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16 August 21
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n conversation as the Vietnam war drew to a close in 1975, an American Colonel, Harry G. Summers Jr., addressed his counterpart Colonel Nguyen Dôn Tu, saying, “You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.” Tu famously replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
The United States had every imaginable opportunity to know better than to attempt to occupy Afghanistan. The attacks of September 11th, 2001, created a profound impetus for the United States to act decisively to defend the country. However, invading and occupying Afghanistan was a clear and obvious strategic blunder to anyone who wanted to know.
The Taliban did not defeat American forces on the field of battle any more effectively than the North Vietnamese Army or their Viet Cong allies did. The result was, as we now understand, the same.
American perceptions of war and peace are still largely predicated on the two great European wars of the 20th century. How wars begin, how wars are fought, how wars end are all questions we answer based on those lessons and frameworks.
The wars the United States fights today are fundamentally different on every level. Americans understand Europeans and Europeans understand Americans. Those understandings were the basis for how the conflicts would be fought and how peace would be achieved.
No such understanding exists with cultures like Vietnam and Afghanistan. Germany could surrender with the certainty that the war was over and they could rebuild. To ancient civilizations like Vietnam and Afghanistan, life under foreign occupation is a life they will never accept, no matter what degree of horror and brutality they are subjected to. They will fight on regardless, even if they have to form supply lines with bicycle convoys.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, their entire administration, and all of their enablers were told in no uncertain terms, if you occupy Afghanistan you will become enmired and exhausted and you will go home in humiliation. That point was indelibly underscored by the Soviet Afghanistan debacle that had ended little more than a decade earlier. And then we did the exact same thing. Breathtaking.
It was no mistake: they knew full well, without any doubt, that this day would come. Invading and occupying foreign nations does not work. This is literally covered in the 5th century BC Chinese military classic, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. Ill-conceived wars lead nations to ruin.
The time to leave Afghanistan was after the al-Qaeda camps were destroyed. The origins of the 9/11 attacks were not in Afghanistan anyway, they were in Saudi Arabia. That is however a subject for another discussion.
On a humanitarian basis the impact on Americans, however difficult or deeply felt, is dwarfed by the catastrophic effects of our military assaults on their lands. We little comprehend, or rarely try to.
The rationale that the lives of Afghan women and girls will be far worse under Taliban rule, a purely subjective Western perspective, even if true is no justification for continuing the military occupation of a foreign land.
Yes, Joe Biden is right: time to go from this place we never should have been.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Kabul Airport. (photo: AFP)
ALSO SEE: Afghanistan's Military Collapse:
Illicit Deals and Mass Desertions
everal people were reportedly killed Monday at Kabul airport, where thousands of panicked Afghans and foreign nationals have gathered in hope of leaving Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. At least five people were killed amid the chaos of people fearful for their lives trying to force their way onto planes, Reuters reported, citing multiple witnesses.
Desperate Afghans crowded around at least one U.S. Air Force plane as it struggled to take off, and there were reports of people falling from aircraft to their death.
It was not immediately clear how others at the airport were killed. U.S. forces previously fired in the air to warn unauthorized people from trying to board military flights, according to numerous reports early Monday.
The State Department said Sunday that U.S. forces have secured control of the airport’s perimeter. The American military presence will swell to nearly 6,000 by early this week, with troops having the sole mission of helping U.S. and allied personnel depart the country.
Here are the significant developments
- By Sunday evening, the Taliban had taken control of the presidential palace in Kabul, underscoring its lightning quick seizure of cities in the past week.
- As of late Sunday, all U.S. Embassy personnel had been moved to the airport, the State Department said. The British ambassador was also on-site helping to process the visas of Afghans who had worked for Britain.
- British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace appeared to break down during an interview Monday as he discussed the fate of those attempting to flee the Taliban in Afghanistan.
