Archive for February, 2005

A Third Way on Climate

Published
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Steve Darden
on 2/28/2005
in Climate Change, Global Warming and Science Policy
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A caveat before proceeding: your writer considers climate change research and related policy options to be a serious issue. Climate science has become highly politicized - some of the scientists involved have become political actors. Meanwhile political actors cherry-pick each new climate science publication to see if it can be interpreted to support their preferred policy. In the excellent A Third Way on Climate?, Prometheus analyzes an 11/30/04 essay by Hans von Storch, Nico Stehr and Dennis Bray:

This then is the classical set-up of a modern science with high policy relevance – high stakes (implementation of Kyoto and beyond) and high uncertainty (in the assessment of ongoing change and in perspective of what may come)….

Judgments of solid scientific findings are often not made with respect to their immanent quality but on the basis of their alleged or real potential as a weapon by "skeptics" in a struggle for dominance in public and policy discourse.

Bubbling the best policy options to the top of this witches’ brew is going to be a challenge - it is becoming clear that changes are needed in the way climate science and policy generation is done. For now I’m trying to understand the current state of the science and how science and policy are coupled (there must be some coupling right?)

This post is mainly about quality control issues - with examples of what can happen when broken quality control is combined with politicized science. Traditional quality control procedures like "peer review" turn out to be much too weak - at least in this superheated environment. It’s obvious we need truly independent review, verification of high-impact results, and at least the possibility of audit (that means all the data sets, software, working papers, etc. must be safely archived so that if an audit is merited, then an independent team can do so promptly). Future posts will struggle with the harder question "how do we fix it?"

Key points first:

  • The 1000-year N. American temperature reconstruction "hockey stick" graph, turns out to be "an artifact of poor mathematics"{1}.
  • But this work was peer-reviewed, it must be OK!
  • Not so. Peer-review doesn’t mean what we thought it meant. In the case of climate research, it specifically does not mean that another researcher verified your results (or even checked your data and calculations).
  • Much more robust standards for review and audit of scientific results are required.

We have developed a short-list of objective climate science sources (seriously, I truly believe these sources are as clean as you can find - it is quite difficult to locate sources that are NOT already agenda-promoters). There are many other good sources not mentioned here, it just takes a lot of effort to wash each one down. Rather than trying to summarize or rewrite what has already been well-written, I would like to motivate you to read the following, presented in suggested reading order (that is, decreasing clarity , e.g., the Von Storch results are more difficult than the McIntyre and McKitrick results):

  1. Global Warming Bombshell Richard A. Muller {1}, October 15, 2004 MIT Technology Review. I’ve selected two of Prof. Muller’s recent articles as he sets such a high standard for clarity. If you read only one reference, please read this one. From this article I understood what before looked like it was going to require more statistics than I was willing to invest.
  2. Medieval Global Warming Richard A. Muller, December 17, 2003. This is Muller’s first article where he survey’s the emerging questions about the 1998 Mann paper (by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and his coauthors Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, commonly referred to as MBH98 for short).
  3. What Is Climate Change? R. Pielke, Jr., Summer 2004, Issues in Science and Technology. Roger Pielke, Jr. directs the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at Boulder, CO.
  4. Prometheus: McIntyre on Climate Science Policy Prometheus is Roger Pielke, Jr.’s blog, a resource to bookmark for anyone seriously interested in science policy. That is what they do at the center - work out how to make good science policy happen.
  5. Some Thoughts on Disclosure and Due Diligence in Climate Science, Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit. Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick are one of the teams that have found serious errors in the MBH98 work.
  6. Kyoto Protocol Based on Flawed Statistics Feb. 1, 2005 edition of Natuurwetenschap & Techniek (NWT), a prominent European science magazine. This survey of the McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M) research is longer and more detailed than Muller’s for MIT Technology Review. Well worth a read - the history of science politics will give you a better understanding of the social problems to be solved.
  7. See also in the same issue Science popes and conflict of interests and a lead editorial.
  8. Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, the link is to the pre-publication copy - further reproduction or electronic distribution is not permitted.
  9. The M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate Index: Update and Implications has been accepted for publication by Energy & Environment and is available here by kind permission of the publisher.
  10. Re-constructing Past Climate from Noisy Data (Science Express, Sept. 30, 2004), Hans von Storch et al. The original article is subscriber-only, this Soon & Legates article is a useful summary, who quote Von Storch as follows: Von Storch bluntly summed up his results with the following comment reported in Der Spiegel on October 4:"We were able to show in a publication in Science that this [hockey stick] graph contains assumptions that are not permissible. Methodologically it is wrong: Rubbish."

