www.vheadline.com Posted: Thursday, March 13, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

A court measure taken against the Chacao Mayor’s Office could affect the famous Chacao Palm Sunday collectors, who for 235 years have cut palms for the Holy Week religious ceremonies in the Avila hillsides.

According to opposition Mayor Leopoldo Lopez, Judge Danilo Anderson, who made the ruling, has mounted a campaign against the municipality.

Last year the “Palmeros,” as they are known, were refused permission to cut palms after complaints of environmental damage.

In the end they were allowed into the Avila for three days (not the usual two weeks camping) accompanied by National Park (Inparques) rangers to monitor proceedings.

Lopez says he will meet representatives from Inparques and the Control judge to see how far the measure affects the “Palmeros.”

The Mayor recalls that the “Palmeros” are represented on the Environmental Brigade that he set up last year after the controversy.

www.nzherald.co.nz 14.03.2003 - 8.30am

LONDON - World oil prices came off their recent highs on Thursday as the United States said efforts to garner support for a new UN resolution on Iraq could extend into next week, potentially further delaying a Middle East war.

Oil traders said however that despite the downturn, sentiment was bullish because the looming war on oil producer Iraq and shrinking energy stockpiles in the United States, the world's largest crude consumer, continue to raise supply security fears.

London benchmark Brent crude oil fell 35 cents to US$33.56 a barrel while US light crude was 33 cents down to US$37.50.

"There is a bit of consolidation going on but basically there is still a bias to the upside -- people are concerned about security of supply issues," said Kevin Norrish, energy analyst at Barclays Capital.

"We are not moving into a higher price band just yet because of this uncertainty on the (UN) vote," one oil trader said.

Still lacking Security Council support, the White House said on Thursday diplomatic efforts could spill over into next week. Its main ally Britain offered a new concession by offering to drop a demand for President Saddam Hussein to appear on Iraqi television and own up to past illegal weapons programmes.

France repeated its opposition to giving Saddam any ultimatums and said it was prepared to kill any such resolution by using its veto.

Members of the UN Security Council are to meet at 2000 GMT to discuss the new British proposals.

Prices rose on Wednesday as the fall in US stocks combined with worries that oil cartel Opec would not be able to compensate for lost Iraqi exports in event of war.

Latest US data showed crude inventories falling last week to a 27-year low. There there were also sharp drops in gasoline inventories, which ought to be growing as stockbuilding starts for the summer driving season.

Analysts say core oil stocks are now 89 million barrels below normal.

"Given the reported ramping of Opec production and the continued recovery of Venezuelan production, the shortfall is shocking," SG Securities said in a research note.

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has stepped up output this year to cover an outage of crude from Venezuela, where an anti-government strike brought production to little more than a trickle in December and January.

Venezuela, normally the fifth-biggest exporter providing about 13 per cent of US oil imports, has increased shipments of crude and oil products though rebel oil workers say production is still less than half of normal levels.

Analysts say timing is now key for the war because oil demand is generally two million barrels lower in the second quarter of the year as spring advances and the loss of Iraqi crude will not be as acutely felt as now.

"The more the war gets delayed the less the potential for price spikes," Barclay's Norrish said.

The West's energy watchdog the International Energy Agency says the Opec cartel likely lacks enough capacity to compensate immediately for the loss of Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil.

It said in its monthly report that the global oil system was "running on empty" and that a further supply disruption would "tax a system running close to capacity."

Opec however has pledged to guarantee supplies should war break out and Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi reiterated on Thursday Opec's ability to deliver oil in case of war in Iraq.

A further note of relief for soaring prices came from an end to freezing US temperatures which have supported heating oil prices at near record levels in recent weeks. Oil traders said a sell-off on heating oil futures was exerting downward pressure on crude.

news.nationalgeographic.com Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News March 13, 2003

With their awe-inspiring architecture and sophisticated concepts of astronomy and mathematics, the Maya were undoubtedly among the great ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica. At the peak of their glory, around 800 A.D., the Maya ranged from Mexico's Yucatán peninsula to Honduras.

Then, almost in an instant, a society of some 15 million people imploded, leaving deserted cities, trade routes, and immense pyramids in ruins. The sudden demise is one of the greatest archeological mysteries of our time. What caused the collapse of the great Maya civilization?

The Castillo pyramid, built by the Maya possibly as early as A.D. 618, has four stairways totaling 365 steps, which may represent the days in a year.

