Category: The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com

В городе Волноваха в подконтрольной российским военным части Донецкой области Украины были убиты девять человек, среди них двое детей. Убийство мог совершить российский военнослужащийhttps://t.co/sVYOA8Q7Sb

— Радио Свобода (@SvobodaRadio) October 29, 2023

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis Saturday night that “this is our second independence war,” as troops battled on the ground inside the Gaza Strip in what he and other members of his war cabinet described as the war’s “second phase.”

It was unclear how many tanks and soldiers had entered Gaza or when more would come, but the Israeli military reissued its warning to Gaza residents to evacuate the northern part of the coastal enclave, and reported that two soldiers had been wounded in the ground battle.

“The war inside Gaza will be long and difficult — and we are ready for it,” Netanyahu said in a televised address. “This is our second independence war. We will fight to protect our country. We will fight on land, in the sea and in the air. We will destroy the enemy above ground and underground.”

Meanwhile in New York, thousands of pro-Palestinian activists marched across the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday and rallied in front of the Brooklyn Museum, chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Let Gaza live!”

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry on Sunday reported a death toll of 7,700 from Israel’s retaliatory strikes since  the Oct. 7 terror attack in which Islamist militants killed more than 1,400 Israelis and kidnapped about 220. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which supports the 80% of Gaza residents classified as Palestinian refugees, described an increasingly desperate humanitarian crisis in which its storehouses had been ransacked of foodstuffs.

“The situation in Gaza is growing more desperate by the hour,” U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Sunday during a visit to Nepal. “I regret that instead of a critically needed humanitarian pause, supported by the international community, Israel has intensified its military operations.”

The Times of Israel reported Sunday that Israel had reopened the second of three water pipelines to Gaza, allowing about 28.5 million liters a day to flow into the enclave. That is more than half the flow of 49 million liters a day before the war.

An Israeli spokesman said the pipelines typically provide about 9 % of Gaza’s water. Humanitarian aid groups have said the water crisis stems largely from the shortage of fuel to run desalination plants; Israel has not allowed fuel into Gaza for fear it will be abused by Hamas. The New York Times reported Friday that Hamas has stockpiled food and fuel as well as weapons in its massive network of underground tunnels.

Israel also continued to battle threats on its northern border, striking targets in Lebanon the Israel Defense Forces said belonged to the Shiite militia Hezbollah, which has fired a small but steady number of missiles at Israel throughout the three-week war.  Foreign journalists were invited to tour the north on Monday.

Netanyahu, taking questions from reporters for the first time since the war began, acknowledged the gaps in military intelligence that allowed for the unprecedented assault by Hamas three weeks ago.

“After the war, everyone will need to give answers to hard questions, including me,” he said Saturday night. “There was a horrible failure, and it will be fully checked. I promise you, no stone will be left unturned.”

But by Sunday morning, Netanyahu appeared to be trying to escape culpability. “At no stage” was the prime minister  “warned of war intentions on the part of Hamas,” read a post on his X account, according to The New York Times.“On the contrary, the assessment of the entire security echelon, including the head of military intelligence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred and was interested in an arrangement.” The post was later deleted.

The post ‘This is our second independence war,’ Netanyahu declares as Israeli troops battle inside Gaza appeared first on The Forward.

William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics. Nordhaus’s work literally could affect the lives of billions of people. This is because his quantification of the immediate costs of climate action — as balanced against the long-term economic harms of not acting — is the basis of key proposals to mitigate carbon emissions. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of nations and a sizable portion of humanity depends on whether his projections are correct.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to act now to reduce emissions.

Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.

His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

In a journal article published last year, Stiglitz and co-authors Nicholas Stern and Charlotte Taylor, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.” They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment.”

Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”

In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Farmers harvest barley and wheat in northwest Syria on May 31, 2023, crops that are being threatened by drought and climate fluctuations.
Photo: Rami Alsayed/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Among most scientists, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything anywhere when the globe hits even 2 C warming. Climate researchers Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper, defined 1.5 C warming as “dangerous” and 3 C or greater as “catastrophic,” while above 5 C was “beyond catastrophic,” with consequences that include “existential threats.” The late Will Steffen, a pioneering Earth systems thinker, warned alongside many of his colleagues that 2 C was a critical marker. At 2 C warming, we could “activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth system to even higher temperatures.” Such “tipping cascades” could lead quickly to “conditions that would be inhospitable to current human societies,” a scenario known as hothouse Earth.

But the path to hothouse Earth will be long and tortured. When I interviewed him in 2021, Steffen, who died last January at age 75, was concerned about “near-term collapse” of the global food system. Drought and heat have already reduced global cereal production by as much as 10 percent in recent years, according to Steffen. “Food shocks are likely to get much worse,” he wrote in a 2019 piece co-authored with Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. “The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5 C of global heating. … Such shocks pose grave threats — rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation, and death.” 

In a 2022 report titled “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios,” 11 leading Earth systems and climate scientists, Steffen among them, concluded there is “ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic … at even modest levels of warming.” According to the report:

Climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. … It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.

