Afghan Apocalypse — ‘Guardian Angels’
Filed Under Bullshit, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
In the neurotic groundswell last week of the absorption of gay people and the bullies that define the genre, the wars overseas have lost a lot of its news flavor with American audiences, despite the fact young GIs are still killing and dying over there — now they’re being made dead by their Afghan comrade-at-arms.
On Friday, an Afghan solider shot and killed a US soldier and wounded two others, which brought the number to 20 NATO troops killed so far this year (35 for all of 2011) in most-friendly fire circumstances — the so-called “green-on-blue” shootings, which shockingly account for 14 percent of all troop deaths.
The situation has gotten so far out of hand, desperate measures have been taken.
From USAToday in March:
U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan have assigned “guardian angels” — troops that watch over their comrades even as they sleep — and have ordered a series of other increased security measures to protect troops against possible attacks by rogue Afghans.
…
In several Afghan ministries, Americans are now allowed to carry weapons.
And they have been instructed to rearrange their office desks there to face the door, so they can see who is coming in, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the internal directive.
Leaving Afghanistan will be in a real-nasty whimper — the US has lost 1,968 troops since this nonsense started in 2001, more than 1,300 of those in the last three years alone.
Meanwhile this morning, in another screw loose, Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban official who reconciled with the government and was a top member of the Afghan peace council, was assassinated at a Kabul street light.
From Mohammad Zahir, head of the city police’s criminal investigation division: “Only one shot was fired,” Zahir said. “Our initial reports are that it was a pistol with a silencer. Rahmani died on the way to the hospital.”
And oddly enough, the Taliban denied responsibility for the killing.
Odd also is the professionalism of the hit — silencer on a weapon in a land where IED’s kill in a loud, bang all day long and explosive-laden vests are the tactical style of choice?
If the military can’t do Afghanistan. politics sure won’t accomplish the mission.
Despite Dianne Feinstein’s attempt at US bravado on Fox News this morning: “Militarily, I think the Taliban are not going to beat us,” said Ms. Feinstein, a Democrat from California. But the Taliban “have a safe harbor in Pakistan, and the Pakistanis are doing nothing to abate that safe haven.”
And Pakistan is the asshole card in all this shit.
Right now, Pakistan still has the main supply routes into Afghanistan sealed because of the major f*uck-up last November when a US airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at an outpost at the boundary of the two countries.
Pakistan turned the matter over to its parliament, which wants an unconditional apology from the US for the Mohmand attack and ending drone attacks.
No apology has come the US and the drones strikes continue — supposedly nine suspected militants were killed by drone nine days ago along the northern Pakistani border.
And right now today, U.S. General John Allen, the current head of the whole shebang in Afghanistan, is meeting with his Pakistani and Afghan counterparts in Islamabad to see if they can’t iron out the difficulties to end this terrible war.
These guys are the Afghanistan-Pakistan-ISAF Tripartite Commission, this the first meeting of the bunch in more than a year, and comes on the near-eve of Pakistan itself holding parliamentary talks Tuesday on ending the supply-route blockade.
A good overview of the reality of Pakistan’s role in the Afghan war can be found in an interview with investigative reporter Gareth Porter at Press TV — the people of Pakistan pretty-much hates the US because of the drone strikes.
Porter concludes: This is a fundamental disconnect between the interests of these two countries and I think it is now basically too late for the United States to put pressure effectively on Pakistan to get them to change their policy.
All this as NATO will hold a big summit in Chicago the end of this month and just Pakistan maybe won’t be invited, but will be coming anyway.
Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen: “But as you also know, our transit routes through Pakistan are currently blocked. So we have to continue our dialogue with Pakistan, with a view to finding a solution to that because that’s really a matter of concern,” he added, without clearly mentioning if Pakistan had been invited to the summit or not.
And so it goes.
Beyond the horror of the bloodletting, economics booms in the face of failure.
From ABC News:
The war in Afghanistan has cost the United States $443 billion from 2001 through 2011, according to the Congressional Research Office.
According to a Pew Trusts report, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have contributed more to growth in U.S. debt than any other policy since 2001 except the Bush tax cuts and in the increased interest from legislative changes.
That’s one for Mitt Romney to stutter about, but President Obama hasn’t done anything to compensate for it.