- U.S. officials said they will accelerate the evacuation of thousands of Afghans eligible for Special Immigrant Visas. About 2,000 Afghans have arrived in the United States over the past two weeks, a fraction of the estimated 88,000 that could need to be evacuated.
- More than 60 nations released a joint statement calling on all parties in Afghanistan “to respect and facilitate, the safe and orderly departure of foreign nationals and Afghans who wish to leave the country.”
Ken Starr speaks during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment proceedings at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 3, 2020. (photo: Senate Television/Getty Images)
en Starr can look like a Pixar character: grandfatherly, dimpled, with long pillowy cheeks and cunicular teeth. It’s not distinctive; it’s the kind of face you swear you’ve seen many times. Indeed, you probably have, because if you examine a certain subset of American politics, he’s everywhere. Look at his Supreme Court connections alone: John Roberts once served under Starr. Brett Kavanaugh was his mentee. He was pals with Antonin Scalia, vetted Sandra Day O’Connor, and calls Clarence Thomas “a whole lot of fun.” Theodore Olson (the lawyer who’d go on to represent George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore and become his solicitor general) spent that fateful election night watching the results come in at his house. Ken Starr is basically the Forrest Gump of Republican America. You might not have noticed, but he’s usually around. Right now, for instance, he’s on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group started by Charlie Kirk. You might also know him as a Fox News commentator or scandal-ridden ex–university president, as a member of Trump’s first impeachment team, or, most famously, as the independent counsel in the Bill Clinton years whose combination of piousness and prurience taught an entire generation of American children about oral sex.
It’s that five-year stewardship of the Clinton investigation that made Ken Starr a household name. And it’s against those five years that everything he’s done since must be measured. The sporadic headlines he’s since generated in some ways reflect the general decline of his party. Once criticized for a sense of rectitude so priggish it began to appear perverse, Starr course-corrected by defending Jeffrey Epstein and then Donald Trump. The guy who took a popular president down a peg for lying about sex lost his own job as a popular university president for presiding over a system that shielded rapists and ignored victims. And now the great investigator of Clintonian infidelity stands accused of having an extramarital affair himself.
The owner of one of the most famous conservative “brands” has mainly succeeding at muddling it. Starr’s swampward trajectory corresponds roughly to the rise of reactionary populism, but his individual decisions can still surprise; spurts of pro bono work and disquisitions on faith serve as occasional reminders—against a seamy backdrop—of what Starr’s profile used to be. It has been argued that the man many knew as a bland and scrupulously correct son of a minister changed during his stint as independent counsel—that in the course of becoming a public figure while also learning on the fly how to be a prosecutor, he became more of a persecutor too, less concerned with ethical constraints while technically respecting legal ones. (Mostly. Sam Dash, who was lead counsel to the Senate’s Watergate Committee and acted as special ethics adviser to Starr’s team, resigned in protest over what he saw as Starr’s decision to act as an “aggressive advocate” for impeachment.)
That increasingly appetitive (or deranged) prosecutorial approach earned Starr so much contempt that it has perhaps overshadowed some of his less controversial qualities. Friends and associates unfailingly describe Starr as pleasant, for instance. They also describe him as extremely hardworking. He is rarely, however, called brilliant, and this is surprising: The man almost became a Supreme Court justice. According to a 1998 Michael Winerip piece in the New York Times Magazine, Starr’s name may have been scrubbed from the Bush administration’s short list in 1990 because Starr was considered—at least then—a mite too ethical. As the senior Bush’s solicitor general, he’d sided with whistleblowers against the administration that hired him in a case involving defense contractors. The administration did not care for that. Here’s one way to gauge what this earlier version of Starr was like: The folks who chose David Souter for their nominee to the Supreme Court dismissed Starr as insufficiently conservative. He’d been faulted with, among other things, failing to disclose O’Connor’s pro-choice views to his fellow Republicans when he vetted her. It’s hard to imagine how different Starr’s public profile might be today if things had gone differently.