I would like to emphasize the value of Roger Pielke, Jr.’s Prometheus Blog. I am continuing to work my way through the archives. It is a rich store of resources on science & technology policy in every domain, not just climate change. For those who are not motivated to go read the sources, here is a bit more background on the above, using the same paragraph numbering, emphasis mine. First, in the captioned Global Warming Bombshell column, Prof. Muller explains the science clearly in a few words:

(1) Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isn’t. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the “hockey stick,” the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasn’t so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place… (continued in the original)

In this important paper, What is Climate Change, Roger Pielke, Jr. explains some of the issues that are hindering progress, and why there is such a bias towards mitigation rather than including adaptation policies.

(3) Believe it or not, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), focused on international policy, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), focused on scientific assessments in support of the FCCC, use different definitions of climate change. The two definitions are not compatible, certainly not politically and perhaps not even scientifically. This lack of coherence has contributed to the current international stalemate on climate policy, a stalemate that matters because climate change is real and actions are needed to improve energy policies and to reduce the vulnerability of people and ecosystems to climate effects.

…Effective climate policy will necessarily require a combination of mitigation and adaptation policies. However, climate policy has for the past decade reflected a bias against adaptation, in large part due to the differing definitions of climate change.

The bias against adaptation is reflected in the schizophrenic attitude that the IPCC has taken toward the definition of climate change. Its working group on science prefers (and indeed developed) the broad IPCC definition. The working group on economics prefers the FCCC definition; and the working group on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability uses both definitions. One result of this schizophrenia is an implicit bias against adaptation policies in the IPCC reports, and by extension, in policy discussions…

In this Prometheus post, Roger Pielke, Jr. comments on the quality-control issues raised by M&M (empasis added):

(4) Here at Prometheus we don’t do hockey sticks. (Astute readers will find one oblique reference to it in this paper - PDF.) However, the debate over the hockey stick is worth our attention not only for what it says about the state of climate science and politics, but also because it is significant for how we think about climate science policy. Climate science policy refers to those decisions that we make about climate science, including priorities for research and processes of scientific assessment and evaluation.

Steven McIntyre has posted his thoughts on climate science policy arising from his experiences with taking on the hockey stick. He writes,

IPCC proponents place great emphasis on the merit of articles that have been "peer reviewed" by a journal. However, as a form of due diligence, journal peer review in the multiproxy climate field is remarkably cursory, as compared with the due diligence of business processes. Peer review for climate publications, even by eminent journals like Nature or Science, is typically a quick unpaid read by two (or sometimes three) knowledgeable persons, usually close colleagues of the author. It is unheard of for a peer reviewer to actually check the data and calculations.

This observation has also been made in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in a 2000 commentary by Ron Errico, who writes,

Too frequently, published papers contain fundamental errors? How can a piece of work be adequately evaluated or duplicated if what was really done or meant is not adequately stated?… My paramount recommendation is that our community acknowledges that a major problem in fact exists and requires ardent attention. Unless this is acknowledged, the community will likely not even consider significant changes. I suspect that too many scientists, especially those with the authority to demand changes, will prefer the status quo.

Errico’s paper, titled "On the Lack of Accountability in Meteorological Research", is well worth reading in full. He makes several recommendations that are completely consistent with McIntyre’s recommendations.

McIntyre also comments on the incestuous structure of the IPCC,

The inattentiveness of IPCC to verification is exacerbated by the lack of independence between authors with strong vested interests in previously published intellectual positions and IPCC section authors… For someone used to processes where prospectuses require qualifying reports from independent geologists, the lack of independence is simply breathtaking and a recipe for problems, regardless of the reasons initially prompting this strange arrangement.

