The Sun is up to all sorts of interesting things this week, with unusually high sunspot activity leading to a series of solar flares (or coronal mass ejections, CMEs, in the jargon). One was launched on Sunday night and arrived here only 34 hours later, a good deal faster than the usual average of 2-3 days. That led to some pretty stunning aurora borealis activity; the shot below was taken in Tromsø in Norway (h/t Bjørn Jørgensen, via the excellent SpaceWeather.com).
As it turns out, though, Sunday’s solar flare was just a warm-up. Another even larger one – scoring 9 on a strength scale that runs to 10 – set off towards us at about 4am GMT yesterday, which means it will be arriving in about 4 hours’ time (2pm GMT on 24 January). The image below is from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory; see also this movie from SOHO, NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
Does this mean we’re in for a Carrington Event? Doesn’t look like it - 95% of the CME is going to miss us, so we’ll only catch the edge. Had it hit us square on, we’d be looking at very substantial disruption to internet, GPS and telecoms. But if you live in a northern latitude and you have a clear evening, then certainly worth keeping an eye on the sky – could be pretty spectacular.
January 24, 2012 at 10:53 am | More on Off topic | Comments Off 
From XKCD, via Tim Harford.
January 23, 2012 at 9:38 am | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Off topic | Comments Off Later today in New York, a 2 day meeting on the idea of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ will begin, bringing together numerous countries’ Permanent Representatives to the United Nations plus a whole host of environment and development experts from capitals. It’s going to be an interesting meeting.
The idea of ‘SDGs’, after all, has acquired a lot of political momentum in recent months. Partly that’s because they’re seen as a potential outcome from this summer’s Rio+20 sustainable development conference – at a point when very few concrete outcomes from Rio appear to be in prospect (see the ‘zero draft outcome document’ pdf that was published earlier this month). The SDGs agenda is also topical given that the Millennium Development Goals are due to hit their 2015 deadline pretty soon, raising the question of what should come after them. (See Claire’s excellent recent publications, like this and this, on that for a full briefing on where things stand on that front.)
But the funny thing is that there’s remarkably little clarity on what SDGs would cover, or how they’d work. Would they just run from now to 2015, alongside the existing MDGs, and cover a few ‘gaps’ that were missed out in the MDGs – like access to energy? Or would they in fact take over from the MDGs after 2015, thus becoming the new organising framework for global development policy? These are big questions – and at a time, of course, when multilateralism has really been struggling to make much running not just on Rio preparations, but also on climate, trade, and any number of other key issue areas.
Against this backdrop, David and I have just published a short CIC briefing paper (pdf) that discusses where we are on the SDGs agenda – and how it might usefully pan out from here. In a nutshell, our argument is that policymakers should think twice before regarding SDGs as an “easy win” from Rio. We argue that this is a very complex and potentially very contentious area of policy – and that policymakers should play a long game at this stage rather than going for quick wins that could all too easily backfire. Accordingly, we think that discussion of SDGs at Rio should go no further than discussion of broad principles and raising the level of ambition. A lot more shared awareness – not just between policymakers, but also with publics, private sector, media, civil society and so on – is needed before the discussion about specifics gets underway in earnest.
January 23, 2012 at 9:08 am | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system | 1 Comment Recent months have seen increasing interest in the idea that Rio+20 could be the launch pad for a new set of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs). But what would SDGs cover, what would a process to define and then implement them look like, and what would some of the key political challenges be? This short briefing by Alex Evans and David Steven sets out a short summary of current thinking the issue, followed by thoughts about the way forward. (January 2012)
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January 20, 2012 at 6:13 pm | More on Articles and Publications, Reports | Comments Off 
OK, OK, that’s not quite what Chatham House are saying in their new report Treasure Mapped: Using Satellite Imagery to Track the Developmental Effects of Somali Piracy. But check out some of what the report does say:
The data analysis indicates pirate incomes have widespread and significant positive impacts on the Somali economy. Although only a fraction of ransoms is exchanged into Somali shillings, the appreciation of the Somali shilling resulting from the injection of US dollars benefits people relying on imported food staples such as rice. There are clear trickle-down effects for casual labourers and pastoralists because of higher cattle prices.
Or this:
Piracy has created employment and considerable multiplier effects in the Puntland economy, even if a significant proportion of the proceeds is invested in foreign goods or channelled to foreign financiers. The distribution of ransoms follows traditional patterns in Somalia, involving considerable redistribution and investment in urban centres rather than coastal villages.
