Month: April 2010

Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

Gertrude Hambira doesn’t look like someone who gets arrested regularly. Nor do the other women and men in suits who work with her at the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ), formed in the mid-1980s to protect farm laborers. But arrest, harassment and even torture have been regular occupational hazards for Gertrude–the General Secretary of GAPWUZ–and her staff for many years.

Unfortunately, things have not gotten much better since the 2008 elections when President Mugabe refused to cede power to the democratically elected Morgan Tsvangirai, a former union leader himself. The resulting power-sharing agreement has left the two sides battling for control as the nation plummets deeper into unemployment and poverty. At least 90 percent of the populati0n is not part of formal workforce.

Meanwhile, land reform policies have left many farm workers (about 1.5 million) without a source of income as farms are divided up–with many tracts given to Mugabe supporters.  While Zimbabwe’s land reform was initially intended to decrease the number of white-owned farms in the country and provide land to the landless, it’s done little to help the poor in rural areas. “Land was taken from the rich and given to the rich,” says General Secretary Hambira. The rich farmers are, however, not utilizing the land, she notes, leading to lower agricultural productivity, higher prices for food, and widespread hunger.

Hambira says that as rural areas become a target for government reforms, “farm workers have become voiceless.” But giving them back their voice is what GAPWUZ is trying to do by helping reduce child labor, by educating members about their rights in the fields and on the farm, by educating workers about HIV/AIDS , and by helping women workers gain a voice in decision-making. And, unfortunately, that’s why General Secretary and her staff often get arrested.  Shortly after I met with her, the GAPWUZ office was raided by government police and she was forced to go in hiding to South Africa for several weeks.

But GAPWUZ isn’t just working to protect the rights of farm workers in Zimbabwe, says Hambira.  By “looking at the plight of farm workers,” the union is helping to build productivity on the farm and to build a strong agricultural sector–one that will be needed more than ever as Zimbabwe struggles to rebuild and restore democracy.

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When we tend to think of “global warming” or climate” change that is being driven by carbon dioxide emissions, it’s easy for us to look at only the temperature data, particularly the temperature data regarding warming of the atmosphere.

The Big Blue Sky is the arena where most of the professional climate “skeptics” have reared their ugly heads to throw lies and disingenuous half truths around claiming that the well documented warming trend due to increases in CO2 are unrelated or over-hyped malarkey by environmentalist alarmists. Skeptics have claimed everything from the sun to gamma rays to an alleged “cooling trend” to hide the ball and raise suspicion in the minds of the public that it i human activity (specifically the burning of fossil fuels) which is having a major impact on our climate.

One area everyone in the PR battle over the effect CO2 emissions has ignore for some reason (not the scientists mind you, but the news media’s reporting ion this issue) is perhaps the single largest place where man made carbon emissions is having a significant effect on not just climate but on life as we know it: The Oceans.

Specifically the rapid rate of ocean acidification because the world’s oceans suck up all those carbon emissions like the world’s largest vacuum cleaner:

WASHINGTON — With the oceans absorbing more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide an hour, a National Research Council study released Thursday found that the level of acid in the oceans is increasing at an unprecedented rate and threatening to change marine ecosystems. […]

Unless emissions are reined in, ocean acidity could increase by 200 percent by the end of the century and even more in the next century, said James Barry, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and one of the study’s authors.

“Acidification is changing the chemistry of the oceans at a scale and magnitude greater than thought to occur on Earth for many millions of years and is expected to cause changes in the growth and survival of a wide variety of marine organisms, potentially leading to massive shifts in ocean ecosystems,” Barry told the Senate Commerce Committee’s Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee on Thursday.

What sort of effects are we talking about? The destruction of shell fish on which many of our coastal communities rely to employ people and provide a valuable source of protein for both humans and other ocean creatures because their shells will literally dissolve. Many fishermen are extremely concerned about this risk:

Erling Skaar, a Bering Sea Crab fisherman from Alaska said: ‘We could be facing a question of having resources or having no resources in a very few years if they keep dumping more carbon in the oceans.’

‘We don’t know the time line, but we don’t want to find out that it’s too late,’ he said.

Perhaps most significant is the threat to the underlying basis for the the a large part of the foundation for the oceans’ food chain: phytoplankton:

Some of the most abundant lifeforms that could be affected by ocean acidification are a type of phytoplankton called coccolithophorids, which are covered with small plates of calcium carbonate and are commonly found floating near the surface of the ocean (where they use the abundant sunlight for photosynthesis). Other important examples are planktonic organisms called foraminifera (which are related to amoeba) and pteropods (small marine snails).

Experiments carried out at sea have shown that the shells of live pteropods dissolve when seawater reaches corrosive levels. Ocean acidification is detrimental to high-latitude ecosystems and highly acidic conditions could develop within decades, not centuries as suggested previously.

