Palestine ‘Right of Return’ Still Key Demand After 61 Years in Lebanon

WW interviews PFLP leaders

‘Right of return ’ still key demand after 61 years in Lebanon

By Joyce Chediac
Published Oct 16, 2009 11:24 PM

When cameras are running, Washington officials sometimes express “concern” for the plight of the Palestinian people. But even this phony caring doesn’t extend to the 4.5 million Palestinians who for 61 years have remained stateless, without official nationality, stranded in Arab countries.

The right to return has never been raised in the so-called Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that Washington brokers. The U.S. government sidesteps the right of Palestinians to return to their original towns and villages because it opposes this right.
Palestinians in Lebanon are allowed to live only in overcrowded refugee camps, with no rights to social services. Here, children of the Bourj al Barejneh camp in Beirut have only sewage-lined streets in which to play.

Workers World recently visited five Palestinian camps in Lebanon as a guest of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist organization with a long history in the Palestinian struggle. The situation of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon underscores why the right of return is so important, and why all progressives concerned with the Palestinian question must actively support it and never let it be dropped.

Slow war against Palestinians in Lebanon

For the 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, the civil war did not end in 1990. Right-wing forces in and outside of the Lebanese government are still waging a slow war against them.

In Lebanon today, Palestinians are not allowed to live outside the refugee camps. They cannot own property. They cannot be citizens and can’t vote. They are not entitled to any social services. They cannot work in most jobs.

They are scapegoated by Lebanon’s right wing for many of the social and political ills, and must worry constantly about their safety from attacks by paramilitary militias and from the Lebanese Army.

From 1970 to 1982 the Palestine Liberation Organization and its fighters were based in Lebanon. During the Civil War of 1975-90, poor and disenfranchised Lebanese united with the Palestinian resistance to wage a struggle for the liberation of all. Though the struggle was defeated by Arab reaction and by Israel, backed and armed by the U.S., Lebanon’s reactionary rulers will never forget or forgive the role that the Palestinian struggle played. This is why Lebanon’s rulers are slowly squeezing the Palestinians from every direction. Until they can return to Palestine, however, the Palestinians in Lebanon, have nowhere to go.

“In Lebanon Palestinians have the right of free speech, but not economic or social rights,” Abu Ali Hassan, a national PFLP leader in Lebanon explained. “In other Arab countries Palestinians have a higher standard of living, but cannot speak out. Palestinians in Lebanon are the worst off economically.

“Most Palestinians in Lebanon want the right to return” to Palestine, he continued, “but to do this they need support in the form of social rights, the right to work, the right to buy a flat [apartment], and the right to live outside the camps.”

‘Living situation worse than Gaza’

Abu Jabad is the PFLP leader responsible for political activities in Lebanon. His home is in Nahar al Bared camp, which was destroyed by the Lebanese Army two years ago. He said: “The living situation for Palestinians in Lebanon is worse than in Gaza and the occupied land. Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank have a university. Palestinians in Lebanon don’t. In fact, because Palestinians are considered foreigners, education here is more costly.”

Lebanese government decrees passed in 1964 and 1995 bar Palestinian refugees from working in more than 70 professions.

“Palestinians work as farm workers and as construction laborers. This is seasonal work. There are no benefits,” said Hassan. “Palestinians must work outside Lebanon. Many go to Europe illegally or as refugees, assisted by [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East].”

Fuad, a PFLP leader in the Bourj al Barejneh camp, said, “All families here have people who work in the Gulf and in Europe.” He added, “There is just one UNRWA high school for the Palestinians in all of Beirut. There are 600-700 students there.”

Raafat El Najjar is the medical director of a clinic in Bidawi camp in Tripoli. He said Palestinian doctors “are not allowed to work outside the camps. A Lebanese [doctor] gets $40 per patient. I get $3 per patient. Sanitation workers, people who repair cars outside make more money than the professionals in the camp.”

Cannot own property

Meanwhile, a 2002 amendment to Lebanon’s national property law forbids “non-Lebanese persons, who do not possess citizenship issued by a state recognized by Lebanon, to inherit or buy property.” This prohibits Palestinians from owning land or even an apartment outside the refugee camps. If they already own property, they cannot pass it to their children.

Dependant on U.N. for basic services

Because they cannot work in Lebanon and have no access to social services, Palestinians in Lebanon must rely on the very limited resources of UNRWA as the main provider of basic services—education, health, relief and social services.

This relationship has a dual character, Hassan pointed out: “The United Nations accepts the state of Israel. However, it also passed Resolution Number 194, which supports the Palestinian right to return, and to get financial compensation for what they have gone through.”

There are 422,188 Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, making up 10 percent of Lebanon’s population. According to UNRWA, “The Lebanon Field has the highest percentage of Palestine refugees who are living in abject poverty and who are registered with the Agency’s ‘special hardship’ program.”

Fear daily for their safety

Hassan explained that two of the 13 camps in Lebanon were destroyed outright and never replaced. Israel destroyed Nabatiyah camp, near the Israeli border. Lebanese fascists destroyed Tel Al Zaatar in Beirut, and massacred the population. In 1982, the Israelis and Lebanese fascists massacred the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila camps. In 2007, the Lebanese Army bombed and destroyed Nahr al Bared. Its residents are still displaced.

