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Friday, January 17, 2025
The growing threat of multiyear droughts | Science
The growing threat of multiyear droughts | Science
Abstract
Droughts have major societal and ecological impacts, including drinking water shortages, crop failures, tree mortality, wildfires, and reduced ecosystem productivity (1). Shifts in the hydrological cycle and continued warming with climate change are leading to rapidly evolving droughts that are more intense and longer lasting (2). Extreme but short-term droughts (<1 year) can have a wide range of consequences, depending on the severity and timing of the drought as well as an ecosystem’s resistance (3, 4). However, as a drought extends to a multiyear event, these ecological effects can amplify because short-lived buffering from physiological adaptations or water storage may weaken, leading to longer-lasting results (4). On page 278 of this issue, Chen et al. (5) report that increasing precipitation anomalies and atmospheric moisture demands are leading to multiyear droughts with growing impacts on vegetation. This highlights the need to better understand the ecological responses to such drought events.
Thursday, January 16, 2025
[Salon] Getting Russia Wrong: A Quarter Century of Putin - Guest Post by James Carden
The American Conservative Logo
Getting Russia Wrong: A Quarter Century of Putin
James W. Carden
Jan 16, 2025
It started out rather differently than we now sometimes imagine it. When Vladimir Putin took over the Russian presidency from Boris Yeltsin 25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1999, he was seen as a man with whom Washington could do business.
President Bill Clinton lauded Putin’s accession to the presidency as a “democratic transfer of executive power,” which it certainly was not. Clinton administration officials hailed Putin as “one of [Russia’s] leading reformers” who, according to the New York Times, “clearly has an intellectual grasp of democracy.” The “prospects for meaningful reform in Russia,” opined another journalist, “are now excellent.” Administration officials also dismissed worries over Putin’s KGB background as “psychobabble.”
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, a Carnegie Endowment expert who has since become one of Putin’s most public critics wrote that, in his view,
U.S.–Russian relations offer one bright counter to this otherwise gloomier international picture. Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to speak directly to President Bush. In that phone call, he expressed his condolences to the president and the American people and his unequivocal support for whatever reactions the American president might decide to take. He then followed this rhetorical support with concrete policies.
Expectations for an era of heightened U.S.–Russian cooperation began to unravel in the mid-2000s. Indeed, future historians (should there be any) will likely come to see the period between 2007 and 2012 as crucial to explaining why U.S.–Russian relations went so terribly wrong.
The milestones are by now familiar to those with even a cursory interest in this Great Power rivalry. These include Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, where he declared Russia would pursue a foreign policy independent from that of the West, and the six-day war in neighboring Georgia in August 2008, during which the Republican nominee for president made the fatuous and equally unlikely declaration that “we are all Georgians now.” It was, however, the grisly rape-murder of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 that did more than most to poison Putin’s view of Washington and the way it does business.
Briefly, then: The Obama administration was able, under false pretenses, to obtain a promise from the Russian government not to veto UN Security Council resolution 1973 “to take all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack” in Libya. The deal was that the Russians would abstain from using their veto as long as the establishment of a “no-fly zone” didn’t morph into a regime change operation.
Yet after Gaddafi’s very public execution and the American secretary of state’s tasteless celebration of it, Moscow felt that Washington welched on the deal. For Putin, then waiting in the wings as prime minister, this was the likely point of no return.
If that was his, what was ours?
By 2011–2012, the unelected U.S. foreign policy establishment (which basically calls the shots regardless of whom we Americans send to Washington) had decided that Putin was a man with whom we could not and should not do business. Any sort of diplomatic relationship ended, not with the Maidan coup and subsequent Ukrainian civil war in the spring of 2014, nor with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. No, it essentially ended when Putin decided to return to the Russian presidency for a third term.
The resulting anti-government protests that took place in Moscow after Putin made his intentions clear encouraged the media’s supposedly best-informed Russian analysts to indulge in fantasies of their own devising. And throughout, they were proven wrong. Masha (now “M.”) Gessen declared in the pages of the Guardian that the Russian media had turned on Putin and predicted that the Putin regime was about to “come tumbling down.” The American Enterprise Institute’s Leon Aron, writing in the pages of Foreign Policy magazine, declared, in an article titled “Putin Is Already Dead,” that
as the Russian protest movement expands and radicalizes in the lead-up to the March 4 presidential election, the key question is not whether Vladimir Putin—and Putinism—will survive. They will not.
In an analysis somewhat further down the sophistication curve, the New Republic’s Julia Ioffe tweeted, “Putin’s fucked, y’all.”