For someone with such Zelig-like ubiquity, not much has been written about his early years. Before the Clinton Whitewater investigation, Starr, who clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger, was rising in Republican circles with impressive and perhaps questionable speed. As Winerip writes, “Starr had to learn as he went. He became an Appeals Court judge in 1983, though he had never been a lower court judge; the Solicitor General—the Government’s lawyer to the Supreme Court—in 1989, though he had never argued before the Supreme Court; the independent counsel in 1994, though he had never been a prosecutor.” This trend would continue after his stint investigating the Clintons: He was hired to helm Pepperdine’s law school and then Baylor University despite having no administrative experience to speak of. (Perhaps, given the sexual assault scandal that would later consume Baylor, experience matters.)
If the Clinton years gave him a taste of real fame—he was Time’s Man of the Year in 1998, along with Bill Clinton—the aftermath saw him trying to capitalize on it. Starr became, if not quite a mercenary himself, the mercenaries’ lawyer. He’d done plenty of that before, of course: He was profitably defending tobacco companies even while he was investigating Clinton (who was trying to regulate them). But his years digging into the president empowered him to use his prestige in a slightly different way—as the guy who maybe knew a guy. When Whitewater needed investigating, Starr had been there to do it and his reasons were at least nominally public-spirited. But when Blackwater needed defending in 2006, he was there to do that too—this time by joining a lawsuit that had been well underway in order to petition John Roberts, his former deputy in the solicitor general’s office, who had only recently joined the Supreme Court. Marc Miles, the attorney representing the families of the four Blackwater contractors killed in Iraq, said at the time, “I think that Blackwater has brought in Kenneth Starr to somehow leverage a political connection to help them succeed in a case where they can’t win on the merits.”
If this was the case, it didn’t work—Roberts rejected his former superior’s argument that Blackwater should be “constitutionally immune” to the lawsuit. (Roberts would rule in Starr’s favor the same year in Morse v. Frederick.) It wouldn’t be the last time Starr appeared to peddle his influence. When Jeffrey Epstein needed help evading charges for raping and trafficking minors in 2007, the Texan with a reputation for primness joined the pedophile’s legal team and, as described in reporter Julie K. Brown’s book, became one of the prime architects of a defense notable for its innovative savagery, which included attacking prosecutors and impugning their motives. Starr attempted to leverage his contacts in the Justice Department to try to get the federal charges dropped. It also didn’t work. But the plea deal Epstein got was famously and shockingly lenient, thanks in no small part to Starr’s efforts.
And perhaps most incongruently, when the most prolific liar in American presidential history—who paid the women he had extramarital sex with to shut them up—faced impeachment charges in 2019, Starr didn’t just rush to defend him (even though he’d once called Starr a lunatic). The author of the Starr Report, which even Diane Sawyer derided as “demented pornography for puritans,” showed up in a black cowboy hat and a trenchcoat—dressed as an almost literal black-hat version of the finger-wagging disciplinarian of errant presidents he used to be.
It’s a discordant set of jobs for someone who had built a monumental and much-mocked reputation for prudish propriety. In a plot turn that would be more poetic if it weren’t so unsurprising, it emerged this month that Starr, that avatar of good Christian values who once stood for everything the Clintons weren’t, had himself allegedly conducted an extramarital affair with a woman who had once worked closely with him. (She says it began in 2009, roughly a decade after his investigation of Clinton concluded.)
The woman, Judi Hershman, explains she is disclosing her affair with Starr (which she’d planned to take to the grave) because of his response to a story she wrote for Slate about a disturbing encounter with Brett Kavanaugh that she’d informed Starr about back in 1998. She wrote that Kavanaugh had screamed at her with “a deranged fury” when he found her working in a conference room. (In her Medium piece she adds that Starr’s response when she requested an apology from Kavanaugh was: “I’m apologizing to you for him. This is it.”) Starr’s comment on Hershman’s story in Slate was “I do not recall any mention of any incident involving Brett Kavanaugh.” But the simple denial was not enough. In what Hershman calls an “embellishment,” he added: “To the contrary, throughout his service in the independent counsel’s office, now-Justice Kavanaugh comported himself at all times with high professionalism and respect toward all our colleagues.”