The Afghan predicament is one of failure — according to an AP-GfK poll in late April, 66 percent of US respondents opposed the war, with 40 percent saying they were “strongly” opposed: Among those opposed to the war, 49 percent say U.S. troops are hurting more than helping.
Journalist and analyst on Middle East and UN issues Phyllis Bennis in a commentary from the Institute for Policy Studies writes that despite the absolute-only real Afghan solution is for the US to get-out-now — like yesterday — the war will instead continue on down memory lane.
The sticking point in an election year:
For President Obama, the challenge may be even greater.
This is his war now, it has been since January 20, 2009.
But support for the war in his party (a slightly embarrassingly low 30 percent last year) has dropped to a humiliating 19 percent today.
Does he really think he can re-energize his base with the claim that “I’m ending the war” when the reality of his plan is so well known?
His plan for two more years of full-scale war in Afghanistan, followed by at least ten years of continued occupation by thousands (16,000? 20,000?) of special forces and “training” troops?
Too many people know that’s the reality of the agreement Obama signed with the U.S.-backed Afghan President Karzai last week.
It’s not an end to the war, it’s simply changing the size and nature of the occupation.
And horrible irony is not lost on anybody.
Reality on the ground is way actual than bullshit words.
The subject matter of a NY Times At War blog post last week, of all things, was Afghan postcards, which featured five examples, including the one shown at left (image which can be found here) and each with a little descriptive note:
Postcard No. 3: This one is also from the German military store at Kandahar.
Hard to say if it is meant to be funny.
I sure hope it is.
Otherwise, the play off “Apocalypse Now” cuts a bit too close to the bone, no?
Maybe, twitch-funny like the smell of napalm in the morning, yes?
Mosquito Maneuver
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Weather | Leave a Comment
In this past winter of our heated content, all those warm, blissful days in February and March — TVed from Chicago, New York and all points east — them soothing temperatures also created an incubator for weird, and possibly some bad shit.
Dr Alison Donnelly of Trinity College Dublin’s Centre for the Environment on the near-simplicity of near-abrupt climate change: “We are seeing a very clear signal and seeing the effects in our back gardens,” she said. “People are saying they have to cut the grass all year long.”
(Illustration found here).
In other words, all the warming indicates the tropics are shifting north — sorta like Margaritaville moving to Cleveland, but way-without benefits.
Dr. Donnelly from above also said this: “Phenology is the only real climate-change indicator that looks at how the change affects plant and animal life. It is also a really good way to convince policy makers about the reality of climate change.”
Good fortune on that last one there, lady.
According to Wikipedia, phenology is the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate.
In other words, at the end of the line, how the weather effects living organisms, plant or animal.
Climate change, from what I’ve seen and gathered in just last four years or so, plays itself out in weather — locally, regionally, nationally, and continent, or even hemisphere.
Warm temperatures this year in the US Great Lakes area resulted in an early arrival of insects that trout love to eat — Richard Merritt, professor of entomology (the study of insects) at Michigan State University: “The life cycle is based on heat over time,” Merritt said. “Once they gather enough heat units in their bodies, they’ll move on to the next stage. If it’s warm they’ll emerge.”
Those insects, however, have been indigenous to that region for a lengthy while, but changes in the climate in the form of heat brings outsiders — one of those is the asshole mosquito, especially the Aedes aegypti, also known as the yellow-fever mosquito.
From the CDC on why this particular brand is bad news:
…because they have adaptations to the environment that make them highly resilient, or with the ability to rapidly bounce back to initial numbers after disturbances resulting from natural phenomena (e.g., droughts) or human interventions (e.g., control measures).
One such adaptation is the ability of the eggs to withstand desiccation (drying) and to survive without water for several months on the inner walls of containers.
For example, if we were to eliminate all larvae, pupae, and adult Ae. aegypti at once from a site, its population could recover two weeks later as a result of egg hatching following rainfall or the addition of water to containers harboring eggs.
Two years ago, Florida had its first outbreak of dengue fever (the poison carried by the mosquito) since 1934, and other cases have been reported at the Texas/Mexico border.
Although recent studies have shown a warming climate reduces infectiousness, the higher temperatures make for a wider range, so the result can be complicated, but not in a good way.
Links have been established between global warming and infectious disease — diarrhea, cholera, tick-borne illness, anthrax, cholera, along with West Nile virus, malaria and dengue (mosquito borne) — and the problem will only get worse.
