Energy Probe

Financial Post

Israel’s back is against the wall. To the south it faces Iran-backed Gaza, a terrorist state dedicated to Israel’s destruction. To the north lies Iran-backed Lebanese territory, equally bent on Israel’s destruction. About 1000 kilometres to the east lies Iran, itself, which will soon have a nuclear bomb and the delivery system needed to detonate it 600 metres above Tel Aviv – the height at which an exploding nuclear bomb best incinerates a populace.

And, for the first time in a generation, Israel is no longer confident that it has a reliable ally in the U.S.

The threat that weighs on Israelis is palpable. In Iran, where some 6000 centrifuges continually churn out bomb material, the countdown to the creation of a nuclear bomb nears its end. Many Israeli analysts believe the countdown will end mere months from now; few Israeli analysts disbelieve Iran’s pledge to eradicate Israel. While those centrifuges have spun inexorably, year after year bringing Israel closer to the brink, the EU and the U.S. have urged Israel to show restraint. "Don’t take out Iran’s nuclear weapons program the way you did Saddam Hussein’s," they have urged, arguing that doing so could lead Iran to unleash terrorist attacks on Western targets and to block oil shipments to the West from the Middle East. Instead, the EU and the U.S. promised to employ tough economic sanctions against Iran to bring it to the negotiating table.
Israel has never had any illusions about the EU — the Europeans enjoy booming trade with Iran at the same time they warn of sanctions – but it did bank on the U.S. coming to its rescue, so much so that it eschewed early opportunities to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, when the task would have been relatively easy.

Now, Israeli hopes are shattered. Even before the Obama administration came to power, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates announced his opposition to any strike against Iran. With the advent of the Obama administration, Israel now finds itself cast as the bad guy and made a diplomatic target by the U.S.

If not for Israel’s intransigence in returning land to the Palestinians, the Obama Administration recently suggested, the Arab world would be pressuring Iran to abandon nuclear weapons. Leaked administration reports indicate that the U.S. will play hardball with Israel, unilaterally imposing on Israel a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Secretary Gates, whom Obama kept in his administration, remains adamantly opposed to an Israeli military strike. And to provide a foretaste of the ratcheting up of pressure to come, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, in a presentation at a U.N. meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty earlier this month, stated that the U.S. had as a fundamental objective "universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea."

This identification of Israel as a nuclear weapons state shook Israel. For one thing, following a 1969 agreement between Golda Meir and Richard Nixon, it had been U.S. policy not to press Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Neither had the U.S. since then acknowledged Israel’s nuclear program, and certainly not in the same company as North Korea and Pakistan. Perhaps most troubling of all, this change of U.S. policy toward Israel was done without consultation or even advance notice – Israel learned of it in the press.
On Monday in Washington, an Israeli prime minister will meet with a U.S. president less as the strongest of allies, as in such meetings in past decades, than as antagonists. President Obama will press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make concessions that, in Israel’s view, threaten its very existence. For his part, Netanyahu will press Obama to agree that negotiations with the Iranians need to end on a date certain, before the Iranians complete their countdown to a bomb.

A year or two ago, Israel held out hope that, if an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities proved necessary, the U.S. would spearhead the attack. Today, although the U.S. Congress and the U.S. public support Israel, the most that Israelis dare hope for is that the U.S. administration will provide passive assistance, by allowing Israeli jets to fly over Iraq for their attack on Iran. What Israelis dread the most is the possibility that the permission won’t be forthcoming and the U.S. military will shoot Israeli jets out of the skies.
Netanyahu now has few options. He knows that there is no time for negotiations with Iran to succeed, not even in theory, particularly if Obama doesn’t expect those negotiations to bear fruit until after the Israelis and Palestinians arrive at some understanding. Obama’s linkage of the two issues can only be seen as providing Obama with an explanation down the road for why engaging the Iranians failed to persuade them to abandon a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu also knows that the Obama administration’s end game – to have Israel and everyone else learn to live with a nuclear Iran – would be untenable. Iran is already the chief supplier of arms to the region’s terrorists. What would the region be like once Iran is producing nuclear weapons at its ultimate expected capacity of 25 to 30 per year? How could any of Israel’s neighbours feel secure enough then to dare make peace with Israel?

Finally, Netanyahu knows that the Iranian bomb will almost surely be completed on Obama’s watch, offering no prospect that a sympathetic U.S. president might help Israel stop Iran’s countdown – virtually all Israeli estimates show Iran having the bomb sometime between 2009 and 2012.
The upshot: Netanyahu has nothing to gain by delaying an attack. With delay off the table, Netanyahu has but two military choices.
He can attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, a high-risk venture likely to achieve only limited success, and at high cost to Israel’s air force. Or he can destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure, a low-risk military operation that would, in effect, impose the harsh sanctions on Iran that the West has long promised.

Either way, the West is likely to face Iranian retaliation and the major disruption to world oil supplies that it has long dreaded.
Lawrence Solomon is a columnist with Financial Post. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Click to access 090316_israelistrikeiran.pdf

According to scientists at the IARC-JAXA International Arctic Research Center in cooperation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (IARC-JAXA) the arctic sea ice extent for May 1st is at its highest level in more than six years.

