Sierra Leonean judge elected head of UN-backed war crimes tribunal

A Sierra Leonean judge has taken over as the new President of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), the United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal set up to deal with the worst acts committed during the long and brutal civil war in the West African nation.

The rise of the EU’s surveillance state

We’ve written an article for theGuardian’s Comment is Free looking at the themes in our latest report on the EU’s surveillance state and the Government’s complicit role in its rise.

Click the link below to have a read:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/nov/02/europe-surveillance-state

Head of UN atomic watchdog urges swift response by Iran to nuclear fuel deal

The outgoing head of the United Nations atomic watchdog today urged Tehran not to delay in responding to the draft agreement on fuel for its civilian nuclear research site, and called for transparency and cooperation to address outstanding issues related to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Iraq: UN agency condemns killing of teenage cameraman

The United Nations agency charged with defending the freedom of the press today deplored the killing of an Iraqi television cameraman who died when a bomb exploded outside his house in the northern city of Kirkuk.

The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up

Many Scientists Say Temperature Drop From Recent Record Highs Is a Blip, While a Few See a Trend; Inexact Climate Models
By JEFFREY BALL
Two years ago, a United Nations scientific panel won the Nobel Peace Prize after concluding that global warming is “unequivocal” and is “very likely” caused by man.
Then came a development unforeseen by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: Data suggested that Earth’s temperature was beginning to drop.
Global climate models did not account for a drop in global temperatures since 2006, but climate scientists believe the lower temperatures are temporary.
That has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels. Scientists who don’t believe in man-made global warming cite the cooling as evidence for their case. Those who do believe in man-made warming dismiss the cooling as a blip triggered by fleeting changes in ocean currents; they predict greenhouse gases will produce rising temperatures again soon.
The reality is more complex. A few years of cooling doesn’t mean that people aren’t heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn’t predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.
“There is a lot of room for improvement” in the models, says Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany and co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again — a long-term trend he attributes to greenhouse-gas emissions. “You need to know what you can believe and can’t believe from the models.”
The renewed discussion of inherent shortcomings in climate models comes on the cusp of potentially big financial commitments. In five weeks, diplomats from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to hash out a new agreement to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions. The science continues to evolve.
The goal of climate models is to project how rising greenhouse-gas emissions will interact with natural forces to affect the global temperature. The models are technological marvels. Using supercomputers, they divide the world into grids of roughly 4,000 cubic miles apiece. The grids are stacked, one on top of the other, up through the atmosphere.
It is complicated stuff. The models consist of dozens of equations written to reflect how liquids and gases move about the planet. Just as a symphony’s sound is affected by the crash of cymbals or the pluck of a violin string, the planet’s future temperature is influenced by powerful ocean currents and tiny specks of sea salt. In between are other players, such as sunlight, clouds and rain.
Added to the equations are such measurements as past temperatures, barometric pressure and sea salinity. Calculations about the influence of sunlight are entered. Then various projections of greenhouse-gas emissions are factored in. The computers run the equations and generate projections of global temperatures.
The models are only as good as the information they are fed. One big uncertainty is ocean temperature. Oceans trap huge amounts of heat, and the process by which they release it over time affects the temperature of the planet. But there isn’t a lot of actual data, because the vastness of the oceans makes gathering temperature data costly and arduous.
The success of the models also depends on the soundness of their assumptions. The effects of clouds, for example, are unclear. Depending on their shape and altitude, clouds can either trap heat, warming the earth, or reflect it, cooling the planet. The way that greenhouse gases affect cloud formation — and how clouds in turn affect temperature — remains a subject of debate. Different models treat these factors differently.
On a graph, the models’ temperature projections ultimately point upward, signifying warming. But along the way, each line has dips — temporary periods of cooling. The timing and depth of the drops differ from model to model.
Most climate scientists have regarded these zigs and zags as noise. Their models are designed to project how greenhouse gases will affect the global thermostat over a century, not what temperatures will be in any year or even in any decade.

