics to do so: Testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in October, Robert Grenier (former CIA station chief in Pakistan) and Dr. Marc Sageman (former member of the CIA's Afghan Task Force)

concurred that escalation would only further spread anti-American sentiment among Afghans and other Muslims, and that nonmilitary initiatives to contain Al Qaeda and foster civic development in Afghanistan would prove far more effective. ...

"'It's me and my brother against my cousin. But it's me and my cousin against a foreigner[,' Sageman said.] So if we send 40,000 Americans...that will coalesce every local rivalry; they will put their local rivalry aside to actually shoot the foreigners and then they'll resume their own internecine fight.... Sending troops with weapons just will unify everybody against those troops, unfortunately."

What's more, it's a war against the wrong "enemy" that will only advance the position of the real one:

Poverty and unemployment are overwhelmingly seen as the main reasons behind conflict in Afghanistan, according to a survey in that country.

British aid agency Oxfam - which questioned 704 Afghans - said seven out of 10 respondents blamed these factors.

Taliban violence was seen as less important than government weakness and corruption, according to the poll. ...

One in five said they had been tortured and one in 10 claimed to have been imprisoned at least once since 1979, when Soviet forces invaded.

Based on what those surveyed said:

• one in six Afghans are currently considering leaving the country

• three-quarters of Afghans have been forced to leave their homes since 1979 ...

"The people of Afghanistan have suffered 30 years of unrelenting horror," said Oxfam chief executive Barbara Stocking.

"In that time millions have been killed and millions more have fled their homes. Those who have committed the most terrible abuses have enjoyed impunity rather than faced justice. Afghan society has been devastated."

In fact, the supposed enemy, the one we're supposedly really concerned with, isn't even there: US military officials will concede privately that there are probably no more than about 100 al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Which has produced echoes of both Iraq and Vietnam. On the Iraq side of that tally is the unavoidable fact, no matter how much the Obama crowd in and out of the White House dance and dodge, that this is a Bush doctrine war. It's declared intent, it's central purpose, what "finish the job" is supposed to mean, is to prevent a Taliban victory because, the argument goes, that would be followed by al-Qaeda forces returning to "safe havens" in Afghanistan from which they can "plot attacks against America." That is, bluntly and clearly, the whole idea is that it is a war not to defend against an existing threat but to prevent the emergence of a hypothetical future threat. That is the Bush doctrine! It is precisely the Bush doctrine! A doctrine now fully embraced by Barack Obama to justify his war.

Oh, a "hypothetical" threat, you ask? Even leaving aside the inconvenient fact that most of the planning for 9/11 was not done in Afghanistan but in Germany (which no one has proposed invading, as far as I know), yes. At that Foreign Relations Committee hearing, John Kerry

asked whether there is legitimate concern about "a new union [between Al Qaeda and] the Taliban."

Sageman didn't perceive such a threat.

"A Taliban return to power does not automatically mean an invitation to Al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan," Sageman said. "The relationship between Al Qaeda and...[the] Taliban has always been strained."

Indeed, if the formula is "Taliban control yields free rein for al-Qaeda," why are there fewer than 100 in Afghanistan at a time when, according to Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Taliban has secured a "dominant influence" in 11 provinces?

Despite all that, here we are. Or, rather, he we are again, prosecuting an unjustified war on behalf of the wrong friends in power, with the wrong tactics, against the wrong "enemy," a war more likely to kill innocents than enemies, more likely to turn people against us than to us, one guaranteed to bring bloodshed, hunger, and homelessness while all but equally guaranteed to find "victory" to be a chimera, not a conclusion.

And, as always seems to be the case, escalation is easy but the end is endless; it's all hard facts, dates, and timetables about getting in, about building up, about "more" - and all mushy vagueness and easily-spun platitudes about getting out as the candidate who demanded an exit strategy for Iraq becomes the president who evokes 9/11 and talks in bumper stickers about "evil in the world" and "finishing the job" in Afghanistan.

Despite what some chose to hear, it was clear from the beginning to anyone who actually paid attention that there was no "timetable" for withdrawal in Obama's grandiloquence or even for the start of one. Obama said in his announcement of the escalation that "after 18 months, our troops will begin to come home" - but later amended that to how it was actually all about "handing over responsibility to Afghan forces," which would

allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011. Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.

In other words, even assuming "our forces" referred to all 100,000 of them, not just the latest 30,000, "It depends." In case anyone didn't catch that, it was soon made abundantly clear:

Clarifying [Obama's] plan in testimony to a congressional committee, [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates said a "full scale reevaluation of where we stand" would take place in December 2010.

The administration would then assess whether plans to begin transferring security responsibility to the Afghans in July 2011 remained on track.

July 2011, that is, was in Gates' words the "intent," the "plan," but "the president always has the freedom to adjust his decisions."

At the same hearings, Admiral Mullen said

that what would begin in July 2011 was a transfer of secured districts from US to Afghan government control. “The July 2011 date is a day we start transitioning - transferring responsibility and transitioning,” he said.

Combine that with something else Gates said:

As the transition gets underway, Gates suggested U.S. forces could begin to pull back from the frontlines as Afghan forces play a bigger role in certain districts and provinces, much as they did during the transition in Iraq.

He said the transfers would take place in the "most uncontested places" of Afghanistan first. Other areas of the country could remain locked in "extraordinarily heavy combat."

Asked whether the July 2011 start of the transfer of security responsibility to the Afghans may not include immediately a withdrawal of U.S. forces, Gates said:

"That is correct. I think as we turn over more districts and more provinces to Afghan security control, much as we did with the provincial Iraqi control, that there will be a thinning of our forces and a gradual drawdown," he said.

What do you get from all that? You get a "clarification" of Obama's "intent" that turns it from a date for the beginning of a withdrawal into a "plan" for "the beginning of a process" that may not even involve the withdrawal of any troops from Afghanistan but only shifting them from certain provinces into other provinces where combat is heavier.

So there's always a timetable for a build-up - there's always a timetable for a build-up, the clarion call of "urgency," of "necessity" - but not for a withdrawal, not even for a drawdown, not even for a date to begin even a symbolic drawdown, only an "intent," an "it all depends," a - you'll pardon the expression - hope.

A "hope" while the blood keeps flowing, especially among, same as it ever was, the civilians: Over 30,000 killed by the war since 2001 and a yearly toll that has risen each of the last four years.

And for what? For what? Matthew Hoh, the former Foreign Service officer who worked in a province considered to be a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan but resigned as a protest over US policy in the country, argues that

many Afghans are fighting the Americans simply because troops there are taking sides in an internal "civil war,"

a fact infuriatingly, horrifyingly, foully, disgustingly, known to US officials.

Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes, according to summaries of new US intelligence reports[, the Boston Globe revealed in October]. ...

“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’

They know that and still they just label it all "Taliban," in the same sort of conscious distortion - the same sort of lie - they used in calling every attack on US forces in Iraq the work of "al-Qaeda in Iraq."

In an interview in November, Hoh asserted that

"[t]he presence of our ground combat troops is not doing anything to defeat al-Qaida"

and the US should stop combat operations and seek "some kind of political reconciliation" because right now all those operations do is "prolong the conflict."

When he quit, Hoh insisted that "a lot" of people in the Obama administration agree with him. Apparently, sadly, tragically (especially for the people of Afghanistan), they are not among those who have Obama's ear.

Meanwhile, and finally for the moment, what about the other side of that tally I mentioned - what of Vietnam? What is the echo of Vietnam? It's one of the worst and one that becomes louder with each news cycle, no longer a rumble but a clanking, a clanging, pounding on the ears of anyone not deaf to Marx's famous line that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." A klaxon screech of expanding wars, of wars spilling beyond boundaries, of secret wars - in Cambodia. In Laos.

In Pakistan.

A secret war.

A deadly secret war.

A spreading secret war.

A growing secret war.

In Pakistan.

I think of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, of the secret air war on Laos, of the secret bombing of Cambodia and the invasion to "clear out" the enemy's "privileged sanctuaries" - or, if you prefer, "safe havens." And I get very, very nervous.

Withdraw. Now.

Catching up: global warming - the news

So as the nations of the world debate and dither and the nanny-nanny naysayers bluster and bellyache, what are some of the latest signs of global warming that the former too often ignore and the latter always do?

Well, let's start with a sort of footnote to the post about the emails. In the wake of the brouhaha over the theft of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, came this from it's director, Phil Jones:

"That the world is warming is based on a range of sources: not only temperature records but other indicators such as sea level rise, glacier retreat and less Arctic sea ice," he said. "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for Nasa and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others.

Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." ...

He added that he had long been under pressure from climate sceptics to further explain his research: "From about 2001/2002 I was getting emails from a number of people involved in the climate sceptic community. Initially at the beginning I did try to respond to them in the hope I might convince them but I soon realised it was a forlorn hope and broke off communication. Some of the emails I sent them subsequently appeared and were discussed on various sceptic websites."

That last is part of the basis for the claims of "suppressing information." The CRU staff found they were spending so much time responding to "requests" for ever more data that it was interfering with their work until the finally went to the FOI officer at the University and asked if the stuff being demanded was really within the scope of the FOI. That officer ultimately agreed that a lot of it wasn't. And of course the agency's refusal to continue to respond to people not acting in good faith has been used against it.

Anyway, onward. What about some of those areas mentioned by Jones? Well, for one thing,

[t]he Greenland ice sheet is losing its mass faster than in previous years and making an increasing contribution to sea level rise, a study has confirmed. ...

For the period 2000-2008, melting Greenland ice raised sea levels by an average of about 0.46mm per year.

Since 2006, that has increased to 0.75mm per year. ...

In total, sea levels are rising by about 3mm per year, principally because seawater is expanding as it warms. ...

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report projected a sea level rise of 28-43cm during this century.

But it acknowledged this was almost certainly an underestimate because understanding of how ice behaves was not good enough to make reliable projections. ...

Another analysis of satellite data, published in September, showed that of 111 fast-moving Greenland glaciers studied, 81 were thinning at twice the rate of the slow-moving ice beside them.

This indicates that the glaciers are accelerating and taking more ice into the surrounding sea.

The important point here is not the amount of melt but the fact that it's accelerating - and liquid water both absorbs more, and reflect less, heat, meaning more warmth to produce more melting. It's a positive feedback loop. It's thought to be unlikely to develop enough to be a serious problem for quite some time, maybe a couple of centuries - which is a very good thing, as a complete melt of the Greenland ice sheet would raise world sea levels by about 20 feet - but the more rapid melt is a clear indication that global warming is continuing.

In some areas, even what was thought to be good news turns out to be, well, not so good. Bad, even.

One of Canada's top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared.

Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multi-year frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin "rotten" ice that can't support weight of the bears. "It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multi-year sea ice. The whole world thought it was multi-year sea ice," said Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.

"Unfortunately, what we found was that the multi-year (ice) has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice."

The research ship easily broke through permanent ice, which is normally 10 meters (about 33 feet) thick. What the team thought to be stable ice cracked when they arrived, and

"[as] I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multi-year ice floe broke up into pieces," Barber said. "This floe was 16 km across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes." ...

Multi-year sea ice used to cover 90 per cent of the Arctic basin, Barber said. It now covers 19 per cent. Where it used to be up to 10 metres thick, it's now 2 metres at most.

This was an area thought to be recovering, based on satellite data, because from there it looks the same and has the same superficial temperature. But it's not.

And despite the nanny-nanny naysayer claims based on cherry-picking individual years and short-term trends, the warming of the planet is continuing. In fact,

[t]his decade is on track to become the warmest since records began in 1850, and 2009 could rank among the top-five warmest years, the U.N. weather agency reported Tuesday on the second day of a pivotal 192-nation climate conference.

Only the United States and Canada experienced cooler conditions than average, the World Meteorological Organization said, although Alaska had the second-warmest July on record.

In central Africa and southern Asia, this will probably be the warmest year, but overall, 2009 will "be about the fifth-warmest year on record," said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the WMO. ...

The decade 2000-2009 "is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, than the 1980s and so on," Jarraud told a news conference, holding a chart with a temperature curve pointing upward.

The decade has been marked by dramatic effects of warming.

In 2007-2009, the summer melt reduced the Arctic Ocean ice cap to its smallest extent ever recorded. In the 2007-2009 International Polar Year, researchers found that Antarctica is warming more than previously believed. Almost all glaciers worldwide are retreating.

Meanwhile, such destructive species as jellyfish and bark-eating beetles are moving northward out of normal ranges, and seas expanding from warmth and glacier melt are encroaching on low-lying island states.

But just remember, the whole thing is a UN-driven conspiracy and the WMO is part of the UN, so how can you believe anything they say, even if it is verified independently? They're all in on it, you know! "Climategate," after all, is an "international scientific fraud." (My gosh, this story of the hacked emails is turning into a game of Gossip - or, as we used to call it, Rumors - getting wilder and wilder over time.)

Meanwhile, the glaciers keep retreating, the ice keeps melting, the seas keep rising, the CO₂ concentrations keep increasing, and the thermometers keep going up.