What these scientists are describing is global civilizational collapse, possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged reader of this article. 

According to the “Climate Endgame” report, the current trajectory of carbon emissions puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 C and 3.9 C by 2100. This is a horrific prospect. Earth systems analysts tell us that habitable and cultivable land in a 3 C to 4 C warming regime would be so reduced and ecosystem services so battered that the deaths of billions of people could occur in the next eight decades or less.

Terrible numbers get thrown around. But scientists mean what they say. Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that “something like 10 percent of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4 C.” He notes, with a modicum of hopefulness, that we “will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 C.”

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.” Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80 million people added every year.

By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote. “It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.”

In an email to The Intercept, Nordhaus characterized his colleagues’ critiques as “a distorted and inaccurate description of the work and my views. I have long supported carbon pricing and climate-focused [research and development], which are key to slowing climate change. The proposals in my writings have pointed to targets that are FAR more ambitious than current policies.” He declined to elaborate on any distortions or inaccuracies.

To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists — the folks we call mainstream or neoclassical economists — have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth. The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the “market.”

Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled “Economics.” The book is considered “the standard-bearer” of “modern economics principles.” You’ll find in its pages a circular flow diagram that shows “households” and “firms” exchanging money and goods. This is called the market. Households are the owners of land, labor, and capital, which they sell to firms for the manufacture of goods. Households then buy the goods, enriching firms, which allows the firms to buy more land, labor, and capital, enriching households. The quantity in the flow diagram, in ideal circumstances, is ever expanding: The profits of firms grow and so does the income of households.

A simple, imperturbable closed system that’s also ludicrous, fantastical, a fairy tale. In the circular flow diagram of standard economics, nothing enters from the outside to keep it flowing, and nothing exits as a result of the flow. There are no resource inputs from the environment: no oil, coal, or natural gas, no minerals and metals, no water, soil, or food. There are no outputs into the ecosphere: no garbage, no pollution, no greenhouse gasses. That’s because in the circular flow diagram, there is no ecosphere, no environment. The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

“I taught that foolish little diagram to undergraduates at Louisiana State University for 30 years,” the late Herman Daly, one of the 20th century’s great dissenters from standard economics, told me in an interview before his death at age 84 last year. “I thought it was just great. I was well beyond a Ph.D. before it came crashing in on my head that this is a very bad paradigm.”

In the 1970s, working at the University of Maryland, Daly pioneered the field of ecological economics, which models the biophysical reality that delimits all economies. “The human economy,” wrote Daly, “is a fully contained wholly dependent growing subsystem of the non-growing ecosphere” — a commonsense observation that amounted to heresy in mainstream economics. Daly emphasized that the economy depends on nonrenewable resources that are always subject to depletion and a functioning biosphere whose limits need to be respected. His most important contribution to the literature of this renegade economics was his famous (in some circles, infamous) “steady state” model that accounts for biophysical limits to growth. Daly paid the price of heterodoxy. His fellow economists declared him an apostate.

E.F. Schumacher arrived at similar conclusions about mainstream economics in his 1973 book “Small Is Beautiful,” which became a bestseller. “It is inherent in the methodology of economics to ignore man’s dependence on the natural world,” Schumacher wrote, the emphasis his. Economics, said Schumacher, only touches the “surface of society.” It has no capacity to probe the depths of the systemic interactions between civilization and the planet. Faced with the “pressing problems of the times” — the negative environmental effects of growth — economics acts “as a most effective barrier against the understanding of these problems, owing to its addiction to purely quantitative analysis and its timorous refusal to look into the real nature of things.”

Purely quantitative analysis is the amphetamine of the mainstream economist. The steady dosing keeps his pencil sharp and his eyes blind. It has not gone unnoticed that graduate schools produce a kind of ingenious hollowness in economists who race to the finish on the schools’ assembly line. As early as 1991, a report from a commission on “graduate education in economics” warned that the university system in the United States was churning out “too many idiot savants,” economists “skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues” — unable, that is, to look into the real nature of things.

Forest fires spread due to the dry season and high temperatures in Karanganyar, Central Java, Indonesia, Oct. 6, 2023.
Photo: Devi Rahman/AFP via Getty Images

By what mathemagical sorcery has Nordhaus, celebrated member of the Ivy League elite, arrived at projections that are so out of line with those of climate scientists?

The answer is in something called DICE, the mother of integrated assessment models for climate costing. It stands for dynamic integrated climate-economy. Nordhaus formulated DICE for the first time in 1992 and updated it most recently last year.

In DICE, the effect of a warmed climate is measured solely as a percentage loss (or gain) in GDP. Growth of GDP is assumed to be “exogenously determined,” in the language of economics theory, meaning it will persist at a set rate over time regardless of climate shocks. Earth systems scientists will tell you that to assume exogenously determined growth is the height of hubristic arrogance. By contrast, Nordhaus assures us in his DICE model that growth continues like a cruising Cadillac on the California coast with an occasional pothole. But the reality is rainstorms, mudslides, earthquakes, and other drivers on the road.