“We care about the climate in the 2080s. We don’t care about the climate on Aug. 15, 2084,” says Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.
The models’ focus on century-long trends is in part a function of limited data. Predicting short-term temperatures requires more measurements than projecting long-term trends. But such data have been lacking. “These long-term climate projections are a much easier problem than these shorter-term climate projections,” says Mr. Dessler. “It’s sort of counterintuitive.”
Though often overlooked in the debate about man-made warming, natural factors have contributed to record high temperatures. The year 1998, for example, was widely noted as the hottest year on record, intensifying concerns about global warming and people’s role in it. But one reason that 1998 set a record is that a strong shift in ocean temperature known as El Niño occurred that year. “1998 was a very hot year because it was an El Niño year,” says Mr. Dessler.
The 2007 U.N. report included in its widely read summary a chart of projected temperatures that lacked visible periods of cooling. That is because it was an average of the lines from many different climate models. As averages do, it looked smooth. And it pointed up, indicating rising temperatures.
Yet as the report was released, the global average temperature was below what it had been in 2005, which along with 1998 was one of the two hottest years on record. Even so, the average temperature in 2006 and 2007 remained among the 10 highest ever recorded.
About a year after the U.N. report’s release, researchers in Germany published a paper in the journal Nature that attributed the cooling to the enigmatic ocean currents.
The paper was based on a model that used new ocean-temperature measurements. It concluded that a shift in ocean currents was counteracting the warming from greenhouse gases. And that is causing the planet, on balance, to cool.
The paper argues that intermittent cooling from natural factors such as ocean currents will prove less significant in the long term than continued warming from greenhouse-gas emissions. But climate scientists acknowledge that those natural variabilities aren’t fully understood. “This is pioneering work,” says Mr. Latif, one of the authors of the authors of the German paper. “I won’t say our forecast will be correct.”
A separate study by researchers in the U.K., published in 2007 in the journal Science, also says the cooling will soon be outweighed by warming from greenhouse gases.
Unsurprisingly, the research hasn’t settled the debate. Scientists who have long questioned man-made global warming cite the temperature drop that began in 2006 as more evidence the models are wrong. “They were predicting warming,” says Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr. Lindzen’s work, regarded as leading the research challenging man-made warming, suggests that natural factors such as clouds generally inhibit, rather than intensify, greenhouse-gas warming. He wrote in a recent article that the study from the U.K. admits that the kind of climate model cited in the U.N.’s IPCC report “did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability, thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC’s iconic attribution” linking greenhouse-gas emissions to climate change. He added that “even when all models agree, they can all be wrong.”
The researchers behind those studies strenuously reject that description. But they disagree among themselves on how long the cooling will last. The British paper says warming will resume as early as this year. The German paper says warming won’t resume for perhaps a decade.
Such disagreements aren’t unusual in a nascent science. “I don’t think anybody is surprised that we’re going to get one model that suggests it’s going to cool and another that suggests it’s going to warm,” says Vicky Pope, a scientist at the Hadley Center, the U.K. institute where the research for the British paper was done. “That’s consistent with where we are with the science.”
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com

Climate Change and Malaria in Africa

Limiting carbon emissions won’t do much to stop disease in Zambia.

