Science vs. Religion

I love a controversial post title... There are any number of relevant links I could put here, but I was particularly inspired to post by this thread on the Guardian's "Comment is free" blog (I think it's a worthy project, BTW; pretty much all of their comment and analysis gets blogged. Invariably stuff about religion attracts a lot of responses, but the most active posts are probably on sport).

The discussion is sparked by Stephen Unwin's response to a review of Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion." Unwin is essentially defending the position of uncertainty regarding god's existence or otherwise; he sets up a good argument that is mainly between atheists and agnostics with a few believers thrown in.

I've noticed agnostics getting a good kicking recently...

and have found it difficult to defend my position as such. I shall update this post shortly; need to do a little work.

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Science vs. climate change denial

The Royal Society has written to ExxonMobil to ask it to stop funding the climate change denial lobby. The Guardian's report also links a PDF of the original letter, which is worth a look. This comes a day after they published an extract from George Monbiot's book in which he traces the history of companies funding bodies that have the specific aim of discrediting science that could harm their objectives. I think people who do this are sick and wrong, so I'm glad that the Royal Society is stepping in to try to preserve science from those who seek to obfuscate and mislead the public for purely selfish ends.

N.B no more below.

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Take this Rummy!

I know posting other people’s work is both illegal and lazy but they are better writers and better informed. Nonetheless, I promise to write soon.

West must address roots of Islamic struggle
By Harlan Ullman


Published: September 7 2006 20:06 | Last updated: September 7 2006 20:06
His approval ratings are dropping, violence in Iraq is surging and Republican control of Congress after the November elections is in the balance. Consequently, George W. Bush is taking his case for what is now called “winning the struggle between freedom and terror in the Middle East” on the road. In the coming weeks, the president will deliver a series of what he calls “non-political” speeches to persuade the public he is on the right track.
Dissenters and critics are scolded for ignoring Munich in 1938 and accused of abetting a new brand of the old appeasement that brought on the second world war. Mr Bush has adopted the neo-conservative description of the enemy as “Islamist fascists”. One wonders if the enemy views us as Judeo and Christo-fascists? Regardless, the Munich analogy is wrong. Appeasement is not our main problem. More relevant is the summer of 1789 in Paris and the French Revolution.
Today, two powerful revolutions are sweeping the Arab and Muslim worlds. The first pits citizens demanding greater slices of political and economic pies against their autocratic governments. The second is the growing struggle between fundamentalism and modernism in determining Islam’s future. The west is oblivious to these revolutions, to the forces causing them and to consequences that could be as profound as what happened in Paris more than two centuries ago.
Beyond ignoring these revolutions, the Bush administration errs by lumping the “enemy” together into a “single worldwide network of radicals” to be defeated. Worse, we forget what brought Hitler to power in 1933 and seem incapable of embracing a comprehensive strategy that deals with the causes of these dangers.
The war on terror began against an adversary that was Sunni, Salafist and Wahabi. However, the administration has broadened the war to include Hizbollah and Iran – Shia who are of a different ideological and political stripe from Salafist and Wahabi radical Sunnis – and Hamas, the elected Sunni government in Palestine. Sunni Salafist and Shia “terrorists” have different agendas, aims and ideologies. The former would turn the clock back centuries by instituting caliphate-type governments. The Shia, beyond the sectarian violence in Iraq and the Sunni-Iranian divide, see the world largely through Israel’s former occupation of and recent retaliatory strikes in Lebanon, the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what is viewed as America’s one-sided support of Israel. Many Iraqi Shia are inflamed over Israel’s destruction of Lebanon and the influence of Iran and Syria has been strengthened by the conflict in Lebanon. Without this understanding, a one-size-fits-all strategy can never work.
The roots of these revolutions are not conceptually different from the seeds for Hitler and his fascism and for the Soviet Union that were sown after the first world war by the refusal of the allies to rehabilitate the defeated powers. Desperation, humiliation, disenfranchisement and deprivation led to violence and revolution then and now.
A comprehensive strategy must address root causes. If that strategy does not attack the grounds for desperation and humiliation, wrapped in perverse, often suicidal and conflicting interpretations of Islam, this fight can never be won. Without a resolution that leads to recognised and secure Israeli and Palestinian states, terror will not disappear. Without convincing the autocratic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that greater political modernisation is crucial, we cannot win. And without engaging Syria and Iran, more terrorists will materialise than are killed or captured in this fight. This is neither Munich nor 1938.
But until 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue understands this, we will not win the struggle between freedom and terror no matter how many speeches are given.
The writer, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is author of America’s Promise Restored: Preventing Culture, Crusade and Partisanship from Wrecking Our Nation
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

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America's Self-Perception

I've been on holiday and have returned to a desk full of work but thought I would add another piece provided by the Financial Times to prove that I have not fallen off the face of the earth.

As someone who lived in the US for 17 years I find this piece quite accurate on America's self-perception. On a side note, I read more and more comparisons of the US to the USSR, that should be enough to sound the alarm.

America's creed leads to a clash of rhetoric and realityBy Anatol Lieven



Published: September 6 2006 03:00 | Last updated: September 6 2006 03:00

The Bush administration's ideological rhetoric concerning US policy in the Middle East has become separated from the policy itself to an extent almost reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. According to the rhetoric, the US has adopted democratisation as the core of its political strategy and made a clean break with its past strategy of propping up local dictatorships and playing one country and ethno-religious group against another.

