Scared to Death?

As promised, I’ve read the section of North and Booker’s “Scared to Death” which deals with climate change and I’ll offer my thoughts. It’s a racy read – engagingly constructed and heavily biased – but it fails to back any of its contentions (that the IPCC is corrupt, anthropogenic climate change is a myth etc…) with peer reviewed evidence or convincing conjecture. For me, it fails to achieve what it sets out to do – which is to convince the reader that climate change is a scare story concocted by self-interested actors for personal profit (or other forms of gain). At best, it provides a corrective to the hubris of institutions like the IPCC and those who would happily politicize climate science to reinforce their personal goals, but it is a partial corrective – in more ways than one.

The core of North and Booker’s argument is that as the earth has experienced a history of climatic variations, including periods since the end of the last ice age which were hotter than the current warming period, forcing effects caused by greenhouse gases are not the prime mover behind modern day climate change.

As they cite no peer reviewed science which offers a critique of the role which such gases plays in regulating the climate, their argument is both historical and political. In the first place, they suggest that other factors must have influenced the climate to produce such warmer periods, and that such factors remain crucial. In the final part of their section on climate change, they suggest one alternative explanation – the role of sunspots and solar flux in hindering or promoting cloud formation.

In the second place, they list the ways in which the IPCC has alienated scientists and treated data in an unprofessional manner. They quote high profile dissenters from the view that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the major factor, such as Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer and Patrick Michaels. They also quote disgruntled scientists like Paul Reiter, who participated unhappily in the IPCC’s health impacts section, where his expertise (in malaria) was not matched by that of his colleagues (some of whom were experts only in the construction of motorcycle helmets). In this way, North and Booker seek to establish a circumstantial “guilt” (their work is basically a trial of the IPCC and the mythical “consensus” which it supposedly enforces).

But there are some significant problems with their approach. For one thing, there are factual errors. At one point, they claim that temperatures were higher between 7,000 B.C. And 3,000 B.C. Than they are today (the holocene climate optimum). Yet this is misleading. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we now know that “there is no evidence to show that the average annual mid-Holocene temperature was warmer than today’s temperatures.” The northern hemisphere may have experienced warmer summers, but this effect was certainly not global.

Another misleading claim made by North and Booker concerns the Medieval Warm Period which, they argue, saw “generally higher” temperatures than the present period. This isn’t true. All peer reviewed studies converge around the finding that in many areas of the world temperatures between about 1000 and 1450 were comparable to today’s, but that the extremes were local – even if the warming was part of a global process. Some places in the northern hemisphere did warm significantly, but others did not, and the warming was certainly not felt across the world.

All of this then leads into a demolition of the so-called “Hockey Stick” graph, produced by climate scientist Michael Mann and used heavily by the Third IPCC Assessment Report, released in 2001. For North and Booker, Mann’s graph is simply fraudulent, produced by a computer program which was designed to produce the results that its creator desired i.e. a pronounced twentieth century warming following a millenium or more of relative stability.

Yet Mann himself has had much to say about such critics. Writing in his defense, he argues that the “claim that the 20th century on the whole is the warmest period of the past 1000 years” is a misrepresentation of his work. Instead, he writes that “Numerous studies suggest that hemispheric mean warmth for the late 20th century (that is, the past few decades) appears to exceed the warmth of any comparable length period over the past thousand years or longer, taking into account the uncertainties in the estimates.” Mann stands by his work showing an anomalous period of warming from the late twentieth century, which exceeds similar periods shown by historical data, including any within the Medieval Warm Period. Many studies have emerged subsequent to his “hockey stick” work which back it up, with modifications – showing a clear anomaly in recent times which can only be feasibly attributed to anthropogenic warming.

Moreover, Mann charges his critics (McKitrick and McIntyre) of misusing statistical data in seeking to discredit his work. In a powerful rebuttal to his critics, he has accused them of censoring the data, removing troublesome data sets (such as tree ring data from North America) that would suppress medieval warming and little ice age cooling effects. They subsequently came out with graphs showing exaggerated warmth and cooling in both periods, making current warming seem less anomalous.

North and Booker say nothing about Mann’s defense or potential problems with McKitrick and McIntyre’s own methods. For them, the Hockey Stick has simply been refuted and demolished – as have all similar reconstructions of temperatures which show recent times as exhibiting anomalous warming. This, while not necessarily dishonest, is the hallmark of polemic, which is precisely what their chapter on climate change represents.