We know now that this is the basic template for how Ken Starr responds to a crisis because he was recorded doing it. In a 2016 TV interview for KWTX News 10, Starr was asked about an email a woman had sent him on Nov. 3, 2015—and there the email was, in full view, bearing his email address—in which she reported being raped. The subject line, “I Was Raped at Baylor,” seems hard to overlook. Starr’s first response squishily acknowledges this: “I honestly may have. I’m not denying that I saw it.” But then a woman named Merrie Spaeth, a communications consultant and family friend he’d brought with him (and who had been Hershman’s boss during the Clinton investigation), interrupts to ask the news director not to use that portion of the interview. He refuses and she takes Starr to another room to confer. “She needs to ask you that question again. Whether you do it on camera or not it’s up to you,” Spaeth says to Starr when they return. Starr then says to the camera: “All I’m gonna say is I honestly have no recollection of that.” He then turns to Spaeth. “Is that OK?” But then he tries again and, as with his response to Hershman, he doesn’t leave well enough alone. He adds. “I honestly have no recollection of seeing such an email and I believe that I would remember seeing such an email” (emphasis mine). By 2018, two years after he’d been ousted as university president, the line had evolved beyond all recognition: “Unfortunately—and this is going to sound like an apologia, but it is the absolute truth—never was it brought to my attention that there were these issues.”
Is it interesting that a man who spent years trying to prove that an evasive and lawyerly president lied ended up agonizing over how exactly to legalistically phrase his own failures? No! It is only moderately more interesting that the Starr marriage—which openly courted comparisons to the Clintons’—now appears to be in the position it smugly criticized: In 1999, Alice Starr famously said she’d divorce her husband if she were in Hillary’s place, remarking that she would “rather not be married to someone who doesn’t love me enough to remain faithful.” “We took a vow to be faithful to one another when we married,″ she said of her own marriage, adding that they’d “lived up to that vow.″ In response to Hershman’s affair allegation, Alice Starr provided a statement through Merrie Spaeth affirming her marriage to Ken: “We remain devoted to each other and to our beautiful family. Judi Nardella Hershman was Alice’s friend. Alice set up jobs and board appointments for her in McLean, Virginia.” (Ken Starr himself had no comment, according to Spaeth, who also added that because of how busy the independent counsel’s office was in the days before the 1998 House Judiciary Committee hearing, it would have been impossible for Judi Hershman to have found herself alone in a conference room with Brett Kavanaugh.)
That Alice is standing by her man is no surprise; when Ken began his tenure at Baylor, she said in an interview, “He can’t do anything but tell the truth—ethics are extremely important.” What those ethics are remains something of a mystery. Starr’s post-Clinton priorities were interesting and not altogether predictable: They have ranged from appealing for clemency for death row inmates in 2005 and 2006 to defending Epstein in 2007 to campaigning against same-sex marriage in 2008 to signing (in 2013) a letter asking that a teacher who pleaded guilty to molesting five female students get no jail time, just community service.
Put differently, Starr has occupied some strange spaces in American controversies besides the one he’s best known for. He supported Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, for instance, but he also testified about “troubling questions” at Sen. Ron Johnson’s circus of a Senate hearing on so-called election irregularities. He’s a little too odd to classify as a mere hypocrite. Even his condemnations take some surprising turns: In a chapter of his latest book, Starr comes perilously close to condoning the removal of Confederate monuments: “It’s one thing to tear down monuments of Confederate generals, as military champions of the unspeakable institution of slavery. Whether you like these desecrations or not, that reaction is understandable, albeit lawless.”
