October 29, 2015

In recent years, the Russian navy has started to slowly recover from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. With the Russian surface fleet still faces quite a few challenges, the country’s submarine force has been more active than ever since the end of the Cold War. Though not near as large or as capable as the once mighty Soviet submarine fleet, some of the most advanced late Soviet-era designs are starting to enter service.

The best example is Russia’s Project 885 Yasen-class nuclear attack submarine K-329 Severodvinsk, which started construction in 1993 but only entered service in 2014. The massive cruise missile-carrying SSGN’s construction had been repeatedly delayed because of post-Soviet Russia’s budgetary woes. During the intervening years, many of the vessel’s components were rendered obsolete and the follow-on Project 885M vessels—starting with Kazan—will have many refinements. Nonetheless, Severodvinsk is by far the most capable submarine in the Russian fleet.

“We’ll be facing tough potential opponents. One only has to look at theSeverodvinsk, Russia’s version of a [nuclear guided missile submarine] (SSGN). I am so impressed with this ship that I had Carderock build a model from unclassified data.” Rear Adm. Dave Johnson, Naval Sea Systems Command’s (NAVSEA) program executive officer (PEO) submarines said last year during the Naval Submarine League’s symposiumin Falls Church, Va. “The rest of the world’s undersea capability never stands still.”

Severodvinsk leverages many of the automation technologies the Soviet Union invested in during the 1970s and 1980s with the Project 705 Lira-class boats—better known by their NATO-code name as the Alfa-class. The Alfa-class submarines—which were built with a titanium hull and liquid-metal cooled reactor—were the fastest and deepest diving operational submarines ever built—save for the lone Soviet Project 661 Anchar-class (NATO: Papa-class) boat. As such, the 13,800-ton, 390-foot long, submarine is highly automated vessel with a crew of only 32 officers and 58 enlisted submariners.

The U.S. Naval Institute’s Combat Fleets of the World noted that some reports suggest the vessel might have a maximum speed of between 35 and 40 knots. It is far quieter than previous Russian submarines and has a maximum “silent” speed of about 20 knots. Like most new nuclear submarine designs, Severodvinskreactor is designed to last for the life of the boat.

According the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), while the new Russian submarine is quieter than the Improved Los Angeles-class boats, the new vessel is not quite as silent as the Seawolf or Virginia-class. However, the Russians were always only lagging slightly behind the U.S. in quieting technology according to Navy sources.

Unlike most Soviet submarine designs, the Yasen-class boats do not make use of a double-hull—instead it has hybrid design with a lighter structure over the vessel’s pressure hull according to Russian media reports. Another unique feature for a Russian vessel is that it incorporates a spherical bow sonar called the Irtysh-Amfora for the first time. As a result, Severodvinsk has its torpedo tubes located at about mid-ship like U.S. submarines. The vessel has eight torpedo tubes, four of which are 650mm tubes while the rest are 533mm tubes. Combat Fleets of the World estimates that the Yasen-class may carry as many as 30 torpedoes.

But the Russians are well aware that time has not stood still since 1993 whenSeverodvinsk was laid down. The Russian navy is set to take delivery of an improved Project 885M Yasen-class attack submarine in 2016 according to Russian state media, which is named after the city of Kazan. The new Project 885M boat incorporates many improvements over Severodvinsk. Kazan is expected to have improved sensors and weapon systems compared to Severodvinsk. It is also likely to be quieter than Severodvinsk.

The Russian navy hopes to procure a minimum of eight Yasen-class attack boats. Four boats have been ordered thus far with a third vessel, Novosibirsk, having been laid down in July 2013.

While the Project 885M is an impressive and very capable vessel, it is not quite an equal to the latest American boats in terms of acoustical or sensor performance. In terms of raw performance, the Severodvinsk and her sisters are likely more similar to the U.S. Navy’s three Seawolf-class attack boats, which according to Navy sources were designed specifically to counter late generation Soviet vessel like the Project 941 Akula—also known more commonly as the Typhoon— Project 971Shchuka-B (oddly code-named Akula by NATO) and the Project 945 Sierra-class boats.

The Yasen-class boats are fast, heavily armed and deep diving—and ideally the United States would have more Seawolf-class vessels to handle them. But while the Virginia-class subs don’t have the deep diving, high-speed open ocean performance of the Seawolf-class, it should be more than adequate to handle the handful of Project 885s that Russia builds.

