Article I had published in the Weekender, 24 October:

THERE’s a widespread and significant misconception about the likely effects of strong action to cut or “mitigate” greenhouse gas emissions: that it will hurt economies.

The chair at a recent climate debate in Cape Town summed up popular perception and prejudice when he said that those calling for a switch to a low-carbon economy are asking for a “huge sacrifice”.

It’s a twofold misconception. First , the damage to gross domestic product (GDP) is usually exaggerated, particularly in the US by conservative opponents of the proposed, and rather modest, Waxman-Markey climate bill.

The 350 event on Signal Hill was a brilliant and most encouraging morning. Originally planned for the top of Table Mountain, mist forced us to relocate to the “rump of the lion”, and all of the roughly 250 people who’d gathered at the lower cableway walked for an hour or so to get to the parking on Signal Hill. The mist persisted – and so did the people. We rehearsed at 10am, but it still did not clear. The parking lot began to fill up, and we moved to a nearby grassy hillside – but still the mist did not clear. So people began to chant, “We want sun! We want sun! We want sun!” And by some synchronicity, the planet finally cooperated, the last wisps of vapour blew away, and a small helicopter rose at last from the Waterfront to swoop around and photograph us. After nearly two hours of waiting, I don’t believe a soul had given up and left early. Human beings really can be as amazing and wonderful as we can be selfish and shortsighted.

All photos but the aerial shot are mine. From the 350.org page on Flickr: “Climate Action Partnership volunteers form up on Signal Hill in Cape Town to make up the number 350, signifying 350 parts per million (PPM) CO2 in the atmosphere, 350 PPM being the maximum safe limit of CO2 concentration. WE ARE CURRENTLY AT 390 PPM!”

Richard Goldstone writes in the New York Times, about his experience investigating the Israeli assault on Gaza:

I believe deeply in the rule of law and the laws of war, and the principle that in armed conflict civilians should to the greatest extent possible be protected from harm.

In the fighting in Gaza, all sides flouted that fundamental principle. Many civilians unnecessarily died and even more were seriously hurt. In Israel, three civilians were killed and hundreds wounded by rockets from Gaza fired by Hamas and other groups. Two Palestinian girls also lost their lives when these rockets misfired.

In Gaza, hundreds of civilians died. They died from disproportionate attacks on legitimate military targets and from attacks on hospitals and other civilian structures. They died from precision weapons like missiles from aerial drones as well as from heavy artillery. Repeatedly, the Israel Defense Forces failed to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.

Israel is correct that identifying combatants in a heavily populated area is difficult, and that Hamas fighters at times mixed and mingled with civilians. But that reality did not lift Israel’s obligation to take all feasible measures to minimize harm to civilians.

His commission’s report can be downloaded here.

If you want to see the latest figures for the state of our atmosphere, the Global Monitoring Division of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory is a good place to start. They consolidate data from a huge global network of monitoring stations.

Select your greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide – CO2, methane – CH4, nitrous oxide – N2O) and watch the graphs climb. We’re perhaps used to seeing graphs for carbon dioxide, so for the sake of a little variety in your gloomy global warming news, here’s a graph for increases in nitrous oxide.

Otherwise known as “laughing gas” or “happy gas”, nitrous oxide is somewhat less amusing in increasing concentrations in large swaths of atmosphere. Over a hundred year period, it is 298 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. At the moment, it apparently accounts for 6% of the human-related warming effect. It’s released by industrial activity, burning coal for example. Also released by tropical soils and from the oceans, human activity has till recently been thought to account for 30% of what’s now in the atmosphere. But it appears releases from nitrogen-based fertilisers may have been greatly underestimated. Overall, atmospheric levels have increased 15% since 1750. It’s also an ozone-depleting gas – in fact, it’s now the key ozone depleting gas.

I started to wonder the other day just why Macs are so much more expensive in South Africa than elsewhere.

