Climate on ice

The Earth has been going through a series of Ice Ages in the last few million years. Their discovery and investigation is one of the great stories of modern science. The understanding that human civilization began recently (about 12,000 years ago) during an interglacial (when the ice temporarily retreated) connected the historical and near-historical past with the "deep" human past - before the invention of agriculture and writing - and with our earlier ancestors (genus Homo and genus Australopithecus), whose rise was probably forced by the cooling and drying Ice Age climate.*

Before the Ice Ages started, Earth climate was apparently hotter, more humid, and ice-free - at the upper end of the "Goldilocks regime." Since then, Earth has oscillated between the middle and the cold end of "Goldilocks regime," cooling down and drying out - punctuated by episodes such as our current epoch of middling climate.

Are the Ice Ages understood by modern science? Yes and no. The basic facts of the Ice Ages have been established since the 19th century. Traveling through northern Europe and the northern US and much of Canada, you notice rocky soil, large boulders strewn about, and sharply-etched lakes and rivers - all results of the slowly grinding ice sheets advancing southward and retreating northward. More of the Earth's water volume was tied up in ice during the Ice Ages, and the sea level was lower. There was more coast, and America and Asia were connected by a land link at what is now the Bering Strait. From Siberia, the ancestors of the native Americans crossed the bridge, which was closed off when the last Ice Age ended. The Eskimos (Inuit) continued to cross back and forth by water.

Why the Ice Ages are happening is still not completely clear. Their timing is best explained by the insights of Milankovic first published in the early 20th century. He noticed some striking facts about the shape of the Earth's orbit and the tilt of its axis relative to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. At present, the Earth's orbit is nearly circular, and its tilt from vertical about 23.5^o. That tilt defines the relative latitude-dependence of incoming solar radiation (insolation) and the strength of seasonal climate variations. But the tilt is not constant; it's disturbed by the gravity of the Moon and the Sun. The Earth's orbital shape is affected by the gravitational pull of other planets, notably Jupiter, and, if it becomes more elliptical, keeps the Earth slightly farther from the Sun for significant parts of the year. Each of these changes is a complex of oscillations with different periods, notably 41,000 years for the oscillation of the Earth's tilt and about 100,000 years for the Jupiter-induced disturbances. (There is also a weak 26,000-year period from the precession of the equinoxes.) These are exactly the periodicities needed to explain the advance and retreat of the ice sheets. Modern versions of this theory are based on more detailed field work uncovering the history of soil layers and ocean sediments that reveal far more about the ice and its history than was available a century ago to Milankovic. Modern computer calculations of the Earth's orbit and orientation allow more exact reconstructions over long periods.

And modern theories also incorporate a crucial enabling factor missing from Milankovic's proposal, the reduction or cessation of the mighty poleward ocean currents that move excess equatorial heat away from the tropics.** The present positions of the continents (sitting atop the South Pole and nearly landlocking the North Pole) reduce what would otherwise be a stronger poleward oceanic heat flow that would even out the Earth's temperatures more completely. Without these currents, the polar regions would be significantly colder than they already are. In fact, the Earth's climate would be cooler overall, but would also exhibit an even more extreme variation by latitude - another example of an important climate rule of thumb mentioned earlier. The era of ice ages features continental positions and ocean current reductions favorable to polar glaciation. During ice advance, these currents weaken further; during ice retreat, they become stronger. Recent work has led to an expansion of the list of secondary factors to include the effect of cloud and plant variability, in addition to ocean current and insolation changes.

The formation of ice sheets on land is not a simple matter of the polar regions becoming colder. Indeed, colder air has a much lower water saturation vapor pressure and tends to be drier than warmer air. Forming ice on the surface is not the same as the ocean turning into an ice cube. It requires enough warmth to evaporate liquid water, which is then subject to rapid cooling with altitude and latitude, leading to condensation as clouds and then precipitation as snow. And the growth and shrinkage of surface ice sheets formed from snow is not as obvious as it sounds. Cooling air in the polar regions is often correlated with shrinking ice sheets. Colder years still have warm summers, when some of the ice melts. The colder winter air is drier and produces less snow. The net effect, integrated over a year, is glacier shrinkage. Strangely, ice sheet growth is often correlated with somewhat warmer years, for just the opposite reasons. These facts are another reminder that climate is an on-going process, and "things" like ice sheets are really snapshots of processes. Indeed, ice sheets are best viewed, not as signs of cold, but as relics of a rapid and wet cooling episode at some time in the past. They also remind us of the independent importance of water and hydrology, alongside temperature, as a climate variable in its own right.