There is no room for ambiguity. There is no mention, for example, of the work of Wally Broecker, who provides a far more realistic picture of the Medieval Warm Period and subsequent warming periods. Writing in Science, Broecker has argued that both the MWP and current warming can be fitted into a far longer term pattern of “oscillations” which work out over periods of some 1,500 years. For Broecker, these oscillations are caused by changes in the Atlantic’s thermohaline system (caused by the rise and fall of the salt content of seawater). But, crucially, his current concern is how present day anthropogenic forcings are interacting with longer term “natural” cycles, with potentially significant results.

Broecker has, to an extent, been welcomed by those who question the “consensus” surrounding anthropogenic warming – owing perhaps to his embrace of long cycles (which others refute, including Mann). But what they never discuss, is Broecker’s acceptance that anthropogenic forcing is a real causal factor behind present day warming.

North and Brooker like to have it both ways. On the one hand, they claim that an all-powerful consensus has developed which excludes dissident scientists (through withholding grants etc..) while on the other, no consensus has ever really existed, as there have been – and are – many such dissenters. But there aren’t, at least within the community of climate scientists.

North and Brooker make a seemingly convincing case that such a consensus took a long time to form, a process which occurred in parallel to the lionization of the UN’s IPCC as the “gold standard” of climate change research. For example, they quote a Gallup poll from 1991 which found that 49 percent of 118 scientists surveyed rejected the contention that climate change was a pressing threat to human societies.

Yet this is not what the survey actually found. In fact, 61 percent of respondents expressed agreement or strong agreement to the proposition that “there is little doubt among scientists that mean temperature would increase.” 50 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agred that most scientists would see the likely effects of climate change as “substantial.”
Moreover, the survey also asked respondents to name those scientists working in the field that they most respected. Richard Lindzen, quoted approvingly by North and Booker, came well below James Hansen and Stephen Schneider – derided as apostles of anthropogenic theory in their book. What it shows is that, in 1991, there was disagreement amongst scientists familiar with climate research. But the preponderance of those questioned did lean towards accepting the IPCC’s early findings.

Tellingly, the Gallup poll also commented on an earlier assessment by the Global Environmental Change Report Survey. The GECR found strongest agreement amongst scientists to the contention that increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases would “increase the atmosphere’s heat-trapping  capacity and warm the climate.” 95.8 percent agreed.

North and Brooker similarly distort the findings of a 1996 survey by the UN’s Climate Change Bulletin. In their version, only 10 percent of the scientists canvassed strongly agreed that global warming was underway, which was a true but extremely misleading point. 62 percent of those questioned placed themselves in the first three categories of a 1-6 spectrum from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Only 5 percent “strongly disagreed” while, by 2003, 32 percent described themselves as “strongly agreeing.”

As mentioned above, North and Booker have produced a polemic. It is a lively polemic, entertainingly written and narrating its tale adeptly. But it is a misleading account of climate change. North and Booker seek to portray “climate sceptics” as heroic outsiders breaching the walls of a fortress of consensus. They therefore exaggerate the level of disagreement before the IPCC process took off, and don’t even bother to provide evidence of how climate scientists think now. They quote no peer reviewed scientific papers, relying on the work of economists to criticise Mann’s “Hockey Stick,” for example, and at no point do they supply any evidence which challenges the theory of greenhouse gas fueled anthropogenic climate change.

Due North

I’m man enough to admit a mistake or two, and apologies are due to Richard North for some misleading comments in my last post, as you will see from the comments.

But if you don’t flick down, suffice to say that he is not Richard D. North, and has left UKIP and his research position, which was with a grouping in the European parliament.

I haven’t read his work but, as a favour to him -  I will be reviewing it as soon as I can in this space. But not buying it.

The thrust of the last piece remains valid. The argument is that North and others continue to misrepresent the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sniping away at its flaws and failing to recognise its strengths and achievements and the basic robustness of the science which underlies it.

The IPCC Circus Continues

The moronic smearing of the IPCC continues apace with this weekend’s unveiling of the imaginatively named “Africagate scandal” by the Times’ intrepid (and journalistically bankrupt) Jonathan Leake, who masquerades as the chip-liner’s “environment editor.”

According to Leake, he has discovered another criminal error in the UN’s work on Climate Change – namely “a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50%” which appeared in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment of the potential impacts that climate change could have on the world’s societies and ecosystems.