A man carries an injured child as another man gestures at a site hit by missiles fired by Syrian government forces on a busy marketplace in the Douma neighborhood of Damascus, Syria October 30, 2015. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh

BEIRUT (Reuters) - More than 40 people were killed and about 100 wounded when Syrian government forces fired missiles into a marketplace in a town near Damascus, a conflict monitor and a local rescue group said on Friday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war through a network of sources on the ground, said government forces fired 12 missiles at Douma, 10 miles (15 km) northeast of Damascus.

Douma has suffered intense bombardment in recent months in a wave of strikes the Syrian army has said targets insurgents that have launched attacks on government-held areas.

Syrian Civil Defence, a local humanitarian rescue group that operates in rebel-held areas, posted a picture on its Facebook page of about a dozen bloodied bodies laid on the ground on plastic sheeting. It said the attack had said used guided missiles.

A volunteer from the group in the wider area told Reuters the death toll in Douma had risen to at least 47, and that local rescue services were completely stretched.

"We are treating (wounded) only as much as we are able," he said, asking not to be named for security reasons.

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People inspect a site hit by missiles fired by Syrian government forces on a busy marketplace in the …

"Everyone in the civil defense in Eastern Ghouta is deployed and totally stretched, and rockets are still hitting residential areas."

On its twitter feed the Civil Defence linked to a video showing people tending to survivors in a chaotic scene of blackened rubble and fire. Footage showed bodies on the ground of the market place, where stalls had been blown to pieces. Reuters was unable to independently verify the events shown.

"Utterly heinous that while world leaders meet for peace in Vienna, attack(s) against civilians continue in Syria," the group said in a tweet.

Many of Douma's residents have fled the 4-year-old conflict, moving to nearby rural areas. Medics say they have struggled to cope with large numbers of wounded in the intensified strikes.

Syria's civil war has killed more than 250,000 people and driven more than 10 million from their homes. International diplomats were meeting on Friday at a peace conference in Vienna, the first to be attended by President Bashar al-Assad's main ally Iran.

(Reporting by Sylvia Westall and John Davison; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Peter Graff)

LESBOS, Greece (AP) — Greece's prime minister lashed out Friday at European "ineptness" in handling the continent's massive immigration crisis after 31 more people — mostly children — drowned in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea.

Greece's Merchant Marine Ministry said 19 people died and 138 were rescued near the eastern island of Kalymnos, in one of the worst accidents in Greek waters since hundreds of thousands starting fleeing the war in Syria. Eight of the victims were children and three were babies.

At least three more people — a woman, a child and a baby — died when another migrant boat sank off the nearby Greek island of Rhodes, and three more were missing. On the islet of Agathonissi, a fisherman recovered the body of a boy missing from yet another accident on Wednesday.

The death toll in the Aegean over the past three days has now reached at least 50. On the Turkish side, Turkey's state-run agency said four children drowned and two others were missing after two new accidents Friday involving boats en route to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Samos.

Nearly 600 people were rescued by the Greek coast guard in the past 24 hours, while thousands more made it safely from Turkey to Greece southeastern islands.

Far to the west in Spain, rescuers found the bodies of four migrants and were searching for 35 missing from a boat that ran into trouble trying to reach Spain from Morocco.

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The body of a dead man lays on a beach in Petra village on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, …

Greece is the main point of entry for people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa and seeking a better life in Europe, after an alternative sea route from Libya to Italy became too dangerous. Well over half a million people — mainly Syrians and Afghans — have arrived so far this year from the nearby Turkish coast, as European governments weigh taking tougher measures to try to limit the number of arrivals in Europe.

The influx has overwhelmed authorities in financially struggling Greece.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused Europe of an "inability to defend its (humanitarian) values" by providing a safe alternative to the dangerous sea journeys.

"I want to express ... my endless grief at the dozens of deaths and the human tragedy playing out in our seas," he told parliament. "The waves of the Aegean are not just washing up dead refugees, dead children, but (also) the very civilization of Europe."

Tsipras accused Western countries of shedding "crocodile tears" over children dying in the Aegean but doing little for those who make it across.

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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras answers to an opposition lawmaker question about government' …

"What about the tens of thousands of living children, who are cramming the roads of migration?" he said.

