965. Waning Relevance of Marxism

Saral Sarkar

By Saral Sakar, November 5, 2012

Sandip Bandyopadhyay's article "Interest in Marxism Waning?" (Frontier, Autumn Number, 2012) attracted my attention, because I am one of those whose interest in Marxism has waned. It has been waning since the mid 1970s, i.e. since before the CPI(M) started its second and long innings in power in West Bengal and long before socialism was wound up – first in China and then in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It has therefore nothing to do with the betrayal of Marxism or socialism by the CPI(M) or the CPSU(B) or the CPC, nor has it much to do with the cruelties of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union or of the CPI(M) cadre in West Bengal. Marxism, the ism, is not the same as the policies and praxis of the above mentioned parties in the countries where they ruled, just as socialism is not the same as the policies of the Socialist Party of France or that of Spain.

In fact, in the second half of the 1960s, Marxism experienced a rejuvenation in Western Europe. The student movements there were largely inspired by Marxism. Young people, particularly students, again became interested in studying Marxist literature, although they were very well informed about and, therefore, very critical of the Soviet model of socialism and the Soviet understanding of Marxism. In Italy and France, where, in those days, big and strong communist parties existed and hence Marxist literature used to be sold and probably also read, young people's interest in Marxism bypassed the established interpretations of Marxism and took the form of an effort to understand the world of their days. It was a different world, very different from the world in which the classics of Marxism were written. This world, they realized, could not be understood or explained adequately by faithfully applying the teachings of Marx and Engels, which originated a century earlier in very different contexts. What actually mattered was to see whether the Marxist tools of analysis were useful for the purpose, and many found them useful.

Bandyopadhyay writes: "There are valid reasons for questioning the relevance of Marxism in the present-day world." He does not state these reasons. What are they?

    For about 25 years after the end of the Second World War – from about 1950 to 1974 – Western industrialised countries experienced what has been called an "economic miracle". It was a long period of boom, of rapid economic growth and, along with it, rapid growth in prosperity. Also the working class rapidly prospered. Skilled workers, roughly speaking, rose to the middle class level. Revisionism had already gained the upper hand over revolutionary Marxism and lasted till the end of the 1940s. But until then, the organized working class and their parties, the Social Democratic and communist parties, kept up their critique of capitalism and regarded socialism as their long-term goal. But in the 1950s and thereafter, for all practical purposes, they (except the communist parties) openly accepted capitalism as the best or the most efficient economic system. From then on, the only thing the organised working class struggled for was to get a higher share of the cake. In this situation, the vast majority of this class refused to play the role of the grave-diggers of capitalism. Workers of the highly industrialised countries had no good reason any more to fight against the system, to kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs. "Pauperization" of the working class proved to be a myth. The assertion of Marx and Engels that "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains" did not make any sense anymore. Their call to the proletarians "Working men of all countries, unite" fell on deaf ears. The proletarians of the Western industrialised countries had well-paid jobs and some prosperity to lose. And they profited from the colonial exploitation of the working men of the poor countries of the world. No wonder, interest in Marxism waned. Radical leftists understood the new situation, namely that the working class was no longer the agent of revolution. Some of them thought that perhaps the sub-proletariat, the fringe groups, could be the new agents of revolution.

In India today, as far as I can perceive from this distance (I live in Germany), the material living conditions of workers, particularly of those in the organised sectors of the economy, have improved very much. In the wake of India's integration in the world economy, and against the background of high GDP growth rates, the mood has changed. Not many people are nowadays willing to fight for a great cause or ideal. Instead, there is a rush for making money, making career, and consuming the luxuries offered by the world market. Members of the established communist parties are no exceptions. The only people in India who are today struggling against exploitation, oppression, and injustice are the Adivasi forest dwellers. And their leaders and cadre don't call themselves Marxists.

In this situation, can Marxism again have a relevance for the struggle for a better world? In order to be able to answer this question, we must first be clear about what a better world should mean today.

