Sunday Roundup - February 23, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at the Iran nuclear talks, Arctic ice, Gaza, soccer in Brazil, video games as treatment for learning disabilities, the Syrian Civil War and the chaos in the Ukraine.


Iran
With the breakdown in the Syrian Civil War talks and with the apparent stalemate in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, it's encouraging to find at least one ray of hope for the troubled Middle East.  As reported in The Guardian Thursday: "Three days of talks between Iran and six world powers in Vienna have ended to 'a good start' as diplomats negotiating for a final nuclear deal, agreed on a mutual framework before they could discuss details in future sessions."  EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who acts as "the convenor of talks on behalf of Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia and the US – the group known as P5+1 – is negotiating directly with Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister."   Ashton said both sides had "agreed to start the technical work and further political discussions as early as March. They would set a timetable over four months to discuss the differences that have so far prevented settlement of the decades-long dispute over Tehran's nuclear programme."



Climate Change
It's been a wild winter in the Northern Hemisphere - drought in California, avalanches in the Rockies, winter storms in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast, massive flooding in the UK.  Anyone out there still unconcerned about global climate change or humankind's role in causing it?  Ryan Koronowski reported Thursday on the ClimateProgress website of a new "record".  In February, Arctic sea ice dipped to "record low levels in February. On the 18th, sea ice covered 5.544 million square miles of the Arctic, while the previous low on that date was in 2006, at 5.548 million square miles."   The sea ice is dwindling even in the almost perpetual darkness of winter "because there is less of its bright whiteness to reflect back sunlight into space. As the ice melts, more of the surface area changes to darker ocean water, which absorbs the sun’s energy, warming the ocean and allowing more ice to melt."  Some researchers are blaming the frequent strong winter storms in the UK on this phenomenon.
(Image of flooding near Tewksbury is from the Daily Mail; copyright by Adam Gray/SWNS.com)



Gaza
Bad as the Palestinian situation is in the West Bank, it's much worse in the Gaza Strip, where Israel, with assistance from Egypt, has maintained a blockade on Gaza's 1.7 million inhabitants since 2007.  Gaza is back in the news in recent weeks.  After the Arab Spring there was some easing of restrictions on the Egyptian side.  Unfortunately,  Egypt closed supply tunnels on its border with Gaza after the Muslim Brotherhood was removed from power.  Earlier this month, far-right members of the Israeli Knesset walked out on a speech by European Parliament President Martin Schulz when he criticized Israel for its blockade of the Gaza Strip and for the Israeli water policy in the Occupied Territories.  On February 12, a dozen human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, called upon the European Union to urge Israel to "immediately, unconditionally and completely...lift the unlawful closure of the Gaza Strip, and demand that all parties comply with their obligations under international law."  Calling Israel’s closure of the Gaza Strip a collective punishment of 1.7 million Palestinians and a "breach of international humanitarian law", the rights organizations noted that the "impact of the closure and the violence on the population’s right to life, health, education, food, water and an adequate standard of living has never been clearer."
(Photo of two Gaza children looking through rubble after an Israeli airstrike is by EPA/Mohammed Saber and appeared in The Telegraph in Nov 2012)


Brazil and Soccer - The Beautiful Language
As we all know, the World Cup is being played in Brazil this year.  In a brilliant article for Roads & Kingdoms' "Far Post" series, sportswriter Jack Lang writes about the unique Brazilian "language" for the sport.  As the World Cup approaches "amid the FIFA-approved images of soccer stars in sun-drenched stadiums, much of what truly defines Brazilian football will be concealed, lost in translation. For while Neymar, Thiago Silva et al represent one aspect of this nation’s continuing clout in the sport, there is another sphere in which it excels. No other nation can match the verve with which Brazil talks and writes about o jogo bonito."  From players' nicknames to sportscasters' commentary to their creative shorthand descriptions of play, the article is a great romp through the language and character of Brazil's soccer culture. 


Your Brain and Video Games
On Tuesday, the Utne Reader reported on an Oxford University study that "indicates that video games may be able to help the 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population who are affected by dyslexia.  UR notes that this is not the first study to point out the benefits of video games. "Past research has shown that playing video games can improve mental reasoning and decision-making skills as well as precision and self-esteem."


Ukraine
The violence in the Ukraine, which has resulted in as  many as 100 deaths over the past week, seems to have ended thanks to a deal to cut the President's powers, revise the Constitution and release an opposition leader.  Mother Jones tries to describe "why Kiev is burning":  "The EuroMaidan protests, which started on November 21 in response to President Viktor Yanukovych's rejection of a European Union trade deal, have been going on for nearly three months....the conflict is fueled by sharp political and ethnic divides. A significant portion of the population wants closer ties to Europe, but Putin has been pressuring Yanukovych's government toward closer economic integration with Russia."