The modern theory of the Ice Ages (continental positions, poleward ocean currents, Milankovic's astronomical insights) is still not totally satisfactory. But it does fit the evidence well, better than anything else proposed so far, and Milankovic's ideas are as fundamental to modern geoscience as Wegener's theory of continental drift. Unlike continental drift, however, modern science has not directly witnessed episodes of dramatic ice advance and retreat. That leads to some degree of uncertainty.

It also leaves a hole temptingly exploited by the fanatics of "global warming" - proponents of the idea that minor atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) are a major causative element in climate change. Such an idea collides head-on with the success of this modern picture of the Ice Ages that explains the Quaternary climate pretty well.†

More complete and refined measurements of ice advance and retreat and inferred temperature and atmospheric changes (from gas trapped in ice) provide no support for this obsession either. On the contrary: the temperature changes associated with Ice Age changes consistently precede changes in infrared-active gas concentrations, a fatal blow to the CO2 monomania. The pattern seems to be: temperature change > atmospheric chemistry change > ice change. The missing piece that can't be measured directly is probably the change in ocean currents, although changes in clouds and plants are also possible contributors. All three affect the ice coverage, but they also affect CO2 and CH4 concentrations in the atmosphere. These facts reinforce a conclusion arrived at by other lines of reasoning: these gases are mainly effects, not causes, in the Earth's climate. Changes in their concentration can have a weak, secondary causal effect on climate. The size of the resulting effect is limited to augmentation of temperature swings by no more than about 1 ^oC for roughly a doubling of the recent CO2 concentration (about 2-3 parts in 10,000). Shamefully, the IPCC's executive summary makes an exaggerated and unsupportable claim of 3 ^oC for this change, another striking case of bad science based on sloppy reasoning and misuse of evidence.

A simple but complete estimate given earlier was +0.3-0.4 ^oC for a doubling of CO2 concentration. Loosening the assumptions, but keeping all the crucial pieces of climate (evaporation, water vapor, clouds, convection, etc.), allows a larger estimated range of +0.3-0.8 ^oC. This estimate might be in serious error. But it is reassuringly both less than the rough upper limit of +1 ^oC, but not drastically smaller. Violation of the limit would mean the estimate is definitely wrong. Being too small (say, by a factor of 10 or more) would suggest something important missing from the estimate. And keep in mind that this estimate was atmosphere-only; it did not include the mitigating effects of ocean and plant absorption of CO2.

Attempts to invoke minor infrared-active gases as causes of Ice Age changes have flopped. These attempts to rewrite paleoclimate history with minor gases like CO2 and CH4 playing starring roles are reminiscent of the junk science of the "hockey stick." The claims of the "global warming" cult require not only a sense of certainty about climate models and immediate crisis that the science does not warrant; they also require overturning much of what has been learned in the last century and a half about climate and replacing real knowledge with cult "knowledge" - in this case, about the Ice Ages.

POSTSCRIPT: Recent precise measurements of ice core properties: Petit et al. (1999); Fischer et al. (1999); Delmotte et al. (2004).

Recent reviews on the Ice Ages, ice core science, and climate change: Masson-Delmotte et al. (2006); Peacock et al. (2006); Soon (2007).
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* An interesting, if rather off-beat, version of this theory is the "aquatic ape" theory for the immediate ancestor of Australopithecus, living in a cooling and drying East Africa. The independent science writer Elaine Morgan has popularized and extended this idea. Like the Gaia concept, it has gotten entangled with a certain amount of touchy-feely New Age meshuggas. But the idea has a distinguished pedigree going at least as far back as the early Greek philosopher Anaximander and does explain many odd things about humans.

** The Gulf Stream, running between the Caribbean Sea and the northwest Atlantic, is the best known, but far from the only one.

† The Quaternary Epoch is the age of glaciation-deglaciation and also of hominids, modern humans and their immediate ancestors.

Never passing up an opportunity

Ever notice how the Palestinians are the "caboose" of the Arab world? Meaning, they always adopt something that's old hat elsewhere and about to go out of style. For example, the PLO adopted radical nationalism in its 1964 charter, just when radical Arab nationalism was about to be discredited by the 1967 war. In the 1970s, it adopted radical Marxism, when that was about to be replaced by radical Islam. In the 1980s, the PLO clung to this orientation long after it was discredited. Then it reverted briefly to radical nationalism, supporting Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Only slowly did radical Islamic ideas and movements penetrate among the Palestinians, really only since the late 90s. By that point, they were old hat in the Shi'ite world of their Iranian sponsors, and they're presently becoming old hat among Sunnis as well. Indeed, now that Iraqis are the victims of suicide bombings and other radical-Islamic barbarities, splattered all over al Jazeera and al Arabiya, radicalism of that sort seems to be acquiring a bad rap in the Middle East. Not a moment too soon.

