The ice man goeth? We'll see...

More doom and gloom from the global warming brigade. Obviously the Arctic sea ice coverage is less than it (recently) has been, but there is a lot of talk of "tipping points" and feedback loops.

(CTV) And with several weeks left in the melt season, 2008 could still surpass September 2007 for the lowest amount of sea ice since satellite measurements were first taken in 1979.

At last measure on Aug. 26, Arctic sea ice coverage was at 5.26 million square kilometers -- a decline of 2.06 million square kilometres from the beginning of August.

In September of last year, a record low was recorded, with 5.69 million square kilometres of sea ice recorded.

It's not a benchmark that Stroeve is proud of, but she's also not surprised by the chilling picture the numbers provide.

"I guess the main thing people should understand is this is just a continuation of that long term downward trend. I think whether or not we break the record it's just the continuation of what we've been seeing since 2002, where every year we're losing ice and we're not recovering at all," she said.

How a scientist can claim to be "proud" or otherwise about data I fail to understand. Information is information unless you were the one who created the data; built a big mirror in space and melted all the Arctic ice your own self, mayhap.

And again with the drowning polar bears:

Observers from the U.S. federal government doing a whale survey in mid August reported seeing nine polar bears swimming off Alaska's northwest coast.

The bears were between 20 and 100 kilometres from shore. Some were swimming north, apparently trying to reach the polar ice shelf, which was more than 600 kilometres distant.

While polar bears have been known to swim 100 kilometres, but can often become dangerously weak from the ordeal.

Stroeve said she has also heard reports of seals being spotted further north than ever before as they travel further and further north to find ice.

"It's scary. It's such a huge change that's happening very quickly and it makes me very sad because I just can't see how the species that rely on the ice can survive this," Stroeve said.

They survived the last time this happened, and unless we kill them off (more likely) they probably will again. If a bear is capable of swimming 100 km, it suggests that it has evolved in an environment where that can be necessary. The way to be sure is to throw a Grizzly in the ocean and see how it does, but somehow I don't see that happening, so we may never know. I will also point out that these observers have no idea why these bears are doing what they're doing; more speculation. As for seals, there are lots of them where there isn't any year-round ice so they may decline, but the little buggers were pretty good swimmers last I heard, and quite capable of pulling up on a beach.

I am not claiming that this is not happening, just suggesting that the hyperbole is well, hyperbole. Things are cyclic, and because things are trending one way does NOT mean it will necessarily keep going that way. It's been getting colder in the Antarctic at the same time it's melting up north, but the data is scarce and this part goes back and forth. A key thing though is that I've not seen anything creditable showing me that Greenland is melting like the pack ice, so there's still a big chunk of high albedo surface up there year-round.

I'm quite tired of hearing what "could" happen. All sorts of stuff could happen, but the chicken littles who keep warning of catastrophic sea level rise have yet to be even partly vindicated. If the NW Passage opens up that's a geopolitical problem, especially for us, but otherwise a slightly warmer northern hemisphere is the sort of thing that both we and the animaux can adapt to.

Sometimes I hate HTML

The last post seems to me a bit disjointed, but that is partially due to the technical problems I had with editing/posting it, derailing my train of thought.

To attempt to clear things up, for myself at least, this will serve as a bit of an addendum. I'd just edit the other one, but that gave me such a headache yesterday that I don't want to touch it again.

I feel that we've passed the point of diminishing returns in Afghanistan, see here. I have recovered (mostly) from the funk I was in when that was written, but the conclusions remain.
Our mission there(in my mind) is no longer really about fixing Afghanistan, as I don't think that's do-able by us or by anyone else. Afghanistan is the sort of marginal, faultline-of-empires kinds of place that will always be screwed up.

The current upswing in enemy activity in Afghanistan may or may not be sustainable, but it is a big mistake to rush to conclusions based on a few bad weeks or months. If they keep it up over the next year as well then it's time to reconsider.

Getting back to point two, the mission began as and has reverted to containment and damage control. Al-Qaeda took a pasting in Iraq and the survivors and wanna-be martyrs are turning to Afghanistan for another kick at the can. It might be necessary to maintain some sort of military/intelligence presence in Afghanistan long-term just to keep things from spilling outside of the current sphere.