Most US vibrio infections appear in the Southeast via oysters, and it used to be a summer problem, but thanks to a warming climate that window for infection is widening to nearly year round.
Erin Lipp of the University of Georgia: “It’s not just a summer disease. It’s becoming a spring and fall disease now.”
Mosquito music.
In an article at HuffPost last week on spreading infectious disease via climate change, especially tick-borne Lyme disease (reported cases have more than tripled since the mid-1990s), there was this on our little winged blood-sucker: Of increasing concern to the CDC is a mosquito recently arrived from overseas. The Asian tiger mosquito is particularly sensitive to climate and capable of transmitting not only West Nile, but also devastating diseases of the developing world, including dengue fever (already reported in Florida and Texas) and chikungunya.
“It’s only a matter of time,” says the CDC’s Beard (Ben Beard, a climate change expert). “We need to focus on what we can do about it now: surveillance, preparedness and prevention.”
And that’s what piqued my interest this morning on the asshole mosquito — what to do about it.
Which came from a post yesterday by Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture, who asked readers for help in battling mosquitoes.
Ritholtz noted he would try just about anything to preempt these pesky varmints in my backyard, and is looking at two possible routes:
A reasonable cost repellent that eliminates annoying mosquito bites;
A money-is-no-object-kill-the-bastards-dead-with-extreme-prejudice solution…
And readers responded, some ideas in the comments section included bug zappers, screened-in areas, propane-fired mosquito traps, hang a bat house, Brewer’s yeast, cooking oil (for larval eradication), smoke (“They flee smoke. This even worked in VietNam”), lavender and lavender oil, geraniums and basil plants, garlic spray/fogger/granules, Irish Spring soap bars on posts, burning frankincense in an electric incense burner, and on and on…
One just said, “stay inside.”
However, a commentator commented: Mosquitos have been around since the mid dinosaur era. Good Luck.
About the size of it.
There’s way-more to climate change than just hot and cold and then hotter still.
Pump Dreams
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Energy, Environment, Weather | Leave a Comment
Weather tends to pop its now-ugly head into modern life on a much-more frequent schedule than just a few short years ago — yesterday afternoon tornadoes cleared a chaotic path through the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with video showing tractor-trailers being tossed around like toys.
CNN meteorologist Sean Morris estimated the tornadoes were EF1 or EF2 twisters, at their strongest.
“This is fairly weak in terms of tornadoes, but we saw the awesome power of the twisters as they lifted the trailers several hundred feet in the air,” he said.
And these kinds of scenarios will only get worse — why?
Fossil fuels — Duh!
(Illustration found here).
Via Climate Progress from the Planet Under Pressure conference last week in London:
As consumption accelerates everywhere and world population rises, it is no longer sufficient to work towards a distant ideal of sustainable development.
Global sustainability must become a foundation of society.
It can and must be part of the bedrock of nation states and the fabric of societies.
And ‘consumption‘ of what?
Fossil fuels — Duh!
Even beyond the bubbling crude, coal is the real kicker — creating a third of all carbon dioxide emissions, producing nearly 40 percent of the world’s power.
According to WSJ’s Market Watch last week:
“China and India are leading the global buildout of coal-fueled generation.
Over the next five years, we see generation growing 370 gigawatts (GW)… and that requires more than 1.2 billion tonnes of additional coal.
To put this in perspective, this is equivalent to one new 500 megawatt power plant every three days… through 2016.”
And from the Union of Concerned Scientists: Waste created by a typical 500-megawatt coal plant includes more than 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack scrubber each year. Nationally, more than 75% of this waste is disposed of in unlined, unmonitored onsite landfills and surface impoundments.
However, as much as we love coal, oil greases all of modern civilization.
Global consumption is about 87 million barrels a day (bbl/day) with the US and Europe sucking up about a third of that and in 2010, the globe was producing about 85 million bbl/day — what math?
From Spiegel Online and a ‘World without Oil:
But in most countries of the world, especially the emerging countries, economic growth and energy consumption still go hand in hand.
A global change of course is overdue, according to the German Advisory Council on Global Change.
“The carbon-based world economic model,” say the scientists on the council, constitutes “a normatively unsustainable situation” and is as morally reprehensible as slavery or child labor.