Abu Jabad, the PFLP leader responsible for political activities in Lebanon, explained that the Palestinians living in these camps were killed, deported or made to flee to other camps, increasing the already severe overcrowding. “The situation is very dangerous. Palestinian lives are threatened,” he added. “It’s not over, as can be seen by destruction of Nahar al Bared two years ago.”

“There is no certain future, and always fear of war,” Dr. El Najjar said. “Some Palestinians in Badawi camp who lost proper ID cards can’t go outside the camp. Others are afraid to leave the camps.”

‘Where is justice?’

Imad Audeh, the PFLP leader responsible for north Lebanon, added: “People are not living the way they are supposed to live. Where is justice? There is a U.N. resolution to return, but we are still waiting for 61 years to return.

“The Lebanese government says, ‘You are going back? Why should we give you citizenship?’ This is an excuse. While they are living here, at least give the Palestinians some rights, like the Lebanese.” The government “doesn’t want to nationalize Palestinians because it would upset the balance.”

Audeh referred to Lebanon’s archaic, religion-based political system, which awards great authority to ruling cliques in the Maronite Christian and Sunni Muslim communities, based on an obsolete census conducted more than 75 years ago. “Palestinians don’t have religious discrimination,” he said. “Palestinians will be with anyone who supports them.”

What do Palestinians in Lebanon want?

“We want the human rights we need to go on living here, and the implementation of U.N. decision 194,” Abu Jabad said. “We have the right to return to our homeland. The U.S. government must play a role in this and not against Palestinian rights.”

Despite the difficult conditions, the spark of struggle lives. Imad Audeh spoke for all the Palestinians interviewed on this visit when he said, “We are sure that we will take back Palestine.”

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Talks over contested northern Iraqi boundaries make headway – UN mission

Talks on disputed internal Iraqi boundaries – in the oil-rich, ethnically mixed north – have made progress on measures to address concerns of local residents, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) announced today.

Senior UN official welcomes release of female aid workers abducted in Darfur

The top United Nations humanitarian official in Sudan has welcomed the release on Sunday of two international aid workers who were kidnapped in the country's conflict-ridden region of Darfur three months ago.

Iran News Bulletin: Revolutionary Guards Officers Killed in Attacks

Sunday, October 18, 2009
19:39 Mecca time, 16:39 GMT

Iran officers die in suicide attack

Sunday’s suicide attack was the worst to be seen in Iran in recent years

Eleven commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are among about 31 people killed in a suicide attack in southeastern Iran.

The suicide bombing, which occurred early on Sunday morning in the city of Pisheen, in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province, wounded another 28 people, nine of them critically.

General Nourali Shoushtari, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ armed forces, and General Mohammadzadeh, the Guard’s commander in Sistan-Baluchestan, were killed.

The attack, the deadliest in Iran in recent years, occurred as officers were preparing to hold a meeting between locals from Shia and Sunni communities.

Ali Larijani, Iran’s parliamentary speaker, confirmed the deaths in an address to parliament.

“We express our condolences for their martyrdom … The intention of the terrorists was definitely to disrupt security in Sistan-Baluchestan province,” Larijani said.

West blamed

A Sunni group called Jundallah (Soldiers of God) claimed responsibility for the attack, according to state media.

The group has been accused by Tehran of launching regular attacks in the province and is strongly opposed to the predominantly Shia government.

Mohammad Marandi, an assistant professor at the University of Tehran, told Al Jazeera that officials suspected the group was linked to Saudi Arabia, the US and Britain.

“Iranian officials are very confident that the terrorist group behind the attack was funded by the Saudis and supported by the Americans and the British,” he said.

“I think the greatest blow [from this attack] is to any Iranian trust with regards to the Americans.

“On the one hand, the Americans are talking about rapprochement and building a new future, yet at the same time we see the Americans supporting groups in [Iran’s] Kurdish regions as well as in Sistan-Baluchestan.”

But Washington denies involvement with the group and condemned the attack soon after it occurred.

“We condemn this act of terrorism and mourn the loss of innocent lives,” Ian Kelly, the US state department spokesman, said in a statement.

“Reports of alleged US involvement are completely false.”

Regional concerns

Ali Nouri Zada, the director of the Arab-Iranian Studies Centre in London, dismissed suggestions Jundallah was being supported by Saudi Arabia or the West.

“It’s very easy to point at Saudi, to the British and Americans, [but] Jundallah is considered a terrorist organisation by the Americans and British,” he told Al Jazeera.

“As far as the Saudis are concerned, the Saudis are very sensitive - they have minorities, they have Shia … and they are facing al-Qaeda themselves.

“It [Jundallah] is a local organisation. It’s very easy in Baluchestan to find weapons.”

Following the attack, Iran’s foreign ministry summoned a senior Pakistani diplomat in Tehran, Iran’s Press TV reported.

“The Pakistani official assured Tehran that his country would take all measures to secure its border with Iran,” it said.

Both Iran and Pakistan have in the past accused each other of supporting Baluch groups in each others’ territory.