But here’s the real punchline:
The total cost of piracy off the Horn of Africa (including the counter-piracy measures) was estimated to be in the region of US$7–12 billion for 2010, while ransoms were said to be in the region of US$250 million. Even if Somali communities received all of the ransom money, replacing this source of income (for example with a combination of a foreign-funded security forces and development aid) would be considerably cheaper than continuing with the status quo.
A negotiated solution to the piracy problem should aim to exploit local disappointment among coastal communities regarding the economic benefits from piracy and offer them an alternative that brings them far greater benefits than hosting pirates does. A military crack-down on the other hand would deprive one of the world’s poorest nations of an important source of income and aggravate poverty.
January 17, 2012 at 10:53 am | More on Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development | 1 Comment 
Equal parts diplomat and advocate, civil servant and CEO, the Secretary-General is a symbol of United Nations ideals and a spokesman for the interests of the world’s peoples, in particular the poor and vulnerable among them. The current Secretary-General, and the seventh occupant of the post, is Mr. Kofi A. Annan of Ghana, who took office on 1 January 1997.
That’s an excerpt from, er, the UN’s website.
January 16, 2012 at 1:13 pm | More on Global system | Comments Off 
As everyone starts to freak out about what it would mean for the UK – with its high gas import dependency on Qatar and low gas storage capacity – if Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, Chatham House’s Paul Stevens has a useful corrective in this morning’s FT. There are two key reasons why Iran is unlikely to try to block the Straits, he argues:
The first reason to believe Iran might stop short of closing the strait is simply because such a move would fail. Cutting off Gulf oil supplies represents an existential threat to the west that it would have to use force to counter. The response, if transit were seriously threatened, would rapidly degenerate into a shooting war between Iran and the US supported by many of its allies. While oil prices might reach unprecedented new levels, the US Navy would quickly restore access.
The second reason is that a serious threat to close Hormuz is arguably the principal Iranian deterrent against a military attack by the US or Israel on its nuclear facilities. So to use it in response to an EU oil embargo would be using that proverbial sledgehammer to crack a pistachio nut.
And in any case, he goes on, “Iran does have other options to retaliate. It could intensify pressure on oil prices by contributing to the instability in Iraq that has followed the US troop withdrawal as the Shia ruling clique has begun a de facto war of attrition against the Sunnis.”
All this said, Stevens is also heavily sceptical about whether the EU’s embargo on Iran will actually work:
History is littered with failed oil embargoes, ranging from Cuba, Rhodesia and South Africa to the embargo against Iraq after 1990.It is also worth highlighting that an EU oil embargo would greatly strengthen the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad at a time when it is under considerable pressure, especially with the parliamentary elections looming in March. Unemployment remains high, as does inflation, which has been greatly aggravated by the removal of many price subsidies in the past twelve months. Also in the past few weeks, the value of the Iranian rial against the dollar has fallen dramatically.
January 16, 2012 at 9:03 am | More on Conflict and security, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa | 1 Comment Key point:
Over the last few decades the religious Right has dominated the mainstream discussion around “morals and values” in the United States. Claiming to be the moral compass for the country, they have defined a radically conservative platform for issues including abortion, welfare, LGBTQ rights and more. The Left, for the most part, has let this happen. Rather than leading with our values and vision, progressives have focused on making rational arguments for what is “right.” No matter how skilled our analysis, we have been unable to speak to the complex and holistic experiences of everyday people, to resonate with their need to be a part of something deep in their hearts and spirits. While the Right has organized people around fear, they have been even more powerful when they tapped into and met people’s desire for belonging. The Left has largely ignored these needs, contributing to our ineffectiveness in broad social change.
From Out of the Spiritual Closet: organizers transforming the practice of social justice.
December 20, 2011 at 10:58 am | More on Influence and networks | Comments Off This account of tactical innovation at Occupy Portland is pretty funny:
We occupied the park and set up a few tents and facilities to serve food and coffee. The police soon declared an emergency closure of the park and came out in force, with full riot gear and all the weaponry. The line of riot cops soon forced us out of the park, so someone decided that we ought to march to City Hall. It was about 9 pm on a Saturday night, so City Hall was closed, but we marched there anyway, 800 of us blocking traffic the whole way. Once there, the riot cops once again lined up to disperse the crowd. However, since City Hall was closed and there was no point in staying there anyway, someone had the idea to march down to the area of town where all the clubs were, so we took off marching again. The riot cops were trailing behind us…
After marching for 3-4 hours, we eventually found ourselves a block away from the park that we’d been forced out of, so we took it again. The riot police lined up and prepared to take the park again, but the attempt was called off and the police just left. They realized that they would have to go through the standard military procedure of clearing the park inch by inch, only to have us go back out into the streets and march again while they, one more time, trailed along helplessly- their entourage functioning as a part of the march, creating an even larger disruption to traffic (the marchers covered a city block, the trailing police took up another city block, effectively doubling the size of the obstruction to traffic)…
H/t John Robb.