Two Aspects of a Better World

The book "Limits to Growth" (Meadows et al.) was published in 1972. Ever since, the intensifying global ecological crisis, the dangers arising from global warming, declining biodiversity, exhaustion of all kinds of resources, and continually rising world population are matters of great concern for all those who, for whatever reason, are willing to look beyond their own and their nation's particular interests. One can say, imitating Marx: Capitalists, socialists and communists have till now changed the world in various ways; the point today, however, is to save it. I contend that the work of saving the world from the above mentioned crises and dangers and creating a better world has two aspects. Firstly, the economies of the world must be transformed into ecologically sustainable ones, and they must be based mainly on renewable resources, which we should expend at a rate no higher than the rate at which they are or can be replenished. Secondly, the societies must be transformed into egalitarian ones. Egalitarian societies are not only desirable in themselves. They are also necessary for ensuring peace within a society and peace between different societies. A society having these two qualities can be called an eco-socialist society.*

It has become clear that there is an ineluctable contradiction between ecology and industrial economy we know for the last two hundred years. Marx and Engels were very much aware of the ecological degradations caused by the industrial economies of their days. Marx wrote:

"In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; … . The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, … the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production … develops technology and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer" (Marx 1954: 506-507).

Here Marx is speaking of "soil". In place of "soil", we nowadays should read resources and the environment. And Engels, using the negative environmental effects of deforestation as an example, wrote: "… nature takes its revenge on us"(Marx and Engels 1976, Vol.3: 74-5).

But this awareness did not influence the theory of Marx and Engels. The ecological degradations they described were merely presented as an extra point of criticism against capitalism. They remained growth optimists. So they also saw a way out, a way of avoiding nature's revenge. Engels wrote:

"… all our mastery of [nature] consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

     … with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise and hence to control even the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities." (ibid).

In principle, this optimism cannot be flawed, except that Engels forgot to say, firstly, that there are also limits to the possibility of this control – limits that are also inherent in the laws of nature – and, secondly, that this control involves costs and that such costs might be too high for a society to pay. We also know today that some of the negative ecological consequences of our production activities may also become irreversible.

Despite his very fundamental critique of capitalism –  namely, capitalism "saps the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer" – Marx assigned this system a world-historic role in preparing the conditions for future human emancipation: "The development of the productive forces of social labour is capital's historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production." (Marx 1981: 368). That means, Marx considered modern industrial production to be a precondition for the future communist society. In the quote further above, however, we see that Marx criticized not only capitalism, i.e. the relations of production capitalism, but also the forces of production, i.e. "modern agriculture", "urban industries" and "modern industry".

Such contradictory positions in Marx's writings allow some Marxologists, such as John Bellamy Foster, to take pains to prove that it is "possible to interpret Marx in a different way, one that conceived ecology as central to his thinking, …" (Foster 2000: vi, emphasis added). After painstaking study, Foster even "came to the conclusion that Marx's world-view was deeply, and indeed systematically, ecological (in all positive senses in which that term is used today), … " (ibid: viii). This is nothing but an effort to defend Marx in an age in which many of his basic positions have become indefensible. But it is not the duty of socialists to defend Marx. It is their duty to strive to create a socialist society, with or without Marx.

Most Marxists, communists, and socialists have failed to take cognizance of the fact that in the years since 1972 a great paradigm shift has taken place in the areas of economic, political, and social thinking. It is a shift from the then prevailing growth paradigm to what I call the limits-to-growth paradigm. One may also call the latter the ecological paradigm. Those who have carried out this paradigm shift in their thinking now see the necessity of a gradual and orderly, in fact planned, retreat from the growth madness of the economies of the world. The socialist societies of the future will either be built in the framework of a hugely contracted world economy, or they will not be built at all. Obviously, that will be a newly conceived socialism, much different from what has been conceived by the great leaders – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao up to Castro and Che.