Past attacks

Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan region borders Pakistan and Afghanistan and has seen several clashes in the past between security forces and Sunni fighters.

Al Jazeera’s Nazanine Moshiri, in Tehran, the capital, said: “Just three weeks before [June’s] presidential elections there was a big explosion in that area, where 25 people were killed and more than 100 injured.

“The head of Jundallah said that his group carried out the attack.

“The Iranians say that they are carrying out a duel war against drug-traffickers and Jundallah, which they claim is linked to al-Qaeda.”

Moshiri said that there was no suggestion that the blast was linked to the recent disputed presidential elections.

“What is common in this area is kidnappings, explosions and clashes between Jundallah and Iranian authorities,” she said.

“But what is very interesting is that this meeting that was about to take place was with senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards. So this was potentially an extremely important meeting.”

The Revolutionary Guards is an elite force fiercely loyal to the tenets of the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Iran bombing kills 5 Revolutionary Guard leaders

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI and BRIAN MURPHY, Associated Press Writers

TEHRAN, Iran – A suicide bomber killed five senior commanders of the powerful Revolutionary Guard and at least 26 others Sunday near the Pakistani border in the heartland of a potentially escalating Sunni insurgency.

The attack — which also left dozens wounded — was the most high-profile strike against security forces in an outlaw region of armed tribal groups, drug smugglers and Sunni rebels known as Jundallah, or Soldiers of God.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised sharp retaliation. But a sweeping offensive by authorities is unlikely.

Iranian officials have been reluctant to open full-scale military operations in the southeastern border zone, fearing it could become a hotspot for sectarian violence with the potential to draw in al-Qaida and Sunni militants from nearby Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The region’s top prosecutor, Mohammad Marzieh, was quoted by the semi-official ISNA news agency as saying Jundallah claimed responsibility for the blast in the Pishin district near the Pakistani border.

There was no immediate statement directly from the group, which has carried out sporadic kidnappings and attacks in recent years — including targeting the Revolutionary Guard — to press their claims of persecution in the Shiite government and officials.

In May, Jundallah said it sent a suicide bomber into a Shiite mosque in the southeastern city of Zahedan, killing 25 worshippers.

The latest attack, however, would mark the group’s highest-level target. It also raised questions about how the attacker breached security around such a top delegation from the Revolutionary Guard — the country’s strongest military force, which is directly linked to the ruling clerics under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The official Islamic Republic News Agency said the victims included the deputy commander of the Guard’s ground forces, Gen. Noor Ali Shooshtari, as well as a chief provincial Guard commander, Rajab Ali Mohammadzadeh. The others killed were Guard members or tribal leaders, it said.

More than two dozen others were wounded, state radio reported.

The commanders were entering a sports complex to meet tribal leaders to discuss Sunni-Shiite cooperation when the attacker detonated a belt fitted with explosives, IRNA said.

Ahmadinejad — who counts on support from the Revolutionary Guard — vowed to strike back.

“The criminals will soon get the response for their inhuman crimes,” IRNA quoted him as saying.

But controlling the scrubland and arid hills along the southeastern borders is a huge challenge that has been out of Iran’s reach.

Drug traffickers ferry opium and other narcotics through the cross-border badlands — a key source of income for the Taliban in Afghanistan and the ethnic Baluchi tribes that straddle the three-nation region and include members of Jundallah. Iran has pleaded for more international help to cut off the drug routes and criminal gangs.

Iran also has accused Jundallah of receiving support from al-Qaida and the Taliban, though some analysts who have studied the group dispute such a link.

“There is no evidence of outside help for Jundallah from wider militant networks,” said Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. “It’s a homegrown group that moves across the borders within fellow Baluchi tribes. It is very hard to control the border.”

In an attempt to boost security in the region, Iran in April put the Revolutionary Guard directly in control of the Sistan-Baluchistan Province in Iran’s southeastern corner.

The 120,000-strong Guard also controls Iran’s missile program, guards its nuclear facilities and has its own ground, naval and air units.

The Revolutionary Guard led the blanket crackdown on dissident after Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in June. But the attack Sunday appeared to have no link to the political showdowns.

State television accused Britain of supporting Jundallah, without providing any evidence.

The Revolutionary Guard blamed the attack on what it called the “global arrogance,” a reference to the United States.

On the eve of talks about Tehran’s nuclear program, Washington was quick to react.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the United States condemned what he called an “act of terrorism.” Reports of alleged U.S. involvement are “completely false,” he said.

Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, told lawmakers that the bombing was aimed at further destabilizing the uneasy border region with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“The intention of the terrorists was definitely to disrupt security in Sistan-Baluchistan Province,” Larijani said.

In Quetta, Pakistan, police official Akbar Sanjrani said Iran had closed at least one border crossing. He said Iranian authorities did not give a reason for blocking the route, but Sanjrani speculated it was related to the bombing.

Pakistan’s Foreign Office spokesman, Abdul Basit, rejected Iranian claims that Jundallah’s leader is in Pakistan.

“We are struggling to eradicate the menace of terrorism,” Basit told Geo TV.

The group also has claimed responsibility for a February 2007 car bombing that killed 11 members of the Revolutionary Guard near Zahedan.