December 19, 2011 at 9:51 am | More on Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks | Comments Off 
The Economist’s World in 2012 publication captures one of the big uncertainties for next year – and this one’s a straight either / or, they say:
Somebody is going to be proved wrong in 2012 and will lose a lot of money. Either the bullion market or the Treasury bond market is mistaken about the long-term inflationary outlook.
By early September 2011, gold was trading at around $1,900 an ounce, an indication that investors felt inflation was set to soar. Such an outlook would normally be bad news for government-bond markets. But the ten-year Treasury bond was simultaneously yielding less than 2%, an indication that the “bond vigilantes” were far more concerned about deflation than inflation. Although the gold price fell and bond yields rose in October, the underlying contradiction didn’t disappear.
Gold’s been falling since World in 2012 went to press, especially this week, and is currently below $1,600 an ounce – in large part, market watchers say, because of perceptions that the Fed won’t be turning on the QE printing presses (and hence driving inflation up) any time soon. The deflationary side of the argument will presumably get added momentum from the apparent slowdown in emerging economies: Brazil had zero growth in Q3, Indian growth is falling too, and it’s the same story in China - where as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard observes,
It is hard to obtain good data in China, but something is wrong when the country’s Homelink property website can report that new home prices in Beijing fell 35pc in November from the month before. If this is remotely true, the calibrated soft-landing intended by Chinese authorities has gone badly wrong and risks spinning out of control.
The growth of the M2 money supply slumped to 12.7pc in November, the lowest in 10 years. New lending fell 5pc on a month-to-month basis. The central bank has begun to reverse its tightening policy as inflation subsides, cutting the reserve requirement for lenders for the first time since 2008 to ease liquidity strains. The question is whether the People’s Bank can do any better than the US Federal Reserve or Bank of Japan at deflating a credit bubble.
All this, plus Christine Lagarde warning of a 1930s style slump. Are the goldbugs headed for a massive loss?
Maybe – but I still wonder what will happen next year on the QE front. The European Central Bank keeps disappointing market expectations of large scale bond purchases for now, including after last week’s summit; but it may not be able to continue to do so if the Eurozone’s travails worsen dramatically next year. And the same may be true of the US as well, if things worsen there too. Admittedly, as the Economist notes,
[QE] has become controversial [in the US], with Texas’s governor, Rick Perry, a candidate for the Republican nomination for the American presidency, describing the idea as “almost treasonous”. Nor is it clear that previous rounds of QE did much to help the real economy.
But Rick Perry (and indeed the Republicans generally) look less of a threat to Obama now than they did when World in 2012 went to press; and while QE may indeed not have made that much of a difference, there’s also the fact that policymakers have pretty much run out of other ideas for stimulating the economies (I keep thinking of emergency room movie scenes… “Clear!”… BZZZZT…. beeeeeeeep…)
So on balance I’m still with the goldbugs rather than the T-billers, just about. But who the hell really knows anything about the future, anymore…
“As the Declaration of Independence laid the groundwork for the [US] Constitution, so the commission’s report lays the foundation for the constitution of a space-based civilisation.”
“The commission believes it is reasonable to expect to have a human outpost on the moon in 2005 and an outpost on Mars in 2015. To fund the program, the commission suggests establishing the space budget at a constant percentage of GDP.”
The conclusion of a Star Trek fans’ convention? Nope: this is 25 years ago, and the commission in question is the US National Commission on Space, launched by the House of Representatives, and with a membership appointed by the President – including a former head of NASA, legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager (immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s book and film The Right Stuff), and Neil Armstrong. The quotes are from a rather wonderful book published shortly after its report came out, entitled The Overview Effect, which was written by Frank White – a senior associate at Princeton University’s Space Studies Institute, who was heavily involved in the commission’s work.