A fall in the numbers of pteropods could cause a chain reaction since they make up the basic food for organisms from zooplankton to whales, as well as for species that are important commercially, such as North Pacific salmon. For example, the plankton on which cod larvae feed would disappear, and the cod would then go too, and something else not linked heavily to the food chain – like jellyfish – will move into their niche in the ecosystem.

We could, in just a few decades be inundated with jellyfish as the predominant ocean species. They are already pressuring cod stocks. in the Baltic Sea. Jellyfish have also invaded the warmer eaters of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Something tells me they won;t be what’s for dinner on the tables of your children and grand children in the future. But they may be all we have left. That and algae which eats plastic.

And let us not ignore the threat that warmer, more acidic oceans pose to human health.

For residents of marine and freshwater coastal regions, perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of the interdependence of human and ocean health are the episodic harmful algal blooms (HABs) that affect almost every part of the U.S. coastline. HABs are natural phenomena caused by the proliferation of algae, resulting in damage to the environment and/or risk to the health of humans and aquatic life. Many HAB species produce toxins that are accumulated and passed up the food chain, causing illness or death in humans and other organisms that consume them. Nontoxic organisms can also cause blooms. These so-called “noxious” or “nuisance” bloom species grow to high biomass and cause oxygen depletion, reduction in biodiversity, physical damage, and shading of the benthos. The frequency and severity of HAB events appears to be increasing globally …

HABs are a key focal area of the national research initiatives on Oceans and Human Health (OHH) at NSF/NIEHS and NOAA. All of the OHH Centers, spread from the east coast to Hawaii, include one or more research projects devoted to understanding HAB problems. Collectively, the Centers are engaged in intense study of a variety of major recurrent toxic HAB species in the U.S.: Alexandrium tamarense, Gambierdiscus spp., Karenia brevis, Microcystis spp., and Pseudo-nitzschia spp. (Figure 1). Emerging HAB problems, such as the cyanobacteria responsible for β-N-methylamino-L-alanine poisoning, are also under investigation.

Many scientists believe that these direct threats to human health may very well be accelerated by ocean acidification along with increased pollution:

The greatest problems for human society will be caused by being unprepared for significant range expansions or the increase of algal biotoxin problems in currently poorly monitored areas, thus calling for increased vigilance in seafood-biotoxin and HAB monitoring programs.

Climate change isn’t just severe winter weather where and when it’s not expected or a Spring that arrives too hot and to early at higher latitudes or Summers that break record temperatures and fuel wild fires across the globe. Climate change also involves that vast 70% of the earth’s surface we call the oceans. We ignore the changes occurring there at our peril.

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McVey Studios Website graduated in 2009 from West Liberty Univ.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Unlike Robert Kuttner, I can imagine the Republicans successfully filibustering the opening of debate on financial reforms. But I hope he’s right that they are bluffing. There’s been surprisingly little pre-game hype over the vote tomorrow. I think it will be one of the most important votes of Obama’s first term. And, if the Democrats achieve cloture, things will get very, very interesting during the votes on amendments.

Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic asks Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis? and then asks us not to consider it a joke question. Sorry, it is a joke question. I don’t care how much porn people at the SEC were watching at work. What caused the financial crisis was the issuance of credit to bad credit risks, the gaming of dishonest rating agencies, and the development of financial products that created these perverse incentives and destroyed any semblance of accountability. A couple of SEC executives watching porn all day at work was insignificant compared to what the Federal Reserve and Wall Street executives allowed to happen.

As a general rule, an employee who spends all day watching porn proves that his job is superfluous, not that he is indispensable for the company’s success.

So, who do want to see Obama nominate to the Supreme Court? Someone conventional? A particular judge? A governor or former senator? Someone from academia or the business world?

I’m kind of hoping it is someone I’ve never heard of. But I like Diane Wood from among the names that I’ve seen floated around.

Back during the transition and early days of the new administration, when Obama was announcing the names and qualifications of his first nominees, I complained that he seemed to restrict his choices to people who had graduated from the country’s most elite universities…Stanford, Berkeley, and the Ivies, mainly. It was rare to find someone who had attended a second or third-tier university. Why did I see that as a problem? Well, it’s complicated, but growing up in Princeton, New Jersey with the sons and daughters of Ivy League professors, I know a bit about the culture of elite academia and the kind of kids who are educated there. I have a ton of respect for Princeton as a learning institution and for the superachieving kids that make up the Student Body. But they are living in an alternative reality that is disconnected from the common experience of the vast majority of people in this country and the larger world. I don’t have a problem with hiring a lot of Ivy Leaguers to positions of governmental responsibility, but I do have a problem with overpopulating the government with people who have mostly enjoyed a very privileged upbringing.