In practice - especially since the latest conflict in Lebanon - US strategy relies entirely on the ability of pro-American authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to control the anger of their populations at US and Israeli policies. To help keep these Sunni regimes in line, Washington relies on their fear of an expansion of Iranian and Shia influence. This is precisely the dominant US strategy of the past generation, except for periods when Saddam Hussein's Iraq replaced Iran as the chief regional bogeyman. President George W. Bush's language of democracy is also accompanied by utter contempt for the views of potential voters in the region.

This glaring clash between rhetoric and reality is odd, but much odder is the degree to which it has gone un-remarked by the US political class and even most of the media. Of course, criticisms have been raised on both the left and right. But the Democratic party and the US media have not made nearly as much of this contradiction, and the dangers it embodies, as one might have expected.

One reason why so much of the US goes along unquestioningly with Mr Bush's rhetoric concerns the nature of American nationalism. The belief that it is the US's national right, duty and destiny to spread "democracy" and "freedom" in the world is ingrained in most Americans from early childhood. This belief stems from the faith in the constitution, law and democracy that forms the so-called "American creed", the foundation of America's collective national identity. In the words of the great American historian Richard -Hofstadter: "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one."

This American creed shares with Soviet communism the belief that it is applicable not just to its host nation, but to all mankind. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that the Americans "are unanimous upon the general principles that ought to rule human society"; and this is no less true at the start of the 21st century than it was in the 1830s.

The nationalist myths attendant on the creed include a widespread belief that America is exceptional in its allegiance to democracy and freedom and that America is, therefore, exceptionally good. Because America is exceptionally good, it both deserves to be exceptionally powerful and by nature cannot use its power for evil ends. The creed is therefore also a foundation of belief in America's innate innocence. So, if as has often been said, Mr Bush occupies a kind of ideological bubble, it is a bubble made of steel and he shares it with tens or even hundreds of millions of other Americans.

Of course, much of the strengths of these beliefs about America's mission come from the fact that in the past they have proved true: in Germany and Japan after 1945 and eastern Europe in the 1990s. The creed also makes the US exercise of direct empire less likely, for it enforces at least a surface respect for democracy and self-determination.

But the core problem for American mainstream thinkers and voters is that because their perceptions are drawn from ingrained beliefs, not empirical study, they cannot easily learn from evidence, experience or the views of ordinary people elsewhere in the world. Nor can they easily distinguish one historical case from another: Poland from Ukraine, post-war Japan from the contemporary Middle East.

Americans' sense of national mission resembles, to an extent, the belief of the great European imperial nations of the past that they were spreading "civilisation" and "progress" to the rest of the world. Like those beliefs, it embodies elements of reality along with those of lies and hypocrisy. But neither evidence nor the views of the outside world count for much, given the depth of the nationalist belief itself. European nations in the 20th century had these nationalist faiths beaten out of them by repeated catastrophes. We can only hope that Americans will learn from their examples before it is too late.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. His next book, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World, co-authored with John Hulsman, is published later this month by Pantheon

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

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Climate Scenarios

I was in the midst of writing a post on climate change, when The Economist went and dedicated a whole frickin' issue to it. The leader article sums up the state of debate and the immense difficulty in formulating policy around climate change very well, while a more focused piece gives the history of climate science. Unfortunately other sections of the report are subscriber only.

The key point is that the IPCC's prediction that temperatures will rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius is awfully broad. In short, 1.4C would be tolerable, 5.8C would be catastrophic, so how do we decide what to spend insuring the planet against the consequences?


There are various possible climate scenarios but each still contains a lot of uncertainty, because as The Economist says, the economics of climate change are at least as uncertain as the science. For instance capping carbon emissions could reduce global productivity for the century by 5%, or by less than 1%.

The following sum up what might happen:

1) Low-end climate change: Either we get the IPCC's minimal 1.4C or somehow the scientists were wrong and carbon dioxode and methane continue to build up in the atmosphere but temperatures fail to rise.

Expensive programmes to cut emissions would seem very foolish in this scenario. While it would be nice not to have to spend the money, the probability of this is very low.

2) Ultra climate change: energy policies continue as at present or change but with little effect and carbon continues to build up in the atmosphere. Temperatures rise by 5.8C by the end of the century and the following century is spent trying to recover from the effects. Moreover, tipping points such as melting of perma-frost would be reached meaning that the effects would be irreversible and the climate would be massively unstable for the foreseeable future.

This could mean rebuilding London in the Peak District, and finding a home for the surviving population of Bangladesh; the people of Africa migrating North en masse... etc. While the scenario is only as likely as the minimal climate change discussed above, the probability is non-zero and the costs are unimaginably high.

3) Moderate climate change. Some efforts are made to reduce emissions, atmospheric carbon stabilises and we see a temperature rise of about 3C. There would be major effects including coastal flooding in some seriously populated and built-up areas. I suppose it would be similar to the effects of Hurricane Katrina, but in many cities around the world, most of which aren't rich.

This scenario is the most likely given present policies, which is why there needs to be government action on two fronts: reducing emissions and preparing to adapt to a new climate. It will be interesting to see the results of the UK government's Stern Review of the economics of climate change, which are due to be published this Autumn. This should give a better idea of the type of preparation that's needed.

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