In Brief/Other Links 

For more on the second reason for the Israeli far-right-wing walkout during Martin Schultz' address to the Knesset, see  Haaretz, February 16 "The Israeli 'watergate' scandal: The facts about Palestinian water"


For other soccer culture articles, here's a link to the home page of "The Far Post" series.


Syrian and American diplomats "blamed each other for a lack of progress at peace talks in Geneva aimed at opening a dialogue between Damascus and opposition representatives from the Syrian National Coalition, who are fighting a civil war that activists say has claimed 140,000 lives. The peace talks broke off Saturday (Feb 13), and it’s not clear when, or if, they’ll resume." [Al Jazeera, February 16]

The $60 Trillion Climate Time Bomb

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Quote of the day

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

- Walt Whitman

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Bubbles of methane emerge from sediments below a frozen Alaskan lake.

In an August 2011 post, I mentioned the severe impact on the global warming process from the release of methane trapped in ice and ocean sediment in arctic regions. A temperature increase of a few degrees in the Earth's annual temperature would cause this methane to begin to volatilize and get into the atmosphere. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas and this increased concentration in the atmosphere would further raise temperatures, leading to a runaway effect. There are 400 billion tons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - more than enough to fuel this chain reaction.

In July, the journal Nature published a study of the economic impact of the release of methane from a 50 billion ton reservoir of methane on the East Siberian shelf. The authors, researchers from Cambridge and from Erasmus University, in Rotterdam believe that the "economic impacts of a warming Arctic are being ignored" and they set out to remedy that. Using a sophisticated climate change model called PAGE09, they quantified how methane released from this one reservoir would affect the global economy. Their sobering conclusion: the release of methane would "bring forward by 15–35 years the average date at which the global mean temperature rise exceeds 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels." This methane release would add significantly to the already staggering costs of climate change. It is an economic time bomb. 

The 2 degree figure is the estimated maximum global temperature rise above which the Earth would experience devastating climate effects such as crop failure and melting glaciers.   Now for the really bad news..."[T]he International Energy Agency warned [in June] that the world is on course for a rise of 3.6 to 5.3 degrees Celsius citing record high global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions last year." [Reuters/Huffington Post]

The authors of the Nature article "calculate that the costs of a melting Arctic will be huge, because the region is pivotal to the functioning of Earth systems such as oceans and the climate. The release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia, alone comes with an average global price tag of $60 trillion in the absence of mitigating action — a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012 (about $70 trillion). The total cost of Arctic change will be much higher."

The researchers also looked at a "low emissions" case where mitigation steps were taken to keep the global mean temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. The results of the low emissions case are somewhat better but would still cause a global economic impact of $37 trillion.

"Much of the cost will be borne by developing countries, which will face extreme weather, poorer health and lower agricultural production as Arctic warming affects climate. All nations will be affected, not just those in the far north, and all should be concerned about changes occurring in this region...Mid-latitude economies such as those in Europe and the United States could be threatened, for example, by a suggested link between sea-ice retreat and the strength and position of the jet stream8, bringing extreme winter and spring weather. Unusual positioning of the jet stream over the Atlantic is thought to have caused this year's protracted cold spell in Europe."

The authors conclude that it may be too late to prevent this methane release and recommend that responsible bodies such as the World Economic Forum "should...encourage innovative adaptation and mitigation plans. It will be difficult — perhaps impossible — to avoid large methane releases in the East Siberian Sea without major reductions in global emissions of CO2."

Other Stuff

The methane trapped in the sea in the form of methane hydrates represents a huge potential energy source. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 trillion cubic feet out there. "To put that in perspective, that is an amount equal to, or greater than the total amount of all other fossil fuels on the planet. Estimates vary, but even the conservative ones say there is more than twice as much methane hydrate as there is natural gas." [Triple Pundit Website]

The Atlantic's May 2013 cover story was "We Will Never Run Out of Oil". Author Charles C. Mann describes the efforts of the Japanese to commercialize the extraction process. With little in the way of coal and oil reserves, the Japanese are in the forefront of this effort that "could free not just Japan but much of the world from the dependence on Middle Eastern oil that has bedeviled politiican's since Churchill's day."

Clive Cussler's adventure novel Fire Ice, published in 2002, has the ocean's methane hydrate formations off the eastern US coast as its focal point. Cussler and co-author Paul Kemprecos spin a thrilling tale of a megalomaniacal plot to set off methane hydrates in the seabed, triggering devastating earthquakes and tidal waves.

[Photo Credit: Josh Haner/The New York Times/Redux/Eyevine - from July 24 Nature article]