This blithe presumption of constant growth in a climate-damaged future is the first of Nordhaus’s errors, as Stern and Stiglitz point out. “Nordhaus’s model doesn’t fully take into account the fact that if we don’t do more to avert climate change, climate change will affect growth rates,” they told me in an email. “We will have to spend more and more repairing damage, leaving us less and less to spend on growth-enhancing investments.” And, they add, some outcomes arising from weak climate action could profoundly alter what is possible in terms of economic activity. Extreme heat, submergence, desertification, hurricanes, and so on: Such weather events and broad climatic shifts could render large areas of the world low productivity, unproductive, or uninhabitable.

The second of Nordhaus’s errors is the use of reductionist mathematical formulas. He employs something called a quadratic to calculate the relationship between rising temperatures and economic outcomes. Among the properties of a quadratic is that it permits no discontinuities; there are no points at which the relationship implied by the function breaks down. But smooth functions chart smooth progressions, and climate change will be anything but smooth. Such calculations do not account for extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, displacement and migration, international and local conflict, mass morbidity and mortality, biodiversity crash, state fragility, or food, fuel, and water shortages. There’s no measurement of amplifying feedbacks and tipping points such as Arctic sea ice loss, shutdown of vital ocean currents, collapse of the Amazon, and the like.

The third of Nordhaus’s errors is related to similarly simplistic formulas. Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as fundamentally related to the temperature of that place. So, if in 2023 it’s a certain temperature in London, and the GDP in London is such-and-such, it’s reasonable to assume that when latitudes north of London rise in temperature in the future, GDP will rise to be the same as London’s today. Make of this what you will — it’s foolishness on a grand scale, and yet it’s central to the Nordhaus model.

The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate. Nordhaus’s list of the indoor activities free of any effects from climate disruption include manufacturing, mining, transportation, communication, finance, insurance, real estate, trade, private sector services, and government services. Nordhaus appears to be conflating weather with climate. The one can make trouble for outdoor dining plans on your yacht. The other sinks the yacht. 

Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.

This crude mess of a model is what won him the Nobel. “It shows how little quality control goes into selecting a winner in economics that he was even nominated for the prize,” Steve Keen, a research fellow at University College London and self-described renegade economist, told me. Keen has authored numerous books that question the orthodoxy of mainstream economics. He was an early critic of the integrated assessment models at the IPCC that owe their optimistic sheen to Nordhaus’s methodology. His caustic 2021 essay, “The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change,” delved into the problems of Nordhausian models.

“When it comes to climate, the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

“Any investigative journalist who overcame a fear of equations and simply read Nordhaus’s texts would have known that his work was nonsense,” Keen told me. “Assuming that 87 percent of the economy would be ‘negligibly affected by climate change’ because it takes place in ‘carefully controlled environments’?”

“When it comes to climate,” Keen said, “the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

And it’s not just Nordhaus. Climate economists have followed dutifully in his footsteps and come up with cost models that appear to have no relationship with known laws of physics, the dynamics of climate, or the complexities of Earth systems.

A 2016 study by economists David Anthoff of University of California, Berkeley; Francisco Estrada of the Institute for Environmental Studies in Amsterdam; and Richard Tol of the University of Sussex offers one of the more egregious examples of Nordhausian nonsense. (Tol is one of Nordhaus’s protégés, and Nordhaus is listed as a reviewer of the paper.) The three academics boldly assert that shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — a pivotally important Earth system that loops warm equatorial water toward the Arctic and cold water back south — could have beneficial effects on the European economy.

Over the last several thousand years, the AMOC, also known as the thermohaline circulation, has functioned to keep Europe relatively warm in winter because of the warm water it draws northward from the equator. The slowing and eventual shutdown of this system could plunge Europe and broad parts of the Northern Hemisphere into extreme cold. Such a shutdown is a growing likelihood as glacial melt pours into the North Atlantic and alters the delicate balance of salt water and fresh water that drives the looping current. 

For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3 percent of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3 percent for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level.

Under these extreme conditions, what would happen to shipping lanes, coastal cities and ports, and trans-Atlantic traffic of all kinds? For the climate simpletons Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, the question doesn’t come up. “It will be a helluva lot stormier on the North Atlantic, especially for Europeans,” Hansen told me in an email. His study team concluded that shutdown of AMOC “is in the cards this century, possibly by mid-century, with continued high emissions.”

It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4 percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus projected.

Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people.

“The claim that these changes would have effectively zero impact upon the human economy is extraordinary,” wrote Keen. The reality is that if all eight Earth system tipping points were reached, humanity would be in terrible trouble.

An aerial view of a polar bear, one of the species most affected by climate change, walking on partially melting glaciers in Svalbard and Jan Mayen on July 15, 2023.
Photo: Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

An uncharitable view of the work of climate economists in the Nordhaus school is that they offer a kind of sociopathy as policy prescription. Nordhaus estimates that as economic activity heads poleward with warming, the massive reduction in GDP in the tropics will be offset by optimal adaptation in the Global North. “Massive reduction in GDP,” of course, is not explicitly understood by Nordhaus as food system collapse across the equator, followed by social collapse, mass death, wars, and biblical exoduses that produce cascading nonlinear effects drawing the world into a nexus of unknowns.

