Category Archives: Issues

Like David Miranda, I was interrogated at a British airport

Baraa Shiban writes: On Monday night I was held and questioned at an airport because of my work investigating western counter-terrorism abuses in Yemen. But this did not happen in Sanaa or at the hands of some tyrannical regime. It happened at Gatwick. British officials interrogated me under the controversial schedule 7 provision of the Terrorism Act 2000 – the same provision recently used to chilling effect to detain David Miranda.

Not satisfied with clamping down on attempts to report on blanket surveillance and the “war on terror”, the UK government seems to have branched out to people like me – activists working to uncover and prevent such abuses.

I have visited the UK before without incident. I have long admired British culture – I spent part of my education in Wales. This time I came at the invitation of Chatham House to speak at a seminar on Yemen. Standing at passport control, bleary eyed from the long flight, I expected another routine trip.

The border agent asked what my job is. When I explained I was the Yemen project co-ordinator for London-based legal charity Reprieve he said, “Sir, please come with me. We have a Terrorism Act and I have some questions I need to ask you.”

I was then taken away from the desk and interrogated for over an hour. The suited man quizzed me about my political opinions. When I suggested that these should have no bearing on whether I am allowed into the country, the agent threatened to hold me for the maximum extent of his powers. “I am authorised to detain you for up to nine hours,” he said. “We have only been here for an hour, but we can be here for up to nine. So you understand what this can lead to.”

He took my Reprieve business card and disappeared. When he returned – I would guess having made use of a computer and a popular search engine – he suggested he had detained me not merely because I was from Yemen, but also because of Reprieve’s work investigating and criticising the efficacy of US drone strikes in my country.

A telling exchange followed: “So,” he asked, “does your organisation have anything to do with terrorism in Yemen?”

I replied, “My organisation addresses counter-terrorism abuses inside the country.”

“Exactly!” He said. “Why doesn’t your organisation do something about the terrorism that happens in your country, instead of focusing on the counter-terrorism abuses?”

What could I reply? Of course I oppose terrorism. But I also oppose the secret air war in my country – waged by the US, apparently with covert support from the UK and others. [Continue reading…]

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Pope attacks global economics for worshipping ‘god of money’

Reuters reports: Pope Francis made one of his strongest attacks on the global economic system on Sunday, saying it could no longer be based on a “god called money” and urged the unemployed to fight for work.

Francis, at the start of a day-long trip to the Sardinian capital, Cagliari, put aside his prepared text at a meeting with unemployed workers, including miners in hard hats who told him of their situation, and improvised for nearly 20 minutes.

“I find suffering here … It weakens you and robs you of hope,” he said. “Excuse me if I use strong words, but where there is no work there is no dignity.”

He discarded his prepared speech after listening to Francesco Mattana, a 45-year-old married father of three who lost his job with an alternative energy company four years ago.

Mattana, his voice trembling, told the pope that unemployment “oppresses you and wears you out to the depths of your soul”.

The crowd of about 20,000 people in a square near the city port chanted what Francis called a prayer for “work, work, work”. They cheered each time he spoke of the rights of workers and the personal devastation caused by joblessness.

The pope, who later celebrated Mass for some 300,000 people outside the city’s cathedral, told them: “We don’t want this globalised economic system which does us so much harm. Men and women have to be at the centre (of an economic system) as God wants, not money.”

“The world has become an idolator of this god called money,” he said.

Sardinia’s coast is famous for its idyllic beaches, exclusive resorts and seaside palatial residences of some of the world’s richest people, including former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and a host of Hollywood actors.

But much of the island, particularly its large cities and the vast agricultural and industrial interior, has been blighted by the economic crisis, with factories closed and mines operating at low capacity. [Continue reading…]

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AIPAC goes to war with Obama — to get a U.S. war with Iran

M.J. Rosenberg writes: Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani have spoken. And they are on the same page. By that I mean not they agree about the issues dividing the two countries but that they are both ready to move forward, to test each other and see if an agreement is possible.

As tentative as all this is, it is a major breakthrough – as anyone who has paid even a little attention over the past 34 years knows.

However, I do not see this process leading anywhere because the Netanyahu government and its lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), are determined to end the process and they have the ability to do it.

They intend to use the United States Congress to pass resolutions that will cause Rouhani to walk away by making clear that Congress will accept nothing short of an Iranian surrender on nuclear issues. Although President Obama wants to negotiate with Iran about ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program is not used to produce weapons, the lobby, which writes the laws imposing sanctions on Iran, insists that Iran give up its nuclear program entirely.