At just this time, during a brief, unhappy stint over in Foggy Bottom, I learned of a cable sent in by U.S. law enforcement agents who had taken a Russian national with expired papers in for questioning at an airport out in California. With a great, breathless urgency the agents described that they, in the process of interrogation, had learned that Vladimir Putin would, in the view of the man in custody, be coming back to serve as president of Russia for a third term. I thought, What were these Masters of the Obvious so worked up about? Of course he was. Yet my reaction was a bit unfair—after all, what was understandably news to these agents out West also came as an unwelcome surprise to our superiors in the White House.
Some might recall that around that time the sitting vice president, Joseph R. Biden, was dispatched to Moscow to advise the sitting Russian prime minister, Putin, that if he were in his position, he would not run for a third term. The White House was perhaps unaware that the serious tend to disregard advice proffered by the unserious. By this time however, the president and his comically egotistical chief Russia adviser had convinced themselves that the sitting (and, alas, very temporary) Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, would be back for a second term, largely, it was assumed, on the strength of his personal relationship with the American president.
The personal connection between Obama and Medvedev was thought to be real. It was also, for some reason, assumed to somehow matter in the calculus of the man who held the actual power in Russia.
New to Washington in the summer of 2010, I, at the invitation of a friend from my time as a lowly paper-pusher at Goldman Sachs, was given a tour of the West Wing by an Obama speechwriter. The speechwriter, touted then as the second coming of Ted Sorensen, could not have been more gracious to this stranger from New York, and in the course of the tour, stopped at a picture of his boss and the Medvedev chowing down at Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington.
“POTUS,” he said, “really loves this guy.”
I thought, but didn’t say: Oh. Trouble. When U.S.–Russia relations are overly (as they were in that period) reliant on the personal relationship between the two principals, nothing (much) good comes of it. In this case, some good did come of it: the New START Treaty. But Putin’s return to the presidency for a third time dashed widely held expectations that Obama would have four more years with which to work with the seemingly pro-Western Medvedev (and note what a long way in the other direction Medvedev has traveled since then).
So when Putin did what every serious person knew he was going to do and return for a third term, a decade’s worth of bitter recriminations—from the White House, from Capitol Hill, and from our government-supervised media—followed.
The rest is history. None of it good.
About The Author
James W. Carden
James W. Carden is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and a former adviser to the U.S. State Department.
Surprise! - Andrew Bacevich, It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over - Guest Post
Surprise! - TomDispatch.com
Andrew Bacevich, It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over
January 16, 2025
As one politician, all too sadly, returns to Washington -- and you know just who I mean -- another, all too sadly, is leaving. Call it, if not the end of history, then at least the end of something that matters (and, of course, the beginning of who knows what else). Departing is Congresswoman Barbara Lee. She will be remembered forever (at least by me) for, in the immediate wake (and that's an all-too-appropriate word) of the 9/11 attacks, casting the only vote in Congress -- yes, the only one! -- against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that the rest of the House and Senate passed (420 to 1). It essentially turned the constitutional right to war-making over to the president just as what came to be known as the Global War on Terror began.
For refusing to give George W. Bush and the presidents who followed him a blank check when it came to disastrous rounds of future war-making, she suffered much criticism and abuse. She was called a traitor, even a terrorist. One newspaper labeled her “a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies.” As she said, looking back years later, "It was a very difficult decision, but I knew that I couldn't vote for that. And also I knew that, based on my background in psychology, you don't make hard decisions when you're upset, when you're in mourning. You have to think through the implications of any type of major decision. And then I was concerned about the issue of forever wars. It set the stage, and I knew it was going to do that. The military option could be the first option before we tried any other option to settle disputes, to respond to terrorist attacks."
In some sense, you might say that the vote to send us into that Global War on Terror would end the moment in history following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, when American officials came to consider the U.S. the "sole superpower" on Planet Earth. And you might even say that, so many years later, it also helped set the stage for Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement and his first presidency. With the departure of an antiwar congressional great and the return of Trump to the White House -- you know, the man who, on January 6, 2020, tweeted to his followers, who had stormed Congress in the wake of his electoral loss, "We love you. You're very special!," then adding, "Remember this day forever!" -- let TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of the novel Ravens on a Wire (a vivid look at the post-Vietnam American military), consider what History may now be signaling to us. Tom
Second Thoughts on the L.A. Fires -
Second Thoughts on the L.A. Fires - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail
: Why, if one has the means to live elsewhere, do people dwell in places where disaster is likely? Didn’t Our Lord warn about building houses on sand?