Nothing to worry about, assures Nordhaus: The violent extinction of low-GDP nations will hardly affect the outlook for economic growth because things will improve in the cold Global North. This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

Do governments, policymakers, and the public have any clue that the message from climate economist elites is unhinged? So far, we have followed along in the belief that all is well. One of the better indicators of this lemming-like fealty to a narrative of delusory optimism is in the financial sector.

Keen authored a report for investors this year in which he noted that pension funds have swallowed whole the Nordhausian projections of our sunny future as the climate system collapses. “Following the advice of investment consultants, pension funds have informed their members that global warming of 2-4.3 C will have only a minimal impact upon their portfolios,” Keen wrote. “This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for.” Keen does not expect things to end well for investors.

When I asked him what needed to be done to alter policy at the IPCC, Keen replied, “We need everyone to be as angry as I am.” Negligence by economists like Nordhaus, he said, “will end up killing billions of people.”

Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the Anthropocene. Global governments, he charges, are “criminals” for ushering in the Plutocene in pursuit of short-term political and economic gain. I first reached out to him during the black summer of bushfires that raged across Australia in 2020. Glikson’s mood was foul then, and it has not gotten better since.

“The governing classes have given up on the survival of numerous species and future generations,” he told me, “and their inaction constitutes the ultimate crime against life on Earth.” Part of the reason for inaction is the false cheer that Nordhaus has spread with his math-genius, climate-idiot models.

The post When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics appeared first on The Intercept.

“I wanted to scream [but] he took my mouth and he threatened me with death,” said the mother of four, who was abandoned by her husband after she became disabled in a motorcycle accident several years ago.

Now, she says, she lives in fear and hesitates to let her children leave her side.

Sexual violence by armed men against displaced women is increasing rapidly in eastern Congo as yearslong conflicts continue. The trend underscores the disproportionate consequences for women and girls in the region’s perpetual state of war. The Associated Press is not identifying survivors who spoke to journalists in the Bulengo displacement camp.

In Bulengo and other displacement sites nearby, an average of 70 sexual assault victims each day visit clinics run by Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF.

Conflict has simmered in eastern Congo for nearly three decades. The United Nations estimates that more than 130 armed groups are active in the country’s northeast, vying for land or resources while some have formed to protect their communities. Sexual violence has long been used as a weapon of war by armed fighters in the region.

More than 4 million people were displaced within Congo because of conflict in 2022, the most in Africa and second in the world only to Ukraine, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. Of nearly 100,000 people who arrived at displacement sites near the eastern city of Goma in July, nearly 60% were women and girls, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Doctors Without Borders treated 1,500 female victims of sexual violence in just three displacement camps outside Goma in July, more than double the number in May, the organization said in a September 18 report. 

Survivors and aid workers say displacement rips people from their livelihoods and leaves women and girls vulnerable to assault.

Like many other displaced single mothers, the 42-year-old mother of four is struggling to feed her family and unsure when she might return home.

With the help of her two sons and two daughters, she had cultivated her fields of cassava, potatoes and beans. But in February, armed rebels and Congolese security forces clashed close to her home in the northeastern village of Karenga.

“We were forced to flee, leaving behind all our belongings,” she said. Limping, she walked an entire day to bring her family to one of more than 100 sites where displaced people have gathered around Goma.

One May evening, after three months of struggling to feed her family in a camp with tens of thousands of other displaced people, she sent her children to find food. They hadn’t eaten all day, she said. That’s when a stranger found her alone and raped her.

After the attack, she confided in a friend who directed her to a clinic run by MSF. The charity group along with United Nations agencies and local organizations help provide medical services, psychological treatment, latrines and other measures to improve conditions for survivors of sexual violence.

But their role is limited. Deliveries of food and other basic needs to the camp are infrequent, said Rebecca Kihiu, MSF’s regional sexual violence activity manager.

The camp’s conditions leave women vulnerable to abuse. Shelters are little more than plastic sheets, with no way of securing them from intruders, Kihiu said. Armed men lurk outside the camp, where women and girls are forced to venture to find firewood and other necessities.

“They know that they will go and find these assaults outside the camp. But they have no option,” Kihiu said.

Already scarred by fleeing their homes, survivors of sexual assault in camps like Bulengo live with the experience long afterward. “It’s a trauma that will stay for a lifetime,” said Esmeralda Alabre, coordinator for UNFPA gender-based violence programming in northeast Congo.

A mother of eight in the same displacement camp received some medical help after she was raped. But she is still afraid, especially at night. She now arranges her children around her when they sleep, hoping their presence will deter a future aggressor.

Kihiu says some groups of women band together on trips outside the camp for added security, but this tactic falters if they need to split up to collect resources more efficiently.