From the just-published Feb. 1, 2005 Kyoto Protocol Based on Flawed Statistics in Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, we get some reaction from referees of the M&M Geophysical Letters paper (emphasis added):

(6) Turning Tide: In January 2005,an adapted version of McIntyre and McKitrick’s paper was accepted for publication by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). The issue will come out in early 2005, as will a new issue of Energy and Environment containing a second publication by the two Canadians on implications of their GRL findings. Judging by the reactions of the referees of GRL, which McIntyre made available to us, the tide may be turning in the climatology field. One referee stated: “S.McIntyre and R.McKitrick have written a remarkable paper on a subject of great importance. What makes the paper significant is that they show that one of the most important and widely known results of climate analysis, the “hockey stick”diagram of Mann et al.,was based on a mistake in the application of a mathematical technique known as principal component analysis (PCA).”

The same referee also writes:“McIntyre and McKitrick found a non-standard normalization procedure in the Mann et al.analysis.Their paper describes this procedure;it was an apparently innocent one of normalization, but it had a major effect on their results. The Mann et al. normalization tends to significantly increase the variance of data sets that have the hockey-stick shape. In the Mann et al.data set, this turned out to be bristlecone pines in the western United States. Thus the hockey stick plot, rather than representing a true global average of climate for the past thousand years, at best represented the behavior of climate in the western US during that period.This is an astonishing result. I have looked carefully at the McIntyre and McKitrick analysis, and I am convinced that their work is correct.”

The referee ends with:“I urge you not to shy away from this paper because of its potential controversy. The whole field of global warming is currently suffering from the fact that it has become politicized. Science really depends for its success on an open dialogue,with critics on both sides being heard. McIntyre and McKitrick present a cogent analysis of the global warming data.They do not conclude that global warming is not a problem;they don’t even conclude that the medieval warm period really was there. All they do is correct the analysis of prior workers,in a way that must ultimately help us in our understanding of past climate,and predictions of future climate.That makes this a very important paper. I strongly urge you to publish it.”

{1}Dr. Richard A. Muller is a physicist at UC Berkeley Dept of Electrical Engineering, Faculty Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkely Laboratory. He teaches the marvelous "Physics for Future Presidents" course - from which he has derived a monthly column for MIT Technology Review since 2001. Visit Dr. Muller’s homepage for an index to those columns - you will learn something new from every essay.

A Climate of Staged Angst

Published
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Steve Darden
on 2/27/2005
in Climate Change, Global Warming and Science Policy
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A Climate of Staged Angst

Hans Von Storch and Nico Stehr published this essay 24 January 2005 in Der Speigel. Prometheus has made available this English translation. I kept their title, which I believe is a direct translation from the original German.

Von Storch et al may be known to you in relation to last year’s Re-constructing Past Climate from Noisy Data (Science Express, Sept. 30, 2004) where they published one of the refutations of the Mann et all 1998 "hockey stick" 1000-year proxy temperature reconstruction. This paper should have been routine science: "written in pencil" as mistakes are found, superior theories offered, or prior work confirmed. Because of the extreme politicization of climate science, Von Storch and colleagues have been the target of the "righteous defenders" of the "good cause". This essay attempts extract useful lessons from that experience.

This is worthy of full read - it’s only a bit over 2000 words of acute observations from working climate scientists seeking a way out of the paralysis caused by the previous "spiral of exaggeration" of the "climate catastrophe" (as the topic is known in Germany, Austria). Extracts, with emphasis added:

One example of this is the discussion of the so-called "hockey stick," a temperature curve that allegedly depicts the development over the last 1000 years, and whose shape resembles that of a hockey stick. In 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the committee of climate researchers appointed by UNO, rashly institutionalized this curve as the iconic symbol for anthropogenic climate change: At the end of a centuries-long period of stable temperatures, the upward-bent blade of the hockey stick represents the human influence.

In October 2004, we were able to demonstrate in the specialist journal "Science" that the methodological bases that led to this hockey-stick curve are mistaken. We wanted to reverse the spiral of exaggeration somewhat, without also relativizing the central message - that climate change caused by human activity does indeed exist. Prominent representatives of climate research, however, did not respond by taking issue with the facts. Instead, they worried that the noble cause of protecting the climate might have been done harm.

Other scientists lapse into a zeal reminiscent of nothing so much as the McCarthy era. For them, methodological criticism is the spawn of "conservative think tanks and propagandists for the oil and coal lobby," which they believe they must expose; dramatizing climate change, on the other hand, is defended as a sensible means of educating society.

