October 2009 Archives

Climate change is the cause of our time but it is often hard to convince a whole lot of people including many politicians, business people and even ordinary citizens of the urgency of responding proactively to the overheating of the planet.

So along comes a significant announcement of an independent task force established by the World Meteorological Organization to explore how scientists can project more accurate readings of impending storms, hurricanes, typhoons, drought and floods caused by climate change.

The WMO will conduct a year of consultations to decide how to implement its ambitious "global framework for climate services." A plan for action is anticipated at the next WMO congress in 2011.

Canadian environmental journalist Stephen Leahy, who covered the September WMO conference in Geneva for Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), makes the point that scientists are hobbled by the fact that their projections for dire events -- like rising sea levels, drowned island nations, melting of glaciers and severe droughts that potentially could kill agriculture in some regions -- are too far off in the future.

Way beyond the life-times of the current decision makers who are baby-boomers.

"One of the things that I have been asking climate scientists for years is nobody cares 60 years from now what is it going to be like in central Canada. [The general public] want to know what it's going to be like in five years time 'in my backyard,'" Leahy says.

The more chaotic weather conditions stemming from the overheating in atmosphere has made risk projections for serious rain or severe storms in the short-term much more difficult. Farmers, meteorologists and indigenous peoples cannot rely anymore on their knowledge of traditional weather patterns.

At the same time the tools for forecasting has improved, Leahy says.

He points to new technology and improved climate science which has already shortened the time it takes to prepare for drought or floods to avoid the more serious consequences to infrastructure and lives in local communities.

What the WMO envisages are on demand climate services that might for instance help farmers determine what to plant and where, based on three to five year projections of impending droughts or assist coastal communities facing rising sea levels in advance.

It would especially be an aid for impoverished communities in developing countries that lack access to weather and climate observation instruments.

What makes a normally skeptical journalist like Leahy hopeful is that the new climate change prediction tool initiative has engaged leading US and European scientists.

He points for instance to the presence of Jane Lubchenko, a noted ecologist, currently an administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and head of Barack Obama's US delegation at the WMO conference.

Much is apparently still on the table including the cost of developing the on- demand climate services, where the money is going to come from and how the services will be provided, reports Leahy.

Key will be the development of new sophisticated super computer modeling tools as the IT underpinning the research of the International Panel of Climate Change is not powerful enough for short-term one year projections.

"The [panel's computing modeling] is too broad and coarse in the sense that they look at giant readings. They cannot tell you what things will be like in southern Ontario. They can tell you what it is going to be like in eastern Canada or what the projections are to 2050, lets say."

The IPCC tends to focus on trends in the range of 50 to 100 years, which is just too far off, he explains.

Another journalist and editor, Olive Heffernan wrote recently in the British science journal Nature (www.nature.com/climate), that there are "a host of scientific and political hurdles" regarding the collection and sharing of climate data among the participating 150 countries in the WMO.

In an interview, she stated that while the UK government freely provides its own climate data to legitimate scientists, it might baulk at offering packages of information to insurance companies or planners. One way around this is to allow "data of convenience" that is tailored for specific purposes for commercialization; while fundamental information is made freely available, adds Heffernan, quoting one expert in the field.

Photo by Kevin Dooley. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

Much of what law enforcement agencies use in surveillance technology can be traced to the U.S. military.

Furthermore, the most interesting innovation within the military has come from developments in visualization software, sensors, cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles, not in the latest in weaponry, argues University of Alberta criminologist and surveillance expert Kevin Haggerty.
"The American military is not just about the use of force. They have tremendous informational capacity, though they have tremendous use of force capacity. But since the Revolution in Military Affairs [i.e. the future of warfare under new technologies], warfare has increasingly become informational activity."

Haggerty is skeptical about the utility of such military surveillance items as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in 24/7-style policing where the areas of concern range from gang wars and missing kids to the theft of valuable personal possessions.

"There is a clearer mandate [within the military] about what you are trying to do. In the military you have ideally an end point; whereas policing is a very amorphous activity."
But that hasn't stopped the producers of the new visualization software from seeking domestic applications for their products, adds Haggerty.

"The logic of how you manage populations and secure spaces in a military context, particularly urban spaces, leads into the logic of how you secure and manage population and spaces in a domestic policing context."

Urban geographer Stephen Graham, a professor at Durham University in the UK, has written about the application of U.S. warfare strategies in the cities of the global south.

Photo: Los Angeles Sheriff's Dept. has worked with a defense contractor, Ocatron, to develop a specialized UAV for police work. Here's one test flight.

Author of the forthcoming Cities under Siege: the New Military Urbanism, he nails down in his previous writings the notion of the Revolution in Military Affairs within U.S. military planning. Here, the stress is on the reliance on omnipresent surveillance via sensors and "situational awareness," to inflict devastating and targeted aerial attacks on a perceived enemy. "Nobody in the city moves without the full and complete knowledge of the mobile tactical center."
As Graham notes, the U.S. military strategists take little account of the specificity of the geographical space when "full spectrum dominance" is the priority.

Yet, for all of the deep thinking in the Pentagon, the US military experienced great difficulty in fully securing all of Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Most journalists and experts agree that ethnic cleansing by the majority Shia forces against the minority Sunni in the sprawling city of Baghdad, not George W. Bush's military surge, ultimately led to a downscaling of local urban battles and attacks.

Nevertheless, the implementation of CCTV systems to blanket cities like London or Chicago comes directly out of the US military's philosophy of "combat zones that see [CTS]."
A project of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and launched at the start of the Iraq insurgency against the Americans in 2003, CTS facilitates the mass tracking of an urban setting and population through video cameras and sensing devices down to the minutest detail possible, says Graham.

Another piece of military planner lingo, HURT (Heterogeneous Urban Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition Team) entails the use of remote control and UAV technology to inflict considerable physical harm against insurgents without resulting in casualties of U.S. soldiers and pilots - the result of which can kill support for the war effort back home.

Graham describes one system, labeled "video flashlight," which uses software to paint in simulations of the details of occupied cities based on data fed by CTS like CCTV systems and other radars and sensors. The result is three dimensional models of subject cities which allow viewers "to fly" through them and explore the real-time tracks of known or suspected targets.

"Disturbingly, such fantasies of continuous, automated and robotized urban targeting and killing are far from the realms of sci-fi fantasy. Rather, as with the CTS and HURT programs, they are fuelling very real multimillion dollar research and weapons development programmes aimed at developing ground and aerial vehicles, which not only navigate and move robotically, but also select and destroy targets without 'humans in the loop' based on algorithmically driven 'decisions'."

Graham, a generally cool-headed academic in his writing, can't help but place these U.S. cyberpunk military theories of robotic killing machines in a racial and imperialistic context.
"Theorists of surveillance will also need to be mindful that these processes are being further fuelled by proliferating cultures of fear, and the widespread demonization of Arab and global south urbanites and urban places, generated and perpetuated by both 'war on terror' discourses and the Orientalized products of Western entertainment industries novels, video games, films."

The cross-over to the streets of the global north is not surprising, Graham adds, "given the growing privatization of western militaries, law enforcement and security industries and the efforts by a small number of military-security 'prison-industrial complex' conglomerates to colonize both 'homeland' and 'war zone battle spaces' equally."

Graham, S. Surveillance, urbanization, and the US "Revolution in Military Affairs". In: Lyon, L. Theorizing Surveillance: The panopticon and beyond. Willon Publishing; 2008:247-268.