Leake takes to task a passage in the African Impacts section, which describes how Climate Change could cause “deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-20 period, and reductions in crop growth period” noting that the source, (Abouma 2003) comes from “a 2003 policy paper written for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank” which “was not peer-reviewed.”

The claim was echoed by the IPCC’s synthesis report, which was presented to policy makers across the world – who may or may not have read it. It may also be wrong, and coming from an unreviewed paper based on the submissions of civil servants in autocratic regimes like Morocco and Tunisia this may be the case. But the point that this one piece of information somehow invalidates the African Impacts section simply does not stand up.

The section on agriculture is littered with longer term projections from peer reviewed papers, and while not projecting imminent drought and disaster for African farmers (though things are bad enough in East Africa already and have been for years) they do make terrifying reading.

On the other hand, the agricultural impacts section is remarkably even handed (a point utterly ignored by Leake who seeks to portray it as merely corrupt and scientifically inept). At one stage it notes that the growing season in Ethiopia’s highlands may be lengthened while dryland and irrigated farms could benefit, and small goat farmers could find a comparative advantage compared to their larger rivals.

The section’s claims are hedged sensibly. Note the language in the section uncovered by Leake, which speaks about “additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change.” There is no bombast here, just a warning.

For truly misleading and pompous writing you have to head for the anti-IPCC commentariat. Please do check out the odious James Delingpole’s emanations for a fine example, if you can stomach the smugness at work. As he gushed on Sunday, “This was the day when so many wheels came off Al Gore’s AGW gravy train and flew off in so many different directions, it was all but impossible to keep track of them.”

And Richard North, writing on his own blog, crowed that, by now,”Even the mildest critics of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri might now be moved to observe that they have eschewed uncertainty, to project the most pessimistic scenario imaginable – with no scientific support and a great deal of embellishment.”

This is utter nonsense. As I noted above, uncertainty is very clearly present in the IPCC impacts section. North should retract that comment and apologize to those who compiled it. His criticisms of Rajendra Pachauri, the excessively applauded head of the IPCC process may be more reasonable. After all, according to North, Pachauri did publicly revise the “could” to a “would” with regard to large African crop declines by 2020. And Pachauri wields the same sort of smugness that Delingpole and North possess, wandering the globe promoting himself rather more than the fight against climate change, around which he has made a prosperous career.

But Pachauri is not the IPCC. Read the African impacts section and then ask yourself whether it really exaggerates the threat of climate change, and whether the “Africagate” factoid is critical to its argument, which tends to support the view that by 2100, African agriculture will be adversely affected by climate change, leaving millions more people struggling to eat. Opportunities for mitigation and adaptation are suggested – as if Leake, North or Delingpole would care. They only have time for African agriculture when it fits in with their personal crusade – to head off attempts to shift human societies in sustainable directions.

But there is more to such people than meets the eye. While they weigh in against partisan think tanks and campaigning organizations like the WWF, they are more often than not neck deep in such manipulative institutions, which seek to mould public opinion in pursuit of personal profit.

North, for example, makes his fortune out of rubbishing any stories which might alarm members of society as the author of “Scared to Death” subtitled “From BSE to Global Warming – Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth.” North’s work is essentially just a screed directed at scientists, the media and politicians who all make capital of some form out of propagating and exaggerating panics.

North is [edit: was] also the chief researcher for the UK Independence Party, [edit: for the UKIP affiliated EDD grouping in the European Parliament] which has a solid record of making political capital out of climate change denial, and will no doubt be doing so come the UK elections this year.

He has also been exposed as trying desperately to whitewash the reputation of fellow climate sceptic Christopher Booker, whose Wikipedia page he “sanitised” last year, removing a list of inaccuracies in his friend’s work from the online encyclopedia. [it seems that he did do this]

He has also engaged in a baffling e-mail exchange with one of his own critics. After writing a letter to the Evening Standard criticising North, Andy Rowell of Spinwatch was contacted by the “contrarian” writer. North then claimed not to be a climate change denier adding that “nor have I ever disputed the value of much of the work corralled by IPCC.” Well, he has now, and he had then. As Rowell blogged:

The slight problem with this one is that North’s website does attack the IPCC, which he says “has produced what looks like a consensus that global warming is real, big, bad, mankind’s fault and merits concerted action. But the “consensus” is not as strong as you might suppose ….There is also a good deal of argument about whether the IPCC process is as open-minded as it ought to be. In particular, there is a widespread belief that the summaries of the IPCC process don’t capture the uncertainties of the bulk of the work.”