Starr’s isn’t a story of straight decline. He never really left, for one thing; that makes a comeback trickier. But neither has he ascended to become a fixture in the conservative firmament. The way he engages with modern conservatism is almost hilariously anti-strategic: Though certainly capable of partisan bile, he’s at other times so quaintly bookish that he barely seems to understand his party at all. When he addressed the young Trump-crazed Republicans at the 2019 Turning Point USA summit (other speakers included Sean Hannity, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Donald Trump Jr., to give you a sense), he interrupted the music and the lights to ask everyone to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and then delivered a lecture encouraging them to study history, including the writings of William Brandeis and Lincoln’s second inaugural address. It is bold—in a mild way—to lecture about history when you know you’re up against Guilfoyle’s incantatory shouts. It might also explain the limits of his influence. Then again, so might the lack of a consistent agenda. Starr’s lawyering has been deployed in the service of both conventional and distasteful efforts but doesn’t coalesce into any particularly cohesive sense of purpose. And while his books register a real desire to provide intellectual backing for conservative impulses, what little ideology he has—to the extent that it’s faith-based—is compromised by his own hypocrisy.
Starr does still seem to enjoy the spotlight even if he’s not especially gifted at keeping it. Thirty years after he shot to national fame, he hasn’t lost the ability to provoke an “Oh, him!” reaction when his name comes up, and Trump’s impeachments presented not one but two occasions for him to reemerge to the broader public as a voice of authority on the thing he has long been most famous for. But his interventions on those fronts have been strangely muddled. He obsessed over the finer points governing special counsels in a magazine article but then cut an absurd figure in a black cowboy hat at Trump’s side. Having made an impression neither as an intellectual nor as a firebrand, he’s now on the board of an organization fiercely touting an anti-vaccination agenda. He’s on Fox News. And he’s earning headlines for allegedly cheating on his wife. It’s not exactly the Supreme Court.
Betsy Cruz, 58, a single mother new to poverty, shopping for groceries in Lexington, S.C. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT)
illions of Americans will see their food stamp benefits permanently increase by a record amount later this year, The New York Times reported.
The Biden administration is expected to announce the new rules Monday, and they will take effect in October, according to the Times.
Average monthly benefits are slated to increase by $36 from a pre-pandemic average of $121, or about 25 percent.
The change does not require approval from Congress and will apply to all of the more than 40 million people who receive these benefits, officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The change is based on updates the Department of Agriculture made to the Thrifty Food Plan, which outlines nutritional goals for Americans. The framework suggests how much money each family can spend on a number of food groups to achieve a healthy diet.
Congress in 2018 passed a law ordering a review of the plan, which the Biden administration asked the Department of Agriculture to accelerate upon taking office, the Times reported.
According to the Times, the weekly cost for this plan will jump from $159 to $193 for a family of four.
Three-quarters of families use their food stamps well within the first two weeks, according to the Times. The increase, though it may appear small, will help alleviate the financial burdens associated with eating healthy under a tight budget, experts say.
The newspaper noted that beyond being adjusted for inflation, the program’s value has not adjusted since its inception in 1962.
The Hill has reached out to the White House and Department of Agriculture for comment.
The Uyghurs are the largest minority ethnic group in China's north-western province of Xinjiang. (photo: Getty Images)
Woman says she was held for days at a Chinese-run secret detention facility in Dubai along with at least two Uighurs.
young Chinese woman says she was held for eight days at a Chinese-run secret detention facility in Dubai along with at least two Uighurs, in what may be the first evidence that China is operating a so-called “black site” beyond its borders.
The woman, Wu Huan, 26, was on the run to avoid extradition back to China because her fiancé was considered a Chinese dissident. Wu told The Associated Press she was abducted from a hotel in Dubai and detained by Chinese officials at a villa converted into a jail, where she saw or heard two other prisoners, both Uighurs.