People speculate on why this should be so, but I think it's obvious: the Palestinians have no real developed politics of their own, only what various sponsors feed them for their own purposes. Far from being the "root cause" of the Middle East's problems generally, they are in fact the "outermost branch effect," a function of everything else - very much the tail, not the dog.

The Palestinian problem persists in part because the rest of the world, the West especially, has accepted without much question a set of wrong or misleading assumptions about the conflict's origin and nature. These assumptions were first promulgated by radical Arab leaders in the 1930s; became accepted in the West at first only in reactionary, anti-semitic, and oil-connected circles, in the 1940s and 50s; then adopted by the New Left in the 1970s as part of its ideology of "noble savagery"; and today are repeated by implication, with little awareness, in the media. The purest form of this poison can be found in the academic "Middle Eastern studies" cult. The media-diplomatic version is a watered-down version of same.

The Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine (which is what it really is) is not "the" Middle Eastern conflict or problem - it's one of many, and not even the most important. It has produced four major wars, plus a number of less intense, but more dragged out, episodes. The first and third of those wars (in 1948-49 and 1967) produced somewhat less than a million refugees on both sides, all told. A number of conflicts in the modern Middle East have generated each significantly more refugees. The largest was the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which produced between one and two million deaths and about five million refugees. The Armenian genocide of 1915-17 produced a couple million refugees and over a million deaths. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s produced over a million deaths and a couple million refugees. The present civil war in Iraq has produced about a million outgoing refugees (so far), although that should be balanced against returnees.

Nor can it be claimed that the wars are somehow a product of the refugees - the truth is the opposite, of course: it's the wars that produced the refugees - wars started by Arab governments. The Palestinians are the deliberately orphaned tools of these wars - orphaned by those same Arab governments who bear the main responsibility for creating and perpetuating the problem. But spare a little pity for the tools - Newton's third law does apply here. Being used that way - as a tool to beat someone else, or "waving the bloody shirt" - has to hurt. That's where the radical ideologies come in - they're "opiates of the masses," in effect - both painkillers and hallucinogens.

Only the Jordanian government has taken up a smidgen of this responsibility, in that it's the only Arab government that allows Palestinians to become citizens. Palestinians are often looked upon with suspicion by Arab governments and sometimes kicked out when they wear out their welcome. (See Lebanon in the 1970s or Kuwait in 1991.) These governments obtained over 50 years ago a special UN agency (UNRWA) to administer Palestinian Arab refugees, separate from every other refugee problem, which is handled by different agency.

A British diplomat said in the late 40s, right after Israel's independence, that future Western attitudes towards it would be shaped by two factors, oil and anti-semitism. This situation hasn't changed much, at least as far as elites go. The oil factor plays a large role in the anti-Israel attitudes of elites both here and in Europe and, in fact, forms a central force in what might be called the "anti-Israel" lobby. It has limited presence in the more democratic and open parts of our political culture, but it lurks in the background in the more secretive and less public parts - anything connected with oil and oil regimes, and anything funded by oil money - Saudi-financed mosques and imams, "Middle East studies," and key parts of the "realist" foreign policy establishment.

But anti-semitism plays a large role as well. In Europe, it's often just - well - anti-semitism. But both there and here, there is another side: not anti-semitism, but a false perspective of "noble savagery" and victimhood that's imposed on the problem by liberals and the left. This isn't anti-semitism - but it is a consequence of it. These same liberals and leftists are quick to oppose religious intolerance and supremacism in the West on the part of Christians, something the Christian world has taken centuries to outgrow. When faced with something similar in the Muslim world, with similar origins, these same liberals and leftists often become confused, shuffle their feet, and change the subject - when they don't swallow the hatred whole, transform it into self-hatred, and demand that Jews share this self-hatred as a cheap higher virtue.

Temperature, heat flow, opacity: Deeper analogies

Earlier, we looked at a fluid flow analogy for radiative heat transport. Changing the radiative opacity was found to be analogous to changing the cross-sectional area of a pipe. If the area is lowered and the amount and flow rate of the fluid are unchanged, the fluid pressure has to increase. It's like high blood pressure in mammals: if the amount of blood and heart rate don't change, then narrowing of arteries leads to higher pressure.

There's an electrical analogy, too, also mentioned briefly. If temperature is like voltage (V) and heat flow like current (I), then opacity is like resistance (R). The analogue to radiative transport in that case is Ohm's law: V = IR. For a given I, raising R means raising V. Likewise, for a given flow of radiative energy in (and out), raising the opacity means raising the temperature.*

The electrical case immediately leads to an interesting conclusion. The power dissipated as heat by the current flowing through a resistance is P = VI = I²R. So more power is dissipated, for a fixed current I, linearly as R is increased. If the electrical circuit has a definite temperature T, we can also conclude that the rate of entropy generation by this conversion of electrical energy to heat is P/T = I²R/T. This rate also increases linearly with R.