By BJORN LOMBORG
The challenge of global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December U.N. conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:
When he first got sick, Samson Banda didn’t realize he had malaria. Only after he came down with a serious fever did he end up at a clinic in the Bauleni slum compound in Lusaka, Zambia. The clinic has just a few nurses and staff with basic medical skills. Locals can wait for an entire day to be seen.
Unchecked malaria is serious. Nine out of 10 of the world’s annual one million malaria-caused deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease—transmitted via mosquitoes—can cause low blood sugar, an enlarged spleen and liver, severe headaches, a shortage of oxygen to the brain, and renal failure. It can lead to coma and death. Twenty-seven year-old Samson was ill for six months before he started to recover.
Bauleni is an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes during the rainy season between November and April. The slum lacks any sanitation or sewer supply, so locals dig pit latrines. The waste overflows. Most adults have some long-term infection that tends to recur.
“Our conditions are pathetic—both the health clinics and the sanitation in this area,” Mr. Samson told a Copenhagen Consensus Center researcher.
Ask what he wants to see foreign donors’ money spent on, and he is quick to answer: better health care. When he is asked about global warming, Mr. Samson responds: “I have heard about it, but I don’t even know how it would affect me. If I die from malaria tomorrow, why should I care about global warming?”
In the West, campaigners for carbon regulations point out that global warming will increase the number of malaria victims. This is often used as an argument for drastic, immediate carbon cuts.
Warmer, wetter weather will improve conditions for the malaria parasite. Most estimates suggest that global warming will put 3% more of the Earth’s population at risk of catching malaria by 2100. If we invest in the most efficient, global carbon cuts—designed to keep temperature rises under two degrees Celsius—we would spend a massive $40 trillion a year by 2100. In the best case scenario, we would reduce the at-risk population by only 3%.
In comparison, research commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center shows that spending $3 billion annually on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays, and subsidies for effective new combination therapies could halve the number of those infected with malaria within one decade. For the money it takes to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives. Mr. Samson has not done these calculations, but for him it is simple: “First things first,” he says. Malaria “is here right now and it kills a lot of people every day.”
Malaria is only weakly related to temperature; it is strongly related to poverty. It has risen in sub-Saharan Africa over the past 20 years not because of global warming, but because of failing medical response. The mainstay treatment, chloroquine, is becoming less and less effective. The malaria parasite is becoming resistant, and there is a need for new, effective combination treatments based on artemisinin, which is unfortunately about 10 times more expensive.
Mr. Samson is right to ask what spending money on global warming could do for him and his family. The truthful answer? Very little. For a lot less, we could achieve a lot more.
Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank, and author of “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” (Knopf, 2007).

The unwanted equation: poverty vs climate change

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Monday, 2 November 2009
The proposed Copenhagen climate treaty has plenty of jargon – “mitigation” and “adaptation” are two examples already given. But the key word may yet turn out to be “additionality”.
Additionality means that finance provided to help developing countries deal with climate change is entirely on top of the aid sums they receive from the rich West to help them with their development – with agriculture, poverty relief, health and education. They fear that, without this guarantee, when the rich states have to start providing huge sums of climate finance under the treaty, they will simply divert their aid flows, and that money that once went to schools and hospitals will be switched, for example, to windfarms. But although additionality is hinted at in the EU proposals, it is not guaranteed – which could be a deal-breaker in December.

“Even the poorest countries are aware that if the money is coming from future aid commitments, it’s forcing them to choose between building flood defences and sea walls, and building schools and hospitals,” said Oxfam’s Robert Bailey. “And that’s not a trade-off that’s going to be acceptable.
“Why should they sign a deal that gives with one hand and takes away with another? If there’s no new money, there’ll be no deal,” Mr Bailey said.

Climate change ‘can kill children’

Press Association, Monday November 2 2009
A quarter of a million children could die next year due to the effects of climate change, Save the Children warned.
The charity said the figure could rise to more than 400,000 per year by 2030.
Its report Feeling the Heat, which is launched, claims that climate change is the biggest global health threat to children in the 21st century.
The charity predicts that 175 million children a year - equivalent to almost three times the population of Great Britain - will suffer the consequences of natural disasters like cyclones, droughts and floods by 2030.
It warns that more than 900 million children in the next generation will be affected by water shortages and 160 million more children will be at risk of catching malaria - one of the biggest killers of children under five - as it spreads to new parts of the world.
Save the Children is urging world leaders to put children first during climate change negotiations in Barcelona this week, ahead of the Copenhagen summit in December.
Ultravox star Midge Ure, a Save the Children ambassador, recently returned to Ethiopia 25 years after the 1984 famine which prompted him to create Band Aid with Bob Geldof.
“Climate change is no longer a distant, futuristic scenario, but an immediate threat,” he said.
“We’ve all heard about the East African food crisis but I’ve been in Ethiopia seeing first hand the impact it’s having on children’s lives.
“I’ve seen how vulnerable children are to the effects of climate change.”
Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2009, All Rights Reserved.