As I write, an entry-level white MacBook is advertised in the US at $999, or R7,300. They’re more expensive in the UK, for example, R8,700. No doubt tariffs and taxes play a role here. But if I want to buy the same MacBook here in Cape Town, though, I must pay … R12,000. No less than 64% higher than the US price.

Is this an inevitable consequence of importing electronics into South Africa? A local dealer tells me the price gap is partly a consequence of buying exchange rate cover. If so, all imports should be similarly affected. But, to take just one example, local PC retailers Incredible Connection manage to sell an Acer Aspire One A110 Blue for just R1,999, when the same machine is advertised in the US at $265, or R1,959.

So who’s behind the 64%?

Apples are distributed in this country by an organisation calling themselves “Core Group”, to whom Apple appear to have granted a license to profiteer (local dealers assure me their margins are no more than 10%). So, who or what is “Core Group”? Its website (which is pretty shabby compared to the gleaming elegance one usually expects from Mac sites) tells us that:

Core Group consists of The Core Computer Business (Pty) Ltd – the distribution company of Apple Computer in SA – and Core Peripherals (Pty) Ltd, which distributes all other brands…

In 2001, the ‘Ichikowitz Group’, which previously was a minority shareholder, bought a controlling interest in Core Group and installed a new management team, and implemented a new strategy…

[Ichikowitz] operates businesses ranging from automotive import and distribution, lotteries and gaming, information technology, sporting goods and dental equipment to minerals, petroleum and other natural resources.”

Lotteries and gaming, petroleum… this does not sound like your usual computer business. And the ‘Ichikowitz Group’ (why the inverted commas?) clearly likes to keep a low profile – it has no website of its own. Dig a little furthur, and we find this: “The arms dealer who flies Zuma“, and begin to understand why. One Ivor Ichikowitz, it seems, is the brother of Core Group CEO Rodney Ichikowitz, and it turns out:

Ivor Ichikowitz, the arms and oil broker who laid on his company jet to ferry Nelson Mandela to a Jacob Zuma election rally in Transkei, has made a career from turning political connections into profit… Ichikowitz (42) made a fortune selling surplus South African armoured vehicles into Africa and the Middle East, and seems to have manoeuvred his way into Zuma’s inner circle … Ichikowitz, who also represents controversial commodities trader Glencore, partnered Majali in his 2001 bid to supply Iraqi crude to South Africa under the controversial oil-for-food programme allowing limited trade with Saddam’s Iraq … In 2005 the M&G revealed Majali, with official ANC backing, intended setting up an oil trading operation intended to benefit the ANC and Saddam’s Ba’ath party … Ichikowitz’s other main business: selling reconditioned surplus South African military equipment into Africa and the Middle East.

(None of this is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Ichikowitz’s company, Paramount.)

A couple of threads on a local website reflect a certain amount of public unhappiness with the ‘Apple experience’ in South Africa.

Lotteries, gaming, arms dealing in Africa, oil deals with Saddam… Way cool, Apple.

Okay, I hadn’t previously looked very closely at the 12 tightly packed graphs on page 23 of the Copenhagen Synthesis Report, indicating anticipated changes in food production across the world.

But now that I have — that pink bar indicating the likely range of decline for maize production in Southern Africa is one of the most conspicuous. (Another is in East Africa, where they are likely to see a 30% INCREASE in barley yields. But that dramatic shift is indicated as being less important for hunger.)

The colours, by the way, indicate the importance of the change for hunger, with pink indicating greater importance.

In other words, according to the latest science, we in Southern Africa can expect a 30% decline in maize yields over the next 20 years. And wheat – down 15%. Seen that in any headlines?

Though oil companies BP and Shell both acknowledge the reality of climate change, both continue to support industry associations that are lobbying against climate change legislation:

“BP maintains its membership of the API through paying substantial fees based on the large size of BP’s business. It is our concern that these fees are used by the API to undermine US government action on climate change and that BP’s membership of the API contradicts its position on the issue,” writes John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, in a letter to Tony Hayward, the BP boss.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/19/oil-firms-warned-over-us-lobbying

It is difficult to say how much climate change denialism is funded by US industry, but amazingly, the long-term campaign against it seems to have begun as much with the tobacco industry as with big oil.