The analogy is not perfect. In the radiative case, it's all energy of radiation - what's flowing and what's being dissipated are the same, and "voltage" is temperature now. Instead of conversion of one form of energy to another, radiative energy at higher frequency (shorter wavelength) is "degraded" by being subdivided into more and more smaller pieces, each piece with a lower frequency (longer wavelength).** The radiative energy becomes more randomized, and the entropy of the radiation field increases.

If the opacity is increased, the heat energy flow doesn't change, and the heat isn't "redirected" or "trapped." The atmosphere's "resistance to flow" goes up, and so does the "voltage" as well.

There is an analogous, but more complex, formula for the rate of entropy generation. It's best expressed in terms of optical depth, rather than opacity: optical depth = opacity times length.† We still have a current-voltage-resistance-type relation: radiative heat flow ~ T⁴/(optical depth). But the entropy generation rate is

   (optical depth)*(radiative heat flow)2    (radiative heat flow)3/4
 ~ -------------------------------------   ~ --------------------     ,
                 T5                           (optical depth)1/4

which just goes to show how funky radiation is compared to matter.

And note the curious implication: when opacity and optical depth increase and the radiative heat flow remains constant, the rate of entropy generation decreases! The power dissipated is just (radiative heat flow) itself.
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* It's more subtle than it seems at first. The "current" (heat flow) in the atmosphere is set by the effective "atmosphere top" temperature, which is a function of incoming solar radiation and cloud albedo alone. Increasing "resistance" (opacity) increases the "voltage" (temperature) difference between the surface and the atmosphere top. But since the latter is fixed, the surface temperature is what rises.

** The "pieces" of radiation are just photons; their number is not conserved. The energy of a photon is Planck's constant times its frequency. Because energy is conserved, a given amount of radiative energy in one energetic photon can be converted into many more but less energetic photons, by multiple absorptions and re-emissions in matter.

Entropy is increased by reorganizing the invariant radiative energy flow into smaller bits - a larger number of lower energy photons still headed in the same direction.

† If opacity is mass-specific (as it usually is), then a factor of density is needed as well. The formula given is actually an integral over the depth.

The other American Nobel Peace Laureate

Everybody's heard of Jimmy Carter, American's best-known Nobel Prize winner. Few have heard of Norman Borlaug, the other recent American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.*

Norman who? Read more here about the father of the Green Revolution. Borlaug is publicity-shy to the point of pathology, yet has saved more lives than any other man in history. He's ignored by the news media, which fact alone tells you more about the news media than you want to know.

When Binah studied development economics in college, Borlaug was spoken of in hushed tones usually reserved for saints like Mother Teresa and political giants like Churchill or FDR.

POSTSCRIPT: Read here what Borlaug thinks of the environmentalist movement and opposition to biotechnology. And don't miss this, on DDT and malaria.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Western celebrities nowadays love to pose as righteous victims of something or other, or perhaps as oppressed Third World peasants. Check out what an African thinks of white Westerners pretending to be ... well ... Africans.
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* Few Americans are aware that the first American Nobel Peace Laureate was Theodore Roosevelt. He helped to negotiate the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. There was no Camp David in those days (that was set up by Eisenhower in the 1950s and named after his son). So the negotiations were held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Kavanna on vacation

Kavanna is on a break right now - back soon!

Before they leave the starting gate

American elections have become absurdly drawn-out circuses - for 2008, the chatter about candidates started as soon as the 2006 mid-term elections were done. With our politics dominated by the media and media consultants, I suppose there's no going back to, say, six-month campaigns.

About the Democratic possibilities, there's little left to say. It's virtually certain that Hillary will be the nominee. For VP nominee, the media-liberal-activist choice is Obama. The smart choice is Richardson. We'll have to wait and see what she does.

A few months ago, the Republican side was dominated by Rudy, but with Romney providing a significant challenge. Even though Romney would be a better president in many ways, his campaign since then has fallen flat, while Giuliani's has gone from strength to strength. Rudy doesn't have it sewn up the way Hillary does, but unless some major unexpected detour happens, he will be the Republican nominee. Fred Thompson is making a big splash right now as the "real conservative," but his candidacy is unlikely to go anywhere - it's a Web-driven Deaniac-type bubble.

Romney's big mistake is that he's trying to be everything to everyone. He's trying to hold on to the liberal Republicanism inherited from his father, former Michigan governor George Romney, that formed the core of his success in Massachusetts. At the same time, to appeal to the religious wing of the Republican party critical in the Republicans' newly consolidated Southern base (about a quarter to a third of Republican voters), he's playing up his conservative side. But he's a Mormon, and that puts off conservative Christians and others ... you see his problem.

