Bolivia Withdraws From UN Drug Convention
I never thought I would say this, but Evo Morales is right (this time). The Bolivian president asked the nation’s Congress to pass a law that would take his country out of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The bill already passed the lower chamber of Congress and is likely to be approved by the Senate where Morales enjoys a two-thirds majority.
Bolivia is withdrawing from the UN Convention over the country’s failed efforts to have the coca leaf removed from the list of international illicit drugs. Chewing coca leaf is an ancestral and common practice in Bolivia and neighboring Andean countries. It helps people cope with fatigue and high altitude (I’ve tried it myself during a visit to the province of Jujuy in Argentina). The Bolivian amendment to the UN Convention was defeated after strong opposition from the United States and other developed countries.
This is precisely the kind of “drug control imperialism” that was recently denounced by the groundbreaking report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. It rightly states that the UN (as a result of pressure from the U.S. government in particular), has “worked strenuously over the past 50 years to ensure that all countries adopt the same rigid approach to drug policy –the same laws, and the same tough approach to their enforcement.”
Given the obstinate resistance of Washington to allow even the most timid and sensible changes in international treaties such as declassifying the coca leaf as an illegal substance, one must applaud the decision of the government in La Paz to denounce the UN Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.
Tuesday Links
- Why are we still in Iraq?
- Despite the world’s greatest nation-building efforts, things in Bosnia are still getting worse.
- Vouchers offer parents more choice in education than they currently have, but education tax credits are still better at helping the poor.
- Although federal courts have already held parts of current National Security Letter statutes unconstitutional, we still have a way to go in restoring civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.
- While Osama bin Laden has been dispatched, we still have many issues to navigate in our national security strategy. Please join us on Facebook at 12:30 p.m. Eastern today, where Cato legal policy analyst David Rittgers, who served three tours in Afghanistan with Army Special Forces, receiving an Army Commendation Medal with “V” Device for valorous action and two Bronze Star Medals, will give a LIVE video update on the future of national security policy and strategy. Submit your questions for him here.
Monday Links
- It is false to assume that GM’s earnings report means the auto bailout was a success.
- It is false that, among other things, failing to raise the debt limit means defaulting on our obligations.
- It is false that Osama bin Laden’s death means torture is a good idea.
- It is false that international institutions can deliver what they say they can deliver.
- It is false that oil speculators are to blame for fluctuating oil prices:
The Current Wisdom: The Short-Term Climate Trend Is Not Your Friend
The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
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It seems like everyone, from exalted climate scientists to late-night amateur tweeters, can get a bit over-excited about short-term fluctuations, reading into them deep cosmic and political meaning, when they are likely the statistical hiccups of our mathematically surly atmosphere.
There’s been some major errors in forecasts of recent trends. Perhaps the most famous were made by NASA’s James Hansen in 1988, who overestimated warming between then and now by a whopping 40% or so.
But it is easy to get snookered by short-term fluctuations. As shown in Figure 1, it is quite obvious that there has been virtually no net change in temperature since 1997, allowing for the fact that measurement errors in global average surface temperature are easily a tenth of a degree or more. (The magnitude of those errors will be considered in a future Current Wisdom).

Figure 1. Annual global average surface temperature anomaly (°C), 1997-2010 (data source: Hadley Center).
Some who are concerned about environmental regulation without good science have seized upon this 13-year stretch as “proof” that there is no such thing as global warming driven by carbon dioxide. More on that at the end of this Wisdom.
Similarly, periods of seemingly rapid warming can prompt scientists to see changes where there aren’t any.
Consider a landmark paper published in 2000 in Geophysical Research Letters by Tom Karl, a prominent researcher who is the head of our National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and who just finished a stint as President of the American Meteorological Society. He couldn’t resist the climatic blip that was occurred prior to the current stagnation of warming, namely the very warm episode of the late 1990s.
Cooler heads at the time noted that it was an artifact of the great El Nino of 1997-98, a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific that has been coming and going for millions of years.
Nonetheless, the paper was published and accompanied by a flashy press release titled “Global warming may be accelerating.”
What Karl did was to examine the 16 consecutive months of record-high temperatures (beginning in May, 1997) and to calculate the chance that this could happen, given the fairly pokey warming rate—approximately 0.17°C (0.31°F) per decade, that was occurring. He concluded there was less than a five percent probability, unless the warming rate had suddenly increased.
The Current Wisdom
The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
History to Repeat: Greenland’s Ice to Survive, United Nations to Continue Holiday Party
This year’s installment of the United Nations’ annual climate summit (technically known as the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change) has come and gone in Cancun. Nothing substantial came of it policy-wise; just the usual attempts by the developing world to shake down our already shaky economy in the name of climate change. News-wise probably the biggest story was that during the conference, Cancun broke an all time daily low temperature record. Last year’s confab in Copenhagen was pelted by snowstorms and subsumed in miserable cold. President Obama attended, failed to forge any meaningful agreement, and fled back to beat a rare Washington blizzard. He lost.
But surely as every holiday season now includes one of these enormous jamborees, dire climate stories appeared daily. Polar bear cubs are endangered! Glaciers are melting!!
Or so beat the largely overhyped drums, based upon this or that press release from Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund.