One Marxist, Michael Löwy (2003), who belongs to the Trotskyite stream of Marxism, appears to have partially carried out the paradigm shift mentioned above. He sees the necessity of a convergence of socialism and ecology. He writes: "This convergence is only possible under the condition that Marxists critically analyze their traditional conception of 'productive forces' and ecologists break with their illusion of a true market economy." Löwy wants to "free Marxism from its productivistic slag". But he too wants to save (the rest of) Marxism, i.e. he wants to integrate the rest into his brand of eco-socialism.

Another aspect of the present-day world situation that reduces the relevance of Marxism for a socialist society of the future is the fact that the world, especially the less developed countries, are overpopulated and that the populations of such countries are still growing. Another great flaw in the thoughts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and their followers has been that they totally rejected the views of Malthus. Today, when the absolute availability of important resources in the world is dwindling fast, population growth results first in falling per capita resource availability, and then in conflicts, including war-like conflicts, over resources. No amount of technological development, which itself depends on availability of abundant and cheap resources, will be able to overcome this problem.

Some other aspects of Marxism are however still relevant and will, I think, remain relevant and important: historical materialism, dialectical thinking, stress on class analysis, and thinking in terms of base and superstructure. But the vision of socialism/communism that shines through the works of Marx and Engels and has often been elaborated by their followers is no longer convincing. If they were alive today, Marx and Engels would surely revise their vision and become eco-socialists. And they would not think that the working class would be the main agent of transformation of capitalist society into an eco-socialist one. Marx himself once said: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist" And that was, according to Bettelheim, "no mere witticism" (Bettelheim 1978: 503).

    The question as to which kind of people would then lead the transformation must remain undiscussed in this short article.

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Notes

* For my detailed argumentation, see: (1) Saral Sarkar (1999 & 2000) and (2) Saral Sarkar and Bruno Kern (2004/2008)

Literature

Bettelheim, Charles (1978) Class Struggles in the USSR – Second Period,     1923–1930. England: Hassocks.

Foster, John Bellamy (2000) Marx's Ecology –Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly

    Review Press.

Löwy, Michael (2003) "Überleben statt Profit", in SoZ, January 2003.

Marx, Karl (1954) Capital, Vol. I. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Marx, Karl (1981) Capital, Vol.3 (Translation by David Fernbach). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1976) Selected Works (in 3 Volumes), Vol. 3. Moscow:

    Progress Publishers. 

Saral Sarkar (1999 & 2000) Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? – A Critical Analysis of

    Humanity's Fundamental Choices. London: Zed Books & New Delhi: Orient Longman.

Saral Sarkar and Bruno Kern (2004/2008) Eco-Socialism or Barbarism – An Up-to-date

    Critique of Capitalism. Mainz: Initiative Ökosozialismus & Hyderabad: Chelimi

    Foundation. (http://www.oekosozialismus.net/en_oekosoz_en_rz.pdf)

Köln, November 5, 2012.

964. The Monster of Monticello: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

Thomas Jefferson

By Paul Finkelman, The New York Times, November 30, 2012 

THOMAS JEFFERSON is in the news again, nearly 200 years after his death — alongside a high-profile biography by the journalist Jon Meacham comes a damning portrait of the third president by the independent scholar Henry Wiencek.

We are endlessly fascinated with Jefferson, in part because we seem unable to reconcile the rhetoric of liberty in his writing with the reality of his slave owning and his lifetime support for slavery. Time and again, we play down the latter in favor of the former, or write off the paradox as somehow indicative of his complex depths.

Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.

Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience.

There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.

But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings.

Rather than encouraging his countrymen to liberate their slaves, he opposed both private manumission and public emancipation. Even at his death, Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric: his will emancipated only five slaves, all relatives of his mistress Sally Hemings, and condemned nearly 200 others to the auction block. Even Hemings remained a slave, though her children by Jefferson went free.