Despite Iran’s claims of an al-Qaida link, Chris Zambelis, a Washington-based risk management consultant who has studied Jundallah, said in a recent article that there is no evidence al-Qaida is supporting the group. He does note, however, that the group has begun to use the kinds of suicide bombings associated with the global terror network.

“Jundallah’s contacts with the Taliban are most likely based on jointly profiting from the illicit trade and smuggling as opposed to ideology,” Zambelis wrote in the July issue of West Point’s CTC Sentinel.

Associated Press writer Abdul Sattar in Quetta, Pakistan, contributed to this report. Murphy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Iraq: Headway made in talks over contested northern boundaries – UN mission

Talks on disputed internal Iraqi boundaries – in the oil-rich, ethnically mixed north – have made progress on measures to address concerns of local residents, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) announced today.

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Pakistan launches its offensive - a good sign

The long-awaited and much-anticipated Pakistani military offensive against Taliban elements in South Waziristan (blue circle on map below) kicked off on Saturday. The Pakistani leadership has finally realized that there is no negotiating with the Taliban - they have to be hunted down and killed.

Over the last few weeks, there has been a spate of violence in Pakistan as Taliban militants attempted to convince the public to force the Pakistani leadership to call off their publicized major offensive into the tribal area of South Waziristan. Actually, the plan backfired - all the militants succeeded in doing was galvanizing public opinion and the conviction of the military leadership that such an offensive was essential.

There has been a slow awakening in Pakistan since the Taliban moved closer to the non-tribal areas, such as the attacks in the Swat Valley late in 2008 and earlier this year. In that operation, the Pakistanis entered into a ceasefire with the Taliban after allowing the Taliban to impose Sharia’ law in the region. The Taliban did not abide by the agreement and the Pakistanis had to launch an offensive to oust the Taliban from the area.

Swat Valley was a wake up call for the Pakistanis that the Taliban are not content to remain in the autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas - Swat is in the North West Frontier Province, which falls fully under Pakistani sovereignty. It also demonstrated to the Pakistanis that the Taliban cannot be trusted. Agreements, ceasefires, truces - these are only tactics to be used to regroup and re-arm.

The Pakistanis have committed two army divisions to this fight, with air support. It began with a three-pronged assault deep into South Waziristan, the redoubt of numerous Taliban and al-Qa’idah fighters, including chief of the Pakistani Taliban Hakimullah Mehsud and possibly al-Qa’idah leader Usamah bin Ladin himself. The terrain is forbidding, and the Taliban and its Arab and Uzbek allies are tough and committed fighters.

This will be a costly fight for the Pakistan Army in terms of casualties, but a necessary fight if the central government is going to defeat this threat to its very existence. The Taliban militants don’t want just to be left alone - they want to impose their own fundamentalist Islamic belief system to what already is an Islamic Republic.

Hopefully, the Pakistanis will execute this offensive to a successful completion rather than fighting for a short period of time, then entering into a ceasefire agreement that never holds. They did this in 2004, 2005 and 2008 - it just does not work. Maybe this time will be different. Maybe this time the Pakistani intelligence service - riddled with Taliban and al-Qa’idah sympathizers and supporters - will not be able to convince the leadership to negotiate.

As I have said before, you cannot negotiate with these people. You have to hunt them down and kill them.

Superfreakonomics: Everything you know about Global Warming is wrong

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of the bestselling Freakonomics, are back to challenge more accepted views. This time they claim that CO2 may be good, trees are harmful and a giant hosepipe in space could save the planet

In a nondescript suburb of Seattle there’s a charmless and windowless building that used to be a Harley-Davidson repair shop. A sheet of paper taped to the door reads “Intellectual Ventures”. Inside is one of the most unusual laboratories in the world. There are lathes and mould makers and 3-D printers, many powerful computers and a fish tank for zapping malarial mosquitoes with lasers.
Intellectual Ventures (IV) is an invention company. Scientists and puzzle solvers of every variety dream up processes and products and file patent applications, more than 500 a year.
Nathan Myhrvold — a polymath who as a young man did quantum cosmology research at Cambridge with Stephen Hawking — co-founded IV nine years ago. Myhrvold, now 50, recalls watching Doctor Who when he was young: “The Doctor introduces himself to someone who says, ‘Doctor? Are you some kind of scientist?’ And he says, ‘Sir, I am every kind of scientist’. And I was, like, yes! Yes! That is what I want to be: every kind of scientist!”
He did so by playing a variety of roles at Microsoft: futurist, strategist, founder of its research lab and whisperer-in-chief to Bill Gates. “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan,” Gates, an investor in IV, once observed.