She was questioned and threatened and forced to sign legal documents incriminating her fiancé Wang Jingyu, 19, for harassing her, she said. She was finally released on June 8 and is now seeking asylum in the Netherlands.
While “black sites” are common in China, Wu’s account is the only testimony known to experts that Beijing has set one up in another country. Such a site would reflect how China is increasingly using its international clout to detain or bring back citizens it wants from overseas, whether they are dissidents, corruption suspects, or ethnic minorities such as the Uighurs.
Uighurs extradited
The AP was unable to confirm or disprove Wu’s account independently, and she could not pinpoint the exact location of the black site. However, reporters have seen and heard corroborating evidence, including stamps in her passport, a phone recording of a Chinese official asking her questions, and text messages that she sent from jail to a pastor helping the couple.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said: “What I can tell you is that the situation the person talked about is not true.” Dubai did not respond to multiple phone calls and requests for comment.
Yu-Jie Chen, an assistant professor at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, said she had not heard of a Chinese secret jail in Dubai, and such a facility in another country would be unusual. However, she also noted it would be in keeping with China’s attempts to do all it can to bring select citizens back, both through official means such as signing extradition treaties and unofficial means such as revoking visas or putting pressure on family back home.
“[China] really wasn’t interested in reaching out until recent years,” said Chen, who has tracked China’s international legal actions.
Chen said Uighurs in particular were being extradited or returned to China, which has been detaining the mostly Muslim minority on suspicion of “terrorism” even for relatively harmless acts such as praying. Wu and her fiancé are Han Chinese, the majority ethnicity in China.
Dubai has a history as a place where Uighurs are interrogated and deported back to China, and activists say Dubai itself has been linked to secret interrogations.
Radha Stirling, a legal advocate who founded the advocacy group Detained in Dubai, says she has worked with about a dozen people who have reported being held in villas in the UAE, including citizens of Canada, India and Jordan, but not China.
“There is no doubt that the UAE has detained people on behalf of foreign governments with whom they are allied,” Stirling said. “I don’t think they would at all shrug their shoulders to a request from such a powerful ally.”
However, Patrick Theros, a former US ambassador to Qatar who is now strategic adviser to the Gulf International Forum, called the allegations “totally out of character” for the Emiratis.
In the villa jail
On May 27, Wu said, she was questioned by Chinese officials at her hotel and then taken by Dubai police to a police station for three days. On the third day, she said, a Chinese man who introduced himself as Li Xuhang came to visit her. He told her he was working for the Chinese consulate in Dubai and asked her whether she had taken money from foreign groups to act against China.
Li Xuhang is listed as consul general on the website of the Chinese consulate in Dubai. The consulate did not return multiple calls asking for comment and to speak with Li directly.
Wu said she was handcuffed and put in a black car. After half an hour, she was brought into a white villa with three stories, where rooms had been converted into individual cells, she said.
Wu was taken to her own cell with a heavy metal door, a bed, a chair and a white fluorescent light that was on day and night. She said she was questioned and threatened several times in Chinese.
She saw another prisoner, a Uighur woman, while waiting to use the bathroom once, she said. A second time, she heard a Uighur woman shouting in Chinese, “I don’t want to go back to China, I want to go back to Turkey.” Wu identified the women as Uighurs, she said, based on their distinctive appearance and accent.
The guards also gave her a phone and a SIM card and instructed her to call her fiancé and pastor Bob Fu, the head of ChinaAid, a Christian non-profit, who was helping the couple.
Wang confirmed that Wu called and asked him for his location. Fu said he received at least four or five calls from her during this time, a few on an unknown Dubai phone number, including one where she was crying and almost incoherent.
The last thing Wu’s captors demanded of her, she said, was to sign documents testifying that Wang was harassing her.
“I was really scared and was forced to sign the documents,” she said.
After Wu was released, she flew to Ukraine, where she was reunited with Wang. After threats from Chinese police that Wang could face extradition from Ukraine, the couple fled again to the Netherlands.