Going up just how much? Well, the UK Met Office just predicted a better than even chance that 2010 will be the hottest year on record, surpassing the previous "We've been cooling for over a decade!" record year of 1998. (Link via Notes from Underground.)

The "central estimate" of their forecast is that the global average surface temperature for 2010 will be 0.58 degrees C above the long-term average for 1961-1990 (which is 14 degrees C), compared to the average for 1998, which was 0.52 degrees above.

If a new hottest year is indeed recorded, it will undermine the argument of climate change sceptics that the actual warming of the atmosphere ceased in 1998. ... The new record is likely to be broken, the Met Office said, because of a combination of global warming and El Nino, the periodic, natural warming of the waters of the eastern tropical Pacific, which is currently pushing up world temperatures.

In 1998, the record was established because the El Nino of that year was the strongest ever seen. But 2010 is likely to top it, climate scientists believe, even though the present El Nino, which began this summer and is likely to extend to next spring, is much less strong than its 1998 equivalent, and is regarded merely as "moderate".

This implies that global warming will play an even stronger role in the average temperature out-turn for next year, although the natural variability of the climate will also play a part.

While there is no guarantee that 2010 will be an all-time record - remember, that was based on the "middle estimate" - the Met said there is a 90% chance that 2010 will be warmer than 2009. It's worthy of note that the Met's prediction for 2009 turned out to be spot on and that since it started making such predictions 10 years ago, it's average error has been 0.06 degrees - and even if it's prediction for 2010 proves to be too high by that amount, the coming year will still tie with 1998 for the warmest ever.

And you can bet that if 2010 does set a record, the nanny-nanny naysayers will claim the numbers were fudged to cover up "Climategate."

So what's the bottom line - or the top line, so to speak? Six.

Average temperatures across the world are on course to rise by up to 6C without urgent action to curb CO2 emissions, according a new analysis.

Emissions rose by 29% between 2000 and 2008, says the Global Carbon Project.

All of that growth came in developing countries, but a quarter of it came through production of goods for consumption in industrialised nations. ...

According to lead scientist Corinne Le Quere, the new findings should add urgency to the political discussions. ...

"If the agreement [at Copenhagen] is too weak or if the commitments are not respected, it's not two and a half or three degrees that we will get, it's five or six - that's the path that we are on right now." ...

Before about 2002, global emissions grew by about 1% per year.

Then the rate increased to about 3% per year, the change coming mainly from a ramping up in China's economic output, before falling slightly in 2008 as the global economy dipped towards recession. ...

Concentrations in the atmosphere also show an upward trend - as monitored at stations such as Mauna Loa in Hawaii - but at a lower rate. ...

One of the most intriguing findings from the study is the difference between the emissions produced directly by a given nation and the emissions generated through production of the goods and services consumed by its citizens.

Emissions from within the UK's borders, for example, fell by 5% between 1992 and 2004, says the GCP analysis.

However, emissions from goods and services consumed in the UK rose by 12% over the same period. ...

Another of the analyses shows that per-capita emissions across the globe are rising.

On average, each human now consumes goods and services "worth" 1.3 tonnes of carbon - up from 1.1 tonnes in 2000.

The GCP analysis suggests that constraining the global temperature rise to 2C would entail reducing per-capita emissions to 0.3 tonnes by 2050.

Fat chance of that happening. I've said this before in varying contexts, but it merits repeating: My biggest fear of death is the frustration of not knowing what happens after that. Not to me, to the world. It's the idea that there is an absolute end to knowledge.

But sometimes I do not regret I will not live to see the world I see coming.

Catching up: global warming - Copenhagen

Updated I'm not even going to try to cover all the bits and pieces of news coming out of the Copenhagen talks. There's too much going on and besides, probably everything you need to know can be summed up in the fact that the logo for the summit has the Siemens logo on it and the whole event is sponsored by Coke.

In any event, the day-to-day conference news is largely irrelevant except for the way it illustrates the various divisions that can advance or more likely impede efforts at some kind of binding agreement to attack global warming. But because that - a binding agreement - was the idea, what ultimately comes out of Copenhagen will be important no matter how much or little it accomplishes.

Suffice it for the moment to say that the day before the conference opened, there was a bit of unexpected optimism. Admittedly it was given the expected political spin, but still the source itself was cause for some small hope. Specifically,

[a] study released by the U.N. Environment Programs indicated that pledges by industrial countries and major emerging nations fall just short of greenhouse gas reductions that scientists have called for – and the gap is narrower than previously believed.

"For those who claim a deal in Copenhagen is impossible, they are simply wrong," said UNEP director Achim Steiner, releasing the report compiled by British economist Lord Nicholas Stern. ...

The UNEP report said all countries together should emit no more than 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2020 to avoid the worst consequences of a warming world.

Computing all commitments publicly announced so far, the report said emissions will total some 46 billion tons annually in 2020. Emissions today are about 47 billion tons.

"The gap has narrowed significantly," Steiner said. "People overestimate the possibility of closing that gap." He cautioned that the figures included many variables, and assumed that all countries would carry out the maximum they had promised so far.

Yeah, well that last part - assuming countries would actually do what they pledged - is the real snag. It hasn't worked that way to date. There's been some progress toward meeting previously-pledged goals by European Union states, but I don't think any nation has completely fulfilled its promises, certainly not among the major industrialized nations. Even the EU, in the face of a 2007 recommendation that industrialized countries should reduce emissions to a level 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, has pledged only a cut to 20% below that level.

The big surprise, the big hope, comes from the industrializing nations, the very ones the right wingers held up as getting a free ride on greenhouse gas cuts. Those nations were urged to cut their emissions by 15% below "business as usual" levels, that it, below what they otherwise would have been. India is now pledging a 20-25% slowdown and China is promising a hefty 40-45% cut from expectations.

[Yvo] de Boer[, the UN's top climate official,] said China's commitment alone amounted to about one-fourth of the action needed to meet scientific predictions that the Earth's average temperature would increase no more than 2 degrees Centigrade (3.6F) above preindustrial levels.

Disappointingly but hardly surprisingly, the US, dominated by "I got mine, Jack!" and "We're so special" thinking, is way behind.

Awaiting U.S. congressional action, however, the Obama administration could make only a provisional offer of a 17 percent reduction by 2020 from 2005 levels. Against 1990, that represents only a 3 to 4 percent cut, experts say.

Lacking Congressional action, it's hard to say where that 17% cut will come from, but one possibility is using the authority of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Which the Obama administration appears to be attempting to do:

The Obama administration took a major step Monday[, December 7,] toward imposing the first federal limits on climate-changing pollution from cars, power plants and factories, declaring there was compelling scientific evidence that global warming from manmade greenhouse gases endangers Americans' health. ...