What is true for other sciences should also hold for climate research: Dissent is the motor of further development, Differences of opinion are not an unpleasant family affair. The concealment of dissent and uncertainty in favor of a politically good cause takes its toll on credibility, for the public is more intelligent than is usually assumed. In the long term, these allegedly so helpful dramatizations achieve the opposite of that which they wish to achieve.

The Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (home of Prometheus blog) is an excellent resource regarding the coupling of science and politics through policy.

Global Warming Bombshell

Published
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Steve Darden
on 2/26/2005
in Science Policy
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The original title for this post, was that of Richard A. Muller’s MIT Technology Review article of that title. After much post-editing I’ve retitled the post A Third Way on Climate which better reflects the focus.

Sorry for the re-direction,

Steve

The Daily Demarche: If you are not part of the solution…

Published
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Steve Darden
on 2/25/2005
in Islam
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In If you are not part of the solution… Dr. Demarche writes

The anti-war left of the 1960s produced the ubiquitous phrase from which today’s title is drawn, and made very effective use of it. It seems, however, that many of the current liberal elite have no desire to look in the mirror and ask what, exactly, they are doing to make the world a better, safer, place. The constant anti-Bush rhetoric and America blaming by the likes of Noam Chomsky produces great sound-bites and catch phrases, but as far as I can tell offers little in the way of useful problem solving. They want America out of Iraq, NOW! OK. Then what? I keep expecting someone, anyone, on the left to make a well reasoned, thoughtful suggestion. I am repeatedly disappointed.

To this end I try to keep up with the writings of the faithful opposition, which lead me to Common Dreams today, a site which bills itself as “Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.” I found a piece there by Juan Cole (professor of modern Middle Eastern and North African studies at the University of Michigan) that was originally published in the L.A. Times, titled “The Downside of Democracy: What if the U.S. doesn’t like what the voters like in the Mideast and beyond?” An excellent question, one with which I have struggled myself. The Iraqis could very well elect a mullahcrocy, if not now then in the near future. As Mr. Cole asks:

…What if the newly elected regimes are friendly to states and groups that Washington considers enemies? What if the spread of democracy through the region empowers elements that don’t share American values and goals?

As I read the beginning of this article I thought that today was the day, at last, where I would find what I have long yearned for- a legitimate contribution from the left, no whining, no brow-beating, but a useful piece of thinking that might help America, Iraq and our allies move forward. Of course, I was let down once again. Mr. Cole abandoned his opportunity to be part of the solution with the rest of the article…

In closing Dr. Demarche challenges his readers "to answer the good professor’s questions posed above".

I undertook to answer, but the answer grew too long-winded for the comments section. So I’ll post it here.

My answer is that we have no viable alternative strategy that will reverse the spread of Islamist hate. The press latches onto the idea that the Bush doctrine is about democracy. It is, but what will stop the geometric growth of jihadis is jobs and cultural integration - both of which are a consequence of economic integration. Besides the widely agreed benefits of democracy, it is overall the most successful form of government for economic progress. So I support the policy. I recognize that departing from the old "stability first" policy opens the possibilities Prof. Cole describes. While I don’t think there is an alternative, I do think we can "manage through" the possible outcomes.

What if the newly elected regimes are friendly to states and groups that Washington considers enemies? I think this part of the question is a straw man. The US "enemies-list" is very short:

1) states that (a) have or are attempting to achieve WMD capability, and (b) are not considered deterrable (North Korea, not relevant to our ME case).

2) states that support or provide safe haven for terrorist groups with "global reach" (Iran, Syria, very relevant as they are prime targets of the strategy).

The terrorists of concern are the Islamists (or Islamo-fascists if you prefer) who follow the Wahhabi medievalist teachings. For a current report on what those teachings are, see Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques. The Islamists are the primary serious threat because of the product of (muslim Demographics) X (Unemployment) X (Intolerance). That equation means a virtually unlimited supply of jihadis who want you dead or converted.

What if the spread of democracy through the region empowers elements that don’t share American values and goals? Well, that definition would include at least France and Belgium. I propose that we don’t need to be concerned about every detail of the form of government. Our criteria for a good/bad result in each State "X" is a silly-simple question:

Are companies such as Macdonalds, Dell and Nike wanting to launch new businesses in "X"?

A positive answer tells us a lot:

1) risk is acceptable: which means there is established rule of law, a stable government, government policy is hospitable to foreign investment, and there is an absence of military conflict.