In 1999, when he left Microsoft, Myhrvold appeared on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. At the same time he is famously penny-pinching. As he walks through the IV lab pointing out his favourite gadgets, his greatest pride is reserved for items he bought on eBay or at bankruptcy sales. He is a firm believer that solutions should be cheap and simple whenever possible.
His small group of scientists and engineers has sent satellites to the moon, helped defend the United States against missile attack and, via computing advances, changed the way the world works. They have also conducted definitive research in many fields, including climate science. So it was only a matter of time before they began thinking about climate change.
On the day we visit IV, Myhrvold convenes roughly a dozen of his colleagues to talk about possible solutions to global warming. They sit around a long oval conference table, Myhrvold near one end. And more than 10 hours later we emerge having heard the most extraordinary but convincing proposal.
Everyone in the room agrees that the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it. But they also agree that the standard global warming rhetoric is oversimplified and exaggerated.
Too many accounts, Myhrvold says, suffer from “people who get on their high horse and say that our species will be exterminated”.
When Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, is mentioned, the table erupts in a sea of groans. The film’s purpose, Myhrvold believes, was “to scare the crap out of people”. Although Gore “isn’t technically lying”, he says, some of the nightmare scenarios Gore describes — the state of Florida disappearing under rising seas, for instance — “don’t have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame. No climate model shows them happening”.
But the scientific community is also at fault. The current climate prediction models are, as Lowell Wood puts it, “enormously crude”. Wood is a heavy-set and spectacularly talkative astrophysicist in his sixties who long ago was Myhrvold’s academic mentor. (Wood himself was a protégé of the physicist Edward Teller.) Myhrvold thinks Wood is one of the smartest men in the universe.
Off the top of his head, Wood seems to know quite a bit about practically anything: the melt rate of the Greenland ice core (80 cubic kilometres per year); the percentage of unsanctioned Chinese power plants that went online in the previous year (about 20%); the number of times that metastatic cancer cells travel through the bloodstream before they land (“as many as a million”).
Wood has achieved a great deal in science on behalf of universities, private firms and the US government. He worked on the “Star Wars” missile defence system. Today he is wearing a rainbow tie-dyed short-sleeved shirt with a matching tie.
“The climate models are crude in space and they’re crude in time,” he continues. “So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.”
There are several reasons for this, Myhrvold explains. Today’s models use a grid of cells to map the Earth and those grids are too large to allow for the modelling of actual weather. Smaller and more accurate grids would require better modelling software, which would require more computing power.
“We’re trying to predict climate change 20 to 30 years from now,” he says, “but it will take us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do the job.”
Most current climate models tend to produce similar predictions. This might lead one to conclude that climate scientists have a pretty good handle on the future. Not so, says Wood.
“Everybody turns their knobs” — that is, adjusts the control parameters and coefficients of their models — “so they aren’t the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded.”
In other words, the economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the models to approximately match one another.
As Wood, Myhrvold and the other scientists discuss the various conventional wisdoms surrounding global warming, few, if any, survive unscathed.
The emphasis on carbon dioxide? “Misplaced,” says Wood. Why? “Because carbon dioxide is not the major greenhouse gas. The major greenhouse gas is water vapour.” Current climate models “do not know how to handle water vapour and various types of clouds. That is the elephant in the corner of this room. I hope we’ll have good numbers on water vapour by 2020 or thereabouts”.
Myhrvold cites a recent paper asserting that carbon dioxide may have had little to do with recent warming. Instead, all the heavy particulate pollution we generated in earlier decades seems to have cooled the atmosphere by dimming the sun. That sparked a brief panic over global cooling in the 1970s. The trend began to reverse when we started cleaning up our air.
“So most of the warming seen over the past few decades,” Myhrvold says, “might actually be due to good environmental stewardship.”
Not so many years ago schoolchildren were taught that carbon dioxide is the naturally occurring lifeblood of plants. Today children are more likely to think of carbon dioxide as a poison. That’s because the amount in the atmosphere has increased substantially over the past century from about 280 parts per million to 380.
What people don’t know, the IV scientists say, is that the carbon dioxide level 80m years ago — when our mammalian ancestors were evolving — was at least 1,000 parts per million. That same concentration, in fact, is the regulation standard inside new energy-efficient office buildings.
So not only is carbon dioxide plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon dioxide levels don’t necessarily mirror human activity. Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the Earth: ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, not the other way around.
Beside Myhrvold sits Ken Caldeira, a soft-spoken man with a boyish face and a halo of curly hair. He runs an ecology lab at Stanford University for the Carnegie Institution. Caldeira is among the most respected climate scientists in the world, his research cited approvingly by the most fervent environmentalists. He contributes research to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel peace prize with Al Gore for sounding the alarm on global warming. (Yes, Caldeira got a Nobel certificate.) If you met Caldeira at a party, you would likely place him in the fervent environmentalist camp himself. He remains thoroughly convinced that human activity is responsible for some global warming and is more pessimistic than Myhrvold about how future climate will affect humankind.
Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight. For starters, as greenhouse gases go it’s not particularly efficient.
“A doubling of carbon dioxide traps less than 2% of the outgoing radiation emitted by the Earth,” he says.
Caldeira mentions a study he undertook that considered the impact of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant life. While plants get their water from the soil, they get their food — carbon dioxide — from the air.
“Plants pay exceedingly dearly for carbon dioxide,” Wood jumps in. “A plant has to raise about a hundred times as much water from the soil as it gets carbon dioxide from the air, on a molecule-lost-per-molecule-gained basis. Most plants, especially during the active part of the growing season, are water-stressed. They bleed very seriously to get their food.”
So an increase in carbon dioxide means plants require less water to grow. Caldeira’s study showed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide while holding steady all other inputs — water, nutrients and so forth — yields a 70% increase in plant growth, an obvious boon to agricultural productivity.
“That’s why most commercial hydroponic greenhouses have supplemental carbon dioxide,” Myhrvold says. “And they typically run at 1,400 parts per million.”
“Twenty thousand years ago,” Caldeira says, “carbon dioxide levels were lower, sea level was lower — and trees were in a near state of asphyxiation for lack of carbon dioxide. There’s nothing special about today’s carbon dioxide level, or today’s sea level, or today’s temperature. What damages us are rapid rates of change. Overall, more carbon dioxide is probably a good thing for the biosphere — it’s just that it’s increasing too fast.”