Giuliani, OTOH, knows exactly who he is: a former mayor of New York, a liberal Republican through and through - plus his name ends with a vowel. He's perfectly happy to take votes from conservatives, but he doesn't pretend to be one, a powerful advantage. Not that most Republicans have become liberals; rather, the conservative wing of the party is paralyzed by its ambivalence about modern big guvmint, and the religiously-tinged statist populism of Bush (with neocons, white Southerners, and Catholics in tow) has come a-cropper, big-time. Although the latent appeal of the latter is still powerful, it's been discredited for the time being. Only the liberal Republicans can save the party from its current mess.

The Republicans have a better-than-even advantage in the 2008 presidential race: thus Giuliani is likely to be the next president. They will also probably take the Senate back.

A final curious thing to note: 2008 will the first presidential election since 1960 in which (1) a senator has a serious shot at becoming president, and (2) the major candidates and likely winner are not from the Sunbelt (South, Southwest, West).* Does this presage a shift of political power back to the older Northeast and Midwest? Probably not. It's due to the fact that the Democrats' former base in the South, strong until the mid-90s, has been largely wiped out, and the Democrats cannot be a majority party without it. The Republicans' center of gravity continues to shift, along with the country as a whole, west and south. Their stronghold however is no longer the Midwest and West (a legacy of the Civil War), but the South (a legacy of the 1960s-70s breakdown of the New Deal coalition). This gives the Republican party a different flavor from the old Lincolnesque midwesterners and the more recent Goldwater-Reagan individualism - more populist, more overtly religious, friendlier to big government and machine politics.

In the next generation, the new, post-1994 character of the Republican party will continue to be a source of both electoral strength and a lot of turmoil. While it's put the Republicans in a good position vis-a-vis southern and Catholic voters, it has also antagonized and alienated the older Republican base of conservatives and right-leaning independents.
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* Hillary is from Illinois and now lives in and represents New York. Romney is from Michigan and now hails from Massachusetts. Giuliani is New York City born and bred.

Plants and carbon dioxide: A Web site for herbiphiles

The CO2 Science site is a real find on the Web: a clear, well-organized resource mainly devoted to carbon dioxide and plant growth, maintained by a collaborative group of experts in various fields.

It's organized like many Web-based periodicals these days, with distinct weekly issues, but also continuous feed and updates. It brings together the pieces of the just-born science of plants and carbonicity.

The people who run the site are CO2-enthusiasts. Since plants are our friends and frequently what's for dinner, and CO2 is a boon for them, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in their view, is not a worry.

The approaching Age of Quarantine

A previous posting discussed the fate of modernization and integration outside the Western world since World War One. The most recent episode of "globalization," in the 1990s, was an extension of the earlier waves, but it also failed in some signal ways. Attempts to widen the circle beyond Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America have created a lot of problems - in the Middle East especially.

Many countries are clearly not ready for integration, and others constitute borderline cases. Some of the latter, India and Brazil, while not "core" yet, are clearly on their way. Others like Russia have angrily rejected real economic integration in favor of natural resource monopoly dictatorship and a political class drawn increasingly from and into criminal gangsterism. Yet again, there's the great question mark of China, which is making rapid economic progress, but which is also not socially or politically ready for globalization. Right now, it's a good businessman, but not a good citizen. Then there are the agonizing borderline cases like Mexico and Turkey - not destitute or failed countries, but not fully modern either, and struggling hard.

Another signal of "globalization-gone-too-far" is the rise of nuclear proliferation, as explained in William Langewiesche's new The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor. If sushi is the happy face of globalization, the nuclear suq of A. Q. Khan is definitely the unhappy frown. A more practical look at this issue is John Robb's fine Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization.

As we back away from "globalization-gone-too-far," a greater unity of the West is important, to defend what we are, while avoiding any fantastical notions that we can "force others to be free." The last couple years have seen encouraging signs of maturation from the Europeans on these points and, at a different angle, from us. But for the Europeans, it's more important: it is they, not we Americans, who are much more under the gun. We face the threat of physical attacks alone. They face that threat (far more than the US media ever reports), but the real threat to them is political - and down the road, possibly even existential, like the kind of threat that Israelis face. An Islamist politician peacefully winning an election in, say, Holland is as much a defeat as some jihadi blowing himself up on the subway. Wars always are driven by political conflict in the final analysis - otherwise, World War Two was just a "war on submarines" and the Cold War just a "war on ICBMs." And political conflict can be expressed in many ways - violence is just an extreme version.