It signaled the administration was prepared to push ahead for significant controls in the U.S. if Congress doesn't act first on its own. ...

No analysis has been conducted by the EPA on costs of such broad regulations, although the agency put the price tag of its proposed climate-related car rules at $60 billion, with an estimated benefit of $250 billion. ...

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said Monday, "There are no more excuses for delaying," adding that the so-called endangerment analysis from global warming had been under consideration at the agency for three years. After the official finding, she said the agency is now "obligated to make reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse pollutants under the Clean Air Act."

Business groups raised the same objections they raise to every single bit of environmental (or health, or worker safety, or whatever) regulation: It'll kill jobs, raise prices, stifle innovation, cause earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and plagues of locusts. Seriously, don't people ever get tired of hearing the exact same complaints - often enough in almost exactly the same words - to every single blessed proposal to benefit the general public? And doesn't anyone in the media get tired of repeating the same old word-for-word complaints as if they were serious considerations of the particular issue at hand? Seriously.

Getting back to the Copenhagen meeting, to I expect no one's surprise even the very prospect of a binding international agreement of any sort has got the black helicopter crowd in a tizzy. Rep. Dana Rhorabacher (R-Area 51), for one example cited by Digby, went on about a "global elite," a "globalist alliance," and a "globalist clique" trying to "shackle generations of Americans" under a "global government."

I recently crossed rhetorical swords with another conspiraphile who insisted that global warming was a conspiracy to impose "global taxes." I raise it here just so we remind ourselves of some of what we're up against.

First[, I wrote,] just consider how the conspiracy keeps expanding. Global warming, it seems, is a myth pushed by (gasp) a cabal of thousands of scientists and dozens if not hundreds of scientific organizations, all somehow coordinated by (gasp!) the IPCC, which was founded not only by the World Meteorological Organization but by an agency of (GASP!) the United Nations! Omigod omigod omigod! And it's all for the purpose of a "redistributionist, western-punishing, economy-breaking, global-taxation agenda!" OMIGOD!

Um, there is no "global tax" here, real or proposed. The only thing being proposed [in a working draft of an agreement] is a call for the rich industrialized nations to agree to devote some small part of their GDPs (up to 0.7%) to assist poor nations in dealing with and adapting to climate change and to establish a mechanism to insure that monies intended for that purpose actually go to that purpose. There is no collection mechanism, no way to enforce any sanctions, and as a practical, living-in-the-real-world matter it comes down to voluntary actions by individual nations. A "redistributionist, western-punishing, economy-breaking, global-taxation agenda?" Baloney. Actually, let me change that 'cause I actually like baloney. How about, maybe, cooked (not raw) spinach?

That, of course, didn't satisfy him, I knew it before I started because facts never satisfy such people, and my real audience was anyone else reading the thread. He was, after all, the same person who in a previous thread referred to the Global Poverty Act, a one-page bill sponsored by Barack Obama when he was in the Senate, which would require the White House "to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty" - and labeled it a move to impose "socialism." "Paranoid? Or awake?" he asked. ("What a hoot!" was my answer.)

On the other hand, there are people pushing from the other side, people who are saying - accurately - that the best hopes for Copenhagen aren't good enough, that it won't go far enough. And it seems Danish officials aren't all that thrilled about having them there.

Copenhagen is being turned into a fortress - and authorities are warning that protesters may face swift and severe penalties.

According to the New York Times, a host of measures have been put in place to ensure that protesters can be swiftly rounded up. These include new laws rushed through parliament that stiffen penalties for protest-related offenses, including large fines and extended jail stays. The government has also acquired new "anti-riot equipment."

Law enforcement officials proudly showed the media three dozen cages built in an abandoned Carlsberg beer depot - they will serve as temporary jails for as many as 350 protesters at a time. Some 1,000 people can be arrested and processed at the facility during a 24-hour period, authorities boasted to the media.

Such plans are - according to Per Larsen, the chief coordinating officer for the Copenhagen police force - part of the "biggest police action we have ever had in Danish history." In all, Larson told the New York Times, some $122 million has been spent to "secure the city and to fortify the Bella Center," where leaders are scheduled to meet. ...

Although police say they will allow several permitted actions, including a demonstration this Saturday from the city's center to the location of the UN meeting, officials have issued an order banning open-air meetings that "may constitute a danger to the public order" - a definition so vaguely worded that it gives police leeway to preemptively crack down on protesters.

(All praise to Green Left Global News & Info for the link.)

Police have already launched a raid against a building set up to house demonstrators.

About 200 police arrived at the shelter ... at 2.30am. They locked activists into the building for two hours,

while they searched for and confiscated materials they claimed were meant to "be used to cause trouble" during a large-scale march on Saturday.

That Saturday march is apparently intended to be the big one during the conference, with as many as 30,000 expected to participate, but there will be other actions. Some groups plan various "disruptions" on Friday to protest the corporate presence, one group has called for a breakaway march on Saturday, again to concentrate on corporate presence, and there are apparently plans for civil disobedience actions on Sunday and Wednesday. The CD actions are being put together by Climate Justice Action.

What's more, there is a significant counter-event called the "Klimaforum09," or the "Peoples Climate Summit," with a program of speakers, films, and more that is expected to draw 10,000 people a day.

Last for now, a transnational coalition called TckTckTck, a global alliance of international, national, and local organizations, is calling for a "Global Day of Action" this weekend. Over 2900 events in 136 countries are now planned; check the link for information. It's short notice, but take part if you can.

Updated with some news about the Saturday march. It drew somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000, depending on if you ask the police or the organizers. (In my experience based on the US, that would make a reasonable estimate something over 65,000, a figure arrived at by averaging the two numbers and shading the result towards the organizers, who tended to overestimate somewhat less than police tended to underestimate.) It was in any event likely the largest environmental demonstration in history.

Some of the mainstream coverage, of course, had to focus on reports of nearly 1,000 arrests of brick-throwing youths, mentioning the overall size of the protest and that it was overwhelmingly peaceful pretty much in passing. However and happily, that was not true of all the coverage.

Catching up: global warming - the emails

Updated It should go without saying that the big news on the global warming front is the meeting now going on in Copenhagen, where industrialized and industrializing nations are hoping (and probably failing) to hash out an agreement on heading off at least the worst effects of global warming.

It should. But of course it doesn't. Not when there are hacked emails! to drool over, distort, disdain, and demonize.

The theft of some 1000 emails from the computers of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK has sent the nanny-nanny naysayers heads a-reeling, tongues a-clucking, and dicks a-rising. "The greatest scientific fraud of the century - or ever, even!" goes the cry. The sheer glee is unmistakable.