Nor was Jefferson a particularly kind master. He sometimes punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time. A proponent of humane criminal codes for whites, he advocated harsh, almost barbaric, punishments for slaves and free blacks. Known for expansive views of citizenship, he proposed legislation to make emancipated blacks “outlaws” in America, the land of their birth. Opposed to the idea of royal or noble blood, he proposed expelling from Virginia the children of white women and black men.

Jefferson also dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote racial equality. As a state legislator he blocked consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state.

As president he acquired the Louisiana Territory but did nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast “empire of liberty.” Jefferson told his neighbor Edward Coles not to emancipate his own slaves, because free blacks were “pests in society” who were “as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” And while he wrote a friend that he sold slaves only as punishment or to unite families, he sold at least 85 humans in a 10-year period to raise cash to buy wine, art and other luxury goods.

Destroying families didn’t bother Jefferson, because he believed blacks lacked basic human emotions. “Their griefs are transient,” he wrote, and their love lacked “a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.”

Jefferson claimed he had “never seen an elementary trait of painting or sculpture” or poetry among blacks and argued that blacks’ ability to “reason” was “much inferior” to whites’, while “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” He conceded that blacks were brave, but this was because of “a want of fore-thought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present.”

A scientist, Jefferson nevertheless speculated that blackness might come “from the color of the blood” and concluded that blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”

Jefferson did worry about the future of slavery, but not out of moral qualms. After reading about the slave revolts in Haiti, Jefferson wrote to a friend that “if something is not done and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.” But he never said what that “something” should be.

In 1820 Jefferson was shocked by the heated arguments over slavery during the debate over the Missouri Compromise. He believed that by opposing the spread of slavery in the West, the children of the revolution were about to “perpetrate” an “act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.”

If there was “treason against the hopes of the world,” it was perpetrated by the founding generation, which failed to place the nation on the road to liberty for all. No one bore a greater responsibility for that failure than the master of Monticello.

Paul Finkelman, a visiting professor in legal history at Duke Law School, is a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.”

963. In Nature, Fatal Attractions Can Be Part of Life

An Antarctic fur seal trying to mate with a king penguin. Photo by Tristan Scott

By Ingfei Chen, The New York Times, November 26, 2012

One day during field observations last year at Marion Island, a remote nature preserve in the southern Indian Ocean, something bizarre caught Tristan Scott’s eye: on a rocky beach, a sleek young male Antarctic fur seal was trying to mate with a king penguin.

The fur seals normally hunt penguins and eat them. But this seal was wrestling with the bird, chasing as it repeatedly tried to escape.

Baffled at first, Mr. Scott, a wildlife researcher, realized that the seal “was trying to court the penguin as if it were a female seal.”

When that failed, he “tore the bird to shreds and ate it,” Mr. Scott recalled.

Disturbing as it may sound, such wayward mating behavior is not unheard-of. An earlier episode of seal-on-penguin sexual violence, also at Marion Island, was reported in 2008 by Nico de Bruyn and colleagues at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, where Mr. Scott is a graduate student.

The phenomenon is called misdirected mating, and it extends to other marine mammals. Wildlife experts say sea lions and sea otters have occasionally been seen forcing themselves on other types of seals and killing them.

Indeed, some researchers say misdirected mating is not abnormal. “These things happen in wildlife,” said Heather Harris, a veterinarian who has studied sea otters in Monterey Bay. “We think that it is within the spectrum of possible normal behavior.”

And Axel Hochkirch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Trier in Germany, called the behavior “simply a bad mistake,” and added, “nature is not perfect.”

Nor is such mating limited to marine mammals. Insects, spiders, worms, frogs, birds and fish do it, too, Dr. Hochkirch said. The behavior is a form of so-called reproductive interference, in which an animal’s mate-recognition radar is imperfect; the encounters do not necessarily end fatally.