“Among mortals, second thoughts are wiser,” wrote Euripides famously. Our first thought when someone suffers a loss should simply be condolence; followed by silence and a prayer. But then inevitably we arrive at second thoughts: “He didn’t follow his doctor’s advice. What did he expect?” “Looking at the phone while driving.” “Yet another casualty of psychedelic drugs.” And so on.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Monday, January 13, 2025
Sunday, January 12, 2025
When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Copilot is Uncle Sam - TomDispatch.com
When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Copilot is Uncle Sam - TomDispatch.com
Stan Cox, Washington Doubles Down on Arming Israel
Posted on January 12, 2025
Yes, when Hamas attacked Israel brutally on October 7, 2023, at least two tiny children (and possibly more) died. In response, in the year and a quarter since then, the Israelis have slaughtered untold numbers of children in Gaza. And now, in a winter in which food and sometimes water are desperately lacking, news reports indicate that children there are dying in unknown but clearly staggering numbers. With so many of their parents having been driven from their homes by Israeli bombings and living in tents during the Gazan winter, some are even freezing to death. Talk about an all-too-literal hell on earth, even if, at the moment, the temperatures are now running in the opposite direction!
Almost every day (even New Year’s Day), there have been fresh reports of Israeli bombings or other attacks on the Gaza Strip — known as a “strip” because more than two million Palestinians are living (and dying) in an area only 25 miles long and, at most, seven-and-a-half miles wide — and daily there are reports of more dead children. Under the nightmarish, increasingly chaotic circumstances, no one can truly know how many children have died there since October 8, 2023, but Palestinian authorities estimate more than 17,000, an official number that’s still rising (and, given what we don’t know, may even prove to be a distinct underestimate).
This is a kind of payback by the Israelis that’s hard to imagine if you aren’t close at hand, but a distinctly day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute one if you are. And of course, to add nightmare to nightmare, little of this would be possible if it weren’t for not just the government and military of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but my government, too. As the New York Times put it in a recent devastating report on deaths in Gaza, “The risk to civilians was also heightened by the Israeli military’s widespread use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them American-made, which constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war.” In other words, while it’s true that the Israeli military is slaughtering Gazans by the thousands, the weaponry being used has largely been coming — nonstop! — from my own country. Now, let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox take up that very subject, a distinctly all-American nightmare that is only likely to get worse during the second presidency of Donald J. Trump. Tom
Iran says ready to enter 'constructive' talks for new nuclear deal
Tehran Times
https://www.tehrantimes.com › news › 508257 › Iran-says-ready-to-open-talks-soon-with-the-West-to-reach-a-new
Iran says ready to enter 'constructive' talks for new nuclear deal
Jan 3, 2025"We are still ready to enter constructive dialogue without any delay about our nuclear program, a dialogue with the aim of reaching an agreement," Araghchi told China's CCTV in an interview aired on Saturday. President-elect Donald Trump quit the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran in
Saturday, January 11, 2025
Friday, January 10, 2025
House Passes Bill to Impose Sanctions on I.C.C. Officials for Israeli Prosecutions - The New York Times
House Passes Bill to Impose Sanctions on I.C.C. Officials for Israeli Prosecutions - The New York Times
FM: John Whitbeck
Transmitted above is a NEW YORK TIMES report on the latest manifestation by Israel's loyal and obedient servants in Washington of their fierce hostility toward international law and the moral conscience of most of mankind.
Contrary to my hope that even knee-jerk Israel-Firsters might find it awkward to sanction the ICC and its personnel after ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, who had already obtained an arrest warrant for President Putin, announced that he was seeking an arrest warrant for the head of Myanmar's military junta (https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/05/a-strategically-timed-icc-arrest-warrant-request), the U.S. Congress is forging ahead to offer the world a "truly dazzling demonstration of hypocrisy on steroids" and "further embarrass and disgrace the United States".
One of the rare things upon which decent people everywhere can agree with the U.S Congress is that there can be "no moral equivalence between the Israeli government and Hamas" or, put more precisely, that there can be "no moral equivalence between those enforcing an illegal occupation, as Israel's 57-year-long occupation of the State of Palestine has been definitively declared to be by the International Court of Justice, and those resisting that occupation, as is their right, including by armed action, under international law" (https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/25/icc-arrest-warrants-moral-equivalence).
Thursday, January 9, 2025
[Salon] Trump’s NATO Vision Spells Trouble for the Alliance - Guest Post by Daniel Michaels, WSJ
Trump’s NATO Vision Spells Trouble for the Alliance
Call for much higher arms spending and threat of grabbing allies’ land dial up pressure on members
By Daniel Michaels Jan. 8, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
President-elect Donald Trump raised the prospect of forcibly taking over Canada and Greenland.
President-elect Donald Trump raised the prospect of forcibly taking over Canada and Greenland. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump’s latest demands of America’s NATO partners—that they cede territory to the U.S. and spend more on defense than Washington itself does—risk undermining allies’ confidence and potentially emboldening adversaries.
In a press conference Tuesday, Trump raised the prospect of forcibly taking over Canada and Greenland, which is part of Denmark. Canada and Denmark are founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the U.S. is treaty-bound to protect them.
