US troops conduct area reconnaissance in Syria (Photo: Spc. Jensen Guillory)
The country approved plans to widen the scope of the regional war originating in Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Following an attack by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq against US foreign outpost “Tower 22”, which killed three US soldiers stationed near the Syria-Jordan border, the United States has approved plans for a multi-day strike against Iraq and Syria.
The death of three US troops, the first casualties among US forces in a widening conflict in West Asia, drew attention to the hundreds of US military bases and outposts spread throughout the world.
In confirming responsibility for the attack, an Islamic Resistance official declared, “If the United States continues to support ‘israel,’ there will be an escalation.” and that “All American interests in the region are legitimate targets.”
The United States is using the strikes as a way to continue to blame Iran for the wider resistance in West Asia. The strikes will purportedly be against “Iranian targets.” Resistance organizations such as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq are frequently accused of being Iranian “proxies” by US officials and in the mainstream press.
Contrary to seeking peace for the hundreds of thousands being slaughtered in Gaza, the United States and the Western world have continually chased escalation. Earlier in January, the US and the UK began an airstrike campaign against Yemen, in retaliation against the nation’s casualty-free blockade of the Red Sea, which Yemeni forces claim to be carrying out in solidarity in Gaza. The only deaths surrounding the blockade have been suffered by Yemenis, and have been as a result of the US and UK’s bombing campaign.
The United States and several Western nations have also directly worsened the plight of Gazans by cutting all their funding to the UNRWA, due to dubious accusations made by Israel that some UNRWA were involved in the October 7 operation.
Charles David Keeling with Keeling Curve graphs. Credit: Keeling Papers, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.
Documents shed light on the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry, adding to growing understanding of Big Oil’s knowledge of climate change.
In 1955 in the wilds of Big Sur, a young Caltech researcher named Charles David Keeling gathered carbon dioxide samples among Northern California’s towering redwoods. Crawling out of his sleeping bag several times a night on research trips conducted over the course of 18 months, from January 1955 to June 1956, Keeling measured background levels of carbon dioxide across the western United States — at Big Sur, but also at desert and high mountain stations, in forests and grassland, above the city of Los Angeles, and over the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Keeling’s findings would lead him to conduct a separate series of experiments from the top of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa resulting in the famous Keeling Curve — a visual depiction of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by the burning of fossil fuels. His work underpins our understanding of manmade climate change.
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By December 1954, the Air Pollution Foundation had approved an allocation of $13,814 (approximately $158,000 in today’s money) to fund Keeling’s earliest CO2 investigations.
These never-before-seen documents from the Caltech Archives and the U.S. National Archives, along with material from the Charles David Keeling papers at the University of California, San Diego, and local Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s, establish the Air Pollution Foundation’s sponsorship of Keeling’s research at Caltech as the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry. It’s possible it was also the first time that the oil industry was directly informed about CO2-induced climate change — five years before physicist Edward Tellerwarned the API of the disruptive consequences of burning fossil fuels.
Fossil Fuel Fingerprints
Carbon atoms contain a combination of the isotopes carbon-12 (C12), carbon-13 (C13), and carbon-14 (C14). Carbon atoms from fossil fuels, however, contain relatively little C13 and almost no C14, which is radioactive and decays over time.
In the 1940s and early 1950s, a carbon isotope scientific revolution was underway in the United States. Scientists had learned that they could measure the different ratios of carbon isotopes in materials to accurately determine the age of ancient objects: carbon dating. By analyzing the isotopic fingerprint of carbon atoms in tree rings, scientists could also identify whether the carbon dioxide absorbed by trees through photosynthesis had been produced naturally or as a result of burning fossil fuels. And, by measuring the isotopic ratios in tree rings of various ages, researchers could also estimate how far CO2 concentrations had risen since the Industrial Revolution as a result of burning fossil fuels.
In a proposal sent to the Air Pollution Foundation in November 1954, Keeling’s research director Epstein wrote, “It is clear that several factors contribute to the variations in the isotopic composition of carbon in trees.” Among these factors, Epstein explained, were the various ecological conditions under which the tree grew, including the isotopic composition of the carbon in the atmosphere. “Since 1840, the carbon-isotope ratio (C12/C13) has increased in the trees so far investigated,” he continued — an increase which could be explained by a change in the carbon-isotope ratio in atmospheric carbon dioxide “resulting from the burning of the C12-enriched coal and petroleum.”
Samuel Epstein’s Proposal to the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation for the Study of Carbon Isotopes in the Atmosphere, 1954. Read the entire document on DocumentCloud.
Epstein’s research proposal for the Air Pollution Foundation left no doubt about the potential significance of this research. Approximately sixty years before the Paris Agreement, he described the “concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere” as a matter “of well recognized importance to our civilization” and explained that the possible consequences of“a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization.”
Samuel Epstein’s Proposal to the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation for the Study of Carbon Isotopes in the Atmosphere, 1954. Read the entire document in DocumentCloud.
Confident in the accuracy of his measurements, Keeling communicated his findings to an employee of the U.S. Weather Bureau and, in the summer of 1956, its director of meteorological research, Harry Wexler, invited him to Washington, D.C., to present his data. Impressed, Wexler suggested that the young researcher continue his investigations by measuring CO2 at the newly built observatory on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa. Keeling secured federal sponsorship for this work and measured atmospheric CO2 on Mauna Loa, observing a rising trend of CO2 increasing year on year from approximately 313 ppm in 1957 to 320 ppm in 1967. Caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, the depiction of this trend would come to be known as the Keeling Curve — a key piece of evidence that climate change is human caused.
Palestinians flee from the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza after an Israeli ground and air offensive on January 29, 2024
A UNITED NATIONS envoy to Gaza today called out the “double standards” of governments that have suspended funds to the world body’s agency for Palestinian refugees.
About a dozen mostly global North countries have suspended funding to the UN’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), even though an investigation has yet to be completed into an allegation that 12 former staff members (of about 30,000) took part in the October 7 attacks on Israel.
UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese said that while the governments have suspended aid “the same governments have not suspended ties with the state whose army has killed 26,000 people in Gaza in 3.5 months, though the [International Court of Justice] said it may plausibly constitute genocide.”
She said: “Double standards? Yes, big time.”
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During a UN briefing in Geneva on Tuesday, UN humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke said UNRWA is “irreplaceable in the humanitarian operation.”
Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said it was “telling” that UN bodies and non-governmental organisations agree that defunding UNRWA “means a collapse of humanitarian work among Palestinian women and children in their hour of greatest need — when they’re under this relentless, indiscriminate bombardment and when there is so little capacity for humanitarian relief.”