By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens’ group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, “to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors”; to “link the tobacco issue with other more ‘politically correct’ products”; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with “broader questions about government research and regulations” – such as “global warming”, “nuclear waste disposal” and “biotechnology”. APCO would engage in the “intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2

Exxon Mobil (Engen, in South Africa) has only recently ceased funding groups that seek to cast doubt on climate science.

The ExxonMobil [corporate citizenship] report says: “In 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”
Nine groups have reportedly lost the company’s support, including the George C Marshall Institute, the Washington DC-based think tank that asserts there is no scientific consensus on climate change, and that changes in the sun, not greenhouse gases, could be responsible for rising temperatures.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/28/climatechange.fossilfuels

That’s the Weekender’s headline for an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago on underground coal gasification. (My headline was “Old energy’s last gasp?”)

ESKOM is very comfortable with generating power from coal, but like many of the world’s utilities, the parastatal is under ever- increasing pressure to use less coal and reduce its enormous contribution to global warming.
One of Eskom’s latest efforts to make coal cleaner is a pilot project for underground coal gasification (UCG) adjacent to the gigantic Majuba power station near Volksrust in Mpumalanga.
The idea behind UCG is that instead of first mining coal, processing it, then burning it to produce heat and electricity, you set it alight underground to produce a stream of gas that can be burned to produce electricity.

The Weekender’s website carries the full article, which as it has been edited is a little less sceptical than the version I filed. My concern is that Eskom will use successful UCG as yet another strategy to postpone serious investments in renewables.

Update: 18 October: Okay, I’ve now actually installed Snow Leopard, and it most definitely is not a train smash; I have a much faster, leaner, machine in front of me. One on which I can select a single column in a pdf (funny how much the “small things” count). The Finder, especially as it emerges from the Dock is a dramatic improvement. Oh, and something I’ve not seen noted anywhere else: Help, which has been a lumbering dysfunctional disgrace through several versions of the OS, has finally been tuned up and responds quickly and smoothly to what’s asked of it.

Problems noted so far: A disappearing cursor in Word. Corrupted iCal calendars, duplicated events and birthdays. And an unwanted “feature” in Mail: notes turning up in the Inbox. (Go into Mail Preferences, and de-select “Show notes in Inbox”, in the Mailbox behaviours section of ALL your Accounts, to get rid of this.)

Original post: A year ago I wrote a post entitled, “The Leopard downgrade”, expressing my disgust with OS 10.5 Leopard. (Principally, the Cupertino weasels ripped out Address Book’s Bluetooth support, and the OS was forever dysfunctional on a iBook G4, on which its installation should never have been recommended.)

That post has, since the release of Snow Leopard, started pulling more hits than any other on my blog. Not surprising when you read, for example, that David Pogue’s notably enthusiastic New York Times review (which has now prompted commentary from the NYT readers’ editor) had omitted to mention that Snow Leopard was constantly crashing MS Word and Photoshop on his Mac!! Which it seems it is doing for many others.

If you are one of the unfortunates having this experience, Word crashing, a comment on the same post on Venture Beat recommends trashing your Word preferences to get it working properly and describes how to do this. It’s not clear yet how reliable a fix this is.

I have always enjoyed Pogue’s reviews. But it does seem in this instance he omitted some vital information fromunderstated some vital information in his review, and owes his readers an apology. Completing an upgrade to discover that mission-critical apps like Word are no longer fully functional is extraordinarily stressful.

But the real blame, lest we forget, must lie with Apple itself – this is spectacular incompetence, and demonstrates extraordinary contempt for its users.