AIPAC listed its demands in a statement last week.

The bottom line was this: Congress must not consider lifting economic sanctions until the Iranians stop uranium enrichment, stop work on installing new centrifuges, allow international inspection of nuclear sites, and move out of the country its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. In contrast to the administration which, recognizing that Iran (like every other country) has the right to nuclear power for peaceful purposes, AIPAC says that Iran has no such right. (Israel, of course, has a large stockpile of nuclear weapons but, hey, that’s different.) [Continue reading…]

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A message to the Israeli people about Iran

Paul Pillar writes: Benjamin Netanyahu will not support any agreement between the United States and Iran. Or to be more precise, he will not support any agreement that is at all reasonable and in both U.S. and Iranian interests and thus has any chance of being negotiated. Give Netanyahu credit for consistency: he has long made it abundantly clear that he has no use at all for any negotiations with Iran or for any settlement of differences with Iran, on the nuclear issue or on anything else.

Netanyahu thus is doing what he can to destroy the prospects for an agreement. This includes his usual scare-mongering as well as rhetorical tactics such as trying to equate Iran to North Korea. He has depicted Iranian President Rouhani as representing nothing new and ordered a boycott of Rouhani’s speech at the United Nations before he heard a word of what the Iranian said. In particular, Netanyahu is making demands that he knows would be deal-killers and suggesting that anyone who does not agree with those demands is endangering the security of Israel. Perhaps if a fantasy agreement somehow were reached in which the government of Iran declares that it has been evil and mistaken all these years, agrees to demolish all facilities having anything to do with its nuclear program, invites teams from the Israeli Defense Forces into Iran to perform the demolition, and has President Rouhani agreeing to use his Twitter account not only to convey Rosh Hashanah greetings but also to recite lyrics from Hatikvah, then Netanyahu would announce his support for the agreement.

To understand Netanyahu’s posture one needs to realize that it is not only, or maybe even primarily, about a possible Iranian nuclear weapon. It is partly a matter of heading off any rapprochement between Iran and the United States, which would weaken the Israeli claim to being America’s sole reliable and important partner in the Middle East. It is partly a matter of sustaining the Iranian nuclear issue as the regularly invoked “real problem” in the region that serves to divert attention from matters the Israeli government would rather not talk about or be the subject of international scrutiny. And it is partly a matter of Netanyahu riding a topic he has made a signature issue of his own in Israeli domestic politics and a basis for his claim to tough-guy leadership. [Continue reading…]

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Israel minister criticizes boycott of Iran speech

The Associated Press reports: A senior Israeli minister Wednesday criticized the prime minister’s instruction to Israel’s U.N. delegation to boycott the Iranian president’s speech at the General Assembly, saying it created the impression that Israel was not interested in encouraging a peaceful solution to Iran’s suspect nuclear program.

In a text message statement sent to reporters, Finance Minister Yair Lapid said Benjamin Netanyahu’s instruction to Israeli delegates to leave the General Assembly during the speech was a “mistake.”

“Israel should not seem as if it is serially opposed to negotiations and as a country that is uninterested in peaceful solutions,” Lapid said. “Leaving the U.N. General Assembly and boycotting is irrelevant in current diplomacy, and is reminiscent of the way Arab countries have acted toward Israel.”

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Pakistani drone victims’ lawyer accuses U.S. of blocking his visit to Congress

The Guardian reports: The US government is being accused of derailing a congressional hearing that would be the first to hear testimony from survivors of an alleged CIA drone strike by failing to grant the family’s lawyer a visa.

Shahzad Akbar, a legal fellow with the British human rights group Reprieve and the director of the Pakistan-based Foundation for Fundamental Rights, says the state department is preventing him from taking his clients to Capitol Hill next week. The hearing would mark the first time US lawmakers heard directly from drone strike survivors.

Akbar’s clients, Rafiq ur-Rehman, his 13-year-old son, Zubair, and his nine-year-old daughter, Nabila, are from the tribal regions of north Waziristan. The children were injured in the alleged US strike on the village of Tappi last year. Their grandmother – Rehman’s mother, Mamana – was killed.

Rehman and his children have spent months making preparations to visit Washington after being invited by US representatives to testify in the ad hoc hearing on drone strikes.