For those readers who don’t know what the arctic sea ice extent is (and really, who would), it’s the area of sea ice covering the ocean where sea-ice concentration (SIC) exceeds 15%. More simply, sea ice extent is frozen ocean water.

We’ve made a chart analyzing the number of square kilometers of sea ice extent on May 1st going back to 2003.

And here’s a graph for September 1st (obviously there’s not data for 2009, but there is for 2002).   
Insert Graph:

Here’s the IARC-JAXA’s graph for the entire year:

For global warming enthusiasts the numbers may be a bit off-putting, as they might be evidence that the arctic is not in irreversible decline. But the numbers are also evidence that statistics concerning climate change can be very misleading. Are this year’s number’s an aberration, due to an exceptionally cold winter? Possibly. Furthermore, looking at the statistics for Septemeber 1st, it appears as if acrtic sea ice extent IS declining. Which statistic is more telling?

Arctic ice is expanding and it is contracting — making reports of either outcome, in isolation, both accurate and misleading.

Global warming may save more lives than it costs, its effect on climate-sensitive diseases in the U.S. may be minimal, and global warming science itself is uncertain.
This assessment appears in an internal White House memo entitled "Deliberative-Attorney Client Privilege," which was compiled from the opinions of 12 federal agencies and departments that had concerns with a proposed EPA finding in April that greenhouse gases pose dangers to public health and welfare. 

The thrust of the memo was to demonstrate the EPA was coming to conclusions that were unsubstantiated and sometimes misinformed, and to encourage the EPA to address many deficiencies in its finding. The deficiencies include:

• "The finding rests heavily on the precautionary principle, but the amount of acknowledged lack of understanding about basic facts surrounding GHGs seem to stretch the precautionary principle to providing for regulation in the face of unprecedented uncertainty."
• the EPA Administrator should explain how she "weighed the scientific evidence related to each impact or how/whether she gave more or less weight to particular impacts for either the public health or the welfare finding and how she weighed uncertainty in her deliberations."
• "The Finding should also acknowledge that EPA has not undertaken a systematic risk analysis or cost-benefit analysis."
• " there is a concern that EPA is making a finding based on … ‘harm’ from substances that have no demonstrated direct health effects, such as respiratory or toxic effects"
• "there should be a consideration of the fertilizing effect of CO2, which may overwhelm the negative impact of additional hot days on agricultural yields in some regions of the US. In others regions, the net effect is likely to be negative.
In addition, the memo indicated that the EPA’s Finding could lead to needless and costly regulation.

Click here to read the memo.

FP Comment

President Obama’s proposal for a cap and trade system to head off global warming would be "monstrously stupid," according to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. CEO Charlie Munger, in an interview with CNBC. "It would be a huge shock to the economy and it wouldn’t accomplish very much given the fact that the vast majority of the pollution, or rather the CO2, is coming from a place like China.  And so I think it would be almost demented if we would rush into cap and trade right now in the middle of this economic crisis."
Munger’s comments are striking given the friendship that his boss, Warren Buffet, has with Obama.

While Munger does not rule out that global warming exists, he does dismiss concerns that it could lead to catastrophe. If the sea level rises, the resulting dislocations would simply require capital investment in new infrastructure, he told a 2007 investor meeting. "I don’t think it’s an utter calamity for mankind though. You’d have to be a pot-smoking journalism student to think that."

Ice in the Arctic is often twice as thick as expected, report surprised scientists who returned last week from a major scientific expedition., The scientists – a 20-member contingent from Canada, the U.S., Germany, and Italy – spent one month exploring the North Pole as well as never-before measured regions of the Arctic. Among their findings: Rather than finding newly formed ice to be two metres thick, "we measured ice thickness up to four metres," stated a spokesperson for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research of the Helmholtz Association, Germany’s largest scientific organization.

The Alfred Wegener Institute is one of the six research organizations involved in the month-long expedition, called Pan-Arctic Measurements and Arctic Climate Model Inter Comparison Project. The other five include three from Canada (Environment Canada, University of Alberta, York University) one from the U.S. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and one from Italy (Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate.

The path-breaking project broke new ground by employing the Polar 5 (see photo, left), a fixed-wing aircraft, rather than a helicopter with its more limited range. The Polar 5 not only landed in the Arctic ice, it towed a device called EM-Bird on an 80 metre-long rope 20 metres above the ice surface. The EM-Bird conducts electromagnetic (EM) induction sounding for ice thickness measurements.

The thickest ice that the expedition found was at Ellesmere Iceland, where thicknesses often exceeded 15 metres.

More images,

The EM-Bird (image credit: Alfred Wegener Institute)

Polar 5 towing a sonde for sea ice thickness measurements – the so called EM-Bird – on a test flight. (image credit: Christian Haas, University of Alberta / Alfred Wegener Institute)

Flight route of Polar 5 during the campagne PAM-ARCMIP in the Arctic. (image credit: Robert Stone, NOAA, Boulder / Alfred Wegener Institute)