For hundreds of thousands of other displaced women in northeast Congo, escalating armed conflict stands in the way of a return to normal life. The two women interviewed by the AP said they think each day about how they can return to farming in their village.

And each night they fear for their safety.

“Let the government do everything to end this war so that we can give up this life of misery,” the mother of four said. 

Despite a greyish brown smog settling, some 30,000 marathoners set off at 7:30 a.m. (2330 GMT) from Tiananmen Square on the route through four districts of the Chinese capital over 42.195 km (26.2 miles).

Beijing was the second most-polluted major city in the world on Sunday, according to Swiss air-quality technology firm IQAir.

In the Haidian district on Beijing’s outskirts, the sky looked dreary, but hikers and visitors showed up at the Fragrant Hills Park where many go to enjoy autumn foliage, according to a Reuters witness.

China’s national forecaster advised the public to wear masks, warning on Sunday morning that air quality was reaching moderate or severe pollution.

Smog and fog will blanket parts of China for the next few days, reducing visibility and affecting travel in northeastern, northern, central and some eastern provinces, the National Meteorological Center said on Sunday.

Beijing’s observatory cautioned in the evening that visibility in most areas of the city will drop to less than 1 km (0.62 mile) overnight.

The smoggy weather is expected to gradually weaken and dissipate from Friday, but not before heavy fog forecast to cover parts of Jiangsu, Anhui and Sichuan provinces over the next three days could reduce visibility to less than 200 meters (650 feet), the forecaster said.

Steel production hubs in Tangshan, Handan and other cities in the northern province of Hebei launched emergency responses on Friday after heavy air pollution forecasts. The notices did not indicate when the controls would be lifted.

The smog adds unusually warm October weather, due to significantly weaker cold air currents from the north as the polar vortex that sends cold air southward was situated further north recently, experts said.

Beijing’s high on Sunday was 19 C (66 F), according to the national weather bureau.

Parts of China, including in the north and northeast, have been experiencing temperatures 2 to 4 degrees Celsius (4-7 Fahrenheit) higher than normal the past 10 days.

“At present, a total of 237 national meteorological stations have broken historically highest temperatures in late October, which is still a relatively rare situation,” meteorological bureau’s chief forecaster Fang Chong was quoted by state media as saying.

Weak cold air currents were forecast to last the rest of the month before beginning to cool in early November.

While the smog was expected to clear up in less than a week, the backdrop of hazy weather resembled that of Beijing’s annual race almost a decade ago. In 2014 then-Premier Li Keqiang, who died on Friday, declared “war” on pollution and many marathoners donned masks for protection.

Drawing on new research and analysis, including the latest intelligence from local law enforcement, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime believes the region’s casinos and online gambling sites now handle tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars in returns a year from illegal gambling, drug trafficking, cyberscams and other organized crime, the UNODC officials say.

The same digital tools helping to make that growth possible, they added, are making the money trail harder for authorities to track and interdict.

Sharing some of their findings with VOA, the officials pointed to an underground banking system of “industrial scale,” consolidating mostly in the lower Mekong River countries — Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.

What the findings show “is really a paradigm shift in how organized crime networks active in the Mekong have been using technology not just to expand their activities and revenue streams, but also to create a banking system to move these massive amounts of money around undetected,” Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC deputy representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said.

The UNODC says the region’s gambling industry got a big boost when China started cracking down on illegal gambling and cross-border money transfers about six years ago. Many gambling operators looking for countries with a lighter touch landed in the Mekong region.

Then came COVID-19, with its strict travel controls, turbocharging the industry’s shift to online gambling and giving the underground banking business a lift as well.

“Casinos have long played a role in money laundering in Southeast Asia, but the surge of online gambling has accelerated this in ways that weren’t expected,” Hofmann said.

“High volumes of large, anonymous transactions, very limited regulation and compliance standards and the transboundary nature of services make the online gambling sector really attractive for people wanting to hide transactions,” he added.

Tools of the trade

Among the sector’s most pernicious features, the UNODC says, is the practice of “offsetting,” where clients deposit money into a gambling operator’s account in one jurisdiction and draw an equal amount out of a second account in another jurisdiction but with the same operator’s help. While meant for gambling, authorities across the region say the service is being used more and more to move and launder dirty money. 

Another major and growing concern is “white-labeling,” where all the sophisticated software and services needed to run an online gambling site can be bought from a provider and set up in a matter of weeks, much like a franchise. The UNODC says this helps criminals with little to no gaming or technical knowledge launch their own online casinos to mask their money moves.

Also fueling much of the problem is the rise of hard-to-trace cryptocurrencies, said Amanda Gore, a forensic accountant who heads the Centre for Global Advancement, which studies financial crime in Asia and elsewhere.

“If you put money into a casino and then you cash out in a different format, say for example you cash in with a bank card and then you cash out with … a cryptocurrency, how do you verify that it’s the same person? You could be paying someone as part of a drug deal, for example,” Gore told VOA.