Some couplings between closely related species result in familiar hybrids, like the mule. But when mixed matings result in no viable offspring, scientists say, the behavior is difficult to understand from the standpoint of evolution.

Why, for example, would a fur seal try to mate not just with a different species but with an entirely different class of animal?

Dr. de Bruyn speculated that the episodes started out as normal penguin hunting but that “wires somehow got crossed” and set off a sexual response.

Both incidents happened near the end of the seal breeding season — a time when males experience “huge testosterone boosts” but when mating opportunities are monopolized by a few dominant males, leaving lower-ranking males with no outlet for their sexual excitement. As a result, the researchers say, the two frustrated male fur seals may have turned on the penguins.

Dr. de Bruyn pointed out that sexual aggression was common within many marine mammal species; for instance, male fur seals often bite females on the neck during mating. Sexual conflict occurs to varying degrees across the animal kingdom, and in extreme cases, males’ coercive behavior may spill over to forcing themselves on other species, said Janet Mann, a Georgetown University field biologist.

Another example comes from Monterey Bay, where the local news media give expansive coverage to stranded California sea otter pups rehabilitated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. One graduate of that program had an infamous reputation: Morgan, who was rescued as a pup in 1995, released and then recaptured in 2001 after being spotted forcibly copulating with Pacific harbor seal pups, five of which did not survive.

Observers documented 19 cases of attacks on harbor seals by Morgan and at least two other male otters, mostly in the Elkhorn Slough area 30 miles south of Santa Cruz. The aggressors were “harassing, dragging, guarding and copulating with harbor seals” for up to a week after the pups were killed, according to an analysis published in 2010.

That study, conducted at the California Department of Fish and Game in Santa Cruz, was led by Dr. Harris, the sea-otter vet, who was then a research assistant; Melissa Miller, a veterinary pathologist; and Stori Oates, a biologist at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Their autopsies of seal corpses found bite marks and lacerations on the nose and face, along with tearing consistent with sexual trauma.

Diagnostic tests found nothing awry in Morgan, who thereafter lived at the Fish and Game wildlife facility; he participated in research conducted by the University of California’s Long Marine Laboratory until he died of old age last March, at 17. (Biologists remember him fondly: Mike Murray, a veterinarian at the Monterey aquarium, said that during 11 years in captivity, Morgan taught scientists a tremendous amount about “what makes sea otters tick.”)

Dr. Harris, Dr. Miller and their colleagues suspect the attacks were fostered by a recent demographic shift that resulted in more male otters than females. The species is polygynous — mating is dominated by a few males, as with the Antarctic fur seals — and Elkhorn Slough had become a bachelor pad for many nonterritorial male otters that were shut out of the mating game. The researchers think that as a result, Morgan and the other misbehaving otters redirected their normal sexual responses toward the harbor seal pups, born at a large rookery in the same area.

That hypothesis is plausible, said Dr. Hochkirch, the German biologist. Something about how the seals looked or moved may have attracted the otters. For a wild male animal, “if you don’t find a good mate, you might try to copulate with something which is as close to a mate as possible,” he said. Sperm is cheap, so wasting it on the wrong species would probably not hurt the male’s reproductive success.

Here, too, the seal abuse is reflective of the sexual violence that is typical among sea otters.

“Everyone thinks they’re cute and cuddly,” said Mark P. Cotter, a biologist with Okeanis, a nonprofit marine research organization in Moss Landing. But when otters mate, he went on, the male bites the female on the face so she can’t get away. Female sea otters often die from mating trauma.

Another sexually aggressive species is the bottlenose dolphin. In the Bahamas, bottlenose dolphins are routinely seen sexually coercing smaller spotted dolphins, Dr. Mann said.

And on the West Coast, from 2007 to 2010, the California Marine Mammal Stranding Network recovered and autopsied 50 dead harbor porpoises that were apparently beaten up by dolphins, said Frances Gulland of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif. In one of three porpoise-bullying episodes in Monterey Bay that they filmed, Mr. Cotter and his colleagues saw a school of male dolphins batter a male porpoise to death.