The answer, say researchers, is climate change. According to a new study published in the current issue of Science, a long period of dry climate, punctuated by three intense droughts, led to the end of the Maya society. "Climate change is to blame for one of the most catastrophic collapses in human history," said Gerald Haug, a professor of geology at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and one of the study's authors.

Identifying the Culprit

The drought hypothesis is not new. Sediments taken by scientists in 2001 from a lake on the Yucatan peninsula showed that a series of extended droughts coincided with major cultural upheavals among the Maya people.

But the study of that lake also found man-made effects, such as deforestation and soil erosion, and therefore didn't reflect a "pure climate signal," according to Haug. For the new study, the scientists instead analyzed sediment core from the Cariaco Basin off northern Venezuela, where the record is cleaner.

Identifying annual titanium levels, which reflect the amount of rainfall each year, the Swiss and U.S. researchers found that the pristine sediment layers in the basin formed distinct bands that correspond to dry and wet seasons. According to the scientists, there were three large droughts occurring between 810 and 910 A.D., each lasting less than a decade.

The timing of the droughts matched periodic downturns in the Maya culture, as demonstrated by abandonment of cities or diminished stone carving and building activity.

Experts say the Maya were particularly susceptible to long droughts because about 95 percent of their population centers depended solely on lakes, ponds, and rivers containing on average an 18-month supply of water for drinking and agriculture.

Reading the Sun

The Maya were skilled astronomers who constantly followed the movements of the sun and the moon. They predicted eclipses, explained the movements of planets, and devised a sophisticated calendar of the solar year.

Scientists have found that the recurrence of the drought was remarkably cyclical, occurring every 208 years. That interval is almost identical to a known cycle in which the sun is at its most intense every 206 years. Nothing suggests the Maya knew anything about the sun's change in intensity.

The drought theory is still controversial among some archeologists who believe a combination of overpopulation, an internecine struggle for control among the nobles, a weak economic base, and a political system that didn't foster power-sharing led to the Maya's collapse. One hypothesis suggests the Maya people themselves were responsible for their downfall as a result of environmental degradation, including deforestation.

Defenders of the climate change theory, however, say the droughts sparked a chain of events that led to the demise of the Maya. "Sunny days, in and of themselves, don't kill people," said Richardson B. Gill, author of The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life, and Death. "But when people run out of food and water, they die."

Living on the Edge

In their twilight days, the Maya were a society in deep trouble, according to the authors of the new study. Densely populated cities strained resources. Agricultural production became crucial in order to feed the people. "They were living on the absolute edge," said Hoag.

While the Maya had learned to live with shorter droughts, the study indicates that a more subtle, long-term drying trend was ongoing during the collapse. The three specific droughts may have been what pushed the Mayan society over the edge.

"Not only did the Maya have to face an intense climatic catastrophe, but the duration was something that they had never experienced before," said Hoag. "If they had stayed for another two years, they may have survived. But how could they know that the drought would end?"

Learning from the Past

Other human societies have succumbed to climate swings. In Mesopotamia, a canal-supported agricultural society collapsed after a severe 200-year drought about 3,400 years ago. With wetter conditions, civilizations thrived in the Mediterranean, Egypt, and West Asia. Ten years after their economic peak in 2,300 B.C., however, catastrophic droughts and cooling hurt agricultural production and caused regional collapse.

Other societies, however, have survived past climate changes by changing their behavior in response to environmental change. About 300 years after the Mayan collapse, the Chumash people on California's Channel Islands survived severe droughts by transforming themselves from hunter-gatherers into traders.

Experts say the Maya collapse could serve as a valuable lesson today to societies in Africa and elsewhere that are vulnerable to droughts. When droughts strike, they can trigger a chain reaction beginning with crop failures, leading to malnutrition, increased disease and competition for resources, and ultimately causing warfare between nations and sociopolitical upheaval.

"We can handle climate change if we're prepared for it," said Hoag. "The Maya were not prepared."

www.newscientist.com The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service  19:00 13 March 03 NewScientist.com news service   The Mayan civilisation of Central America collapsed following a series of intense droughts, suggests the most detailed climatic study to date.

The sophisticated society of the Maya centred on large cities on the Yucatán peninsula, now part of Mexico. Their population peaked at 15 million in the 8th century, but the civilisation largely collapsed during the 9th century for reasons that have remained unclear to this day.

