Today’s links to interesting news and analysis. If you find this useful, please pass it to friends and colleagues.
- He exaggerates the risk of war IMO, but has interesting insights: “Sympathy for the Turkish devil“, Spengler (aka David P Goldman), Asia Times, 29 June 2010
- “Is A City Manager Worth $800,000?“, Los Angeles Times, 15 July 2010 — “Bell isn’t a big town, or a wealthy one. But some of its top officials are paid two or three times as much as their counterparts elsewhere”
- “Double-Dip Days“, Nouriel Roubini, Project Syndicate, 16 July 2010
- “A City Outsources Everything. Sky Doesn’t Fall.“, New York Times, 19 July 2010
- Recommended: “Can The ‘Anbar Miracle’ Be Repeated?“, Michael Brenner (Prof International Affairs, U Pittsburgh), blog of National Journal, 19 July 2010
- Don’t these people realize we’re just sheep? “Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police“, ABC News, 19 July 2010 — Will we docilely accept the new made-up rules?
- No, esp not this Pope (today’s short answers to simple questions): “Benedict’s Crusade – Can the Pope bring God back to Europe?, Nick Spencer, Foreign Policy, 20 July 2010
- UK
- Working to bring America the best government money can buy: “Defense industry PACs hike giving“, The Hill, 21 July 2010
- “The Consumption Gap – They thought Asia would save the world economy. They were wrong.“, Stephen S. Roach, Foreign Policy, 21 July 2010
- Today’s US foreign policy insanity: “State Dept. planning to field a small army in Iraq“, McClatcny Newspapers, 21 July 2010
- “Every soldier a hero? Hardly“, William J. Astore (Lieutenant Colonel, USAF, retired), op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, 22 July 2010 — “Simply joining the armed services does not make you a hero, nor does the act of serving in combat.”
- Recommended: the above LAT op-ed is an excerpt from this TomDispatch article
- “Endgame for the Euro? Without Major Restructuring, The Eurozone is Doomed“, Levy Institute, July 2010
Quote of the day, stating the blindingly obvious
“Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack upon Islam.”
— Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director general of MI5 (source)
Today’s graphic, about those forecasts of global warming
This shows James Hansen’s 1988 three scenarios in black, and actual temperatures (GISTEMP) in red.
The 3 scenarios are from “Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model“, James Hansen et al, Journal of Geophysical Research, 20 August 2008. Gavin A. Schmidt (climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) explains the 3 scenarios at RealClimate:
Scenario B was roughly a linear increase in forcings, and Scenario C was similar to B, but had close to constant forcings from 2000 onwards. Scenario B and C had an ‘El Chichon’ sized volcanic eruption in 1995. Essentially, a high, middle and low estimate were chosen to bracket the set of possibilities. Hansen specifically stated that he thought the middle scenario (B) the “most plausible”. {source}
Steve Goddard explains the significance of these results:
{A}ctual temperature rise has been less than Hansen forecast – even if there was a huge volcanic eruption in the 1990s, and no new CO2 introduced over the past decade! We have fallen more than half a degree below Hansen’s “most plausible” scenario, even though CO2 emissions have risen faster than worst case. {source}
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