The.Economist.2007-02-10 (966424), страница 45
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It will probably be uncontroversial because the few remaining climatechange sceptics prepared to speak out against the consensus argue not so much about the climate science as aboutits consequences. Those arguments will take place mostly around the IPCC's two follow-up reports, to be publishedlater this year, on the impact of climate change and on what to do about it.Part of the report's job is to consider studies of the speed of change so far.Warming seems to be accelerating somewhat. Eleven out of the dozen years from1995-2006 were among the 12 hottest years since 1850, when temperatures werefirst widely recorded. So the estimate for the average increase in globaltemperature for the past century, which the third assessment report put at 0.6°C,has now risen to 0.74°C.AFPThe sea level, which rose on average by 1.8mm a year from 1961 to 2003, wentup by an average of 3.1mm a year between 1993 and 2003.
The numbers are stillsmall, but the shape of the curve is worrying. And because the deadline forscientific papers to be included in the IPCC's report was some time ago, itsdeliberations have excluded some alarming recent studies on the acceleration ofglacier-melting in Greenland.Some trends now seem clear. North and South America and northern Europe aregetting wetter; the Mediterranean and southern Africa drier. Westerly winds havestrengthened since the 1960s. Droughts have grown more intense and longer sincethe 1970s. Heavy rainfall, and thus flooding, has increased.
Arctic summertime seaice is decreasing by just over 7% a decade.In some areas where change might be expected, however, nothing much seems tobe happening. Antarctic sea ice, for instance, does not seem to be shrinking,Global warming's footprintsprobably because increased melting is balanced by more snow.The other part of the report's job is to make predictions about what will happen to the climate. In this, it illustrates acurious aspect of the science of climate change. Studying the climate reveals new, little-understood, mechanisms: astemperatures warm, they set off feedback effects that may increase, or decrease, warming.
So, as understandinggrows, predictions may become less, rather than more, certain. Thus the IPCC's range of predictions of the rise inthe temperature by 2100 has increased from 1.4-5.8°C in the 2001 report to 1.1-6.4°C in this report.That the IPCC should end up with a range that vast is not surprising given the climate's complexity. But it does leaveplenty of scope for argument about whether it is worth trying to do anything about climate change.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.About sponsorshipThe Richard Casement internshipFeb 8th 2007From The Economist print editionWe invite applications for the 2007 Richard Casement internship.
This is for a would-be journalist to spendthree months of the summer working on the newspaper in London, writing about science and technology. Ouraim is more to discover writing talent in a science student or scientist than scientific aptitude in a buddingjournalist. Applicants should write a letter introducing themselves, along with an original article of about 600words that they think would be suitable for publication in the Science and technology section. They should beprepared to come for an interview in London or New York, at their own expense, but a small stipend will bepaid to the successful candidate.
Applications must reach us by February 22nd. They should be sent by e-mailto casement2007@economist.comCopyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.About sponsorshipA critic of IslamDark secretsFeb 8th 2007From The Economist print editionAyaan Hirsi Ali blames Islam for the miseries of the Muslim world. Her new autobiographyshows that life is too complex for thatInfidelBy Ayaan Hirsi AliFree Press; 368 pages;$26 and £12.99Buy it atAmazon.comAmazon.co.ukEyevineSAY what you will about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she fascinates. The Dutch-Somali politician, who has lived underarmed guard ever since a fatwa was issued against her in 2004, is a chameleon of a woman.
Just 11years after she arrived in the Netherlands from Africa, she rode into parliament on a wave of antiimmigrant sentiment, only to leave again last year, this time for America, after an uproar over lies shehad told to obtain asylum.Even the title of her new autobiography reflects her talent for reinvention. In the Netherlands, where MsHirsi Ali got her start campaigning against the oppression of Muslim women, the book has been publishedunder the title “My Freedom”.
But in Britain and in America, where she now has a fellowship at theconservative American Enterprise Institute, it is called “Infidel”. In it, she recounts how she and herfamily made the cultural odyssey from nomadic to urban life in Africa and how she eventually made thejump to Europe and international celebrity as the world's most famous critic of Islam.Read as a modern coming-of-age story set in Africa, the book has a certain charm. Read as a key to thethinking of a woman who aspires to be the Muslim Voltaire, it is more problematic.
The facts as Ms HirsiAli tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with hertendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam.Ms Hirsi Ali's father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was one of the first Somalis to study overseas in Italy andAmerica.
He met his future wife, Asha, when she signed up for a literacy class he taught during Somalia'sspringtime of independence in the 1960s. The family's troubles began in 1969, the year Ms Hirsi Ali wasborn. That was also the year that Mohammed Siad Barre, a Somali army commander, seized power in amilitary coup. Hirsi Magan was descended from the traditional rulers of the Darod, Somalia's secondbiggest clan.
Siad Barre, who hailed from a lesser Darod family, feared and resented Ms Hirsi Ali'sfather's family, she says. In 1972, Siad Barre had Hirsi Magan put in prison from which he escaped threeyears later and fled the country. Not until 1978 was the family reunited with him.As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali's mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin's cage” thatthe author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herselfto Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman. Despite her adventurous spirit, inYemen and later in the Gulf she found herself drawn to the stern Wahhabi version of Islam that wouldlater clash with the more relaxed interpretation of Islam favoured by Ms Hirsi Ali's father and many otherSomalis.
She and Hirsi Magan fell out not long after the family moved to Kenya in 1980. Hirsi Magan leftto join a group of Somali opposition politicians in exile in Ethiopia and did not return to his family for tenyears.Ms Hirsi Ali says her mother had no idea how to raise her children in a foreign city. She frequently beatAyaan and her sister, Haweya. Although they and their brother, Mahad, attended some of Nairobi's bestschools, Haweya and Mahad dropped out early on.
Ms Hirsi Ali herself meanwhile fell under the sway ofthe Muslim Brotherhood.Some of the best passages in the book concern this part of her life. As a teenager, Ms Hirsi Ali chose towear the all-encompassing black Arab veil, which was unusual in cosmopolitan Nairobi. “Weirdly, it mademe feel like an individual.
It sent out a message of superiority,” she writes. Even as she wore it, Ms HirsiAli was drawn in other directions. She read English novels and flirted with a boy. Young immigrants ofany religion growing up with traditional parents in a modern society will recognise her confusion: “I wasliving on several levels in my brain. There was kissing Kennedy; there was clan honour; and there wasSister Aziza and God.”Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seekasylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and herage, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia's civil war. (Infact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.) She has since justified thoselies by saying that she feared another kind of persecution: the vengeance of her clan after she ran awayfrom an arranged marriage.However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from amarriage, her life was in no danger.
The subsequent uproar nearly cost Ms Hirsi Ali her Dutch citizenship,which may be the reason why she is careful here to re-state how much she feared her family when shefirst arrived in the Netherlands. But the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up toget out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; howrelatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceablyagreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor willshe be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes moretroubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelongvictim of fanatical Muslims.Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya's sojourn in the Netherlands.
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