What is the basis for all this hoo-hah? When you come right down to it, it's that a few of the emails, taken out of their context and parsed like an evangelist father checking his daughter for hickeys, can be made to sound fishy. Kinda. As a result, Aha! You'd been found out at last! We knew it all the time, even when we didn't have anything we could even begin to call "evidence." All of climate science is bogus! Bogus, I tell you! Fraudsters! Liars! DEMONS!

Well, even before we get to looking at the emails themselves, something should be made clear: Even if every right-wing fantasy about the meaning of those emails was to be granted, even if every twisted interpretation they try to impose on them was true, it still would say nothing about the reality of global warming, nothing about the risks of global warming, nothing about the effects of any given amount of global warming.

Not a thing.

That may seem surprising, considering the effort the wackos have undertaken to portray this as some devastating blow to the entire corpus of the scientific consensus about global warming, but it's true. Even granting everything about the emails - which I hasten to add I have absolutely no intention of doing, nor is there any need - leaves the science and the threat intact.

That's because what is involved here is not the science of present global warming but the attempts to reconstruct an historical record of global temperatures going back 1000 years. It relates, that is, to the so-called "hockey stick."

The original "hockey stick" is a graph, included in this post from October (scroll down, it's the next to last), dubbed that because it indicates relatively stable temperatures from about 1000 CE until about the beginning of the 20th century and rapidly rising temperatures since then - a straight "shaft" and an angled "blade." Other, later studies have warped the "shaft" (see the last graph at the same link) but the basic conclusion of rapidly rising temperatures reaching levels unprecedented in the last millennium remained.

But the thing is, before 1852 there are no actual recorded temperatures - no thermometer readings. So anything before that is a reconstruction using proxies, which can include historical accounts (and yes, they can be useful even lacking thermometers, such as someone noting the first day certain plants appeared in the spring), ice core samples, boreholes, lake sediment, and tree rings, among others. There is, obviously, more uncertainty there than in the case of actual records and the scientists doing the reconstructions will note the uncertainties involved. (Note, for example, the size of the error bars in the original hockey stick graph.)

It's those reconstructions - not the records - that are being attacked in the present case. The nanny-nanny naysayers, having first denied any warming was happening, have fallen back on claiming that there is nothing unusual about current temps, that it's all part of "natural variations" and nothing to worry about. So the hockey stick has become a particular irritation for them - and a point of unremitting attack - because it says, again, that current temperatures are unprecedented for at least 1000 years.

The focus of the attack has been on the tree ring data, probably because it is the proxy open to the most question and the trickiest to use, since the rings can be affected by local weather conditions - such as the amount of rainfall in a given year - as well as by temperature. (Never mind that it's not the only proxy; that's not important to the naysayers. "False in one, false in all" is the idea.)

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the most quoted of the hacked emails, the one where Phil Jones of the CRU says he used a "trick" applied to "Mike's" (Michael Mann's) data to "hide the decline."

Trick? Hide?

Actually, neither. "Trick," as seems to be penetrating most people's heads by now, is used in the everyday slang sense of a clever or quick way to do something. "Here, let me show you a trick for that." "I've learned some tricks of the trade over time."

"The decline" takes a bit more explanation. This had to do with an illustration of the change in global temperatures over the past millennium. It's important to note the word "illustration." This was not part of any scientific paper, it was not part of any manuscript, it was not presented as any sort of proof of anything. It was an illustration.

Reconstructed temperature data from tree rings had tracked acceptably closely to actual recorded temperatures since not long after those actual records started in 1852 until (for one set of tree ring data) about 1960 or (for a different set of tree ring data) 1980. After that, the two started to separate, with the tree rings indicating cooling and the actual observed temperatures getting hotter. No one really understands why. This is known as the "divergence problem" and has been a subject of investigation since 1998. (Note that that link and this one are to technical articles. Be prepared to suffer.)

Scientists, of course, believed the actual observations over the reconstructions. Simply put, the tree ring data after about 1960-1980 was considered unreliable. But a plot that just stopped at that point, omitting the last 20 to 40 years of observed data, would have been misleading. So for an illustration of changing temperatures, that observed data was appended to the plot of the tree-ring data from those studies.

If that had been part of some formal research paper intending to prove anything about global warming, that would have been a very serious matter. But it wasn't; it was, again, an illustration of current knowledge about global temps over history and beyond a possible charge of sloppy labeling it was guilty of no science crime whatsoever and involved no deception.

Which in turn, however, returns me to the business of how this ultimately has noting to do with the reality, risks, or effects of global warming: Because even if all the accusations were true - which they certainly are not, but even if - what is undermined is confidence in the reconstruction of past temperatures, not about the facts of present ones. (Indeed, note I say what is undermined is "confidence," not the reconstructions themselves: Remember that tree ring data is not the only proxy.)

"Oh!" the nanny-nanny naysayers come back. "But what about the Medieval Warm Period? It was just as warm then as now, even warmer, and that was great for civilization!" Part of the implication being that the temperature reconstructions were intended to, were (that is) manipulated to, conceal the MWP because it contradicted global warming arguments about the present. (One of the CRU emails subjected to the "Aha!" treatment referred to a desire to "contain" the MWP; it turned out to mean that the author wanted clearer limits on what the term meant by setting a time frame on it, particularly as to when it started.) Even leaving aside the consideration that even if claims about the benefits of the MWP were true, it would be irrelevant since we don't live in the world and society of 700 years ago, the fact is that, as I've noted several times before here and elsewhere, the so-called MWP very likely did not exist except as a temporary, regionally-limited, reversal in a long-term cooling trend. And while there is evidence that temperatures in the affected area in the period were similar to those at the beginning of the 20th century, there is nothing to say they were as warm as those at the end of the 20th century.

Still doubtful? Look at this graph:


It displays the "temperature anomalies" for the MWP as compared to a baseline of the 1961-1990 average. (The original paper is behind a pay firewall, but the press release is here.) Note that some areas of the northern hemisphere - particularly Greenland, southern Europe, and a good hunk of what's now the continental US were even a little warmer than today. Okay, fine. Now look at this one:


That displays the temperature anomalies for the period 1999-2008 as compared to that same baseline. (Derived from NOAA data via this post at SkepticalScience.com.) I defy anyone to look at those two graphs and tell me that the MWP was for the world at large "as warm as or warmer than" today. It's complete bull.

There's one last email that's been getting waved around that I'll deal with here. This one is from Kevin Trenberth, who directs the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. In that email, he wrote that

[t]he fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Contrary to what the nanny-nanny naysayers have tried to turn this into by slavering over the word "travesty" as if it revealed something about the science of global warming, what Trenberth was saying was that a variety of data from around the world, "including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators," he said later, says warming is continuing - but the temperature readings don't appear to reflect it.