The Spiegel post was about peak oil, not climate change, but those two factors are hand-holding sweethearts.
And we all are locked into that love affair — yesterday, I put another $20 worth of fuel in the old Jeep with the cost still at $4.49 a gallon for regular.
Price hasn’t changed since the last time.
Via Reuters: Brent crude futures fell by 40 cents to $124.46 a barrel by 0940 GMT, after earlier touching a low of $124.23. U.S. crude futures lost 79 cents to $103.22, after falling by more than $1 in the previous session.
And at the pump, US gas notched a nationwide average of $3.90 per gallon on Monday, which by Memorial Day reportedly could be higher than the record $4.11 set in July 2008.
In California, although we’ve cut back on driving, the state average was $4.32 on Monday, down from $4.36 the previous Monday and from $4.38 two weeks ago.
Humanity is caught between the old rock and a hard place.
If we don’t get our collective heads out of our collective asses, this oil dream will soon be a nightmare where the weather has the last say, tossing every freakin’ thing around like toys.
Warmer Still — ‘No Way Out’
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Madness | Leave a Comment
Dramatic changes in climate are being rigged as plot devices for entertainment — ‘Are you not?’
From the New York Times review of the new film, “4:44 Last Day on Earth:”
The cause of the calamity is an environmental breakdown enabled by the human failure to do anything about about climate change.
Or perhaps the hole in the ozone layer; the science is a bit vague.
But the timing of the big finish (referred to in the film’s title) is clear, and though there is an occasional flicker of doubt that it will actually happen, all of the public and private voices of reason and faith seem to agree that there is no way out.
(Illustration found here).
Even as the US has finished a string of record-breaking warm temperatures, described as one of North America’s most extraordinary weather events in recorded history.
Although the Times movie reviewer did not go crazy for ‘4:44,’ the plot device did allow a view of the last day as being somewhat normal — would that be the reality?
One near-fact and leaving that ‘science is a bit vague‘ sense behind — it will be much warmer.
Another round of research finds previous temperature predictions to be above previous expectations:
A new study suggests climate scientists may have underestimated the effect of greenhouse gases, with global temperatures now predicted to rise by between 1.4 and 3 degrees Celsius by 2050.
The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience by a team of international scientists who ran 10,000 computer simulations of climate models in an attempt to explore the range of global warming predictions made by climate scientists.
The researchers found that while their results matched the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the lower end, they were higher than earlier predictions at the higher end.
…
“But it makes me think that people who are thinking about real-world problems, farmers, wine growers in Australia, people managing river catchments for instance, might want to have a look at some of these models to think about what … might plausibly happen, what sorts of changes they might plausibly have to manage for,” he said (Climate-change Professor David Frame at Victoria University of Wellington).
“So one of the real purposes of this is to give planners a chance to … think about scenarios for the future that are physically plausible, are internally consistent, which is an important property and potentially quite practical.”
The professor also doubles up on reality: “If people keep emitting fossil fuels in the way we expect…”
And this is to be expected for the US region: Decreasing snowpack in the western mountains; 5-20 percent increase in yields of rain-fed agriculture in some regions; increased frequency, intensity and duration of heat waves in cities that currently experience them.
Even worse for other parts of the planet, especially in the availability of drinking water.
Some of that shit is already happening — and why climate change is way-way-more than just being entertained.
As in time for young adult crazies — vampires or kids trying to kill one another.
From Climate Progress this morning:
The increase in global climate temperatures has raised concerns about the vampire bat species travelling from Mexico and South and Central America into the southern and central regions of Texas.
Carin Peterson, training and outreach coordinator of the Office of Environmental Health and Safety, said even if vampire bats are not making their appearance, Austin’s surrounding caves and popular bat attraction, Congress Avenue Bridge, already have their annual bat species.
“Biologists are paying attention to the warming climate and what potential impacts that could bring, including non-native wildlife, but this is not something that will likely happen within the next few years,” Peterson said.
‘Next few years…?‘
Just don’t go out without a turtleneck — so now, are you entertained?
Gas By Another Name
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Madness | Leave a Comment
Some joy from the Arctic Methane Emergency Group:
We declare there now exists an extremely high international security risk* from abrupt and runaway global warming being triggered by the end-summer collapse of Arctic sea ice towards a fraction of the current record and release of huge quantities of methane gas from the seabed.