How important that last objective is to us in North America is a matter of some debate, with myself falling on the "too bad for them, let them stew" part of the spectrum most of the time. All things being equal, I'd scale back our forces there and use it as a live-fire training scheme for our Special and highly motivated Regular forces on an all-volunteer basis. Piggyback on the American logistics and combat support system (more than we do now) and provide our best troops to respond to specific missions.

NATO is obsolete, but it remains important to stand by our real friends, and that sure doesn't include the Germans. THAT is the real mission for us now, although no politician would ever say that in public.

I sure as hell don't know how many dead or maimed Canadians Afghanistan is worth ("zero" comes to mind), but foreign policy doesn't have a price list. If you want my honest gut feeling on the matter, it's none of the public's fucking business how many of us get killed if they only use that information to grind whatever policy axes they may have. Ours is an all-volunteer Army, and no-one who feels that the risk is too high/not worth it can be forced to go. The Canadian Army is at war, but the country itself is not.

We'll get out eventually, but on the scale of our involment/comittment, it won't be at a point that is "too late". There is limited potential for disaster there, at least on the scale of the National Interest. Under no probable circumstances can we lose even a significant proprtion of our in-theatre forces. Even if the unthinkable happened and there was a repeat of the retreat from Kabul, 1842-style, Canada's geopolitical position would remain unchanged. The harsh truth is that our Armed Forces are already woefully inadequate to physically defend the country, so even losing 1/3 of our front-line soldiers and equipment would change little if anything in the event it was necessary to try.

I'll leave this on that cheery note. I'm not sure this clears up a whole lot as much as it opens more cans of wigglier worms, but I'm not getting paid for it, so what the hell? There are some other things going on, so I should see what else I can come up with. Not today though.

When the going gets tough, the tough stay put.

As a rule I don’t tend to share Mr. Trudeau’s politics, but I have to say I’ve no fundamental dispute with him here on our net results in Afghanistan, although I do have some problems with his overall view:

MONTREAL - Canada's "aggressive" war in Afghanistan is all about "teaching lessons with weapons" and will leave nothing behind "except the blood we've lost there," the journalist son of late prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said yesterday.
"Our aggressive military activities in Afghanistan are foolish and wrong," said Alexandre (Sacha) Trudeau, 34.
"The Pashtun [people] have extremely different values than ours, values we may not agree with in any case, but it's not our business to try and teach them lessons with weapons," Mr. Trudeau told Canwest News Service. "Because, in fact, they'll be the ones teaching us lessons.
"We're going to have to leave the place or there'll be nothing left of us or of whatever we've done, except the blood we've lost there after we leave. So it's better we leave now."

Politically of course it is a disaster if we leave now, as we’d be letting down the few reliable allies we have. It does seem, and I’m looking at this is objectively as possible, that the situation is in fact deteriorating like a lot of analysts say.

ISAF has lost any tactical initiative that it may have once had, and I don’t see any prospect of that changing with the force levels we have in there presently. If the Americans send in a lot of the drawdown from Iraq, that will stabilize things, but that just means bringing the level of control back to that of the last couple of years. We are reacting to the opposition, and that is a sure sign that things are not going our way.

It will be interesting to see if in the wake of that big ambush the French suffered a few days ago if they step up and join the war with the rest of us. Sarkozy said the right things when he was there:

"The best way of remaining faithful to your comrades is to continue the work, to lift your heads, to be professional," Sarkozy told French troops at a base on the outskirts of Kabul. "I don't have any doubt about that. We have to be here. … We are not here against the Afghans. We are with the Afghans so as not to leave them alone in the face of barbarism."

I haven’t seen our PM fly into Kandahar at any time after we’ve taken a particularly hard knock, so good on Sarkozy for coming out, but (talk - action) = zero.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Afghanistan is a civil war and we have taken sides. Our intentions (once the understandable vengeance was out of the way post 9/11) are good, but ‘Sacha’ makes part of a good point about the values thing. The average villager in Panjwai, etc. is not so far removed from the ideals of the Taliban. This isn’t a warm and fuzzy factoid for domestic consumption, but it’s not a secret, and certainly no mystery to anyone who has spent any significant time ‘outside the wire’. If the locals have the choice of siding with their slightly more brutal cousins who are there for the duration, or the foreigners who rotate in and out and will eventually leave, which side do you think their bread is buttered on?