2) that State "X" is moving from the "Gap" to the "Core" because the economy is integrating with the global economy.

Point #2 is to me the only practical option for defeating the Islamists, and I believe forms the core of the Bush policy. The "stability at all costs policy" has brought us the current situation: the Islamists will out-populate the west with age 15 to 25 unemployed, uneducated male jihadis. That is, if their societies remain isolated from globalization, and mainly educated by the Saudi-funded madrassas.

So what are the ways that things can go wrong with the promotion of democracy strategy? Personally, of the possible failure paths in the ME, I think the theocracy outcome is the most likely. One can imagine a theocracy that passes the "Macdonalds test", but it’s a big ask. I also find it difficult to imagine a democratic-Islamic-theocracy. Which ME states, if offered free and fair elections, are candidates to choose an Iran-like theocracy (one man, one vote, one time)?

** Iraq? probably not (the Iraqi Shia have a tradition opposite to Iran, clerics do not involve themselves in governing. My recall of the Iraqi polls last year was a max response of 20% favored an "Islamic state", but never more than 1% favored a "Taliban-like state". We don’t know what the pollees thought an Islamic state would be. "Iran-like state" never polled as high as the 20%, and from the Taliban-like result we can infer not much attraction to the Iran model. That said, I worry how much of the new constitution will reflect Sharia law).

** Iran? unlikely (any state that has "enjoyed" a theocracy will not chose that path until the reality is forgotten).

** Afghanistan? unlikely, similar logic - but the demographics are not as favorable as Iran.

** Lebanon? very unlikely given their sectarian and multi-religious history.

** Syria? don’t know, but understand their history to be secular.

** Egypt? don’t know, but a worry - the Muslim Brotherhood is strong there, and because of the suppression we do not know how strong (no useful polls).

** Saudi? very likely, and worse, it will be a Wahhabi theocracy.

I will speculate that the Bush-Rice strategists hope to "manage" a gradual transition in these theocracy-prone cases. Such that unrestricted elections are deferred until real progress has been made to move the state towards economic integration. If the economic integration can get far enough along before the Islamists take control, then I think we can relax about an Islamist outcome. To succeed we have to get a significant proportion of those young males employed, and enough of them educated so they can participate in the global economy beyond making Nikes.

But, suppose it "turns to custard": say Egypt and Saudi go Islamist. How would that outcome be managed back on track?

Both are so hungry for revenue that I don’t think we need worry about the oil-embargo weapon. What we need is a policy that will lead to economic integration in the shortest time, while at the same time prevents the propogation of Islamist-terror. We don’t want a policy that leaves the broken state in economic isolation - that just breeds more jihadis.

As with Iran’s nuclear ambitions today, the most powerful policy tools are the economic carrot/stick combination - which are only effective if there is unity: Europe, Russia and China must agree to cooperate. So managing a bad-actor theocracy entails:

** Job #1 is to forge cooperation on a unified economic carrot/stick (I assume SE Asia, Japan and the Anglosphere will cooperate).

** A zero tolerance policy w/r/t terrorist support. Does this imply a quarantine? If so, again we need a unified coalition - to cut the financial threads, to prevent travel in-out of the quarantined states, etc.

** Anti-terrorism enforcement will be greatly enhanced by the support of the Iraqi government. If the US has reasonably unfettered basing rights, it makes policing the interior and borders of bad-actor Egypt and Saudi much easier.

I think Prof. Cole’s question reflects what seems to be a common assumption on the left: that US policy will be implemented in a stupid way. I.e., we’ll promote democracy by figuratively throwing a bomb into the room. I suspect that the Bush team is more crafty than the left assumes. George Friedman’s Stratfor book "America’s Secret War" reinforced the view that there are layers of counter-moves and deception behind an apparently simple policy.

I also will credit the US team in general with the ability to manage-through unexpected problems. It’s fantasy to think that every eventuality will be anticipated with associated perfect plans. It’s hard at this point to rate the post-conflict handling of Iraq on the civilian side. But for sure the US military demonstrated remarkable learning and adapting skills.