Now, researchers studying sediment cores drilled from the Cariaco Basin, off northern Venezuela, have identified three periods of intense drought that occurred at 810, 860 and 910AD. These dates correspond to the three phases of Mayan collapse, the scientists say.

Furthermore, the entire 9th century suffered below average rainfall, "so it was a dry period with three intense droughts", says Gerald Haug, from ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, who led the research. "The climate change must have been what pushed the Mayan society over the edge."

Experts on the Maya have greeted the new data cautiously. "Any explanation for decline is a complex one: over-population, environmental problems and economic factors all made them vulnerable," says Jeremy Sabloff, director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. "But there is growing evidence that climate played a role. Perhaps it was the straw that broke the camel's back."

Wet and dry

Haug and his colleagues identified the bands in the sediment cores that correspond to the annual wet and dry seasons. They then analysed the concentration of titanium in the sediment in great detail, taking measurements at intervals of 50 micrometres.

Titanium is an indicator of rainfall, explains Haug, because higher precipitation washes more of the metal from the land into the ocean floor sediments. The difference in concentration between the wet and dry season each year is as much as 30 per cent.

"We looked in detail at the period corresponding to 9thand 10thcenturies - taking 6000 measurements per 30 centimetres of sediment - and found three extreme minima, as well as a low background level of that lasted about 100 years," Haug told New Scientist.

Latest and greatest

But archaeologist Norman Hammond, at Boston University, is unconvinced that drought caused the downfall of the Maya. He notes that the northern Yucatán city of Chichén Itzá was not abandoned until the 13th century.   "Why did the latest and greatest fluorescence of the Mayan series occur in the area that we know to be the driest," he asks.

The Maya certainly had hydraulic expertise, Jeremy Sabloff points out, building canals, viaducts and reservoirs. Moreover, they had experienced and survived droughts before.

"The Maya thrived for 1500 years before these droughts, so it's clearly not climate alone that brought down the southern cities of the Yucatán peninsular," he says.

Journal reference: Science (vol 299, p 1731)

Gaia Vince

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www.natcath.com By CHARLES DAVIS

Last September, I wrote a column for NCR that opposed the coming war. I said at the time that the United States was overstating the threat from Iraq while downplaying more real dangers. But I am revisiting the issue because I now believe that to not use force to back up the many U.N. resolutions over the past decade could lead to more serious injury to the world than to maintain the current situation of phony containment of Iraq.

My main reason for opposing war was that I believed that Saddam was deterred from using weapons of mass destruction as both the United States and Soviets were deterred during the Cold War. However, in reviewing the 1962 Cuba crisis, I found that when the United States was putting pressure on the Soviets to remove their missiles from Cuba in 1962, Castro was screaming at Moscow to launch a nuclear attack on the United States from Cuba -- even though Castro knew that Cuba would have faced destruction from the U.S. response. This unnerved Khrushchev because he knew the conflict would then probably escalate to full-scale nuclear war. Khrushchev was perfectly willing to threaten to use nuclear weapons but was constrained from using them; Castro, however, would not have been so constrained had he had them.

There is a strong possibility that Saddam is not deterred from providing chemical and biological weapons to terrorists. He has used chemical weapons against his own people in the past and there is no reason to believe that deterrence would persuade him not to provide chemical or biological weapons to terrorists. Short of an invasion of Iraq, Saddam may be persuaded to not make an overt attack with weapons of mass destruction. However, there are all sorts of ways to clandestinely provide them to terrorists.

As President Bush said in his State of the Union address: “Secretly, without fingerprints, [Saddam] could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own.” Imagine how attention would be diverted away from Iraq by, say, near simultaneous chemical and/or biological weapons attacks in European and/or American cities by terrorists with weapons supplied by Iraq. Without regime change in Iraq, disasters such as this are waiting to happen.

My second major reason for advocating regime change is the suffering of the Iraqi people. The tortures, executions and other activities of the Saddam regime against its own people are comparable to the suffering of the peoples of Europe under the Nazis. Many argue that the U.N. sanctions policy is the cause of the suffering of the Iraqi people. In response, I would point out the situation of the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Under the protection of the U.S. and British aircraft in the “no-fly zone” the Kurds have prospered, while Iraqis in other regions have suffered severely. Saddam has clearly manipulated the sanctions to cover up his spending “oil for food” to build his palaces and weapons of mass destruction -- while at the same time allowing the blame for the suffering of the Sunnis and Shiites to be put on the U.N. sanctions.