Suai massacre accused slips out of East Timor across border

The climate of fear

Unless our leaders take radical action, global warming could usher in the far-right strongmen
Peter Preston
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 November 2009 20.30 GMT
Sometimes, when you file a column like this, you begin with a gentle request to the subeditor. For instance: “Please don’t choose a headline saying ‘Today’s Greens are tomorrow’s fascists’. That’s not what I’m saying. The end of democracy, and maybe the end of the world, will be a lot more complicated than that.”
And, of course, complications come deep-fried, boiled or roasted when you start stirring the global warming pot. If Nick Griffin had got an environmental word in edgeways on Question Time, he’d have talked BNP policy on offshore wind farms, high-speed rail links, fast-breeder nuclear power stations and a Boris island in the Thames estuary, as well as clearing the immigrant decks: he would also, in a manifesto mutter, have acknowledged that “some climate change may be manmade”. Even the far right knows there’s a problem. The question – looming, receding, drifting back and forth between Kyoto and Copenhagen – is whether anyone has the will to do anything about it.
Consider the EU summit last week which didn’t offer Tony Blair a new, rather boring chairman’s job. It didn’t offer much on saving the planet, either. By 2020, apparently, poor countries will need £90bn or so to help them grow in the best green ways, and Europe will have to stump up some of that: but the first, much smaller bill for £6bn-plus drops in January, and nobody wants to sign for that. Poland won’t pay, others from the east say they can’t find the cash. Germany will only go so far.
So the summit’s 27 statesmen stand back and wait for Barack Obama. And, as usual, nothing gets done. Democrats can talk the talk when sacrifices come later. By 2020, none of them will still be in power. But 2010, and another bout of electoral retribution from voters already cheesed off because their Oz holidays suddenly got more expensive? Nobody wants to walk that walk as far as the nearest departure gate. The perceived name of the game is sounding sombre and promising to rescue the earth: but not until the last ballot box is opened.
Naturally you can grow too cynical. I don’t suppose Ed Miliband thinks he’s just going through the motions. I’m sure Obama believes that, yes, he can do something useful. The ritual post-summit briefings where world leaders hail progress and green activists cry too little, too late, have a malign habit of fuelling despair. But it is, indeed, desperately late already to begin wondering openly whether democracy, in its rhetorical aspirations and covert calculations, in its consensual stumblings and murmured frailties, can cope with the upheaval that science tells us is necessary. After all, if our former postie of a home secretary can’t abide scientists getting more stressed over gin and tonic than a reefer, why should he jump to attention when professors everywhere advocate far more radical – and expensive – change?
The BNP, for what little it’s worth, feeds on despair. It takes the multicultural world we live in and promises to make it white and simple again. Forget Europe, forget treaties, obligations, UN charters. The fear is father of the deed. And this is the soil in which autocracies flourish. This is what happens politically when the options run out.
We’re used to the awful prophesies of cities submerged, continents parched, millions left to perish. But we’re not used to thinking through what these things will mean for the systems we live by, the norms we embrace. Take the sum of all fears, when it’s (almost) too late. Take the realisation, at last, that something has to be done. Take the sudden, alarmed perception that bickering politicians have been the problem all these years, not the solution. Then take the greatest care.
See what a relatively few terrorist strikes have wrought by way of corners cut, liberties eroded. Imagine how a savage mix of floods and droughts will devastate old assumptions. Enter a strong man, or a series of strong men, promising extraordinary action. Exit a generation of failed leaders without, it is said, the strength to lead.
If our climate changes, then much else must change with it. If Copenhagen sets a time scale for action, then every second counts. If public fear cries at last for sacrifice rather than temporising, then there will be no time for those we chose to lead us in an environment where debate and delay never ceases. That’s democracy, of course. Our way, our belief. But, put to the test on current performance, it doesn’t sound much like survival – unless the political classes know it’s their survival at stake, too. Memo to subs: How about something on the lines of “a freedom to self-destroy”?