Wu said she misses her homeland. “I’ve discovered that the people deceiving us are Chinese, that it’s our countrymen hurting our own countrymen,” she said.
Volunteers support firefighters tackling a wildfire next to the village of Kamatriades on the Greek island of Evia. (photo: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images)
t the end of the 60s sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, the camera pans across the Daily Express case room to a front page proof hanging on a wall. “Earth Saved”, screams the headline. The camera pans. “Earth Doomed”, announces the proof beside it.
The head printer looks baffled. Which page will he be told to select? We never find out, for the film concludes without revealing the fate of our planet whose rotation has been sent spiralling out of control by simultaneous Soviet and US atom bomb tests. All we know is that Earth’s fate hangs in the balance thanks to human stupidity.
Such a vision may be the stuff of popular entertainment but it comes uncomfortably close to our own uncertain future, as highlighted last week by an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which effectively announced “a code red” warning for our species. Unequivocal evidence showed greenhouse gas emissions were propelling us towards a calamitous fiery future triggered by extreme climate change, it announced. Only urgent reductions of fossil fuel emissions can hope to save us.
It was a vision vividly endorsed by scientists, normally the most circumspect of commentators about world events. “Our future climate could well become some kind of hell on Earth,” said Prof Tim Palmer, of Oxford University. Or, as Prof Dave Reay, executive director of Edinburgh University’s Climate Change Institute, put it: “This is not just another scientific report. This is hell and high water writ large.”
Certainly the numbers outlined in the report were stark and strikingly emphatic in comparison with past, far more cautious, IPCC offerings. As it makes clear, humans have pumped around 2,400bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since 1850, creating concentrations of the gas that have not been seen on Earth in the last 2 million years.
Heatwaves and the heavy rains that cause flooding have become more intense and more frequent since the 1950s in most parts of the world, and climate change is now affecting all inhabited regions of the planet. Drought is increasing in many places and it is more than 66% likely that numbers of major hurricanes and typhoons have risen since the 1970s. “If there was still a need for a proof that climate changes is caused by human activities, then this is the report that provides it,” said Prof Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia.
And the consequences of humanity’s massive act of atmospheric interference are now clear: what is hot today will become hotter tomorrow; extreme floods will become more frequent, wildfires more dangerous and deadly droughts more widespread. In short, things can only get worse.
Indeed, by the end of the century they could become threatening to civilisation if emissions are allowed to continue at their present rate. “That might seem like a long way away but there are millions of children already born who should be alive well into the 22nd century,” added Prof Jonathan Bamber of Bristol University, another report author.
In fact, they could become utterly catastrophic with the occurrence of world-changing events – such as continent-wide forest die-backs or collapsing Antarctic ice sheets, says Prof Andrew Watson of Edinburgh University. “The IPCC report gives a comprehensive update on the knowns of climate change, and that makes for grim reading. But it also makes the point that climate models don’t include ‘low probability-high impact’ events, such as drastic changes in ocean circulation, that also become more likely the more the climate is changed. These ‘known unknowns’ are scarier still.”
The new IPCC report is certainly a very different, uncompromising document compared with previous versions, as meteorologist Keith Shine of Reading University pointed out. “I was heavily involved in IPCC’s first assessment report back in 1990. We weren’t even sure then that observed climate change was due to human activity. The IPCC now says the evidence is ‘unequivocal’. That means there is no hiding place for policymakers.”
The crucial point is that this report was agreed not just by scientists but by government representatives on the committee, men and women who have made it clear they are also convinced of the urgency of the situation. “They also see the direct link between greenhouse gas emissions and forest fires, floods and other recent extreme weather events, and that makes it essential for their own governments to act,” said Lord Deben, chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee.