[edit: this refers to Richard D. North, not Richard North. Hope that is cleared up]

How can you believe a man with so many vested interests and such a tenuous grasp on his own publicly stated positions? Isn’t it a tiny bit hypocritical of him to be attacking the WWF for its own partisan campaigning? [sic]

The Genius of the Spider

This is beautiful:

Fog-catching nets which provide precious water in rain-starved parts of the world may be poised for a high-tech upgrade thanks to the spider.

In a paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, Chinese scientists report on why spider’s silk is not only famous for strength but also terrific for collecting water from the air, sparing the creature a hunt for a drink.

The secret, revealed by scanning electron microscope, lies in the silk’s tail-shaped protein fibres which change structure in response to water.

Once in contact with humidity, tiny sections of the thread scrunge up into knots, whose randomly arranged nano-fibres provide a roughly, knobbly texture.

In between these “spindle knots” are joints, which are smooth and slender, comprising neatly aligned fibres.

Small droplets then condense randomly on the spider’s web. Once they reach a critical size, the droplets slide along the slick-surfaced joints thanks to surface tension.

The droplets then reach the spindle knots, where they coalesce with larger drops.

As a result, the joints are freed up to begin a new cycle of condensation and water collection.

…The breakthrough will help the development of man-made fibres that will help water collection and could also be used in manufacturing processes to snare airborne droplets, they believe.

Fog collection entails stretching out nets or canvas on poles and using the mesh to catch moisture from the breeze. The runoff is collected in a pipe or a trough on the ground.

The technique, pioneered in the coastal Andes, is being encouraged in poor, dry parts of the world, such as Nepal. It is also being promoted by charities as a useful tool to offset water stress caused by global warming.

Belo Monte Damned

As the BBC reports, the Brazilian government has approved a massive hydroelectric project in the Amazon rainforest. The Belo Monte dam complex will divert and exploit the river Xingu, a tributary of the Amazon, constituting the third largest project of its kind in the world. Constant objections and protests from indigenous people who live on the river and environmentalists around the world (including, notoriously, Sting), have resulted in delays to Belo Monte, and some environmental stipulations on the project executors, but it will now be going ahead.

Instead of the 5,000 km initially thought to have been affected, the government now claims that “a fraction” of that will be flooded or damaged, yet indigenous campaigners refute this. Although Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc says that “Not one Indian on indigenous land will be displaced,” representatives of the Kayapo people accuse his government of dishonesty – with many living on land not designated as “indigenous” remaining vulnerable to eviction.

Moreover, there have been signs that the environmental assessments which approved the project were not of the highest standard. According to the NGO Amazon Watch, the Brazilian environment agency, IBAMA, had “stalled on issuing the environmental license for almost 3 months due to concerns about the huge impact zone of the project and the number of migrants that would move to Altamira in search of work.”

In November, two senior IBAMA officials resigned in protest against the scheme, claiming that they had been subjected to “political pressure” to approve its license, while the NGO Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre has recently been circulating a letter signed by six IBAMA analysts, “voicing concern that Belo Monte’s impacts to the Xingu river basin and riverine and indigenous communities had not been adequately studied.”

This dissent has prompted Federal Attorneys to launch suites against the government and, as Amazon Watch maintains “further legal challenges to the project are likely.”

The feelings and judgements of those within IBAMA have been supplemented by independent analysts. Electrical engineer Francisco Hernandez, for example, brought together 40 specialists to audit the Belo Monte project. Damningly, they found it to be “a project of doubtful engineering viability, an extremely complex project which would depend on the construction not only of one dam, but rather a series of large dams and dykes that would interrupt the flow of water courses over an enormous area, requiring excavation of earth and rocks on the scale of that carried out for digging the Panama Canal.”

Partly because of the ecological, social and technical uncertainties surrounding the project, funding looks like a problem for the Brazilian government. As Roland Widmer, Coordinator of the Eco-Finance Program of Amigos da Terra – Amazonia Brasileira put it to Amazom Watch, “Considering the enormous financial, legal and reputational risks, it would be imprudent to invest in this project.” And with legal challenges in prospect, the fight will continue to protect (or despoil) the Xingu.