According to Akbar, his clients’ visas for the trip have been approved, but his has not. He believes the hold-up is political.

“It’s not like my name is scratched because there is some sort of confusion. My name is blocked,” Akbar told the Guardian. “Before I started drone investigations I never had an issue with US visa. In fact, I had a US diplomatic visa for two years.” [Continue reading…]

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Return of the Lion: Former warlord prepares for Western withdrawal from Afghanistan

Der Spiegel reports: While the West is trying to extricate itself from the war zone in Afghanistan as quickly as possible, old warlords like Ismail Khan are preparing for a post-withdrawal period that many anticipate will be violent.

Ismail Khan abruptly gets up from his armchair. “I understood the question,” he says. “So you want to know whether now, 12 years after Western troops arrived, every village finally has electricity.” Afghanistan’s minister of water and energy walks over to a map on the wall on which rebuilt hydroelectric power plants, new solar plants and modern wind turbines are marked.

Khan grabs a pointer, taps it onto an area west of Herat and says: “This is where I came across the border from Iran with 17,000 men in 1996, during the Taliban era. Then we continued through Faryab and Mazar to Faizabad and back to Herat.” He drags the pointer to the north and then to the east, sweeping it across all the wind turbines and power plants, as if they were nothing but hindrances. “My militias fought bravely everywhere,” says Khan.

This minister doesn’t want to talk about water and electricity, or about what his ministry has been up to since the Taliban was ousted. All he wants to talk about is the past, about fighting the Soviets, about the regime of former President Mohammad Najibullah and about the Islamists after they assumed power in Afghanistan.

But when he mentions the Taliban, he is also talking about the future. He foresees a return of the fundamentalist Taliban, the collapse of the government in Kabul and the eruption of a new war between ethnic groups. He sees a future in which power is divided between the clans as it was in the past, and in which the mujahedeen, the tribal militias seasoned by battles against the Soviets and later the Taliban, remain the sole governing force. [Continue reading…]

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‘See something, say something’ campaign creates massive database of useless info from citizens spying on each other

TechDirt: The ACLU’s recent release of “Suspicious Activity Reports” from various California law enforcement agencies (working with DHS Fusion Centers) shows that the government has developed a strong culture of paranoia through its increasingly-broad anti-terrorism efforts. The catchphrase, “If you see something, say something,” has resulted in plenty of seeing and saying, but has failed to turn up much in the way of usable counter-terrorism intelligence.

Much in the way that intelligence agencies like gathering data “just in case,” the Fusion Centers are aided and abetted by law enforcement officials who are willing to add to the data piles by approaching anything “suspicious” (very broadly defined) as potentially terrorist-related. This state-approved paranoia has spilled over into the private sector as the documents detail several second-hand reports from concerned citizens.

In both cases (law enforcement and private individuals), much of the “suspicion” seems to be based solely on reported persons being (or appearing to be) Middle Eastern. This term shows up so often it’s often simply abbreviated as ME. For instance, page 21 has a report of some “suspicious” photography occurring on a Metrolink train, involving two people, one dressed in a “‘Middle Eastern’ costume.” [Continue reading…]

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A handshake postponed

Having celebrated the value of making credible military threats, asserted the United State’s self-declared right to conduct military action without the sanction of the UN Security Council, and reasserted America’s commitment to use all necessary means including military force to ensure the free flow of oil out of the Middle East, President Obama offered to shake hands with the president of the country that has most often been threatened by U.S. strikes: Iran.

The Iranians tactfully declined providing Obama with his photo opportunity, satisfied that an opportunity for substantive contact has already been arranged through a meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif scheduled to take place on Thursday.

A handshake can be historic if it actually means something — which is to say, means something more than simply a willingness to shake hands. In and of itself, a handshake with Obama is worth precisely nothing.

If anything, perhaps the most significant thing about the-handshake-that-didn’t-happen is the way the White House has mishandled the event. Having reached out to the Iranians and found that they aren’t ready, the artful diplomatic course would have been to say nothing and deflect questions about whether such a meeting would take place. Instead, by essentially saying we reached out to them but they didn’t reciprocate, Washington puts Tehran on the defense and the Americans end up looking like they were just trying to score points.

In his speech at the UN, Obama expressed the hope that the United States and Iran can develop a new relationship — “one based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” At the very same time, he asserted America’s status as a superpower and demanded that Iran bow to external pressure.