The “porpicides,” as Mr. Cotter and colleagues called them in a paper last year, are mystifying: they confer no clear advantage to the dolphins, which seldom compete with porpoises for the same prey off California.

But because the observed assaults were perpetrated by young males “not very high up on the social ladder,” Mr. Cotter said, high testosterone levels during the breeding season may have fueled the violence.

He and other experts caution against judging animal aggressors by human standards. “In nature, there’s really no right or wrong,” he said.

But conversely, said Dr. Mann of Georgetown, the mere fact that sexual conflicts are “natural” in wildlife does not imply that they are “moral or justifiable or anything else that has to do with human culture.”

Some biologists, afraid that animal sexual violence will be misconstrued, are leery of discussing it. Wildlife scientists are usually working to protect species, Dr. Mann said, and “they don’t want to jeopardize that by sensationalized stories about their animals.”

Indeed, a few scientists declined interview requests, partly from concerns that animals that engage in misdirected mating would wrongly be perceived as sexual freaks. A case in point was Morgan the otter, who was cared for by protective researchers. His death last March went unannounced — unlike the passing of a female Monterey aquarium otter who was eulogized in local newspapers that same month.

Terrie Williams, a biology professor at Long Marine Lab, declined to answer questions about Morgan. In an e-mail, she wrote: “My program’s involvement with Morgan was strictly as an excellent and willing participant in our diving physiology studies. I’d like to remember him as that.”

962. U.N. Agency Says 2012 Ranks Among Hottest Years

By Nick Cumming-Bruce, The New York Times, November 28, 2012

GENEVA — This year has ranked among the nine warmest since records began more than 160 years ago, continuing a trend for the planet that is increasing the dangers of extreme weather events, according to United Nations meteorologists.

“It confirms the trend towards a warmer planet,” Michel Jarraud, head of the World Meteorological Organization at the United Nations, said in Geneva on Wednesday as he delivered a provisional assessment intended to inform policy makers and negotiators attending the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar.

The final judgment on 2012 will come in March, but Mr. Jarraud said that meteorologists were not observing any major events that would greatly alter the preliminary findings.

“Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” he added in a prepared statement.

Among the most conspicuous evidence of climate change associated with global warming was the “alarming” rate at which Arctic ice had melted during the summer months, he said. The melting this year occurred at a much faster rate than in 2011 and outpaced the predictions of climate experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said.

By September, the level of Arctic ice was the lowest since satellite records began and had shrunk by nearly half — an area nearly the size of India — below the average minimum level in the 20 years before 2000, the organization reported.

The ice will reform in the winter but will be thinner than before and more vulnerable to further melting, Mr. Jarraud warned. “The trend is not only continuing but accelerating,” he said. “The more it melts, the faster it will melt.”

The ice melt will contribute to rising sea levels that are already 20 centimeters, or nearly 8 inches, higher than a century ago, Mr. Jarraud said, posing added risks in the event of extreme weather. Hurricane Sandy would have had less impact on New York if it had occurred 100 years ago when sea levels were lower, he said.

After a chilly start to 2012, average temperatures from January to October were 0.45 degrees Celsius, or 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit, above the average from 1961 to 1990, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s findings. A rise of only one degree Celsius was sufficient to increase the frequency of extreme weather events, Mr. Jarraud said.

The above-average temperatures experienced in 2012 had been marked by record temperatures in areas like Greenland, Siberia and central China, the World Meteorological Organization reported.

Much of the United States, together with parts of Europe, western Russia and southern China, had suffered severe drought, while parts of West and sub-Saharan Africa had experienced severe flooding.

Meteorologists have been at pains to make clear that no major weather event was the result of a single cause, but research into climate change was establishing clear links, Mr. Jarraud said, citing the results of research into the extreme heat wave in Russia in 2010. “Without climate change, this episode would have been very unlikely,” he said.