The gentlemen of IV abound with further examples of global warming memes (ideas that replicate across society) that are all wrong.
Rising sea levels, for instance, “aren’t being driven primarily by glaciers melting”, Wood says, no matter how useful that image may be for environmental activists. The truth is far less sexy: “It is driven mostly by water warming — literally, the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms up.”
Sea levels have been rising, Wood says, for roughly 12,000 years since the end of the last ice age. The oceans are about 425ft higher today, but the bulk of that rise occurred in the first thousand years. In the past century the seas have risen less than 8in.
Rather than the catastrophic 30ft rise some people have predicted over the next century, Wood notes that the most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a rise of about 1½ft by 2100. That’s much less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations.
“So it’s a little bit difficult,” he says, “to understand what the purported crisis is about.”
Caldeira, with something of a pained look on his face, mentions a most surprising environmental scourge: trees. Yes, trees. As much as Caldeira personally lives the green life — his Stanford office is cooled by a misting water chamber rather than air-conditioning — his research has found that planting trees in certain locations exacerbates warming because dark leaves absorb more incoming sunlight than, say, grassy plains, sandy deserts or snow-covered expanses.
Then there is this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature has in fact decreased.
In the darkened conference room, Myhrvold cues up an overhead slide that summarises IV’s views of current proposed global warming solutions. The slide says:
• Too little Too late Too optimistic
Too little means that typical conservation efforts simply won’t make much of a difference. “If you believe there’s a problem worth solving,” Myhrvold says, “then these solutions won’t be enough to solve it. Wind power and most other alternative energy things are cute, but they don’t scale to a sufficient degree. At this point wind farms are a government subsidy scheme, fundamentally.”
What about the beloved Toyota Prius and other low-emission vehicles? “They’re great,” he says, “except that transportation is just not that big a sector.”
Also, coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide, especially for developing countries.
Myhrvold argues that cap-and-trade agreements, whereby coal emissions are limited by quota and cost, can’t help much, in part because it is already . . .
Too late. The half-life of atmospheric carbon dioxide is roughly 100 years and some of it remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years. So even if humankind immediately stopped burning all fossil fuel, the existing carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere for several generations.
And by the way, that zero-carbon society you were dreamily thinking about is way . . .
Too optimistic. “A lot of the things that people say would be a good thing probably aren’t,” Myhrvold says.
As an example he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity and the rest is re-radiated as heat — which contributes to global warming.”
The energy consumed in building thousands of new solar cell factories would also create a huge long-term “warming debt”.
“Eventually we’d have a great carbon-free energy infrastructure but only after making emissions and global warming worse every year until we’re done building out the solar plants, which could take 30 to 50 years,” says Myhrvold.
But what happens if the doomsayers turn out to be right? What if the Earth is becoming dangerously warmer, whether because of our fossil fuel profligacy or some natural climate cycle? We don’t really want to sit back and stew in our own juices, do we?
Myhrvold, Wood and Caldeira have developed a cunning plan.
Even as a kid, Myhrvold was fascinated by geophysical phenomena — volcanoes, sunspots and the like — and their history of affecting the climate. In 1815, the gargantuan eruption of Mt Tambora in Indonesia produced “the year without a summer”, a worldwide disaster that killed crops and prompted widespread starvation and food riots. As Myhrvold puts it: “All really big ass volcanoes have some climate effects.”
The typical volcano sends sulphur dioxide into the troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to the Earth’s surface. This is similar to what a coal-burning power plant does with its sulphur emissions. In both cases the gas stays in the sky only a week or so before falling back to the ground as acid rain.
But a “big ass” volcano shoots sulphur dioxide far higher into the stratosphere. That’s the layer that begins at about seven miles above the Earth’s surface, or six miles at the poles. Above that threshold altitude, the sulphur dioxide absorbs stratospheric water vapour and forms an aerosol cloud that circulates rapidly, blanketing most of the globe.
That’s what happened in 1991 when Mt Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. It put more sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere than any volcano since Krakatoa, more than a century earlier. The atmospheric after-effects were undeniable: a decrease in ozone, more diffuse sunlight and a sustained drop in global temperature.
Myhrvold, then working at Microsoft, followed the scientific literature on the Pinatubo climate effects. One year later he read the 900-page report from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) called Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming. This included a chapter on geoengineering, which the NAS defined as “large-scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry”. In other words: if human activity is warming up the planet, could human ingenuity cool it down?
The NAS report raised the possibility of intentionally spreading sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere. After Pinatubo there was no doubt that stratospheric sulphur dioxide cooled the Earth. But wouldn’t it be nice not to have to rely on volcanoes to do the job?
Unfortunately, the proposals for getting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere were complex, costly and impractical. Loading up artillery shells, for instance, and firing them into the sky.
Or launching a fleet of fighter jets with high-sulphur fuel and letting their exhaust paint the stratosphere.
“It was more science fiction than science,” says Myhrvold. “None of the plans made any economic or practical sense.”
Many scientists, particularly nature-friendly ones such as Caldeira, found the idea abhorrent. Dump chemicals in the atmosphere to reverse the damage caused by . . . dumping chemicals in the atmosphere? It was a crazy, hair-of-the-dog scheme that seemed to violate every tenet of environmentalism.
After hearing Wood give a lecture on stratospheric sulphur dioxide, Caldeira also thought it simply wouldn’t work. However, being a scientist who prefers data to dogma he ran a climate model to test Wood’s claims.
“The intent,” he says, “was to put an end to all the geoengineering talk.”
He failed. As much as Caldeira disliked the concept, his model backed up Wood’s claims that geoengineering could stabilise the climate even in the face of a large spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide — and he wrote a paper saying so. Caldeira, the most reluctant geoengineer imaginable, became a convert — willing, at least, to explore the idea.
Which is how it comes to pass that Caldeira, Wood and Myhrvold are huddled together in the former Harley-Davidson repair shop showing off their scheme to stop global warming.
IT wasn’t just the cooling potential of stratospheric sulphur dioxide that surprised Caldeira. It was how little was needed to do the job: about 34 gallons per minute, not much more than the amount of water that comes out of a heavy-duty garden hose.