Rules for cashing in and out of a casino or gambling site vary by country, she added, but “if you are able to use different payment methods, then it can pose pretty significant issues from a money laundering perspective.”

Authorities have no comprehensive estimates of how much dirty money is flowing through Southeast Asia’s underground banking system but the UNODC says several high-profile cases in recent years suggest it stretches easily into the tens of billions of dollars per year.

In January, for example, a Macau court convicted Alvin Chau of running an illegal gambling empire that handled over $105 billion in bets since 2013. Months earlier, a court in mainland China convicted 36 others connected to the operation; the charges included making at least $160 million in illegal cross-border payments through VIP rooms and online gambling sites run from casinos in Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

In July, Thailand arrested Kuo Che-min and last month extradited him to Taiwan, where he was wanted for allegedly running a major online gambling and underground banking network based out of a casino in Cambodia. Thai authorities said he may have laundered over half a billion dollars through the operation.

Police in Taiwan suspect Kuo of having worked with Lin Pin-Wen, an alleged member of one of the island’s main triads, Heavenly Way, which has been linked to a number of other drug trafficking cases. Lin was arrested in Taiwan in November on the same set of charges as Kuo.

Gore said high-profile cases like these were most likely “only the tip of the iceberg” and agreed with the UNODC that the problem was getting worse.

Through the backdoor

Beyond the Mekong, the Philippines has also emerged as a major node of the region’s underground banking system.

In 2016, Manila started licensing Philippine offshore gambling operators, or POGOs, to target overseas gamblers in hopes of generating local jobs and revenue. Reports of their suspected misuse filed with the government by local companies soon rose, and law enforcement authorities linked many of them to drug trafficking and money laundering, according to a 2022 report co-authored by Gore. Another report this year by the government’s own Anti-Money Laundering Council shows reports of misuse skyrocketing again between 2021 and 2022.

“It has gotten worse,” conceded Michelle Sabino, spokeswoman for the Philippine National Police Anti-Cybercrime Group, ascribing much of the blame to POGOs.

“This is the tool, this is the gateway for people, for syndicates to be able to money launder,” she told VOA. “They hide behind the legitimate POGO operations … but under that there are different companies who are doing the illegal activities.”

Increasingly aware of the system’s flaws, the Philippines started reining in POGO licensing at the start of the pandemic, which Gore said drove some operators to relocate to Cambodia, just as China’s crackdown a few years prior drove many to Southeast Asia. Gore and the UNODC say a second crackdown by the Philippines this year is now driving them mainly to Laos and Myanmar.

“That’s why comprehensive regional responses are so important — individual countries’ efforts just bring the issue back through the back door,” Hofmann said.

The UNODC is helping coordinate a response. It held a workshop on fighting underground banking through the gambling industry with law enforcement agencies from Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand last month and is planning more.

Gore said many of the countries in the region need to focus on creating or improving their laws on gambling, and seriously enforcing the ones they may already have.

Sabino said she would welcome more collaboration, as the fight still feels frustratingly fragmented.

“If they’re able to get all these countries united together in one pursuit for us to be able to apprehend cybercriminals then that will be fantastic,” she said. “That will be the day, because right now each and every country has to deal with their own problems with regards to cybersecurity and cybercriminals on their own.” 

 Michael Novakhov’s favorite articles 

Can Russia Ever Learn To Live Without Its Imperial Ambitions?

posted at 11:54:57 UTC via worldcrunch.com

-Analysis-

WARSAW — For Moscow to finally let go of its imperial ambitions, it must lose the war it has been waging in Ukraine. As the history of the last few hundred years shows, this is the only way Russia will change.

The idealogue at the head of Putinist Russia, Vladislav Surkov, has made his vision of an ideal Russia very clear. In his view, Russia is a country that “having stopped falling, has begun to rebuild itself and returned to the natural and only possible state of a great, growing and land-collecting community of nations.”

Surkov says that Russia makes “no promise” of peace. “The immodest role given to our country by universal history does not allow us to leave the stage or remain silent in the crowd,” he declared.

This feeling of Russia having a historical destiny, and an imperative to expand its territory is not new. It goes back as far as the 15th century, after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks when the ruler of Moscow considered himself the successor of the Byzantine and Roman Empires, and the only defender of the true Christian faith, untainted by what they believed to be Latinism and sterile rationalism. Even the title of tsar adopted by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century was a reference to the Roman title of Caesar.

Pavel Miliukov, the 20th-century historian and political activist, wrote 100 years ago about the tsars’ ambitions. According to him, if you asked about their program of action, “They would probably not be able to develop a program other than the old, traditional one, which has become an instinct: to seek and collect even more.”

Almost 200 years later, Peter I solemnly assumed the title of Emperor of All Russia. Russia was officially becoming an empire, and, thus, the main function of the empire was constant territorial expansion.