Some thinkers wrongly believe that worldwide globalization is here already and try to back this claim up with false theories of economic determinism. Modernization/globalization/democratization/etc. is fundamentally a political phenomenon - even a moral one - before it's an economic trend. It has economic consequences, of course, but that's not the root of it. In the 1990s, Thomas Friedman also pushed this idea, less emphatically (because he knew how naive it is), and he's since backed away from it in any case.

The first great age of globalization came to a fiery and bloody end in 1914, setting the twentieth century off on its disastrous course. World War One discredited the political-economic system that had made the stunning human progress from the late 17th century possible. It enabled extremist political movements to seize power and implement deadly agendas of social "improvement" through mass murder, first in Europe, then elsewhere. From 1945 on, emerging from its isolationist shell, the US led the creation of a more stable framework for global economic and security integration - designed solely for North America, western Europe, and Japan - and rejecting the European imperial system that once had partly integrated non-Western parts of the world. In the 1980s, Latin America was cautiously added, although not without serious problems. By the end of the 1980s, east Asia and eastern Europe were added, more successfully.*

But the attempt to extend this system to Africa and the Middle East has failed. Whether these regions really want integration is hard to tell - there are many conflicting signs and trends. Whether they're ready or not is more clear: no, they're not. In the case of the Middle East, the Israelis, with their security "fence," have stumbled on what is likely to become the template for what you might call the coming Age of Quarantine.** Far from being a monstrous deviation, the "Fence" is a harbinger of things to come. It will, I predict, become a master paradigm for politics in the next generation, as evidenced by Thailand and the European rejection of Turkey as a full member of the EU.†

The collapse of the immigration bill is another sign - the reason is simple: the overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to it. Unfortunately, our political and media elites are 10, 20, or 30 years out of touch with reality on this and other issues. Only the rise of talk radio and the spread of the Web has made it possible for many people to check the biased, myopic, and self-interested actions and propaganda of politicians, lobbyists, and the media. It is a defeat for Bush, but it's really a defeat for the whole political class.

There was never anything inevitable or "economically determined" about globalization. It was always a political project, pushed primarily by the US and supported by certain key allies, like Britain and Japan, rooted historically in the Anglo-American vision of a peaceful international order based on what used to be called "enlightened self-interest," trade, and other forms of peaceful cooperation - projected internationally by Wilson and Roosevelt. It is a noble vision. But contrary to a dominant strain of 19th century thinking and modern libertarian fantasy, the necessary political framework does not happen automatically - it needs constant leadership and active protection. That was one of the harsh lessons of the World Wars and the Great Depression. It also needs enough sense to see when it's been pushed too far or inappropriately into places and to degrees beyond what people are ready and willing to accept.
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* I'm counting Israel as part of eastern Europe, which it is in some ways, not just historically, but economically as well - its profile fits moderately-high-income countries like Greece or Poland.

** Certainly all subsequent events in the Palestinian areas, especially in Gaza, have borne out this Israeli hunch. The Palestinians are not only not ready for peace with Israel, they're not even ready for peace with themselves. Some of them are now fleeing to Israel, while Hamas has sacked Yasser Arafat's house in Gaza and carted off his undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.

The "Jordanian" and "Egyptian" options for caretaker roles are looking more likely and attractive by the day. Such a development would bury for good the false promise started at Madrid in 1991.

† Thailand now has an Israeli-built fence with Malaysia, to stop jihadi groups from filtering over the border. And incredibly, Saudi Arabia is building a security fence (making indirect use of Israeli technology and know-how!) to wall out the violent anarchy of neighboring Yemen.

Look on the Sunni side

And a belated happy Fourth!
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Outside the narrow orbit of neoconservatism, the conservative debate over Iraq continues. The June issue of the American Spectator presents a perfect - if perfectly depressing - article by William Tucker, with the perfect image for Bush's current situation:

Right now President Bush is lurching around like a drunk in a barroom, ready to fight anyone who comes along but with no clear recollection of how he got here or how he intends to get home.

Perfect - except for one thing. Tucker recommends the Baker-Hamilton idiocy as a Nixon-Kissinger-type "realist" move, like opening up to China.* What feel-good diplomacy with Iran and its sidekick Syria is supposed to do remains a mystery. Even from a crude power-play point of view, it makes no sense.

1. Iran and Syria have nothing to offer in Iraq.

The current mayhem in Iraq is largely a Sunni problem, not a Shi'ite one. The insurgency is mainly local Sunnis (Iraqi Arabs), but with a significant minority of Sunni al-Qa'eda-style jihadists - suicide bombers and the like. To the extent that foreigners are driving the insurgency, it is driven by money and ideology exported from the conservative Persian Gulf states and Pakistan, not Iran or Syria. To the extent that it's local, it's simply due to the Iraqi Sunnis' rejection of their now-marginal position in the post-Saddam Iraq. After all, they're 16-17% of the population and dropping.