961. Cuba Fall Canine Expo Celebrates Shih Tzus To Schnauzers In Dog Show

By Associated Press, November 26, 2012

HAVANA -- The Cuban capital has played host to political summits and art festivals, ballet tributes and international baseball competitions. Now dog lovers are getting their chance to take center stage.

Hundreds of people from all over Cuba and several other countries came to a scruffy field near Revolution Plaza this past week to preen and fuss over the shih tzus, beagles, schnauzers and cocker spaniels that are the annual Fall Canine Expo's star attractions. There were even about a dozen bichon habaneros, a mid-sized dog bred on the island since the 17th century.

As dog lovers talked shop, the merely curious strolled the field, checking out the more than 50 breeds on display while carefully dodging the prodigious output of so many dogs.

The four-day competition, which ended Sunday, included competitions in several breeding categories, and judges were flown in from Nicaragua, Colombia and Mexico.

"This is a small, poor country, but Cubans love dogs," said Miguel Calvo, the president of Cuba's dog federation, which organized the show. "We make a great effort to breed purebred animals of quality."

Winners don't receive any trophy or prize money, but that doesn't mean the competition is any less fierce.

Anabel Perez, owner of a cocker spaniel named Lisamineli after the U.S. actress, spent more than half an hour coifing the dog's hair in preparation for the competition, while the owner of a shih tzu named Tiguer meticulously brushed his coat nearby.

"I'm a hairdresser for humans," explained Tiguer's owner, Miguel Lopez. "So it's easy for me. I like shih tzus because they are a lot of work to keep well groomed."

960. The Worldwide Vulnerability of Forests

Dying forest in northern Canada

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, November 23, 2012

One of the great scientific tasks of the day is to understand how and why trees die. It may seem like a question that would have been answered many decades ago, but it was not — at least not at a detailed physiological level. Now, amid growing signs worldwide that forests are at risk as the climate changes, scientists are trying to catch up to events.

Lately, more and more evidence is pointing toward a mechanism known as hydraulic failure as the culprit in many large-scale forest die-backs. This occurs when drought reduces the flow of water into tree roots. The trees take measures to limit the loss of water through their leaves, but trees need water flowing through them as much as humans need blood. Eventually, if the drought is bad enough, the tiny tubes that carry water up the trunk of the plant can fill with air bubbles.

Detailed understanding of this mechanism may still be developing, but anybody who has forgotten to water a house plant has seen the consequences. The flow of water through the body of the plant is interrupted, and unless moisture is restored to the soil, it can droop and eventually die.

Now comes a surprising new paper from an international research team presenting ominous findings about the risks to forests from global warming and its accompanying water stress.

For the study, released online on Thursday by the journal Nature, Brendan Choat of the University of Western Sydney in Australia, Steven Jansen of Ulm University in Germany, and a large group of their colleagues compiled data from 226 forest species at 81 sites worldwide. They found that around 70 percent of the species operate with only a narrow margin of safety when it comes to their water supply. In other words, many of the world’s important forest species are vulnerable to hydraulic failure.

In effect, the trees have adopted an aggressive evolutionary strategy, creating robust water-moving machinery that allows them to grow quickly and out-compete other trees during times of adequate rainfall, but putting them at risk of dying when water is scarce.

That means that virtually all types of forests, even in regions that seem to get plenty of rain today, are vulnerable to increased drought and increased evaporation driven by higher temperatures. If the changes in rainfall and soil moisture in coming decades turn out to be as big as many scientists fear, the Choat-Jansen paper implies that the result could be massive die-backs, shifts in the composition of forests, and a transition from forest to grassland in many regions.

That may sound alarmist, but a developing body of evidence suggests that it is already starting to happen. Last year, for example, I wrote about the large forest die-backs that are being seen in the American West and the Pacific Northwest because of mountain pine beetles, an insect pest that is moving farther north because of global warming.