Neither individuals nor states can lay claim to coercive power and simultaneously claim they have an interest in developing a respectful relationship with those who they are currently trying to push around.

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Israel steps up campaign against U.S.-Iranian diplomacy

The New York Times reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, stepping up his effort to blunt a diplomatic offensive by Iran, plans to warn the United Nations next week that a nuclear deal with the Iranian government could be a trap similar to one set by North Korea eight years ago, according to an Israeli official involved in drafting the speech.

Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to address the General Assembly next Tuesday, a week after President Obama and Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, are to speak at the United Nations.

But the Israeli government, clearly rattled by the sudden talk of a diplomatic opening, offered a preview Sunday of Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-edged message, in which he will set the terms for what would be acceptable to Israel in any agreement concerning Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“A bad agreement is worse than no agreement at all,” the Israeli official said, reading a statement from the prime minister’s office that he said reflected Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks.

President Rouhani, in advance of his arrival in New York this week, has signaled a willingness to negotiate. The Obama administration, while professing wariness, is clearly intrigued by the possibility of resolving a problem that has bedeviled President Obama as long as he has been in office. And that, in turn, has deeply unsettled the Israelis. [Continue reading…]

BBC Persian’s Bahman Kalbasi writes: The message President Rouhani is trying to convey is clear – that he has “complete authority” and “sufficient political latitude” to engage with the US and its allies on the substance of their concerns.

Gary Sick, a former White House National Security Adviser, told the BBC: “What we have seen already has been such a dramatic shift. Rouhani and his team are the ‘anti-Ahmadinejad’.

“The sound of the rhetoric makes it so much easier for an American president to react positively.

“The positive tone was evident in Obama’s interview with TeleMundo TV. President Rouhani’s overtures are of the kind we have not seen before and we should test it.”

The talk of an “accidental” meeting between the two presidents in the halls of the UN’s headquarters this week has gone from wishful thinking to a real possibility.

The mood in New York is also very different from the previous years.

Gone are the protests and annual adverts on TV and billboards on Times Square with big pictures of Mr Ahmadinejad, denouncing his anti-Israel rhetoric and warning about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Instead, diplomats are waiting with anticipation to see how the new president gets Iran out of the international relations mess he has inherited from Mr Ahmadinejad. [Continue reading…]

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Give Iran a chance

Hooman Majd writes: What is striking about traveling to Iran these days, less than a couple of months since the inauguration President Hassan Rouhani, is how little seems to have changed since the latter years of the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was perhaps the most destructive force in Iranian politics in a generation, reviled in the West for his anti-Semitic remarks and at home for his vainglory and destruction of the nation’s economy.

A little below the surface, of course, there are differences, from the less conspicuous presence of the gasht-e-ershad, the morality police, to a gradual easing of some social restrictions. But wariness remains, as if the political clouds and the rumble of thunder auguring calamity are permanent fixtures in the Iranian sky — winds of change, stiff breezes really, notwithstanding.

There is little of the laughter and joy and celebration that the world witnessed when Rouhani defeated the favorites of the Islamic system in the presidential election this summer; instead, there are questions. Can he, or will he be allowed to, deliver on his campaign promises? Can he fix the economy without a rapid rapprochement with the West? Is the West even interested in engagement, or would it prefer to bring Persia to its knees, for the second time in a hundred years?

Rouhani campaigned, much like his American counterpart five years ago, on a platform of hope and change. But few Iranians are naïve enough to believe that change will be easy, not in the Islamic Republic, where bureaucratic entropy butts heads with a political system seemingly designed to confound not just foreigners but any attempts at real reform.

But Iranians remain guardedly hopeful, and so should we who do not have to live under the strictest sanctions regime imposed on Iran since the birth of the Islamic republic, or with an economy in tatters, sky-high unemployment and severely restricted civil liberties. Hopeful that what they — and we — are witnessing, from Rouhani’s speeches challenging the status quo, to his cabinet members’ breaking of taboos, to the apparent and sudden willingness of the regime to engage in reasonable behavior, is not a chimera but a sign that the Islamic Revolution has finally grown up.

In Rouhani many Iranians see a man they need not revere, but rather a man they must support because he echoes the desires of the people. That he enjoys, as he has declared and as his top advisers affirmed to me in his office in Tehran, the full support of the one center of power — the supreme leadership — that could silence that voice, is apparent to any thinking Iranian. The only caveat is that the Rouhani administration believes that the time for comprehensive engagement with the West, and for closing the wounds of hostility, is limited — and that it is now.