This fight has been a long one for the Kayapo, having resisted for more than twenty years. Last year, indigenous campaigners organized a week-long protest against Belo Monte – and have attracted (for good or ill) the support of both Sting and the Bishop of Xingu, Dom Erwin Krautler, who has been warning that approval of the dam could lead to an indigenous uprising. Their anger is understandable. Some 100km of fishing grounds are at stake, as well as homes and the far harder to define (and value) spiritual connection that the Kayapo hold to the river.

Resistance to the project has been stoked by what the Kayapo see as efforts to rubber stamp approval for Belo Monte above their heads. The government initially sought to use the National Indian Federation as a means of providing friendly “participation” in assessments of the project, but the plan rapidly became unstuck as NIF officials became embroiled in bribery allegations. Anger grew at the marginalization of local peoples, resulting in at least one government official being attacked by Kayapo protesters.

As Chief Tabata told NPR in 2008, “We have to hurt them. They weren’t respecting the Indians. … That’s our fight. I want the people, the white people to understand why the Indians are so angry.” Clearly many of the Xingu’s indigenous inhabitants do not favour the dam project.

Palm and Profit – the UK’s Deforestation Plan for Indonesia

I used to be rainforest

Isn’t it great that the British government is trying to do something about deforestation in Indonesia? This week, it has announced a £50 million plan to “educate the Indonesian public on how the forests in the country are used and to help them adapt to climate change.”

Education plans like this are almost always a less effective alternative to cracking down on companies which import from offending countries (and certainly less effective than the governments in those countries actually taking on vested interests and enforcing their environmental and corruption laws). But it the UK government was just sending out some leaflets, then the plan would at least be relatively harmless.

Unfortunately it’s not. As the BBC continues, “It will also give palm oil companies money to help them offset extra costs from growing on less fertile, degraded land.”

As much of this land has been degraded and made less fertile by…palm oil companies, this amounts to a subsidy for cutting down rainforests and poorly managing the results. In any case, weak incentives to behave well are pathetic alternatives to effective regulation and, even better, to reducing the UK’s dependence on palm oil imported from rainforest regions.

This all makes UK Development minister Douglas Alexander seem a tiny bit hypocritical when he spoke at Davos last week, claiming that “through this partnership the UK will stand side by side with the Indonesians to help manage their forests, protecting this vital resource for future generations.”

I suggest not. The problem is that deforestation in Indonesia is driven largely by a hugely corrupt political system. As the Jakarta Post reports this week, the Indonesian government fails to collect some $2 billion in taxes owed by logging companies each year, while half of all logging is estimated to be illegal. The government regularly gives permits to firms operating in protected areas, while when illegal loggers are charged, their cases never make it to court.

As for palm oil growers, the head of NGO Sawit Watch told the paper that “The forest to plantation conversion rate reaches 400,000 hectares per year” while “Most of the companies have not secured a forest conversion permit, but were given a license to operate on a lend-lease basis by the local authorities” resulting in huge areas of plantations being considered “forests” while the trees are long gone.

Moreover, deforestation is part of a military-state, one that the UK government is happy to prop up. As Bloomberg reports, “Members of Indonesia’s military coordinate, invest in and supervise the illegal logging business on the island of Borneo” in conjunction with multi-national businessmen.

One means of tackling deforestation and carbon emissions resulting from it, would be to promote rural development – locally focused agriculture, tourism, small scale industry, education and healthcare policies. But another development reported this week will make little headway towards such a goal.

As AFP reports, Indonesia’s government is hoping to set up a “Green Investment Fund” with the help of foreign governments, including the UK. “Projects eligible for the funds would be things like new geothermal or hydro power stations, bio-waste technologies and water distribution projects” – meaning that small scale energy projects and sustainable agriculture would seem to be marginalized.

Such large scale projects fit into the tradition of “development” which has privileged larger infrastructure ventures. Driven by the interests of corporations, lenders like the World Bank loaned billions to poorer nations in order to build what turned out to be largely useless projects. While Indonesian government adviser Edward Gustely claims that returns from the GIF will be measured in greenhouse gas reductions, such pecuniary interests will be paramount, as ever.

Green business is becoming good business – and the UK government is well aware of this – hence its subsidies for palm oil producers and support for the GIF.

ENDCIV.Com

Lookee here.. courtesy of the Stimulator: Endciv.com

More Journalistic Savagery from the Times

Tent city, Petionville

The Times has been very keen to show Haiti in its best light over the past few weeks. It’s best light for an audience of racist Victorian imperialists, that is. The paper has constantly featured lurid details and printed rumours as if they were facts – giving images of savagery and chaos where the overwhelming majority of the evidence we have suggests a remarkably orderly and civilized response to utter misery.