Such global warming would lead at first to worldwide crop failures but ultimately and inexorably to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
This colossal threat demands an immediate emergency scale response to cool the Arctic and save the sea ice.
The latest available data indicates that a sea ice collapse is more than likely by 2015 and even possible this summer (2012).
Thus some measures to counter the threat have to be ready within a few months.
More from the Group, other climate studies, videos and reports can also be found here.
This methane is some way-bad shit — a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
From the UK’s Independent last December and a piece on the joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas.
Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the expedition:
“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter.
“This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter.
“It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said.
“I was most impressed by the sheer scale and the high density of the plumes.
“Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them,” he said.
These science guys from all over the world figure there’s hundreds of millions of tons of this methane gas underneath the Arctic permafrost.
And like a lot of other climate-changing articles on studies/reports/findings, the Independent piece also carried the most-usually found phrase in stories of its kind: ‘More/quicker then previous studies/reports/findings anticipated.’
As such: Dr Semiletov’s team published a study in 2010 estimating that the methane emissions from this region were in the region of 8 million tons a year but the latest expedition suggests this is a significant underestimate of the true scale of the phenomenon.
As the earth continues to warm, the permafrost in the Arctic also starts to melt, which in turn allows this methane shit to bubble up to the surface (as described above as “plumes”) through what’s been called “chimneys” — seen in the drawing at the left — and the more heat, the bigger the release.
Two years ago, this process was already getting bad: “The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans.”
The same thing down south in the Antarctic region — and this methane-release sequence is of the quick BOOM variety, as in not much happening, then pop.
(Illustration found here).
The permafrost methane is just fine where it is right now — everything’s cool until released by what scientists call a ‘trigger,’ and in this case, the trigger is the warming earth.
A 2008 study using history reported this heat could trigger an abrupt climate change because very little warming could unleash this trapped methane, and could happen fairly rapidly.
Key word here is abrupt: 1. Unexpectedly sudden; 2. Surprisingly curt; 3. Steeply inclined; and so forth.
Way back in 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists: The term “abrupt climate change” describes changes in climate that occur over the span of years to decades, compared to the human-caused changes in climate that are occurring over the time span of decades to centuries.
Of course, this was before the real game changer in 2007 with the release of the UN’s IPCC report that determined that is was “unequivocal” the globe was warming, and, us humans were “very likely” the cause of it.
The report started a climate-change shit-storm which continues to this very minute — five years later and assholes still deny what’s now happening right outside their own windows.
One hopes, but…
Natalia’ Shakhova, a colleague at the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — from the Independent story:
“I am concerned about this process, I am really concerned. “
But no-one can tell the timescale of catastrophic releases.
“There is a probability of future massive releases might occur within the decadal scale, but to be more accurate about how high that probability is, we just don’t know,” Dr Shakova said.
“Methane released from the Arctic shelf deposits contributes to global increase and the best evidence for that is the higher concentrastion of atmospheric methane above the Arctic Ocean,” she said.
What prompted this particular post was this particular story this morning from the BBC:
An eminent UK engineer is suggesting building cloud-whitening towers in the Faroe Islands as a “technical fix” for warming across the Arctic.
Scientists told UK MPs this week that the possibility of a major methane release triggered by melting Arctic ice constitutes a “planetary emergency.”
…
Wave energy pioneer Stephen Salter has shown that pumping seawater sprays into the atmosphere could cool the planet.
…
Towers would be constructed, simplified versions of what has been planned for ships.
In summer, seawater would be pumped up to the top using some kind of renewable energy, and out through the nozzles that are now being developed at Edinburgh University, which achieve incredibly fine droplet size.
I’ve done posts on this terrible accident/event-waiting-to-happen before — and it’s frightening no one seems to be paying much attention to what’s already happening to the earth’s climate, much less the near future, causing Nina Federoff, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to proclaim last month she’s “scared to death” of the serious lack of serious concern for what’s happening to the planet’s environment.
So thusly, the BBC ends its piece:
Depending on the size and location, Prof Salter said that in the order of 100 towers would be needed to counteract Arctic warming.
However, no funding is currently on the table for cloud-whitening.
A proposal to build a prototype ship for about £20m found no takers, and currently development work is limited to the lab.
Cow by any other word.