The Wall Street Journal-20080202-The Informed Reader - Insights and Items of Interest From Other Sources

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The Informed Reader / Insights and Items of Interest From Other Sources

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Iran:

U.S. Report Could Spur Nuclear Proliferation

The U.S. government so badly mishandled the findings on Iran's uranium-enrichment program that the world now faces a far greater risk of nuclear-weapons proliferation, the Economist says.

In a cover story some two months after U.S. intelligence services concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003, the British newsweekly says the report undid five years of painstaking diplomacy aimed at keeping the bomb out of Tehran's hands.

Why not applaud what might be an olive branch from Washington toward its longtime adversary? The problem is that the intelligence estimate played down Iran's ability to produce uranium, which the authors call the toughest skill in bomb making. The design and engineering work needed to turn fissile material into weapons, the focus of the National Intelligence Estimate assembled by 16 U.S. agencies, would be relatively easy to hide, and to restart. No one knows how much progress Iran achieved toward building a nuclear warhead before 2003.

Moreover, Iran can't be trusted to use its nuclear program, run by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, toward only peaceful ends, given the country's track record of stonewalling and deception about its nuclear intentions.

The idea that a nuclear-armed Iran wouldn't be the disaster some fear is mistaken, says the Economist. A nuclear Iran might prompt other countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia and Syria, to go nuclear, increasing the odds a weapon will be used.

A military strike against potential nuclear sites likely poses too many security and diplomatic risks. But there is still hope that the U.S. and its allies can salvage the situation, chiefly if the U.S. drops the precondition to negotiations that Iran suspend uranium enrichment. At the same time, Russia and China need to agree to much tougher sanctions against Iran. It isn't clear, as the U.S. and its allies have hoped, that tightening the financial screws will sway ordinary Iranians against the country's nuclear program. But it might be the best option to repair a policy that the authors say is at the point of collapse.

-- The Economist -- Feb. 2

Climate:

Assertion That Global Warming Has Ebbed Is Off Base

Global warming hasn't stopped, as a prominent science writer claimed recently in the New Statesman, a British weekly. In fact, the pace of climate change has accelerated, and saying otherwise misleads readers and gives unnecessary ammunition to conspiracy theorists, writes Mark Lynas, the magazine's environmental correspondent.

Mr. Lynas takes on an article by David Whitehouse published online by the New Statesman in December. Mr. Whitehouse, a former science journalist for the BBC who holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics, said that while carbon emissions are clearly rising, temperatures increases have leveled off since 1998. That suggests the prevailing scientific wisdom about global warming is incorrect, Mr. Whitehouse wrote, a view that prompted a debate on New Statesman's Web site and elsewhere.

That Mr. Whitehouse's article opened the door to climate-change skeptics is unfortunate, says Mr. Lynas, because the analysis was fundamentally flawed. Mr. Whitehouse relied erroneously on year-to- year temperature changes, which can be influenced by other variables, instead of on long-term averages. To calculate climate change by starting with a very warm year -- 1998, in this case -- is a form of scientific cherry-picking, says Mr. Lynas.

There is an overwhelming consensus with the scientific community that the planet is getting hotter as a result of human activities, says Mr. Lynas. Even if the 99% of scientists who support global- warming findings are proved wrong, shifting away from fossil fuels -- which are a finite resource with many other drawbacks -- would hardly be ruinous.

-- New Statesman -- Jan. 15

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