There also have been accusations that “the war in Iraq is about oil.” I believe that is true -- but for reasons different from those who advance that argument.

As I see it, the United States can buy oil from whomever it wants. Note that in the current crisis in Venezuela, the Saudis have proposed increasing OPEC oil production; the sheikhs know that their financial future depends on healthy Western economies. At the same time, oil producers are signing oil contracts with Russia and other Black Sea states to diversify their suppliers.

Clearly, if Iraq was not an oil producer, the United States would not have the same interest in that country. At the same time, no country without energy to sell (except the bankrupt North Koreans) would have interest in developing weapons of mass destruction.

The United States has alternative sources of supply and among the major world economies dependent on imported energy, it is itself one of the world’s greatest energy producers. Since, unlike the other advanced Western economies, the United States also has the capability of developing other sources of energy -- shale, natural gas, hydroelectric, solar and so on -- it is a canard to assert that the United States is going to war to dominate Iraq’s oil resources.

On the other hand, few in the Western press publish the interests of the French and the Russians in perpetuating the status quo in Iraq. John Hall, a columnist for the Media General News, writes, “To a certain extent the source of the current deterioration in French-American relations over Iraq is traceable to oil.” The French have extensive contracts with Baghdad. “There is clearly a huge French financial interest in a peaceful settlement of the Iraqi issue. That doesn’t explain dovish French policy, any more than oil explains hawkish U.S. policy.” In addition, Baghdad has significant debts it owes to Moscow for arms purchased during the Soviet era. Moscow wants to collect on those debts, and both the Russians and the French have contracts to develop Iraqi oil fields once the sanctions are lifted.

Certainly, the United States will want to use some of the funds from Iraqi oil to pay for rebuilding the country after the war and the costs of occupation. But Washington knows it cannot be seen as exploiting the situation for controlling Mideast oil for its own purposes or setting up a colonial regime in Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “The U.S. had sent its soldiers into foreign wars over the last century, most recently into Afghanistan, without having imperial designs on the territories it secured. We’ve put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives. ...We’ve asked for nothing but enough land to bury them in.”

I believe those who shout that the war in Iraq is “about oil” should consider these factors.

There are other significant reasons why the status quo in Iraq cannot continue. To briefly enumerate:

• The League of Nations collapsed in the 1930s after Hitler marched into the Rhineland and Mussolini conquered Abyssinia. Many in the league said forceful measures to expel the conquerors were not needed, collective security would protect Western Europe. The result was the league turned out to be toothless and civilization plunged into World War II. Since the end of the first Gulf War there have been innumerable U.N. resolutions calling on Saddam to disarm. He has not disarmed. Short of invasion there will be no disarmament.
• We owe the Kurds in Northern Iraq. They have been the most “sold out ally” in history. Most recently, at the end of the first Gulf War, they were brutally repressed by both the Turks and Saddam’s forces. According to a March 2 New York Times editorial, “Forcefully repressing Kurdish national aspirations has been a central doctrine of the modern Turkish state. … The Bush administration is trying to convince a skeptical world that it is ready to fight for a free, democratic Iraq. Nothing would undermine the American assertion faster than abandonment of the Kurds.”

There is a need to provide an example of democracy to the Arab world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman calls Bush’s plan for regime change: “the mother of all political gambles. … It could help nudge the whole Arab-Muslim world onto a more progressive track.”

• Considering the lack of confidence among the American electorate of our president’s domestic policies, it is not surprising that there should be broad skepticism over U.S. foreign policy. There is doubt over whether the administration will keep its promises for reconstruction in Iraq (and Afghanistan) after the fighting ceases.

I believe there is no greater effort the United States could undertake at this time than the liberation of Iraq, winning the peace in both Iraq and Afghanistan and creating an example for democracy for the Arab world -- as the United States nobly did in Western Europe and Japan after World War II. Such a course would set the stage for then turning to more effective policies to resolve the Arab-Israeli situation.

Charles Davis was a pilot for the Navy and flew antisubmarine warfare aircraft in the late 1950s. In his civilian career he was an analyst of Soviet military and foreign policy for the Defense Intelligence Agency and National Intelligence Council.

National Catholic Reporter, March 14, 2003