Today is a great example, with one of the paper’s internet hacks uncritically quoting verbatim from Haiti’s Chief of Police (sic), who tells of how “With the blackout that’s befallen the Haitian capital, bandits are taking advantage to harass and rape women and young girls under the tents.”

Escaped criminals are running “wild” apparently, using this golden opportunity to get back to rapine and pillage. The paper even then prints a totally unsubstantiated account of a “rape” by someone who did not see it – all she saw was a pair of panties on the ground.

Meanwhile, the UN has been ramping up its own PR machine to distract from the abject aid effort, claiming that gangsters will use the earthquake as an opportunity to traffic children out of the country.

This may be so, and doubtless there are rapes occurring, but this is certainly not the main narrative. The major crime occurring in Haiti is the sluggish and totally uncoordinated response to massive human need. Aid is arriving at a snail’s pace. Tent cities have sprung up, but there is a huge shortfall of tents that are strong enough to withstand Haiti’s rainy season. Water born diseases lurk ready to strike, taking far more children than gangsters ever could, while medical staff fear epidemics of measles and tetanus. Around half of Haitian children have not been vaccinated against either. Meanwhile, malaria cases are rising, and all forms of medicine are running short including anaesthetics used in amputations.

American troops and aid agencies refuse to roll out as much aid as they could, citing security concerns. As Scott Lewis of the Eagles Wing Foundation told AFP, “Our approach is to flood the area (with aid), get it all out there” but “(US forces) told me, you’re crazy, you’ll get someone killed. But we haven’t reported any injuries. I’ve been frustrated.”

Soldiers recognise this, even if the bureaucracy doesn’t. As Army Captain John Hartsock has found, “At first, we came here with weapons, just like any military mission. But once we got down here we realized there was very little threat.”

This attitude has compounded the obvious problems arising from a massive earthquake such as blocked roads, a damaged port, ruined hospitals and administrative collapse. But it is plain wrong – morally and factually – to explain the faltering aid effort away as somehow inevitable.

——————–

Some businesses have recovered remarkably fast from the devastation. Big Star Market in Petionville, for example, has refilled its shelves with breakfast cereals, toiletries and champagne:

Big Star Market, January 26

Life is getting “back to normal” for the rich, it would seem. According to journalist Sheldon Alberts, outside Big Star, “two private security guards stand sentry with shotguns to keep looters away” while the store has received special assistance from Haiti’s police.

If you have money, then aid is at hand. As Alexander Panetta of the Canadian Press reports from Port au Prince, “As for hygiene, there are portable toilets installed by the public square. But they reek so badly some people won’t go near them. Some people go right in the street. Missiona considers herself lucky because she’s using a friend’s house to shower and do her business.”

Yet, “There are perfectly good toilets right across the street – at the Kinam hotel. In fact, visitors there have a choice of bathrooms: there’s the one by the stone fountain decorating the lobby, the one by the pool in the back courtyard, and those in the rooms….Visitors here are served beef, chicken, pork, and fish. And if they’re not drinking water, it’s because there’s always plenty of wine and beer on tap.”

Mercy Mean

The IMF and the World Bank have been warmly applauded for their willingness to drop Haiti’s debts, but their generosity is in reality extremely shallow.

The World Bank has opted to waive interest payments for five years on the $38 million it has lent to Haiti, while the IMF has approved a $102 million loan upon which interest will be due from 2012.

So ruined Haiti, having lost perhaps 60 percent of its GDP, and with some suggesting that it will take decades to recover, if it does, will have to start paying the angels of mercy in 2 years. Reuters reports that 2012 will see the first interest payments, but the Hindu says there will be a five-and-a-half year grace period.

Either way, for a so-called “Marshall Plan” this is woefully insufficent and penny pinching. Don’t be fooled by earlier write-offs. Although the IMF and World Bank wrote off some $1.2 billion in Haitian debt last year, and the Inter-American Development Bank are considering forgiving a further $441 million, the game remains the same.  The Haitian government has no surplus to divert to interest payments at this time. In five years, perhaps they will, and the IMF will get its pound of flesh – courtesy of rebuilding budgets – schools, hospitals, housing.

It will be interesting to see how the Dodd-Lugar Bill, which has been introduced this week into Congress, will fare. According to its proposers, the Bill would seek to set up a reconstruction fund for Haiti based on grants and not loans – a major improvement. But how this will emerge from Capitol Hill is far from clear.