2. Iran is the looming big problem in the larger Middle East, not Iraq.

One of the main reasons for reducing our overstretch in Iraq is precisely the better to be able to do something about Iran. More generally the point is to sideline the democracy obsession and move to the top the issue of stopping jihadism, which is in full control of a Middle Eastern state only in Iran. Ilan Berman's article on Iran in the same issue of the American Spectator does get it right - it gives a typical Israeli and very sound view of the issue.

Readers should also be reminded of past disasters directly traceable to the Baker-Scowcroft axis. The first was the Lebanon debacle of 1982-84. At the behest of Baker and the Saudis, Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon to interpose between the Israeli army and the PLO. The Marines should have been pulled out as soon as the PLO left. Instead they remained as sitting ducks and were attacked by an Iranian-backed truck bomber, killing over 240 of them. Shortly thereafter the US and French embassies in Beirut were blown up and a large number of American, French, and other Western personnel were taken hostage by Iranian- and Syrian-backed groups - leading in turn to the Iran-Contra scandal. As Secretary of State, Baker gave the green light to Syria in 1990 to complete its takeover of Lebanon, in exchange for Syria's completely useless support during the Persian Gulf war. Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait happened in part because the same "realist" clowns (Baker, Hagel et al.) were telling us what a wonderful guy Saddam was to work with. Only an ignorant, amnesiac, and braindead press corps - mindless flunkies really - could treat the Baker-Hamilton diplomatic advice seriously.

Throwing in the towel on Iran would destroy America's fragile credibility as an opponent of Islamic radicalism - this after much effort has gone into getting the Europeans to see the threat - and it's more of a direct threat to them than it is to us. We have a disturbing long-term track record of treating allies and friends worse than we do enemies. And people rightly criticize America's incoherent reaction to the support for Sunni jihadism coming from its Persian Gulf "allies"; can you imagine what the reaction would be if we embraced the present regime in Tehran? It would be less Nixon-Kissinger and more Chamberlin-Daladier giving Hitler a warm bear hug. It's completely daft.

The correct analogy is right under Tucker's nose. A diplomatic "opening" should be extended to the Sunni governments currently alienated from America. Saudi Arabia aside - it has to be treated as sui generis - the Sunni Gulf States support through private money much of the violence now transpiring in Iraq. Only they are in a serious position to stop it. Meanwhile, Egypt and Algeria, corrupt and repressive as they are, have done an excellent job of suppressing jihadi groups in their countries. After all, it is the Sunni countries which have already gone through the disillusioning wringer of pan-Arabism and Islamic radicalism. They are like China after the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao. The problem is that these Sunni governments, once they've quashed the jihadists at home, are happy to let them operate elsewhere.

Which raises another important point. Democracy cannot be at the top of the agenda right now; the most pressing need is stopping religious fanatics. After that, encouraging the development of non-political personal liberty and civil society; only then, democracy in the sense of elections and political competition. The Middle East, above all, is the one region of the world where having democracy now probably means the triumph of jihadist parties. Not because they're all that popular, but because they're well-funded, well-organized, and well-motivated.** Certainly, the experience of Algeria and Turkey in the early 1990s and more recently of the Palestinian Territories has proven this. Iraq hasn't seen the triumph of a single Islamist party only because the country is so fractured. It's more like Lebanon, the Arab world's last attempt at multisectarian, multitribal democracy. The weak civil society of the Arab world at present cannot support electoral democracy; it will lead to either theocracy or civil war. The best bet right now for decent government in most Arab countries is semi-liberal tribal monarchy, like Morocco or Jordan.

And Baker-Scowcroft-Hagel-etc., with their excellent oil-money connections in the Sunni countries, can put their skills and experience to better use there.

Iran should be theocratic but non-nuclear, or nuclear but non-theocratic - but it shouldn't be allowed to be both. Of course, Iran in many ways is the most important country in the Middle East, and it has legitimate national interests and aspirations to be a regional power. What cannot be accommodated at present is those interests and hopes entangled with Shi'ite theocracy and fanaticism. Iran is an ancient country and civilization; it won't cease to be an important country. What can and should cease is its theocracy.

Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for Saudi Arabia, that other great font of jihadi ideology, influence, and money. It can't be treated the same way as the other Sunni countries, because it is so much part of the problem - the same with Pakistan.

POSTSCRIPT: The same issue of the American Spectator also presents an article by Michael Novak on the global ebb and flow of liberty and the fate of the Wilsonian project in the 20th century. Novak too easily confuses "liberty" with "electoral democracy" and doesn't grasp how much the Middle East violates the globalization-democratization paradigm. He needs to read Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom. It's amusing to read a Harvard-educated Indian Muslim explaining to an American audience something their great-great-grandparents (and their British cousins) would have understood without a second thought: some countries aren't ready for democracy, and some countries should never have been countries in the first place.†
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* At least Nixon's opening to China is the good historical model, and not détente with the Soviets. The latter was a questionable episode obsoleted by the rise of Thatcher and Reagan and then Gorbachev. Opening to China was a smart move, although since the end of the Cold War, it has lost its strategic rationale. Of course, today's China is utterly different from 1973.