The global mean temperature in 2008 was the lowest since about 2000[, he wrote in a recent paper]. Given that there is continual heating of the planet, referred to as radiative forcing, by accelerating increases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses due to human activities, why isn’t the temperature continuing to go up? ... In particular, what are the physical processes? From an energy standpoint, there should be an explanation that accounts for where the radiative forcing has gone. ... But surely we have an adequate system to track whether this is the case or not, don’t we?

Well, it seems that the answer is no, we do not. But we should!

Natural variations are sufficient to explain the temperature variations, but the question is just what are those variations and why are they having the effects they are: for example, continuing melts without a recorded rise in surface temperatures. One possibility is simply a lag time, that heat already stored is still having an effect, which should mean that the effects would diminish over time (less melting, etc.) until the temporary reversal of warming temperatures ends. Another possibility is it's a sign of the development of a sort of positive feedback loop of the type climatologists have long predicted/feared, one where enough change has occurred that it feeds on itself or that even lower temperatures can continue to drive it.

A third is what the folks at Climate Progress proposed:

The answer to the question “where the heck is global warming?” is “precisely where you would expect.”

Citing several studies, they declare "It’s the oceans, stupid!"

[T]he surface temperature data - which is subject to the vagaries of climate variability - only represent a tiny fraction of the human-caused warming. ...

[U]pper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend.

In other words, the world is still warming, but most of that warming is going to heat the deeper oceans. Which reflects what Trenberth was saying, expressed more bluntly: There is, he was arguing, more warming that the temperature records indicate - the global warming is greater than we know. Which is one hell of a lot different from what the nanny-nanny naysayers - who apparently couldn't be bothered to check his paper (to which he referred in the email) - were claiming he said.

The simple fact is, in terms of revealing some sort of conspiratorial manipulation of data as part of some decades long, worldwide hoax, the emails say absolutely nada. If the conspiracy claims were true, if there was anything to them at all, you'd think there would be something substantial in all that mass, something beyond tortured interpretations of individual phrases. And there just isn't.

Like the Holocaust deniers, the Moon landing deniers, the evolution deniers, the birthers and deathers, and the rest, global warming deniers will be with us for some time, convinced with all the intensity of the True Believer that their chosen fantasy is The Truth which is being suppressed by a powerful cabal and who will embrace any shred of innuendo as irrefutable proof of the Great Conspiracy - no matter how many times they are shown to be either wrong, misinformed, or simply utterly ignorant about the subjects they presume to address. No proof will ever be strong enough to be accepted, no counter-"proof" will ever be weak enough to be rejected.

What the leaked emails show at worst is some scientists being crabby, irritable, short-tempered, frustrated at dealing with those they consider fools, intemperate in language in what was supposed to be private correspondence - in short, some scientists behaving badly on a personal level. I can understand and sympathize, having more than once gotten testy in exchanges with nanny-nanny naysayers and getting frustrated at having to deal with the same old, long-debunked claims and fantasies yet again. But for all of the stretches, all of the fill-in-the-blanks arguments citing words that aren't there, all of the wide-eyed gasps and "What about THIS????" finger-pointing from people who clearly don't understand what they're reading, that is, when you strip away the claims based on innuendo or ignorance, the evidence of those scientists actually behaving badly on a scientific, on a professional level, is sorely lacking. Talking smack, I note for the record, is not evidence.

But none of that matters to the nanny-nanny naysayers. So like mosquitoes, the nanny-nanny naysayers will always be around. And like mosquitoes, they are mostly annoying - but they can carry and transmit (in this case political) disease, which is why they must be monitored - and smacked down where necessary.

Footnote: I'll note for the record that I haven't addressed the actual theft of the emails because in this context I'm not overly concerned about that. As I said at another site,

if these had been emails hacked from, I dunno, Exxon-Mobil and laid out some plan to finance nanny-nanny naysayer research in a conscious attempt to deceive people about the reality of global warming because corporate executives were concerned about the company's bottom line if people turned away from carbon-based fuels, I wouldn't be going "Oh no! Stolen emails! Don't look! Don't look!"

So I'm not going to do it with these. It's the content and the distortion of that content with which I'm concerned.

Updated to note that the Associated Press and Popular Mechanics have now each published their own analysis of the emails. The AP one was done by AP staff; the PM one was by Peter Kelemen, a professor of geochemistry at Columbia University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, acting as a guest analyst. Each, even after giving the most skeptic-favoring reasonable interpretation of the emails that they could, concludes that, in AP's words, "the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked." And indeed, AFP quoted a couple of Canadian experts on the topic as saying it is a "fabricated scandal" that is really about "politics in the US," where political opposition to climate change is "driven by an extremist view."

Catching up: health care

Updated The Senate's health care deform bill keeps plugging along like "The Little Engine That Could," going "I think I can, I think I can." And it very likely will, because too many have too much invested in getting something passed to keep them from making whatever damn fool change or further surrender disguised as "compromise" will be necessary to do it and at some point the chant will change to "I thought I could, I thought I could." Except the result of climbing this particular mountain increasingly looks like a train wreck.

The more I hear about this bill, the more shortcomings and limitations is has, the more loopholes it contains, and the less I like it. As the Washington Post was good enough to point out just over a week ago,

[m]easured against the promises President Obama and congressional Democrats have made about health-care reform, the bill ... could be setting Americans up for disappointment: Some of the main reforms would not take place for several years, and even when they do, some observers say, the bill does too little to make sure they would be enforced.

Until 2014, insurance companies could continue to deny coverage or charge higher premiums based on people's medical history. Another highly touted reform - banning annual and lifetime limits on coverage - would take effect in 2010, but it would permit significant exceptions.

After all, the White House says, you can't expect insurers to take just anybody, not until after there's a national mandate to have insurance. That wouldn't be fair. And that mandate won't come - and neither will the subsidies to help people buy insurance - until after the "exchanges" are in place and that won't happen before 2014.

And limits? We don't need no stinking limits:

Where annual benefits are concerned, the Senate bill bans only "unreasonable" limits. What that means is not spelled out; a Senate aide said the Treasury Department would set the standard.

In addition, the bill says that certain health plans could continue to use annual and lifetime limits. As Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, interprets it, those potentially exempt from the ban include companies that self-insure, meaning they pay employee health benefits out of their own coffers, and businesses with more than 100 employees.

Further, the prohibition on lifetime and annual limits applies only to limits "on the dollar value of benefits."