At the Paris climate meeting in 2015, those governments pledged to try to keep temperature rises well below 2C, and not more than 1.5C if possible, from pre-industrial days. The trouble now is that the world has already heated up by almost 1.1C, which means only drastic cutbacks in emissions will succeed in preventing far more serious, intense global warming. It will be tight going. The most ambitious of emission scenarios described by the IPCC offers less than a 50% chance of keeping below that 1.5C threshold.
Prospects for limiting global warming to 2C are better but will still require reductions far in excess of those that have been pledged by nations in the run up to Cop26, the UN climate summit to be held in Glasgow in November. “It is plain that any hopes that climate change might turn out to be ‘not as bad as expected’ were forlorn,” said Prof Rowan Sutton, of Reading University’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science. “It is happening now and it is happening very fast. Dealing with this crisis means taking urgent actions.”
That will not be an easy task, however. As Nick Starkey, director of policy at the Royal Academy of Engineering, pointed out last week. “The UK is not on track to meet existing carbon targets and our goal of 78% emissions reduction by 2035 will not be reached without deep energy efficiency measures,” he said.
What is needed is “a society wide vision”, a national plan that would be instigated to ensure implementation of all the different policies – from transport to power generation and from home heating to farming – that will be needed to make sure emissions are cut as quickly as possible. “We need to put policies in place throughout society otherwise our targets will just become empty promises,” said Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London.
It is a suggestion backed by Lord Deben. “In the UK, we need a new planning act that ensures all local authorities have to take climate change into account every time they make a planning decision. At present, they get absolutely no advice about how to go about this business.” Such processes would ensure that the fine detail of ensuring carbon emissions are controlled and mistakes – such as the recent granting of planning permission for a new coal mine in Cumbria – are not repeated, he added.
However, it will take considerable, sustained effort for the nation to keep up such efforts. On Tuesday, national front pages were filled with images of burning Greek villages and lurid headlines. “PM: wake up to red alert to climate crisis,” warned the Daily Express; “As doomsday report warns of apocalyptic climate change: can UK lead world back from the brink,” asked the Mail; while the Telegraph announced “UN warns of climate ‘reality check’”. Given that many of these papers have gone to lengthy efforts in the past to denigrate climate science and to question the reality of global warming, these were radical announcements. It remains to be seen just how long each publication remains committed to the science.
“The climate story was all over the front pages on Tuesday but by Friday, three days later, it was hardly mentioned,” added Prof Martin Siegert of Imperial College, London. “Yet this is the most important thing that humanity needs to do in the next 30 years. It is going to change our lives, it is going to change the way we regard ourselves on the planet. And if we don’t, we are going to stoke up huge problems for our children. But after three days we seemed to be forgotten despite the fact this is something that needs decades of consistent, persistent work.”
Siegert added that it had been estimated that investment levels equivalent to 1% of GDP are needed to ensure the country’s transition to net-zero status. “However, we are currently spending about 0.01%… a 100th of that estimated price tag. And this is also well below what the government is spending on things that will actually add to our emissions, such as airport expansion plans and the tens of billions it has pledged on new road schemes, which will only make it easier to drive around and burn more fossil fuel.”
These are all issues for the UK to hammer out, as a matter of urgency, over coming months, although the opening of the Cop26 conference in Glasgow is going to be an even more pressing event. At the meeting, which begins on 1 November, delegates from more than 190 nations will gather to hammer out a deal that will determine just how hot life will get on Earth. At Paris, in 2015, nations pledged emission cuts that now urgently need to be updated or global temperatures will soar to well over 2C. Similarly agreements will have to be reached on how to phase out coal power stations as quickly as possible, to protect carbon-dioxide-absorbing forests, and to agree aid for developing nations to help them survive the impacts of global warming.
It will a fine-run thing and it is very likely that we will not know if negotiators succeed until the very last minutes of the Glasgow conference. In this way we will learn the planet’s fate in November, exactly 60 years after the cinematic release of The Day the Earth Caught Fire. We may then have a better idea of whether “Earth Saved” or “Earth Doomed” was the right front page headline.
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