Last point on "managing" the hypothetical Saudi, Egyption theocracies - they would probably respond to credible US power. If so, then success in maintaining an effective military presence in Iraq may prove quite important. In support of that idea, "America’s Secret War" posited that a significant priority in the Iraq go-now-decision was to light a blow-torch under the Saudis. Briefly, the logic was that Saudi cooperation was critical to many aspects of the Al Qaeda campaign. In particular, Saudi Intelligence had the only useful picture of Al Qaedal. And, the flow of funds had to be cut immediately- and by far the majority was coming from Saudi. The Saudis were NOT cooperating - they evidently evaluated the tradeoff between a known internal Islamist threat vs. a threatening US as favoring "talk, but don’t do anything to get yourself overthrown in a coup". Like bin Laden, the Saudis evidently thought the US was talk, but no action. Iraq would demonstrate the US was not a paper tiger. And it would put a serious US military presence on the Saudi frontier. Did this strategy work? Piecing together what I read, it appears that it did change Saudi behavior, and quickly.

North Korea: Give Me Your Tired Your Poor - Not So Fast!

Published
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Steve Darden
on 2/25/2005
in Foreign Policy
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Roger Simon writes on Claudia Rosett’s WSJ article on the wretched treatment of refugees from that giant insane asylum known as North Korea:

Where is the U.N. in all this? Under the U.N. Refugee Convention–which Beijing has signed and the UNHCR, with its $1.1 billion budget, is supposed to administer–these North Koreans refugees had rights. The convention promised them not a return to their deaths, but at least safe transit through China to a place of asylum.

The UNHCR keeps an office in Beijing, with a budget this year totaling $4.4 million, to which asylum seekers have no access. Four years ago, a family of North Korean refugees actually stormed the premises and gained asylum after threatening to eat rat poison from their pockets if forced back out onto the street. Since then, the UNHCR has allowed China’s security agents to better defend the compound against further visits by the people the UNHCR is supposedly in China to protect.

North Korea Zone

Published
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Steve Darden
on 2/25/2005
in Foreign Policy
. 0 Comments

For timely and informed commentary on North Korea the North Korea Zone is the place to go. Due to the severe restrictions on foreign travel to North Korea there is almost no first-hand reportage. Ex CNN-journalist Rebecca MacKinnon established the North Korea Zone blog in Feb 2004 MacKinnon also operates a personal blog RConversation "a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger".

The North Korea Zone is a group effort - there are six authors listed on the front page. In addition to the authors’ expertise, they harvest reports from contributors who are able to enter and exit NK. That is part of what makes NKzone a special resource.

Just to highlight one contributor, Andrei N. Lankov is Leningrad State Ph.D. (history) now at the Australian National University. Two of Dr. Lankov’s recent articles at NKzone.org are Foreign Missions in Pyongyang, and All Quiet on Eastern Front:

When I was reading the available Moscow archives of the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang, it was quite evident there was a dramatic change some time after 1950.

Before 1950, the Soviet Embassy was the de-facto government of North Korea. This is now likely to be denied by the Korean nationalist left, which is very keen on presenting the North Korean developments of 1945-1950 as an indigenous revolution. But the available material leaves no reason for doubt: all the important political decisions of the North Korean authorities were approved or initiated by their Soviet supervisors (of course, this does not necessarily mean that these decisions were unpopular among common Koreans.)

This policy of the “communization of North Korea’’ was carried out by a remarkable group of ruthless, determined, efficient, charismatic people, of whom General Terentii Shtykov, the first Soviet Ambassador to Pyongyang, was pre-eminent.

Joffe: Bush Scored on Style and Substance

Published
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Steve Darden
on 2/25/2005
in EU
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CFR’s Bernard Gwertzman interviews Josef Joffe, the editor and publisher of Die Zeit. Some of the more illuminating comments:


What is your sense of the brief Bush-Chirac visit?

I think that Chirac, in particular, has a burning desire to mend fences, because he is worried about how long he can keep Schroeder in his pocket: "Might not Schroeder seek better relations with the Americans than I have?" That was a very important impulse driving the meeting with Bush. And, I think, if you want to go beyond atmospherics, look at something which was enormously surprising. Suddenly, you have both the United States and France condemning Syrian imperialism in Lebanon. I would be hard put to find a precedent where the French have linked arms with the Americans. Previously, the basic principle of French policy toward the United States has been, "We are in favor of being against everything the United States favored."

Isn’t Lebanon a unique example, because the French retain a sense of Christian unity with that country?

