Emergency Over, Saith the Court

Charles Krauthammer on the Supreme Court’s arrogant power grab in Hamdan:

The court’s wanton overriding of Congress and the president is another in a long string of breathtaking acts of judicial arrogance. But it is fixable. The Republican leadership of the Senate responded to the court’s highhandedness by immediately embarking on writing legislation to establish military tribunals.

The unfixable part of the Hamdan ruling, however, is the court’s reading of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions, which were designed to protect civilian populations and those combatants who respect them, were never intended to apply to unlawful combatants, terrorists of the al-Qaeda kind. The court tortures the reading of Common Article 3 to confer upon Hamdan — and by extension the man for whom he rode shotgun, bin Laden — the kind of elaborate legal protections that one expects from “civilized peoples.”

Old Myths Die Hard

Today’s entry in the “everything you know is wrong” category is a paper which debunks the myth that the Gulf Stream is what keeps Europe warm.

Like many other myths, this one rests on a strand of truth. The Gulf Stream carries with it considerable heat when it flows out from the Gulf of Mexico and then north along the East Coast before departing U.S. waters at Cape Hatteras and heading northeast toward Europe. All along the way, it warms the overlying atmosphere. In the seas between Norway and Newfoundland, the current has lost so much of its heat, and the water has become so salty (through evaporation), that it is dense enough to sink. The return flow occurs at the bottom of the North Atlantic, also along the eastern flank of North America. This overturning is frequently referred to as the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, or simply the “Atlantic conveyor.” It is part of the global pattern of ocean circulation, which is driven by winds and the exchange of heat and water vapor at the sea surface.

The Gulf Stream indeed contributes to Europe’s warmth, but it is wrong to conflate the climate difference across the North Atlantic with the northward flow of warm water in the Gulf Stream. This erroneous logic leads to such statements as (from The Times of London): “The British Isles lie on the same latitude as Labrador on the East Coast of Canada, and are protected from a similarly icy climate by the Atlantic conveyor belt.” Such claims are absolutely wrong.

The interesting part is that it turns out England owes its mild climate mostly to a prominent feature of American geography.