And the nature of the reconstruction fund is important. The Bill suggests that it be focused on large scale infrastructure – “electric grids, roads, water, sanitation facilities” – which is fine. But Haitians need support to build urban and rural communities on a local level – supporting small scale energy, agriculture, education and social institutions. Large-scale projects can, moreover, fall prey to venal contractors. It is no coincidence that such projects are favoured in the Bill. That’s where Bechtel’s expertise lies, not in micro-hydro or agroecology.

———–

In other news, good news, Venezuela has cancelled its debt to Haiti, relieving the nation of a $295 million burden. Additionally, Caracas has promised a $100 million “special humanitarian fund” which will focus on health and education. So, despite some odd utterances recently concerning the origins of the quake, Hugo Chavez has responded to it more effectively than Washington (or almost any other government).

——–

According to the New York Times and Reuters, aid efforts are being hindered by “mobs.” Apparently, “Several people fell and risked being trampled as a crowd rushed the grounds of the ruined Ministry of Culture” and UN forces have had to fire warning shots elsewhere.

This is echoes other articles which have warned of mob violence and looting. But it’s almost the reverse of reality. Struggling for copy, the Reuters stringer involved has come up with a non-story, slyly puffing up its significance by writing that “Despite these incidents, not all handouts have been chaotic.”

Actually, chaos is rare. The rule seems to be orderly devastation. U.S. troops in Cite Soleil are telling reporters of their surprise at how peaceful their task is, and how friendly the people are despite their suffering.

It’s depressing that Haitians are still written off as “mobs” just as they were “looters” last week.

More Gauze, Less Guns

Kim Ives of Haiti Analysis has been in the town of Leogane, near the epicentre of Haiti’s earthquake and delivers a powerful indictment of the aid effort.

After describing how a helicopter landed at Leogane before immediately taking off and dropping a single bag of brown bread rolls, Ives allows local people to speak for themselves:

“This is a complete outrage,” said Alex Estimé, a young man who had spent the last week organizing his neighborhood to dig out bodies from the rubble of the town where an estimated 80% of the buildings have been destroyed. “This is pure humiliation. An earthquake is a misfortune which could befall any country. Would they treat other people like this? No. It is like they are throwing bones to dogs. We don’t want their stinking bread.”

…”This type of aid distribution is totally unacceptable,” said Max Mathurin, the former head of the Provisional Electoral Council that carried out the 2006 elections. Born and raised in Léogane, he was one of those meeting with the mayor.

“Over the past week, I petitioned repeatedly for a backhoe that could have helped excavate people from under rubble and saved lives,” he lamented. “I couldn’t even get something as simple as that from our government or the UN. That was the injury. Now this helicopter is the insult.”

Local people say that aid has been denied them based on vague security concerns. Presumably that accounts for the failure of the helicopter (which has been related to a Mormon charity) to stay. But these concerns are mythical:

“I don’t know what security they need to establish,” responded Roland St. Fort, 32, another one of the town’s neighborhood leaders. “There have been no riots here. The people have been very disciplined. They set up their own security around their outdoor camps.”

Ives suggests that Cuban medical teams offer a counterpoint to the UN and U.S. that could be learned from:

…many of the 500 Cuban doctors working in Haiti have fanned out throughout Port-au-Prince, particularly in the massive refugee camp that now covers the Champ de Mars, the downtown square. There they have set up small clinics, identified by a Cuban flag, to tend to the earthquake’s many victims. According to Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health, who is presently administering the HUEH, some 40,000 to 50,000 people living in the square benefit greatly from this aid. The Cuban doctors carry out their work, without having to be guarded by helmeted men with guns. “The Cuban doctors are an intense resource,” he said.

Clearly, the U.S. response to the  earthquake has been hopelessly militaristic. The Obama administration has focused far too much on security concerns and far too little on the three major issues for Haitians: food, medicine and housing.

The thinking has been that these concerns are best dealt with after security has been established. But the problem with that is that a) security by and large did not need establishing and b) adding more guns into the mix raises the potential for resistance and violence.

Hilary Clinton does not seem to agree with me, or the many voices who have criticized the U.S. strategy. Indeed, instead of responding rationally to such critics, she “resents” their carping about U.S. aid saying “We’re scrambling as quick as we could to do everything we needed in the past two weeks.”