I simplify that greatly, but the details aren’t terribly important from this distance, as the end result will be the same. The Taliban will kill them ON PURPOSE if they don’t play ball, whereas we might kill them by accident while trying to get the Taliban. Who would you be more afraid of and consequently more likely to listen to in matters of life and death? Of course, with guys like the Taliban, everything is a matter of life and death (for you) and they will torture and kill you for co-operating with the infidels in any way shape or form.

This Taliban “surge” does ping my radar however. The fact that they have started this major offensive looks impressive to the layperson, heats things up for and unfortunately kills more of our people, but I doubt it’s sustainable at that level. The assaulting NATO outposts in particular is quite brazen, but it has to be said, expensive for the opposition. Lobbing a few rockets/mortar bombs, etc. is more their style because those leave a good chance to run away to fight again. A large scale assault on anything with even one soldier left with a radio means a lot of dead baddies.

The exchange ratio on this sort of thing is with few exceptions always heavily in our favour. To take out one Police Sub-Station ( arguably our most exposed posts) means not just killing all the ANP there (lamentably easy, historically) but all the NATO mentors as well, and quickly enough that they can’t call for help. If I had to do it with the resources the Taliban have, I’d want at least 50 guys, and I’d expect to lose most of them even if it went well.

So, tactically, things are pretty difficult this summer. The lull in the winter season may be enough for the OpFor to rebuild from whatever damage they do to themselves while hurting us. We just can’t kill enough of the bad guys quickly enough without taking too many ‘’civilians’’ with them. That is the Arithmetic on this Frontier, and it doesn’t work out in our favour.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

This is where the tactical becomes the strategic. Even our successes at the tactical level can’t change the fact that even a Pyrrhic victory is a real one when all of your dead go to paradise and the infidel is forced by his weak-stomached public opinion to pull out.

History quiz time, Tet, 1968; who won? The Americans and A.R.V.N. DESTROYED the Viet Cong and brutalized the N.V.A. units that tried to exploit the uprising. Looks like an American victory doesn’t it? Without TV it probably would have been as big a strategic triumph as it was a tactical one, but it was perceived by the public as an American defeat because of the upsurge in casualties, the highly-publicized temporary reverses they suffered, etc.

Not directly comparable to our current quagmire in Afghanistan, sure, but sound at all familiar? The Canadian Army is in fact learning the ‘’lessons with weapons’’ from Afghanistan at a moderate price in blood and treasure. The blood is lamentable but, to put it coldly, sustainable, and the treasure is replaceable. I do not think we are ‘’foolish and wrong’’ to use force there, it’s the only thing that has a chance of working, but I really can’t come up with a happy ending for Afghanistan. Refer to my earlier posts for my realpolitik proposals re: the problem of Afghanistan; I stand by them, but they will create new problems, albeit ones that I think we can handle better.

“Leave or there’ll be nothing left of us or what we did” is pretty dramatic, but even I don’t think things are that dire. Ultimately futile? Probably, but life is a struggle that inevitably ends in death, so you could make that argument for pretty much anything we do. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but while we’re walking it we’re trying to help, keeping faith with our friends, and (hopefully) learning a lot. There are usually a lot of reasons for doing/not doing something, and the fact that we won’t achieve our goals is rarely a politically decisive one.

What if THIS homeowner had a loaded gun handy?

Following on the case where a Laval, QC man was acquitted of murder for killing a police officer whom he mistook for a home invader, we have this from Maryland:


Without bothering to alert Berwyn Heights police, sheriff's deputies moved into position. Posing as a deliveryman, a deputy took the package to the family's door. After Mr. Calvo's mother-in-law initially refused to sign for it, the package was finally taken into the home, where it sat, unopened, on the living room floor. Whereupon the deputies, guns drawn, kicked in the door, stormed the house and shot to death the Calvos' two Labrador retrievers, one of them, apparently, as it attempted to flee. The canine threat thus dispatched, the mayor [Mr. Calvo] -- in his briefs -- and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated in close proximity to the bloodied corpses of their dogs.

Within an hour, it seems, the police concluded that something was seriously wrong and that there was at least a strong possibility that the Calvos -- whose home contained not the slightest evidence of involvement in the drug trade -- were unsuspecting victims. The deputies left without making arrests.