It is tempting to believe that Iran’s sudden openness to compromise on its nuclear program, its easing of social restrictions, and even its surprising openness to sitting down with the Great Satan is due solely to escalating pressure and threats. But the Obama administration should be mindful that even if that were true a continuation of a strict policy toward Iran could derail a negotiated settlement on the nuclear issue but also the Rouhani presidency.

The wolves in Tehran may have retreated into their dens, but they remain ready to pounce at Rouhani’s first misstep. As the president intimated recently, in essence there is only one thing he now requires for an eventual conclusion to negotiations over the scope of Iran’s nuclear program — and that is “respect” from the West. [Continue reading…]

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Jewish minority rule

J.J. Goldberg writes: One of the most common arguments in favor of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the so-called demographic threat or demographic time-bomb. Proponents worry that if Israel continues to control the Palestinian territories, with or without formal annexation, the different birthrates of Jews and Arabs will eventually result in Jews being a minority in the territory under Israeli control. At that point Israel will no longer be a Jewish state — or, alternatively, will be a Jewish state with a non-Jewish majority that is disenfranchised because of its ethnic identity. There’s a word for that. I won’t say it, but I’ll note that it’s Afrikaans in origin.

How far off such a situation might be is a topic of considerable debate. Some say the threshold will be crossed within a decade or less. Others suggest a longer timeline is possible. A few on the right believe there’s no threat at all, either because Jewish and Arab fertility rates are converging or because Palestinian population figures are inflated. By and large, though, demography appears to be a very mainstream worry.

Well, worry no more. It turns out we’re there already. Comparing the annual Rosh Hashanah population report from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, released September 2, with the midyear (July 1) population figures for the West Bank and Gaza in the CIA World Factbook, it turns out that Jews are now (as of Rosh Hashanah) outnumbered by Arabs under Israeli sovereignty by a grand total of 50,827. So the question is no longer whether or when the Jewish state will feature a minority ruling a majority. The question now is what to do about it. [Continue reading…]

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Mint Press and Dale Gavlak under threat from mysterious ‘third parties’?

No one is safe — not even in Minnesota — from the long arm of Saudi intelligence.

Publish something that offends Prince Bandar bin Sultan and your career might be destroyed, perhaps even your life will be in danger — at least that’s the picture currently be conjured up by Mnar Muhawesh, executive director and editor at large for MintPress News. No doubt these fears resonate with all those lonely individuals who have taken it upon themselves to challenge the political establishment in the United States and the Middle East.

However, whether Mint Press and one of its reporters, Dale Gavlak, have indeed provoked Prince Bandar’s wrath by alleging his involvement in the August chemical attacks outside Damascus, he probably doesn’t need to take any action since the publication and journalist are doing a very effective job at destroying each other.

But let’s backtrack a bit and let Clay Claiborne, in colorful style, sum up how we reached this point:

For three days after the sarin gas attack that murdered over a thousand Syrians, a third of them children, in suburban Damascus on 21 August 2013, the Assad Regime denied that any such attack had even happened. As the videos and eyewitness reports began to come out, that position became untenable, so the Assad Regime started saying “Well then, the rebels must have done it.”

The Left and the Peace and Just Us* movement in the United States is so thoroughly infiltrated with Assad apologists, and other opportunists more comfortable in blindfolds, that many readily jumped on this “blame the victims, let Assad off the hook” bandwagon.

I find what these people have been doing, marching under the flag of the fascist dictator and embellishing his trash, despicable.

One of the more popular theories of how the opposition gassed its own people was a story published by Mint Press. This story, in addition to absolving Assad of any responsibility for the attack and putting the blame squarely with the rebels, had many elements in common with the sort of racist saga were the bungling, stupid [sand] niggers, acting at the behest of some rich white Jew, in this case played by the Saudi Prince Bandar, ends up doing themselves in by a stupid accident.

Dale Gavlak’s name appeared in the byline for that story, but she is currently engaged in a legal fight to have her name removed. She tells the New York Times, that MintPress has “refused ‘repeated demands’ to remove her byline from the article and that she has now retained a lawyer to press her case.”

Earlier, Gavlak issued a statement saying:

I did not travel to Syria, have any discussions with Syrian rebels, or do any other reporting on which the article is based. The article is not based on my personal observations and should not be given credence based on my journalistic reputation.