That is a limitation insurers have evaded in the past, such as by putting limits on the number of visits for certain benefits rather than on the dollar amount of claims. In one example, regarding mental health coverage, the GAO informed Congress of the practice in 2000. It took another eight years for the loophole to be closed.

And don't count on an end to recissions, either. Canceling policies for reasons other than fraud or deliberate misrepresentation has been illegal since 1996. The Senate bill continues that same standard, allowing for recission in the event of "fraud or intentional misrepresentation of material fact" - which is exactly the set of claims the companies make and have been making for 12 years! What, you think they send letters saying "we're canceling your insurance because you got sick?" There's always some claim of withheld information or some such.

So you get canceled illegally, canceled even though you did nothing wrong, canceled supposedly because of a flu shot you forgot to mention but actually because you started to run up claims? Good luck having anything done:

[T]he federal agency responsible "has done nothing to enforce those rights or to ensure that states do so," Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said in a hearing last year.

An official testifying for the agency, Abby L. Block, confirmed that it had taken no enforcement action. She said her hands were tied unless it appeared that a state was not "substantially enforcing" the federal requirements.

Despite the HIPAA standard, most states have allowed rescissions even if policyholders' misrepresentations were accidental, the staff of the House Energy and Commerce Committee reported this year.

Which means, ultimately, that the whole fricking bill is "toothless," in the words of Betty Ahrens of the Iowa Citizen Action Network, a sentiment echoed by Jost:

"Unless an administration is in place in 2014 that is deeply committed to pushing recalcitrant states aside and taking direct action, it is likely that the reforms may never be implemented adequately throughout the country," Jost wrote in a recent blog post.

And improvements? You want improvements? Dream on:

Over the last few years, drug-makers have embraced a startlingly simple tactic for fending off competition from generic brands: paying them off. In a nutshell, the company that holds the patent on a profitable drug strikes a deal with the maker of the cheaper generic brand: you hold off on marketing your generic for several years, and in return, we'll give you a share of our profits on the drug. ...

So common have these deals become lately that they've been given a name: pay-for-delay. The approach - a textbook anti-competitive tactic - is worth billions to drug-makers, because it essentially allows them to buy more protection than their patent confers.

Recently, the FTC has been filing suit to block such deals, but it's clear that Congressional action is better so the agency is trying to get such a provision into the health care bill. How more obviously justified and straightforward can a proposal be? Still, says TPMMuckraker, "The fate of that effort is uncertain." (Emphasis added.) Because cost-containment is only important where it doesn't affect corporate profits.

Oh, but there is still that saving grace, isn't there? The public option!

Well, yeah, you know about that, I expect.

The recent talk was of a brand new, shiny, polished, never-been used compromise that would involve jettisoning the so-called "public option," long since so emaciated - make that eviscerated - even in the House bill that it no longer deserves the name, in return for lowering the age for Medicare enrollment from 65 to 60 or even 55 and raising the ceiling from Medicaid eligibility from 133% of federal poverty level to 150%.

Those changes are not in themselves bad, but at the same time the limits involved are not insignificant. The Medicare option would only be available to those who otherwise lack affordable insurance, sharply limiting its potential. It might be limited to those who would qualify for high-risk insurance pools already part of the bill. That would limit the group to about three million people - who could be facing annual premiums of $7,600.

One source, which I can't locate just now, said the number of people eligible was small enough that there would be little impact on competition and so on affordability. Which is likely true not so much because of the number of people (there are about 36 million people in the US between 55 and 65, so three million is about 8% of that total - not a huge potential market share but not nothing either) but because of the "otherwise lack" restriction, meaning these are people for whose business the insurance industry is not competing in the first place. (What was I just saying about cost containment?)

And while an expansion of Medicaid would be good, bear in mind that the federal poverty level is a piddling $22,000 a year for a family of four and a typical family of that size would have to make between $29,260 (133% of poverty level) and $33,000 (150% of poverty level) to be among the newly eligible. Again, the increase would be good on its own merits, but I can't imagine it affects a large number of people.

But even those limited and justified-on-their-own-merits proposals are meeting opposition. (The "justified" adjective, I can't help but think, being a good part of the reason why.) So the next "New! Improved!" brilliant idea is to replace the remaining shell of a public option with the idea of having private insurance companies sell national, non-profit plans, regulated by the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees health benefits for federal employees - with no indication of what happens if no private company is interested in selling a non-profit plan. (Just why would they be?)

For those of you still wondering "Huh? Wha' happened?" to the strong public option that was the original idea, here's a good part of what:

President Obama evoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the creation of Social Security today in a rare weekend meeting with the Democratic caucus, in a bid to keep his party united behind a historic health care reform bill currently being debated on the Senate floor.

However, it turns out that President Hopey-Changey didn't even mention the public option in his rousing "Win one for the Gipper!" speech. (I suppose I should have made that his "Fired up! Ready to go!" speech.) As many of us have been saying all along, he has shown no interest in having a strong public role in health care (subsidies for insurance coverage that amount to taxpayer payoffs to insurance companies do not qualify); his interest is in passing a bill and he's not prepared to expend any energy securing such a public role, even one as limited as a weak public option (and, again, just saying "he'd like that but hey, you know, let's see what happens" does not qualify as expending energy).

That's clearly reflected in the statement of Budget Director Peter Orszag, who said at the National Press Club this past Wednesday that just about every possible public option compromise is on the table and refused to get into specifics about what the administration prefers in the health care plans.

(Orszag also insisted that the fine for not having insurance coverage that would be part of an individual mandate was unimportant because having insurance will simply be a "social norm," so everyone will buy insurance just because, well, that's what everyone does. He cited seat belt laws as an example, which strikes me as pretty lame support, but that's what he said. He also blew off questions about the public option and why single-payer was never considered by saying people aren't looking at "the bigger picture.")

So, bottom line, at the end of the day and all that, what have we got under this bill? How is it shaping up? How about at least four years of rate hikes, pre-existing condition denials, recissions, and continuing stratospheric drug costs in exchange for locking in the dominant position of private insurance companies, bogus promises of limits on out-of-pocket expenses, no realistic expectation of enforcement of the bill's provisions in the face of corporate interests, a huge new taxpayer-supported market for the insurance industry, and maybe token expansions of Medicare and Medicaid in a package that even according to its own supporters will leave 18 million people uninsured ten years from now. I'm just thrilled.

But wait! On the upside, hey, it does include money for abstinence-only sex education programs despite its demonstrated failures. So I guess it's not so bad.