I’m not an absolutist about this at all. Princeton and Columbia educated Michelle and Barack Obama, and Sonia Sotomayor. Not everyone who attends Stanford or Yale is born with a silver spoon in their mouth (or, like Chelsea and Barbara, is the daughter of a president). It’s just that I think someone who went to, say, Miami University of Ohio and graduated with honors should be taken seriously and be given a shot at working in high positions in government. You want people who are top-notch achievers, but not everyone need be an A-student from the age of thirteen on. So, I can almost relate to P.J. O’Rourke’s anti-Obama rant, A Plague of ‘A’ Students: Why it’s so irksome being governed by the Obami.

Except, O’Rourke’s complaint is not that stupid schlubs like himself aren’t allowed to work in Obama’s administration. His problem is that Obama is treating something seriously that O’Rourke desperately wants to treat unseriously: namely, the governance of the United States of America:

Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the left…

…The secret to the Obama annoyance is snotty lecturing. His tone of voice sends us back to the worst place in college. We sit once more packed into the vast, dreary confines of a freshman survey course—“Rocks for Jocks,” “Nuts and Sluts,” “Darkness at Noon.” At the lectern is a twerp of a grad student—the prototypical A student—insecure, overbearing, full of himself and contempt for his students. All we want is an easy three credits to fulfill a curriculum requirement in science, social science, or fine arts. We’ve got a mimeographed copy of last year’s final with multiple choice answers already written on our wrists. The grad student could skip his classes, the way we intend to, but there the s.o.b. is, taking attendance.

Now, I understand how something as simple as tone of voice can grate like nails on a chalkboard. I felt that way about George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin. It was hard for me to get past how they were saying things to listen to what they were saying. So, if Obama’s style is distracting and irksome to P.J. O’Rourke, I don’t begrudge him that. And I know he is a humorist (sometimes, but not here, a quite accomplished one) and one ought not take him too literally. But he really is arguing that people of average intelligence founded this country and that they can run it best.

The smart set stayed in fashionable Europe, where everything was nice and neat and people were clever about looking after their own interests and didn’t need to come to America. The Mayflower was full of C students. Their idea was that, given freedom, responsibility, rule of law and some elbow room, the average, the middling, and the mediocre could create the richest, most powerful country ever.

Nevermind that this is an atrocious reading of history, our country was, at least, populated by people who were not part of the dissolute European aristocracy. But it was founded by people like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, who were certainly some of the smartest and high-achieving people of their day. (I’d note here, for the record, that Franklin and Hamilton’s frivolous and humble upbringings might have prevented them from serious consideration in the Obama adminsitration).

What O’Rourke viscerally dislikes is Obama’s earnestness and raw intellect. Politics should be a mud-fight, and policy only exists to be cynically mocked. How dare this president treat the electorate as if they might learn something? It feels like we all might be surprised at any moment with a pop-quiz. Can you explain the CBO score of the health care bill in 500 words or less?

Whatever insecurities O’Rourke may have, he’s actually much smarter than the average person. But his discomfort with Obama is obviously shared by a lot of people who just don’t like his style and manner (and I’m not even talking about race). George W. Bush was a ‘C’ student at Yale. Yet, O’Rourke could relate to him. He wanted to blow off ‘Nuts and Sluts,’ too.

From the New York Times:

Published: April 24, 1692 April 24, 2010

SALEM, MASS. CAIRO — The sorcerer still has his head.

But for how long?

For more than two years, Ali Hussain Sibat of Lebanon has been held in a prison in Saudi Arabia, convicted of sorcery and sentenced to death. His head is to be chopped off by an executioner wielding a long, curved sword.

His crime: manipulating spirits, predicting the future, concocting potions and conjuring spells on a call-in television show called “The Hidden” on a Lebanese channel, Scheherazade. It was, in effect, a Middle Eastern psychic hot line.

“Sorcery is the ability to influence matters that affect people’s lives through the use of spirits,” said Abdulaziz AlGasim, a retired Saudi judge. “It is impossible to prove such an act except through confession, and confessions are suspect.”

The authorities say that Mr. Sibat confessed.

We’ve made this mistake and 318 years later we’re not very proud of it. Let him go.

No one could have predicted that Lindsey Graham would play Lucy to John Kerry’s Charlie Brown.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) abandoned his effort to push a climate and energy bill Saturday, saying he would continue only if Democratic leaders promise to relinquish plans to bring up immigration legislation first.

Graham’s departure likely dooms any chance of passing a climate bill this year. He is the sole Republican working with Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) on a compromise proposal that they had planned to unveil Monday.

I have no idea whether or not Sen. Graham will make good on his threat, but it doesn’t pay to trust John McCain’s best buddy when you’re trying to get some bipartisanship. Either climate change is important or its not. Withholding support for a climate bill because of the order in which it is prioritized doesn’t even make a modicum of sense.