I understand, but the point is that there has always been a predictable plan in French policy, which is, "Whatever the United States wants, we don’t want it, no matter whether it might serve our interests or not. We are in favor of opposing." That has been the one-sentence policy of the French.

You know Schroeder well. What compelled him to take an anti-Bush line in his 2002 re-election campaign?

That’s a very simple thing. He was running a sinking political campaign. The [rival] Christian Democrats were four, five, six points ahead in the polls. He was desperately casting around for an issue that could reverse that. He knew that in eastern Germany, anti-Americanism was even more rampant than in the west. So he played that card and, as a result, squeezed by with a few thousand votes ahead of the Christian Democrats. That was a wholly calculated electoral gambit which, however, no German chancellor or candidate would ever have chosen before the [1989] fall of the Berlin Wall, when Soviet shock troops were stationed 20 miles outside of Hamburg. There were two reasons. One was a desperate electoral situation. The other was the permissive factor of the loss of strategic dependence on the United States.

Foreign Affairs - Taking on Tehran

Published
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Steve Darden
on 2/25/2005
in Iran
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The March/April 2005 Foreign Affairs has a interesting analysis by Ken Pollack and Ray Takeyh. Pollack’s biography is here (CIA 1988-1995, National Security Council 1995-2001). He is now at Brookings.

The "carrot and stick" diplomacy suggested here could work. It is hard to see how it will succeed unless Europe gets on board. Since 1979 Europe (not the UK) has refused to even consider passing up any business opportunity with Tehran. So Iran has been able to play off Europe against the US/UK, acquiring all the technology needed for their nuclear ambitions while paying no economic penalty.

The strategy outlined here requires that Tehran understand they will pay heavily to continue with their weapons program:


This split provides an opportunity for the United States, and its allies in Europe and Asia, to forge a new strategy to derail Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons. The West should use its economic clout to strengthen the hand of Iranian pragmatists, who could then argue for slowing, limiting, or shelving Tehran’s nuclear program in return for the trade, aid, and investment that Iran badly needs. Only if the mullahs recognize that they have a stark choice–they can have nuclear weapons or a healthy economy, but not both–might they give up their nuclear dreams. With concern over Iran’s nuclear aspirations growing, the United States and its allies now have a chance to present Iran with just such an ultimatum.

UN Dispatch

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 2/25/2005
in U.N.
. 0 Comments

Ted Turner’s UN Foundation is sponsoring the new blog UN Dispatch. The site is administered by Peter Daou, author of the Daou Report, and according to the About will feature frequent posts from knowledgeable guest contributors.

Because of the absence of accountability and transparency, it’s difficult to find useful info on the UN. Hopefully UN Dispatch will close that gap a bit. Given the sponsorship, UN Dispatch should be expected to have a pro-UN tilt. Whatever - I’m an optimist. I’ll be reading this looking for some objective insights from those guest contributors.

Hat tip to Belgravia Dispatch for the alert on UN Dispatch.

Quality Standards: Greensboro News-Record

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 2/24/2005
in Media
. 0 Comments

This quote is from the 23 Jan, 2005 blog by John Robinson, Editor of the Greensboro News-Record. Robinson’s post is on actual 2004 errors vs. the News-Record objectives for such errors (emphasis added):

It pains me to tell you that we failed in that goal at least 252 times last year. That’s the number of corrections we published. Realistically, we failed more often than that, but those errors were never brought to our attention.

Our policy is to correct errors as soon as we know about them. While it hurts to tell you that we published a lot of corrections, it doesn’t embarrass me. We want to be diligent and forthright about putting the facts right.

All of the errors are regrettable, and the vast majority of them should never have gotten into print. Accuracy is not the same as fairness, both of which are vital to this newspaper. I’ve written about fairness before — and won’t elaborate on it here — but I do want to note the distinction.

….

One of the lessons from the Jayson Blair fiasco at The New York Times is that many sources won’t bother to point out errors. As a result, we randomly select people quoted in our stories and send them surveys asking if we quoted them correctly and whether the story is accurate and fair.

Has your newspaper demonstrated a similar level of transparency? Well, if they have not, what are you doing to change that policy? When you write your editor, you could include a mention that you are no longer a local "captive reader". I.e., if you are unsatisfied with the quality of the local newspapers, and you are reading this post, it follows that you have the alternative of a wide selection of Internet news options.

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