The president-elect also said NATO allies should raise their military-spending target to around 5% of gross domestic product from the current target of at least 2%. The U.S. last year spent roughly 3.4% of GDP on its military, in line with recent years, according to NATO.
Trump’s comments Tuesday can be seen as opening bids in hard-nosed negotiations more than policy statements, some analysts and Trump advisers argued. Still, they are unprecedented. Never before has someone elected as U.S. president publicly discussed using military force or other coercive measures to take over either parts or all of closely allied countries or demanded such high levels of military spending.
Low defense spending by Canada and European members of NATO has long angered Trump, who during his first term threatened to withdraw from the alliance if outlays didn’t increase. He has said European countries should reimburse the U.S. for decades of protection and has called them freeloaders for not adequately funding their own security.
The new pressure from Trump comes amid deep uncertainty over his approach to the war in Ukraine. Under President Biden, NATO members have largely been unified on the need to support Kyiv in its fight to eject Russian forces.
Trump has remained cagey on his approach to the conflict. He has pledged to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II but given no details on how he plans to do that. Many European leaders fear Trump will reduce or end U.S. support for Ukraine.
Boosting NATO spending and acquiring Greenland are both objectives Trump raised during his first term. Denmark said then, and again recently, that Greenland isn’t for sale.
Critics said Trump’s comments run counter to fundamental tenets of the modern world order and risk endorsing authoritarians’ use of force, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s efforts to intimidate Taiwan.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said European leaders he spoke to Wednesday reacted with “incomprehension” to Trump’s remarks. “The principle of inviolability of borders applies to every country, whether it is to our east or west, and every state must keep to it,” regardless of its size and power, he said.
Trump’s threats to pull the U.S. from NATO unilaterally prompted Congress in 2023 to pass legislation preventing a president from withdrawing from the alliance without approval of the Senate or an act of Congress. NATO was created by a treaty signed in 1949 and ratified by the Senate.
His increasingly confrontational approach with allies holds the prospect of gutting NATO and its capacity for deterrence without the U.S. formally withdrawing.
Dramatically increasing military outlays is difficult because European countries are under extreme spending pressure due to generally weak economies and because arms producers are already struggling to deliver equipment that has been ordered. NATO military officials have complained that the combination of slow increases in supply and quickly rising demand are bidding up the cost of arms more than expanding arsenals.
Most European countries have significantly increased military spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago, though many remain below the 2% target. Some that have reached the target appear likely to fall back in coming years due to weak government finances. Almost all face painful trade-offs with social or environmental spending to meet NATO obligations.
Spending increases began following Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and accelerated during Trump’s first term, which began in 2017. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who recently visited Trump, and his predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, both credited Trump with helping prompt Europeans to increase their spending.
NATO allies “weren’t paying their bills,” Trump said Tuesday. “I said we’re not going to protect you if you’re not paying the bills. So, in a true sense, I saved NATO, but NATO has taken advantage of us.”
Leaders of most European NATO members say they need to increase security spending due to threats from Russia, and to spend more efficiently. A new spending target above 2% has been hotly debated since NATO’s annual summit in Washington in July.
Rutte, in his first big speech since taking office in October, said last month that the new target should be “considerably more than 2%” but a specific figure remains under discussion.
Trump said Tuesday that spending “should be 5%, not 2%.” Only one NATO member comes close to 5%: Poland, which last year spent roughly 4.1% of GDP on defense. No other member was above 4%.
The last time the U.S. spent 5% of GDP on defense was in the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, according to the Defense Department.
Trump’s new 5% target “is a made-up number with no basis in reality,” said former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder. He said European NATO members now spend three times as much as Russia does on defense, and at 5% Europe would outspend Russia by $750 billion annually, spending roughly 10 times what Russia spends.
NATO’s Rutte said last month that any increase in spending must be paired with greater efficiency, focusing on innovation and joint purchasing. He said NATO must “get rid of that idiotic system” where each member sets national requirements, which “makes it almost impossible to buy together, to have joint procurement.” If NATO doesn’t boost efficiency, he said, “even with 4% you can’t defend yourselves.”
Daalder, who served under former President Barack Obama, said he fears “the real purpose of setting this high a bar is to give Trump an excuse either to withdraw from NATO or not to have to fulfill America’s treaty obligation to come to NATO’s defense in case it is attacked.”
Trump on Tuesday, citing an exchange he had with European NATO leaders in 2018, said the idea that “we’ll protect you even if you don’t pay…that’s not the way life works.”
Early last year Trump said while campaigning that if a low-spending NATO ally were attacked by Russia, “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
If Trump were to withdraw U.S. support, European allies would need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to replace low spending over recent decades. Germany has missed NATO’s 2% for so long that it now faces a shortfall of more than $230 billion since 1990, according to recent analysis by Germany’s IFO Institute. Italy’s gap is more than $130 billion and Spain’s is more than $80 billion.
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