It’s kind of striking how much more introspective our public discourse has become over the intervening quarter-century. You just couldn’t write stuff like that today and expect to be taken seriously. Now, the shuttle program has been killed off; manned space missions haven’t been outside Earth orbit since the 1970s; and I’d probably be rash to predict that Mars will be settled within my lifetime.
All of which is kind of a shame. For as White chronicles in his book, the real point about space exploration is less the technological wizardry involved than how it changes our perspective and sense of identity. That’s especially true of the astronauts themselves – here for instance is Russell Schweickart, who flew on Apollo 9:
“You identify with Houston and then you identify with Los Angeles and Phoenix and New Orleans. And the next thing you recognize in yourself is that you’re identifying with North Africa – you look forward to that, you anticipate it, and there it is.
“And that whole process of what it is you identify with begins to shift. When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change. You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. There you are – hundreds of people in the Mideast killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of and that you can’t see.
“From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take one in each hand, one from each side of the various conflicts, and say, ‘Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?”
But it’s also true of the rest of us. After all, the images of Earth from space that came back from the Apollo missions probably did more to shape modern attitudes to the environment than any other factor since the second world war. And at a point when we’re failing to get to grips with so many global risks - above all climate change – anything that makes us think of ourselves in more planetary terms is undeniably a Good Thing. Maybe it’s time to get excited about the Final Frontier again.
Me, I favour holding multilateral summits in space. That would really change the G Zero dynamic we’ve seen so much of lately…
Update: there’s a recent interview with Frank White here.
December 12, 2011 at 8:35 pm | More on Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks | 3 Comments From Reuters, this little gem:
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev caused shock and jeers on Wednesday after an obscene insult directed at political opponents appeared on his official Twitter feed.
The Kremlin chief and his more powerful mentor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have been facing growing opposition to their rule by protesters who say parliamentary elections on Sunday were not fair.
The offensive post appeared to have been retweeted on the MedvedevRussia feed at 33 minutes past midnight, according to cached copies of the feed and a notification of the post received by a Reuters reporter.
“It has become clear that if a person writes the expression ‘party of swindlers and thieves’ in their blog then they are a stupid sheep getting f****d in the mouth 
” the post read.
December 12, 2011 at 7:02 pm | More on Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks | Comments Off Some wag was on Twitter earlier this week, observing that if, during the 1980s, the media used to refer to Sinn Fein as “the political wing of the IRA”, then these days we should be referring to Britain’s coalition government as the political wing of the financial services industry.
Sounds like a cheap shot? Then have a look at yesterday’s FT, which has a full page analysis article (£ – or free blog post here) documenting an interesting fact about where the Conservative party gets its funding from:
“In the past decade, a dramatic shift has occurred. Super-rich hedge fund managers have become the biggest single interest group to bankroll the UK’s current main party.”
Wondering what effect this has on policy? Here’s Tim Montgomerie, editor of ConservativeHome.com and the Tory world’s blogger-in-chief:
“The City’s influence is that top Tories spend a lot of time in the company of people to whom the City matters. If the party was reliant on northern industrialists, it would be a different party.”
Or try this observation from “one of the 10 biggest hedge fund donors”:
“There probably aren’t many votes in cutting the 50p top rate of tax – but among those that give significant amounts to the party, it’s a big issue, and that’s probably why it’s a big issue for the party too.”
December 9, 2011 at 8:45 am | More on Influence and networks, UK | 3 Comments That’s what people keep asking former IMF Chief Economist Ken Rogoff, apparently. But, he observes,
It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today’s dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism.
Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it – except sustainability. China’s Darwinian capitalism, with its fierce competition among export firms, a weak social-safety net, and widespread government intervention, is widely touted as the inevitable heir to Western capitalism, if only because of China’s huge size and consistent outsize growth rate. Yet China’s economic system is continually evolving.
Indeed, it is far from clear how far China’s political, economic, and financial structures will continue to transform themselves, and whether China will eventually morph into capitalism’s new exemplar. In any case, China is still encumbered by the usual social, economic, and financial vulnerabilities of a rapidly growing lower-income country.
Perhaps the real point is that, in the broad sweep of history, all current forms of capitalism are ultimately transitional.
So what are the key stresses that may push us on to the next transitional form[s] of capitalism? Five, reckons Rogoff: (1) failing to price public goods properly – like clean air, water or a stable climate; (2) inequality; (3) market failures on medical care; (4) failing to value the wellbeing of future generations, including through resource depletion; and (5) financial crises. Hard to disagree with any of those…
December 6, 2011 at 8:48 am | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system | 3 Comments 
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