Tucker also wastes space and attention on misplaced Vietnam analogies, which American political elites cannot seem to let go of, no matter how irrelevant or misleading. The Sunni insurgency is not winning in Iraq; in spite of all the death and destruction it has wrought, they're losing. A full-scale civil war in Iraq would lead to Shi'ite triumph (although not without a lot of bloodshed first) and Sunni refugees - in fact, the current mini-civil war has already led to almost a million Sunnis leaving Iraq. If Tucker is looking for an analogy to the Vietnamese boat people fleeing the triumphant North Vietnamese army, he's got it bassackwards.

** A good analogy is the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), which immediately followed the Bolshevik coup of November 1917. Of all the Russian parties of the time, the Bolsheviks were the smallest (contrary to their absurd name, which means "majority"). But they were the best-organized, the best-funded (by Germany, whose secret funding continued through 1920), and the most ruthless. Their much more numerous opponents, on the other hand, ranging from Anarchists to czarist generals, were badly fractured and poorly organized. The biggest battalions don't always win.

† The title of a translated Spanish interview with Zakaria gets to the point even more quickly: La Democracia No Es Sólo Elecciones, or "democracy isn't just elections." Iraq provides a textbook case: the Sunni insurgency-cum-civil war there accelerated only after the January 2005 elections made it clear how large the Iraqi Shi'ite majority is (63-65%).

Evaporation, condensation, and energy conservation

The earlier extensive discussions of evaporation and condensation, temperature inversions, and the "extra" latent heat dumped into the atmosphere by the closed cycle left one big issue unaddressed: there's no indication where that extra energy is coming from.

All the heat flowing through the Earth's atmosphere ultimately comes from input solar radiation.* But the Earth's surface absorbs and uses that incoming radiation differently, depending on whether the surface is water or ground.

• If ground, essentially all the visible radiation is absorbed and re-radiated upward as infrared (IR) or heat.
• If water, much of the visible radiation is absorbed and re-radiated upward as IR. But a significant part is used instead to evaporate the liquid water - that is, this fraction of incoming radiation is converted to latent heat.

That's why liquid surface water is colder than the immediately surrounding land. Water evaporates and needs latent heat to do so, taking its "cut" of the heat flow; soil doesn't evaporate and takes no such "cut."

Overall, these basic differences between water and soil create a major difference between how heat flows vertically over land and over water. Water, being colder, doesn't radiate quite as much as land, which is hotter. However, the water then makes up for the difference when it condenses at altitude and releases its latent heat. If the whole surface were land, and the incoming radiation flow were 100 units, the net heat flowing up would be 122 units. But in fact, compared to this imaginary all-land-surface Earth, 122 units flow into, through, and out of the real lower atmosphere; seventy percent of the Earth's surface is water. The "extra" 22 units is merely due to the fact that somewhat cooler but evaporating water is a better absorber and distributor of radiation/heat than is hotter but non-evaporating land.

Overall, the total energy is conserved and radiative power in = radiative power out. But the magical properties of water make themselves manifest again - and again climate is driven by differences, this time between land and sea.
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* I'm ignoring the small heat flux arising from the decay of radioactive rocks in the Earth's core, as well as the tiny flux of radiation from the Galactic and cosmic microwave background.

Herod on the couch

More Herod the Great in the news: a new psychobiography makes full use of everything that has been learned in the last 50 years from archeology, medicine, study of ancient texts, and so on.

Herod, more than ever, fits into the picture of a semi-insane Hellenistic king with paranoid tendencies. Kings of that era often came from inbred families with strong tendencies towards mental illness - like the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes, made famous by Hannukah. In Herod's case, paranoia was the most obvious tendency. But so was megalomania, what with his massive building program, the largest in classical antiquity.

The new book is reviewed by Ha'aretz. The quote from Augustus is striking: Herod wouldn't have eaten or touched a pig, but he did kill his own sons.

Kavanna looks back on one year

And what a long, strange journey it has been - and all the topics covered - whew - who knew one blog could pontificate on such a variety? Climate, education, foreign policy and immigration, books, and various and sundry items of Jewish interest.

Most of the postings are now organized by topic. Just click on one of those topics listed at the end of a posting to see all the postings in that category.

And the archive listing to the lower right is now reverse-ordered for your convenience.

Beteyavon - or bon appétit! :>)