We are also seeing huge impacts on forests from water stress in the Mediterranean, the Amazon and many other regions.

William R.L. Anderegg, a Stanford University researcher who was uninvolved in the new paper but is doing related work, told me he saw the new research as “a major step forward” in gaining a more complete global understanding of the risks to forests from climate change.

The new paper “tells us that many, many tree species live close to the dry edge of what they can tolerate, even if they live in a very wet area,” Mr. Anderegg said in an e-mail. It makes evolutionary sense, he added, because “no matter your environment as a tree, you would want to maximize your growth in order to compete with other trees, while still narrowly avoiding death from water stress. The practical and critical outcome of this is that trees and forests, globally, appear to all be relatively vulnerable to drought-induced mortality.”

Climate change puts at risk not only the rich diversity of life in the world’s forests, but also the ability of those forests to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, as they do today in immense volume, helping to limit global warming. In other words, if forests start dying from global warming, that means the warming will get worse, presumably killing more forests — a dangerous feedback loop.

“The consequences of longer droughts and higher temperatures are potentially dramatic,” Dr. Choat, Dr. Jansen and their colleagues wrote in the new paper. “For example, rapid forest collapse as a result of drought could convert the world’s tropical forests from a net carbon sink into a large carbon source during this century.”

The big question now is how much ability the world’s trees have to adapt. In theory, one might imagine that young trees growing under drought stress would shift their architecture in ways that would limit their risk. But whether they really have the genetic capacity to do this, or to do it quickly enough to keep up with the rapid climatic shifts projected for coming decades, is an open issue.

A distinct possibility, the scientists wrote, is that “the rapid pace of climate change may outstrip the capacity of populations to adapt.”

In a commentary accompanying the paper, Bettina M.J. Engelbrecht of the University of Bayreuth in Germany, who was not involved in the research, writes that the accumulating scientific evidence sounds “a warning bell that we can expect to see forest diebacks become more widespread, more frequent and more severe — and that no forests are immune.”

959. Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs

Robots are common in automobile manufacturing

By John Markoff, The New York Times, November 23, 2012

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

This summer, Jeff Dean, a Google technical fellow, and Andrew Y. Ng, a Stanford computer scientist, programmed a cluster of 16,000 computers to train itself to automatically recognize images in a library of 14 million pictures of 20,000 different objects. Although the accuracy rate was low — 15.8 percent — the system did 70 percent better than the most advanced previous one.

Deep learning was given a particularly audacious display at a conference last month in Tianjin, China, when Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, gave a lecture in a cavernous auditorium while a computer program recognized his words and simultaneously displayed them in English on a large screen above his head.

Then, in a demonstration that led to stunned applause, he paused after each sentence and the words were translated into Mandarin Chinese characters, accompanied by a simulation of his own voice in that language, which Dr. Rashid has never spoken.

The feat was made possible, in part, by deep-learning techniques that have spurred improvements in the accuracy of speech recognition.

Dr. Rashid, who oversees Microsoft’s worldwide research organization, acknowledged that while his company’s new speech recognition software made 30 percent fewer errors than previous models, it was “still far from perfect.”

“Rather than having one word in four or five incorrect, now the error rate is one word in seven or eight,” he wrote on Microsoft’s Web site. Still, he added that this was “the most dramatic change in accuracy” since 1979, “and as we add more data to the training we believe that we will get even better results.”

One of the most striking aspects of the research led by Dr. Hinton is that it has taken place largely without the patent restrictions and bitter infighting over intellectual property that characterize high-technology fields.

“We decided early on not to make money out of this, but just to sort of spread it to infect everybody,” he said. “These companies are terribly pleased with this.”

Referring to the rapid deep-learning advances made possible by greater computing power, and especially the rise of graphics processors, he added:

“The point about this approach is that it scales beautifully. Basically you just need to keep making it bigger and faster, and it will get better. There’s no looking back now.”