And, of course, no one bothered to mention a blockbuster paper appearing in Nature the day before the end of the Cancun confab, which reassures us that Greenland’s ice cap and glaciers are a lot more stable than alarmists would have us believe. That would include Al Gore, fond of his lurid maps showing the melting all of Greenland’s ice submerging Florida.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Santos: ‘Proposition 19 Could Change Colombia’s Drug Policy’
Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos has stated that if Proposition 19 passes next week in California and marijuana is legalized in the state, it could force his country to rethink its drug policy.
“Tell me if there is a way to explain to a Colombian peasant that if he produces marijuana we are going to put him in jail… [while] the same product is legal [in California]. That’s going to produce a comprehensive discussion on the approach we have taken on the fight against drug trafficking,” said Santos, who, a couple of months earlier, endorsed the call for a debate on drug legalization made by Mexican president Felipe Calderón. However, Santos has also said that he believes that legalization will increase drug consumption, a presumption that has been rebutted by evidence in countries with liberal drug policies such as Portugal.
Today, in his opening remarks at a Latin American presidential summit held in the Colombian city of Cartagena, Santos brought up [in Spanish] the subject again : “If we don’t act in a consistent way on this issue, if all we are doing is to send our fellow citizens to jail while in other latitudes the market is being legalized, then we have to ask ourselves: isn’t it time to review the global strategy against drugs?”
Santos’ statements have been backed by his Minister of Foreign Relations, who even said in an interview with El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper, that the country’s new seat on the UN Security Council could be “a good place” to start a “worldwide discussion” on the way that the war on drugs is being conducted.
It’s ironic–and gratifying–that the president of Washington’s closest ally in Latin America is the leading voice in the region questioning the wisdom of the war on drugs. It shouldn’t be a surprise, though. Back in 1998 Juan Manuel Santos signed a public letter to then Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan denouncing the war on drugs as a “failed and futile” experiment, and calling for drug policies to be based on “common sense, science, public health and human rights.”
Even though the impact of Proposition 19 in California and the United States could be limited, Juan Manuel Santos’ statements show that its reverberations in Latin America could be significant.
The Current Wisdom
NOTE: This is the first in a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
The Iceman Goeth: Good News from Greenland and Antarctica
How many of us have heard that global sea level will be about a meter—more than three feet—higher in 2100 than it was in the year 2000? There are even scarier stories, circulated by NASA’s James E. Hansen, that the rise may approach 6 meters, altering shorelines and inundating major cities and millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide.

Figure 1. Model from a travelling climate change exhibit (currently installed at the Field Museum of natural history in Chicago) of Lower Manhattan showing what 5 meters (16 feet) of sea level rise will look like.
Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future.
Titus was commenting upon his 2009 publication on sea-level rise in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The number one rule of grabbing attention for global warming is to never let the facts stand in the way of a good horror story, so advice like Titus’s is usually ignored.
Curb Your Enthusiasm: Americans Should Not Expect Much from Obama’s Visit to the UN
President Obama’s address to the United Nations General Assembly this morning, and his chairing of the UN Security Council on Thursday, is a grand attempt to tell the world–after eight years of George W. Bush–that the United States will no longer go it alone.
The president has a very difficult task, however, if he expects to invest the United Nations with renewed credibility. The UN is a weak and fractured institution, whose limited power and authority has been steadily undermined by a progression of U.S. presidents, both Democrats and Republicans. We should not forget that President Bill Clinton explicitly circumvented the UN Security Council when he chose to intervene militarily in Kosovo in 1999. Clinton’s evasion of the UNSC established a precedent for future military intervention that the Bush administration happily capitalized upon to send troops into Iraq in 2003.
Susan Rice, our current UN ambassador, endorsed this approach in 2006 when she called for U.S. military action against Sudan. Prior UN approval of such a mission was unlikely, but ultimately unnecessary, Rice argued at the time, because of the precedent set by President Clinton in Kosovo.
For American policymakers who have demonstrated such disdain for the UN in the past to now profess great respect for the institution should not surprise us. The UN is only as relevant as the member states wish it to be. In areas of common concern, the desire to cooperate and compromise may temporarily trump concerns over protecting state sovereignty and preserving freedom of action to deal with urgent security threats. In most cases, however, we can expect the member states, with the United States in the lead, to pursue policies that they believe (not always correctly, as we learned in Iraq) will advance their security. And if the UN weakly sanctions such actions after the fact, or refuses to do so, that will only reveal its irrelevance.
In Praise of the Brain Drain
The standard view in policy discussions is that emigration of skilled workers from poor countries to rich countries is bad for development becuase it deprives poor countries of much-needed human capital and it reduces growth.
A new study by Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development challenges this view. Clemens shows that efforts to slow the so-called brain drain “generally brings few benefits to others, and often brings diverse unintended harm.” There is little evidence that limiting skilled migration improves growth or public finances in poor countries, while following such a policy may reduce the demand for education, international trade and capital flows, and the diffusion of ideas and norms. There is also a gap between the policy discussion (that takes the negative aspects of the brain drain for granted) and the research literature (that reaches much more ambiguous conclusions). Clemens also rightly stresses choice and freedom as central factors to consider when formualting policy–an element so far missing from the policy discussions.
The study was first released this spring as a background paper to the UN’s forthcoming Human Development 2009 annual report, which will focus on migration and incorporate much of Clemens’ work.