Warming is largely a polar phenomenon, which means that high latitude areas are four times more sensitive to climate change than the equator. By IV’s estimations, 100,000 tons of sulphur dioxide per year would effectively reverse warming in the high Arctic and reduce it in much of the northern hemisphere.
That may sound like a lot but, relatively speaking, it is a smidgeon. At least 200m tons of sulphur dioxide already go into the atmosphere each year, roughly 25% from human sources such as motor vehicles and coal-fired power plants, 25% from volcanoes and the rest from other natural sources such as sea spray.
So all that would be needed to produce a globe-changing effect is one-twentieth of 1% of current sulphur emissions, simply relocated to a higher point in the sky. How?
Once you eliminate the moralism and the angst, the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem: how to get 34 gallons per minute of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. The answer: a garden hose to the sky.
For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don’t get much better. Here’s how it would work. At a base station sulphur would be burnt into sulphur dioxide and then liquefied. The hose, stretching from the base station into the stratosphere, would be about 18 miles long but extremely light, its diameter just a couple of inches.
It would be suspended from a series of high-strength helium-filled balloons fastened to it at 100 to 300-yard intervals (a “string of pearls”, IV calls it), ranging in diameter from 25ft near the ground to 100ft near the top.
The liquefied sulphur dioxide would be sent skyward by a series of pumps, fixed to the hose every 100 yards. These, too, would be relatively light, about 45lb each — “smaller than the pumps in my swimming pool”, Myhrvold says.
There are several advantages to using many small pumps rather than one monster pump at the base station: a big ground pump would create more pressure, which would require a far heavier hose; even if a few of the small pumps failed, the mission itself wouldn’t; and using small standardised units would keep costs down.
At the end of the hose, a cluster of nozzles would spritz the stratosphere with a fine mist of colourless liquid sulphur dioxide. Thanks to stratospheric winds that typically reach 100mph, the spritz would wrap around the Earth in roughly 10 days.
Because stratospheric air naturally spirals toward the poles, and because the Arctic regions are more vulnerable to global warming, it makes sense to spray the sulphur aerosol at high latitude — with perhaps one hose in the southern hemisphere and another in the northern.
Myhrvold, in his recent travels, happened upon one potentially perfect site. Along with Gates and Warren Buffett, the American investor, he was taking a whirlwind educational tour of various energy producers — a nuclear plant, a wind farm and so on.
One of their destinations was the Athabasca oil sands in northern Alberta, Canada. Billions of barrels of petroleum can be found there, but it is heavy, mucky crude mixed in with the surface dirt. You scoop up gigantic shovels of earth and then separate the oil from it.
One of the most plentiful waste components is sulphur, which commands such a low price that oil companies simply stockpile it. “There were big yellow mountains of it, like a hundred metres high by a thousand metres wide,” says Myhrvold. “So you could put one little pumping facility up there and with one corner of one of those sulphur mountains you could solve the whole global warming problem for the northern hemisphere.”
It is a fiendishly simple plan and startlingly cheap. IV estimates a “save the poles” project could be set up in just two years at a cost of roughly $20m, with an annual operating cost of about $10m.
If cooling the poles alone proved insufficient, IV has drawn up a “save the planet” version, with five worldwide base stations instead of two and three hoses at each site. This would put about three to five times the amount of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Even so, that would still represent less than 1% of current worldwide sulphur emissions.
IV estimates this plan could be up and running in about three years, with a start-up cost of $150m and annual operating costs of $100m. It could effectively reverse global warming at a total cost of $250m.
Nicholas Stern, the economist who prepared an encyclopedic report on global warming for the British government, suggested we spend 1.5% of global GDP each year — that would be a $1.2 trillion bill today — to attack the problem.
By comparison, IV’s idea is practically free. It would cost $50m less to stop global warming than Gore’s foundation is paying just to increase public awareness about global warming.
Would it work? The scientific evidence says yes. Perhaps the stoutest scientific argument in favour of it came from Paul Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric scientist whose environmentalist bona fides run even deeper than Caldeira’s — he won a Nobel prize for his research on atmospheric ozone depletion.
In 2006 he wrote an essay in the journal Climatic Change lamenting the “grossly unsuccessful” efforts to emit fewer greenhouse gases and acknowledging that an injection of sulphur in the stratosphere “is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects”.
Crutzen’s embrace of geoengineering was considered such a heresy within the climate science community that some of his peers tried to stop the publication of his essay. How could the man reverently known as “Dr Ozone” possibly endorse such a scheme? Wouldn’t the environmental damage outweigh the benefits?
Actually, no. Crutzen concluded that damage to the ozone would be minimal. The sulphur dioxide would eventually settle out in the polar regions but in such relatively small amounts that significant harm was unlikely.
Perhaps the single best objection to the garden hose idea is that it is too simple and too cheap. There is no regulatory framework to prohibit anyone — a government, a private institution, even an individual — from putting sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere. Still, Myhrvold admits that “it would freak people out” if someone unilaterally built the thing.
Of course, this depends on the individual. If it were Gore, he might snag a second Nobel prize.
Myhrvold is not arguing for an immediate deployment of the sulphur shield but, rather, that technologies like it be researched and tested so they are ready to use if the worst climate predictions come true. He is also eager to get geoengineering moving forward because of what he sees as “a real head of steam” that global warming activists have gathered in recent years.
“They are seriously proposing doing a set of things that could have enormous impact — and we think probably negative impact — on human life,” he says. “They want to divert a huge amount of economic value toward immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives, without thinking things through.
“This will have a huge drag on the world economy. There are billions of poor people who will be greatly delayed, if not entirely precluded, from attaining a First World standard of living.”
Certain new ideas, no matter how useful, are invariably seen as repugnant. The hosepipe may simply be too repugnant a scheme ever to be given a chance. Intentional pollution? Futzing with the stratosphere? Putting the planet’s weather in the hands of a few arrogant souls from Seattle?
It is one thing for climate heavyweights such as Crutzen and Caldeira to endorse such a solution. But they are mere scientists. The real heavyweights in this fight are people like Gore.
And what does he think of geoengineering?
“In a word,” Gore says, “I think it’s nuts.”
© Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner 2009 Extracted from Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, to be published by Allen Lane on October 20 at £20. Copies can be ordered for £18, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135