And me? I’ve had enough pain from Leopard (it does work rather better on my newer Macbook than it did on the iBook) to last me a lifetime. Snow Leopard appears to have many appealing features. But I think I’ll wait for 10.6.5 at the very least before nervously “upgrading”.

Update 9/9/09: Pogue has commented on this post, saying he “ABSOLUTELY mentioned the Word problems (and others)” in his review. Which he had, saying he “experienced frustrating glitches in various programs, including Microsoft Word, Flip4Mac, Photoshop CS3 ...”

I’m not sure though, that “frustrating glitches” really does justice to Word crashes.

His comment (but not the review or his email to Venture Beat, though perhaps/probably he has mentioned it elsewhere) offers an important clarification: “As it turns out, by the way, my Word crashes were unrelated to Snow Leopard. I had a corrupted Normal.dot file. Once I replaced that, Word became steady as a rock!”

My original characterisation of his review as having “omitted” this information was unfair. Apologies on that score, David.

I was rather astonished recently when I read the Guardian’s notice of the death of Harry Patch, the last surviving British veteran of the First World War.

Astonished, because it contained this memorable – and very moving – disclosure about how he had lived and fought:

He was in the trenches at Ypres between June and September 1917, where he and his gang of five machine gunners made a pact not to kill an enemy soldier if they could help it: they would aim for the legs.

The same report quoted the chief of staff of the British Army, Richard Dannatt, saying: “… we give thanks for his life … for upholding the same values and freedom that we continue to cherish and fight for today.” I cannot held wondering whether Dannatt would really approve of contemporary soldiers undertaking pacts not to kill the enemy. Frankly, I doubt it very much.

Harry’s pact reminded me of an article I read in the New Yorker a few years ago, about the effects of the Iraq war on its veterans. That article, The Price of Valor, by Dan Baum (July 12, 2004), described an extraordinary and appalling turn in modern military history: the point at which a modern army realised that humanity is no asset in combat, and set out to kill it in its troops. Baum tells the story of Lieutenant Colonel S.L.A. “Slam” Marshall, the US military historian who realised through his interviews with US troops who had fought in World War Two, that, “only about fifteen per cent of American riflemen in combat had fired at the enemy”.

One lieutenant colonel complained to Marshall that four days after the desperate struggle on Omaha Beach he couldn’t get one man in twenty-five to voluntarily fire his rifle. “I walked up and down the line yelling, ‘God damn it! Start shooting!’ But it did little good.” These men weren’t cowards. They would hold their positions and willingly perform such tasks as delivering ammunition to machine guns. They simply couldn’t bring themselves to aim a rifle at another human being—even an armed foe—and pull the trigger. “Fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual,” Marshall wrote. “At the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.”

Lieutenant Colonel S.L.A. "Slam" Marshall - a name that should be far more notorious

The US Army immediately adopted revised training techniques, intended to stop its men from seeing the enemy as human beings.

Within months, Army units were receiving a “Revised Program of Instruction,” which instituted many of Marshall’s doctrines. It was no longer sufficient to teach a man to shoot a target; the Army must also condition him to kill, and the way to do it, paradoxically, was to play down the fact that shooting equals killing. “We need to free the rifleman’s mind with respect to the nature of targets,” Marshall wrote. A soldier who has learned to squeeze off careful rounds at a target will take the time, in combat, to consider the humanity of the man he is about to shoot. Along with conventional marksmanship, soldiers now acquired the skill of “massing fire” against riverbanks, trees, hillcrests, and other places where enemy soldiers might lurk. “The average firer will have less resistance to firing on a house or tree than upon a human being,” Marshall added. Once the Army put his notions into practice, they bore spectacular results. By the time of the Vietnam War, according to internal Army estimates, as many as ninety per cent of soldiers were shooting back.

Which is probably a good part of why we can hardly even imagine modern soldiers swearing a pact like that of Harry Patch. Certainly, I do not believe I have ever met Harry’s likes amongst former South African soldiers who fought in the apartheid state’s wars in Angola and the other Frontline States.