For exactly why the (county, not local) police were doing this, read the article (it's short). In brief, it was about a package of marijuiana addressed to Mr. Calvo's wife, hardly the kind of threat to world peace that should accompany this sort of action. The man is the Mayor of his small town, and as a public figure, the cops should have been able to walk up to the door and serve a warrant in a civilized fashion without assuming Mr. Clavo is Scarface or something. And they were Labradors, not fucking Rotweillers or even Alsatians; arguably the least threatening (non-puntable) dogs I know of.

The most alarming thing about this (it's a later development than this article) is that nobody in any authority is doing anything about it as of this writing. The State Attorney General should be kicking some ass, but not a peep.

Some of you will remember Waco from a few years ago, and although it's yet more heavy-handed, trigger-happy US law-enforcement action, at least the Branch Dividians were armed. Still, I haven't seen anything that makes me think they were a threat to anyone else, which brings it in line with the current story.

If these tactical squad guys want so badly to shoot at people, join the US Army and ask to go to Afghanistan. There isn't a lot of this in Canada because neither the public nor (more importantly) the government would stand for it. In fact, in that incident in Laval, the cops didn't shoot even when tactically, at least, they should have.

Time will tell on this one, but I might expect this sort of thing (and more to the point, the lack of legal redress) in China or Russia, not "the land of the free".

Blood in the water

Although I haven’t heard much of it in awhile, (probably `cause I’m not looking) this article seems to put a real dent in the ‘pull out the troops, send in CIDA’ plan. I particularly like that this is written by someone with a vested personal interest in delivering aid to the Afghans.

The place is not safe, full stop. It is marginally (ok, a lot) safer if you’re heavily armed and travelling in armoured vehicles, albeit you are then a really obvious target. If you are in any way obviously a Westerner you are a target, not only from the Taliban but any criminal, etc. groups. The latter types don’t screw with the Army because they’re in it for the money, not to meet Allah in person, but they will certainly take out soft targets, usually for ransom. Painting a big Red Cross, etc. on your stuff just marks you as a soft target.

At that point the Taliban will kill you (although capturing and torturing first aren’t out of the question) and the plain crooks will try to find some way to make money off of you. The only things even slowing any of this down are the security forces; it’s obvious this year that they aren’t stopping it.

So what happens if Jack Layton and his ilk get their way? To this point it’s been: ‘stop the combat operations and focus on reconstruction!’ I have never believed that that would work, but I seem to have a lot more company these days. There is the equivalent to a good-sized (bigger than ours) army in Afghanistan trying to secure the place and it’s just getting worse.

Some will say that this is the symptom of the fighting; if you start talking instead all the nastiness will end. It’ll end alright; under the boot of the Taliban taking the place back to the Stone Age like it did a decade ago. It seems we went in to stop that, and the same bleeding hearts who don’t like us beating on the Islamist idiots are the ones who deplored the state of women (in particular) under the same Taliban.

If things were going our way, more dead Taliban would be an actual advance for us. We can, it seems, keep wasting them and an inexhaustible supply pours over the border from Pakistan and elsewhere; ergo, no net advantage.

Pakistan is trying to take the fight back into the Tribal areas of the NW Frontier, but with limited success. They have gotten kicked (due to plan leaks to the opposition) several times, but if they can find a quiet way to co-ordinate with the Americans, maybe we can kill enough bad guys to make a difference.

Should we stay or should we go? If we stay it will be trouble, and if we leave it will be double (or reverse that, I have no real idea), but the root of the solution involves killing them faster, in larger numbers, without taking a pile of non-combatants with them. Driving around in well marked aid agency vehicles is just a good way to get killed, etc. until we manage to do that. The Taliban know their business, and it’s a simple, nasty one; kill enough people and they’ll be too scared to keep trying to fix the place. The Taliban like it broken, it keeps the people in their place: ignorant and poor.

So leave the troops in and they at least have someone who can fight back, or pull them out and leave all the soft targets completely to their own devices. Yes, Jack and company, that will help all concerned, and we’re seeing the proof of that now. We’ve proved that killing aid workers will do more, at less risk to the bad guys, to undermine our objectives and our will to continue than killing soldiers can.