But now Muhawesh has responded:

Gavlak pitched this story to MintPress on August 28th and informed her editors and myself that her colleague Yahya Ababneh [whose name appears after Gavlak’s on the byline] was on the ground in Syria. She said Ababneh conducted interviews with rebels, their family members, Ghouta residents and doctors that informed him through various interviews that the Saudis had supplied the rebels with chemical weapons and that rebel fighters handled the weapons improperly setting off the explosions.

When Yahya had returned and shared the information with her, she stated that she confirmed with several colleagues and Jordanian government officials that the Saudis have been supplying rebels with chemical weapons, but as her email states, she says they refused to go on the record.

Gavlak wrote the article in it’s entirety as well as conducted the research. She filed her article on August 29th and was published on the same day.

Dale is under mounting pressure for writing this article by third parties. She notified MintPress editors and myself on August 30th and 31st via email and phone call, that third parties were placing immense amounts of pressure on her over the article and were threatening to end her career over it. She went on to tell us that she believes this third party was under pressure from the head of the Saudi Intelligence Prince Bandar himself, who is alleged in the article of supplying the rebels with chemical weapons.

One of the principle websites which helped bring widespread attention to the original MintPress story was Antiwar.com. They have now issued a “Retraction and Apology to Our Readers for Mint Press Article on Syria Gas Attack.”

The staff of Antiwar.com sincerely and deeply apologizes for being a part of spreading this article. We also apologize to Dale Gavlak.

Gavlak’s disavowal of the story is somewhat undermined by an email she sent to MintPress on August 29 and which she shared with Brown Moses Blog:

Pls find the Syria story I mentioned uploaded on Google Docs. This should go under Yahya Ababneh’s byline. I helped him write up his story but he should get all the credit for this.

The New York Times adds:

The dispute over the article has caused even some contributors to MintPress to ask questions about its mission and how it is financed. Steve Horn, an investigative reporter based in Madison, Wis., said in an e-mail that he has decided to cut ties to the news site as a result of Ms. Gavlak’s objections to how her name was used. “I departed because I feel I was misled about the credibility of the article — which I trusted largely because Dale’s name was on it — and because of that, I no longer feel it’s a credible outlet. Frankly, I’m not sure it ever was.”

The thing to not lose sight of here, is that the MintPress story at the center of this fight contained nothing more than rumors.

Rumors can turn out to be true if they lead to an investigation that reveals substantive facts. But this has been the feature of the rebel-instigated-chemical-attack narrative from beginning to end — it has been propelled and propagated without any credible supporting evidence. Moreover, those pushing the narrative have shown an unconscionable lack of interest in evidence, allowing themselves to become enslaved to their own ideological convictions.

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Climate change: IPCC issues stark warning over global warming

The Guardian reports: Scientists will this week issue their starkest warning yet about the mounting dangers of global warming. In a report to be handed to political leaders in Stockholm on Monday, they will say that the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation have now led to a warming of the entire globe, including land surfaces, oceans and the atmosphere.

Extreme weather events, including heatwaves and storms, have increased in many regions while ice sheets are dwindling at an alarming rate. In addition, sea levels are rising while the oceans are being acidified – a development that could see the planet’s coral reefs disappearing before the end of the century.

Writing in the Observer ahead of the report’s release, the economist and climate change expert Lord Stern calls on governments to end their dithering about fossil fuels and start working to create a global low-carbon economy to curtail global warming. Governments, he states, must decide what “kind of world we want to present to our children and grandchildren”.

The fifth assessment report on the physical science of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that humanity is on course over the next few decades to raise global temperatures by more than 2C compared with pre-industrial levels. Such a rise could trigger the release of plumes of the greenhouse gas methane from the thawing Arctic tundra, while the polar ice caps, which reflect solar radiation back into space, could disappear.

Although the report does not say so, Earth would probably then be facing a runaway greenhouse effect.

The scientists’ warning – the most comprehensive and convincing yet produced by climate scientists – comes at a time when growing numbers of people are doubting the reality of global warming. Last week, the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) published a survey showing that the proportion of British people who do not think the world’s climate is changing has almost quadrupled since 2005.

Asked if they thought Earth’s climate was changing, 5% of respondents said “no” in 2005, a figure that rose to 11% last year and reached 19% this year. [Continue reading…]

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