Some Footnotes, Starting With An Observation: We keep hearing about how many more people will have insurance; with the Senate bill, the figure is about 30 million ten years from now. But what we don't hear about is how many of those people will have newly gained access to adequate health care via such insurance. Put another way, how many of those newly-insured people weren't insured because they couldn't be and how many because they didn't choose to be? How many of that 30 million are the result of the mandate to have insurance, not because of a new ability to have it? I don't know what that figure is; I have seen various estimates over time - none of which I can pinpoint at the moment - as to how many of the uninsured are that way because, for example, they are young, healthy people who have decided that the savings on premiums are worth the risk of being uninsured. The central point for me is and always has been access to adequate health care. And just saying how many more people will have insurance which they did not have previously does not tell us how many more people will have access to health care which they did not have previously.

Some Other Footnotes In No Particular Order: Under the "Try it, you'll like it" heading comes

[a] recent study [which] found that 90 percent of Canadians support universal, single-payer health care. [And a] poll taken last summer shows 82 percent of Canadians believe their health care system to be better than the US's, despite constant grumbling about waiting times for treatment of non-life-threatening conditions.

- Apparently, Harry Reid teed off on some of the stalling tactics being employed by opponents:

"You think you've heard these same excuses before? You're right. In this country there were those who dug in their heels and said, 'Slow down, it's too early. Let's wait. Things aren't bad enough.' - about slavery," Reid said.

Michael "Wazzup" Steele demanded an apology which Reid spokesman Jim Manley blew off as "feigned outrage."

I can't help thinking that if Reid had acted like this from the beginning, things would have been quite different now.

- A new study by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services confirms that the Stupid Amendment will have an industry-wide impact, over time eliminating coverage of abortions for all women.

- One "longstanding media taboo," as FAIR calls it, remains intact: The unwillingness to really look at the corporate tit-sucking in which so many of the opponents of decent, universal health care are so heavily engaged.

In what the Washington Post (7/6/09) referred to as “a record-breaking influence campaign by the healthcare industry,” $1.4 million is spent on lobbying every day. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lobbying expenditures for all health and insurance sectors total $263 million so far this year, while those sectors have directly donated more than $23 million to federal lawmakers.

Some of the greatest beneficiaries of these donations also happen to be pivotal arbiters in the shaping of healthcare legislation. Yet corporate media have rarely raised the issue of these lawmakers’ potential conflicts of interest. ...

To be fair, a few reporters did follow Deep Throat’s advice [to "follow the money"], producing substantive examinations of the role of money in the healthcare debate—notably the Washington Post’s Dan Eggen (e.g., 7/21/09). A handful of articles documented that conflicts of interest in the healthcare debate are not confined to just a few members of Congress, and not limited to campaign contributions. ...

But such reporting, given the volume of healthcare coverage, was scarce.

- Finally, just for some laughter among the ruins, go read this.

Updated with the breaking news that Tuesday evening, Harry "Mr. Dynamo" Reid said the Gang of 10 had reached "broad agreement" on the public option business - but it's not yet clear just what that agreement is. I looked at AP, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, McClatchy, Reuters, and CNN. There seems to be general agreement that under the agreement, the PO was ditched in return for opening up Medicare to those 55-64; most of those sources indidcate that the idea of an OPM-regulated "non-profit" private insurance plan is also part. In addition, the WaPo said that a regulation setting the medical-loss ratio (the minimum percentage of income from premiums which companies must expend on actual payouts of benefits) at 90% was included.

However, CNN quotes Russ Feingold, one of the 10, as saying he would not "support proposals that would replace the public option in the bill with a purely private approach." And Rachel Maddow quoted Reuters as having reported just after 9 pm (although I don't find it online) that Reid said that reports that the PO had been dropped were untrue. So it's not clear what the agreement is, only that there is a tentative one which has been sent to the CBO for economic analysis.

What I found notable that of the six sources I checked, only CNN and the Post even mentioned the expansion of Medicaid and both in ways that emphasized the opposition. Apparently once again poor people are the afterthought.

Say what? Two weeks? Really?

Apparently, time can fly when you're not having fun, too. It's been two weeks since anything was posted here, an unintended hiatus of a sort I've previously warned folks may occur from time to time, alas.

It's been a time of developments both personal and political, the latter making it not a good time to pull one of my occasional disappearing acts but the former making it inevitable. Unlike some, I generally reveal little of my personal life; unlike still others, I do reveal some. So I will simply say here that apart from some depressing news from the extended family involving a cancer thought to have been controlled but that appears to have spread to the lungs, there is the matter of the nuclear family's new status of no job, no health insurance, but prescriptions aplenty. So let's just say I've been a bit, um, distracted.

In fairness to myself, it's not like I've been completely dormant: I got into exchanges (some extended, some relatively brief) on other sites on global warming (particularly around the hacked emails, of which more later), how change occurs and whether or not it's a relatively rigid process with a series of well-defined steps that can't be hurried, health care, and, what would November be without it, Thanksgiving - particularly in that case with some semi-literate dunderhead who waved around a claimed masters degree in history but didn't know the difference between Puritans and separatists or between Plymouth and Boston. The former, while central to a true understanding of the history of the era and the area, is admittedly a bit arcane but should be known to anyone laying claim to expertise on the matter. And the latter is, come on, pretty damn basic to anyone claiming to be making informed comment.

That particular exchange reminded me of what I wrote last year on the matter, which said in part:

Once again Thanksgiving has come and once again we are treated to the historical revisionism that has become as traditional as turkey and cranberry sauce. In place of the happy talk mythologies of peace, love, and harmony we were spoon-fed as children we find people snarling out dark tales of murder and mayhem by the bloodthirsty "Pilgrims." ...

I remember a friend of mine some years ago talking about “the urge to find angelic forces in the world,” that is, the seeming need many of us have to fix on some group, some movement, some something that we can convince ourselves is utterly pure in its motives and behavior. In our attempts to find some better balance in our understanding of what was done to the natives of North America, the cruelties inflicted on them, the racism and bigotry which targeted them, too many of us in considering the “Pilgrims” of Plymouth have simply swapped the mythology of savage natives and noble settlers for the perhaps more satisfying but equally false mythology of noble natives and savage settlers.

The difference this year was that the angle was religious bigotry toward dissenters rather than racial bigotry toward natives, argued exclusively by reference to things done decades later by officials of the MassBay colony (i.e., Boston) - but the basic thrust of simply flipping the coin from the "Pilgrims" of Plymouth being honorable human deities to being horrible human demons remained intact. As I said last year, "Balance, it seems, is still a long way off."

Enough of that. "Duty" does call so let's get on with it. Over the next two days, I expect, I'll be doing for lack of a better term "catch up" posts on Afghanistan, global warming, the economy, health care, and privacy/secrecy issues, although not necessarily in that order but in the order of how I get them done.

Back later.