Jan Kucharzewski, the historian and former Prime Minister of Poland, likewise acknowledged Russian imperialism. “Russia, in its wars of conquest, has used (the same) traditional methods for centuries,” he wrote. “When seizing lands, it claimed that it was regaining them, even when it came to the Amur Land, and that it was liberating the people of these lands either from the yoke of a foreign nation or from the yoke of political and social oppression,” he added, arguably predicting the Russian narrative of “liberating” or “de-nazifying” Ukraine.

For Kucharzewski, these imperial conquests were always justified “on the basis of some alleged old titles and demagogy, national and social, applied to the country against which the fight is being waged in order to weaken it internally,” which he also referred to as “political means used to justify and support military action.”

The accuracy of this assessment is backed up by Russia’s past, as well as by the government’s current choices. When Soviet commander Semyon Budyonny’s horse army approached Lviv and Zamość during the Soviet-Polish war in 1920, it was supposedly fighting, as Russian writer Isaac Babel wrote, not against Polish workers or peasants, but was “attacking the nobility.”

According to the Russian narrative, Putin’s shameful attack on Ukraine is aimed not at subjugating Ukrainians, but at “denazification” , that is, freeing them from the oppressive and anti-national regime of President Zelensky.

The expanding borders of the Russian Empire were drawn in the mid-19th century by the Russian poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev:

Seven inner seas, seven rivers

From the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to Cathay

From the Volga to the edges of the Euphrates, Ganges, and the Danube

It is said that when Vladimir Putin asked a young boy where Russia ends, and was told “at the Bering Strait near Alaska”, that he smiled and said: “No, Russia doesn’t end.” This is very similar to a common joke in Poland, which reads, “With whom does Russia share a border?” “With whoever it wants to.”

Russians have almost always been aware of comparisons made between them and the West, especially when it comes to the standard of living and the degree of economic development. In their own view, the lack of freedom was to be compensated by the sense of the country’s greatness and strength and the importance of the historical mission it supposedly had to fulfill.

As Mikhail Lermontov wrote: “Let me be a slave, but a slave of the tsar of the world,” and the 19th-century historian Sergei Soloviev claimed that for an autocratic state the goal is not prosperity, but “the glory of the citizens, the state and the ruler,” and that “national pride arouses in the nation governed by authority, the sense of freedom that drives them to great deeds no less than freedom itself.”

“You will get rich quickly, but don’t interfere with my rule.”

We find all of these ideas lingering today, in the narrative and policy of Putin’s Russia. When the 2008 financial crisis exposed the country’s economic weakness, citizens lost the belief that Russia would soon become one of the largest economic powers, that the ruble would be the world’s reserve currency next to the dollar, and Moscow would be one of the financial centers on a par with New York, Frankfurt and London.

Putin’s informal deal with Russians had been “You will get rich quickly, but don’t interfere with my rule.” But the crash showed that this could soon stop working, and had to be replaced with something else — something well embedded in the Russian tradition: to replace bread with imperial games, and a sense of imperial grandeur. Russia under Putin’s rule was to become great again and, just as the country had defended the world from Nazism, now it was to face American hegemony and the nihilism of the West, threatening the true Christian civilization represented and protected, as always, by Russia.

Since then, Putin himself has crafted a new role. As Dmitry Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center wrote: “At the end of his four-year term, Putin seemed imbued with a sense of history and God’s mandate. Perceived as a pragmatist and outspoken public official, the country manager turned into a missionary. Putin not only appealed to God in his public speeches, but also behaved as someone who was carrying out a work entrusted to him by the Almighty. Later, during the 2014 Ukraine crisis, it allowed Putin to remain calm and confident that God was on his — and Russia’s — side in a new, fierce competition with the United States.”

There are many indications that this new legitimization of Putin’s power has been accepted by many in the country. Putin describes himself as “a leading Russian nationalist.” And a Russian nationalist, as sociologist Irina Glebova wrote, “refers to memories of the power of the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox superpower greatness and satisfies the spontaneous social demand for it,” which results in an increased support for the government.

The return of the imperial idea and the complete rejection of the West does not have to be permanent.

This makes a permanent treaty ending the war with Ukraine, which in Putin’s propaganda is compared to the Great Patriotic War with Hitler’s Germany, virtually impossible. At least as long as imperial and nationalist intoxication persists in Russia.

In spite of its long tradition, this imperialism does not have to last forever. First, it is not entirely clear to what extent the public actually support President Putin and his policies. It is important to remember the political conditions in which surveys are conducted and the degree of refusal to respond.

Secondly, one cannot underestimate the courage and determination of those, many of them, who demonstrated against the war. Today, such demonstrations are not visible, but these people did not disappear, even if many of them fled abroad. The return of the imperial idea and the complete rejection of the West does not have to be permanent.

It is worth recalling what Vladimir Putin himself said relatively recently. He made a clear proposal that only in cooperation with Russia can Europe become a powerful and independent factor in world politics. The well-known Russian political scientist Alexei Arbatov envisioned Russia’s entry into the EU as late as 2007, which he believed would prompt the creation of “the most powerful global center of military, economic and cultural power.”