Darfur: UN-African Union peacekeepers shot in attack, two seriously wounded

Unidentified gunmen shot and wounded three peacekeepers, two critically, from the joint African Union-United Nations mission in Darfur (UNAMID) in an attack on Saturday in the war-ravaged region on the western flank of the Sudan.

Greenhouse effects: Wall insulation

Tony Juniper
As the leaves turn gold, red and brown, and summer fades into memory, many of us will put on the heating. It may keep us comfortable, but heating causes about a third of our greenhouse-gas emissions. If your home is not well insulated, much of this heat is lost — which is a waste of money as well as energy.
In an uninsulated home, up to a third of the heat loss can be through the walls, so this is a good place to start. While older homes tend to have solid walls, those built after the mid-1920s are likely to have cavity walls — two layers of brick or blocks with a space between them. If you are not sure what type your home has, try measuring the thickness of the wall at a window or external door. Cavity walls will be at least 26cm thick. Brickwork with all bricks laid “side on” also indicate a cavity.
Building regulations specify that all homes built since about 1990 must have cavity walls insulated, but this doesn’t cover older homes.
In many cases, you can retro-fit insulation, but to establish whether this is possible — and whether additional ventilation is required — you will need a survey.
You cannot do the work yourself, so will need a properly registered installer. The Energy Saving Trust recommends choosing a member of at least one of these groups: the National Insulation Association, the Cavity Insulation Guarantee Agency and the British Board of Agrément. Each has a website with a list of registered installers — click on the links at energysavingtrust.org.uk.
To improve insulation, the cavity in the wall is filled with material such as mineral fibre, polystyrene beads, foam or glass, usually inserted through small holes drilled in the outside wall. This stops heat passing through the wall. Most companies charge about £500, but grants are available to all householders to cover 50%-100% of the cost (for details, visit government-grants.co.uk).
The investment should pay for itself within two or three years, while the bonus of lower heating bills will continue for many years to come — as will the environmental benefit.
If you don’t have cavity walls, don’t despair. There are ways to improve the insulation of solid walls, too, but they are for a future column.
Tony Juniper is an environmental campaigner and former director of Friends of the Earth; tonyjuniper.com