The key to being effective (as opposed to nice) is doing what works best, and killing defenceless aid workers works brilliantly against western governments and populations. Expect to see more of this.

The Guns of August, or, Back to the USSR

Ok, so the Olympics may still be on (really only begun), but I’m not noticing that as news. What is news, and it’s hard to overstate the disaster potential which remains in it, is Russia’s serious smackdown of Georgia.

As of today, the Russians have claimed to have stopped pursuit operations into Georgia, but they’re not in a hurry to pull back out. I suspect they are looking for any excuse (and they don’t need much of one) to pound the Georgians, specifically the army.

This is a message to the Georgians, all former ‘Soviet Republics’ and to the West as well that Russia is back and it makes the rules in its’ back yard. For a long time the Russians only had economic means to bend satellite countries to its will; those (read: natural gas and oil) remain, but the Red army is back, baby.

This is no surprise to any who have been following things in that part of the world, but a lot of people have these fuzzy memories of the Russians getting shot to hell in Grozny the first time around. The second time (1999-2000) was a far different story, and marked the return of the Russian Army as a serious force.

Georgia has been angling for NATO membership, and we can all be thankful that they weren’t let in. This is nothing against Georgia, but they are in Russia’s sphere, and major wars have started over a lot less than the current goings-on. If they were full members of NATO, we would be obliged to HELP THEM FIGHT THE RUSSIANS. I emphasized that to ensure you were as alarmed by that prospect as you should be...

Culturally and politically we have a lot more in common with Georgia than with Russia, but we can’t help them. If NATO decided to start WWIII over this (II started over Poland, and WWI over Serbia, of all places) Georgia would be flattened before the first NATO troops rolled onto Russian soil, and eastern Europe (e.g. Ukraine, Byelorussia) would revert to the Soviet/Russian glacis that it used to be as the Russians pushed into it to pre-empt them joining us or being used against them.

It gets better. I personally have no use for Kosovo (I think we backed the wrong side), but the Serbs like the Russians and vice-versa. All it would take is for some ‘ultranationalists’ to take over in Belgrade while NATO`s hands are tied with the full might of the Russian armed forces (they have a navy and an air force too!), and Kosovo would be southern Serbia again.

Are our sailors still trained to a high pitch to find and destroy Russian subs? I doubt it. I’m not even seriously considering a nuclear exchange, but let’s remember who we’re talking about here.

Sure, the combined forces of Europe and the US could beat the Russians, but at what cost, and really, to what purpose? If (imperfect example) Mexico decided to take Arizona back, what would the US do? The Yanks would probably stop at the Rio Grande, but they aren’t the Russians. Militarily the Russians did this right, putting the hurt on the opposition and leaving them no sanctuary. It looks ugly on TV but war is hell, even the small, local ones.

It also has to be said that Georgia, allowing for the fact that it was provoked (repeatedly), did start this by attacking in South Ossetia. That was a big mistake, but I imagine this will be the last time Georgia assumes that the Bear is still hibernating.

Hold off on that Hydrogen-powered car...

First off, I've not been very productive here, and I'll be amazed if anyone is still paying attention. That said, I slogged through this paper on Hydrogen as a fuel source, and I think it's required reading for anyone to understand why you won't be pulling up to the pump at the local gas station to fill up your hydrogen powered car.

Your car will run on H2 with little modification; the stuff explodes just fine. The things I didn't know were the energy required to separate it and near impossibility to transport it any significant distance in any economic or useful quantity.

I did see a really good article about some engineer in the US who got grants to convert his house and car to H2. He electrolyses it himself from rainwater using electricity generated by his solar array, and the H2 he doesn't need during the summer is stored in bulk tanks and is topped up by whatever he can generate during the low solar periods and is used to run things until the sun is out enough to make it unnecessary again.

That has potential, but it's a major investment (c. $250K for your house) and not likely to be economical any time soon. Maybe some sort of planned community thing? It will work on a neighbourhood scale and may make sense there before anywhere else, but I'm not in that racket.

I won't summarize it more than that. It's a bit dry but it's only 15 pages, and those of you math-challenged like myself can skim the equations and get the gist from the graphs. We have to come up with some new ways of doing things, and there are some useful suggestions in this paper even if I don't agree with all of their assumptions about global warming.