As for today’s emphasizing of the fundamental and supposedly insurmountable differences between European and Russian civilization, it is worth remembering what Putin himself or Sergey Lavrov said about Russia’s Europeanness: the latter claimed that there is no conflict of values between Russia and the West.

In turn, another significant Russian political scientist and politician, Vladimir Lukin, wrote that “Russia has always been part of the Old World … and will be able to resist the pressure of Asia, America and other civilizational centers of gravity only if it is with Europe.”

The awareness of the failure of Putin’s policy, which led to the loss of chances to win over Ukraine, to the collapse of the myth about the strength and greatness of the Russian armed forces, to the international isolation of Russia and to its increasing dependence on the increasingly stronger and potentially dangerous China, has the potential bring about a redefinition of Russian nationalism.

One thinks of General Aleksandr Lebed, a Russian nationalist and veteran of many battles, who claimed in the 1990s that “the era of empires is over. You can pity her, she was great and proud, but a new era is beginning — the construction of a full-fledged Russian nation state. In the international arena, pragmatic nationalism means that … Russia does not intend to pay a disproportionate price for a return to the imperial chimera”.

So, Russian nationalism may take a less threatening form. Maybe Russia will follow in the footsteps of other countries that have dealt with their imperial past.

Russia will not disappear from the map. The problem is whether it will continue to build its greatness on constant expansion and domination, or on the strength of its culture, economy and prestige resulting from compliance with the rule of national and international law.

For Russia to change, it must lose the war with Ukraine. As the history of the last few hundred years shows, Russia has changed only in such a situation. This was the case after the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, after the First World War and after the Cold War.

The military defeat should become an opportunity for those who think about a different Russia, but are unable to do anything today. These people must be remembered. And remember that whatever Putin says today: Russia, although it will probably remain outside the European Union, will remain part of Europe.

Moscow says high risk of ‘third-party’ entering war in Israel – The Cradle

posted at 11:42:52 UTC via “Will Russia turn to the West?” – Google News

Moscow says high risk of ‘third-party’ entering war in Israel  The Cradle

Can Russia Ever Learn To Live Without Its Imperial Ambitions? – Worldcrunch

posted at 11:42:52 UTC via “Will Russia turn to the West?” – Google News

Can Russia Ever Learn To Live Without Its Imperial Ambitions?  Worldcrunch

NATO has sufficient resources for Israel and Ukraine in a way not to … – London Loves Business

posted at 11:44:15 UTC via “ukraine and nato” – Google News

NATO has sufficient resources for Israel and Ukraine in a way not to …  London Loves Business

Meet the 4 Most Famous (or Infamous) Guns in History

posted at 11:44:18 UTC by Peter Suciu via 19FortyFive

Let the debate begin: What is truly the most famous gun of all time? Thanks in no small part to the proliferation of social media; we currently live in a world where many people have become famous for being famous. This has created a desire to rate the fame of not just individuals but also […]

The post Meet the 4 Most Famous (or Infamous) Guns in History appeared first on 19FortyFive.

Here Comes Joe Biden: Enjoy Your Water Heater—While You Still Can

posted at 11:44:18 UTC by Alex Gage via 19FortyFive

Ever heard the phrase “Give someone an inch and they’ll take a mile”? Americans gave Joe Biden the Oval Office, and now he is taking away their cars, dishwashers, gas stoves, and, most recently, their water heaters. Biden’s Department of Energy on July 21 released new proposed energy-efficiency standards for water heaters. This is the latest round in the […]

The post Here Comes Joe Biden: Enjoy Your Water Heater—While You Still Can appeared first on 19FortyFive.

Nikki Haley’s breakout jolts the 2024 GOP undercard race – POLITICO – POLITICO

posted at 11:44:19 UTC via “Donald Trump and GOP” – Google News

Nikki Haley’s breakout jolts the 2024 GOP undercard race – POLITICO  POLITICO

Alan Dershowitz Weighs In On The Future Of Hamas After It’s Attack On Israel

posted at 11:44:43 UTC by Forbes Breaking News via Forbes Under 30

On “Forbes Newsroom,” attorney Alan Dershowitz discusses Hamas’ future in Gaza.

Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:

https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript

Stay Connected
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com

How the US is Preparing For a Post-Quantum World – Slashdot

posted at 11:45:10 UTC via “Russian New York” – Google News

How the US is Preparing For a Post-Quantum World  Slashdot

Complete Guide to Cyberthreat Intelligence Feeds And Sources – EC-Council

posted at 11:45:29 UTC via “Intelligence” – Google News

Complete Guide to Cyberthreat Intelligence Feeds And Sources  EC-Council

Генсек ООН Гутерриш: Ситуация в Газе ухудшается каждый час

posted at 11:46:30 UTC via Российская Газета

Ситуация в секторе Газа становится хуже каждый час, число жертв среди мирного населения “абсолютно неприемлемо”, заявил Генеральный секретарь ООН Антониу Гутерриш, выступая в воскресенье в Катманду, столице Непала.

Число погибших в секторе Газа возросло до 8005

posted at 11:46:30 UTC via Российская Газета