Tsipras blamed the migrant flows on Western military interventions in the Middle East, which he said furthered geopolitical interests rather than democracy.

"And now, those who sowed winds are reaping whirlwinds, but these mainly afflict reception countries," he added.

"I feel ashamed of Europe's inability to effectively address this human drama, and of the level of debate ... where everyone tries to shift responsibility to someone else," Tsipras said.

On the ground, it's a 24-hour battle to keep up with the river of people entering Europe and trekking hundreds of miles north to wealthier EU nations.

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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras arrives for a parliament meeting about the government's migr …

Four coast guard patrol vessels, a helicopter and three fishing boats helped rescue the survivors off Kalymnos and nobody was listed as missing, the Merchant Marine Ministry said. The accident occurred shortly before midnight Thursday, when the wooden boat in which the migrants had left from Turkey took on water and sank in moderately strong winds.

Meanwhile, authorities on Friday raised to 16 the number of deaths from another smuggling ship disaster Wednesday off the island of Lesbos. They said 274 people have been rescued, while one migrant remains missing.

In Spain, the Marine Rescue service said Friday that 15 migrants were found alive on the boat Thursday in the Mediterranean Sea, south of the Spanish port of Malaga, and four bodies were recovered. Some 35 people are still missing.

Along Slovenia's border with Austria, hundreds of migrants, many holding children in their arms, pushed through metal barriers and a police cordon Friday into Austria.

Several people were seen collapsing amid the melee near the Slovenian refugee camp in Sentilj. A backlog of some 4,000 migrants has formed at the border as Austrian authorities struggled to process the thousands arriving daily from Slovenia.

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Two women hug each other as a boy cries after their arrival from the Turkish coast to the Greek isla …

The foreign minister of Hungary, which has fenced off its southern border, called the refugee crisis is "the most serious challenge the European Union has ever faced." Speaking Friday in Athens, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto also denounced "a piece of hypocrisy" in the criticism of his nation's decision to fence off its border.

Urging stronger EU action to guard Greece's porous sea border with Turkey, Szijjarto said instead of "bashing and criticizing each other," EU members should formulate a common approach on immigration.

Tsipras' left-led government has appealed for more assistance from its EU partners. It argues that the migrants should be registered in camps in Turkey, then flown directly to host countries under the EU's relocation program, in order to spare them the perilous sea voyage.

___

Paphitis reported from Athens.

Indonesia’s huge fires might be the worst climate change crisis on Earth right now

By Tim McDonnell on 27 Oct 2015

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Monday afternoon, Indonesian President Joko Widodo cut short a visit to the United States and headed home to oversee efforts to extinguish a rash of epic wildfires that have engulfed his country.

Joko was in Washington, D.C., for a photo op with President Barack Obama, to talk about climate change, and to promote Indonesia as a choice venue for foreign investors. His trip was also supposed to include a stopover in San Francisco for meetings with tech industry executives. But Joko’s decision to return to Indonesia early underscores the challenges his country faces in stopping the worst deforestation on Earth — deforestation that is playing a critical role in global climate change.

There’s more to global warming than pollution from cars and power plants. In the United States, coal-fired power plants are the No. 1 source of carbon dioxide emissions, followed by tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. That’s why the Obama administration has focused its climate policies on those sources; Obama’s signature plan aims to reduce power-sector emissions by one-third by 2030. Those policies get some natural help from the ecosystem, as trees and soil soak up carbon out of the atmosphere. In the United States, thanks to forest conservation and climate-friendly farming practices, land use (a term climate wonks use to describe emissions that come from the land rather than from human-made infrastructure and vehicles) actually offsets about 13 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the rest of the economy.

But on a global scale, land use is a source of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink. The biggest culprit is deforestation: Living trees store carbon; dead trees release it back into the atmosphere as they decompose. Emissions from crop soil, fertilizer, and livestock also play a major role. Overall, land use accounts for about one-quarter of the world’s total greenhouse gas footprint.

In Indonesia, the situation is even more dire. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), land use represents 61 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That means deforestation causes far more climate pollution than all of the country’s cars and power plants combined.

In fact, Indonesia has the world’s highest rate of deforestation, even higher than Brazil, which contains most of the Amazon rainforest. From 2000 to 2012, according to research published in Nature, Indonesia lost more than 23,000 square miles of forest to logging, agriculture, and other uses. That’s roughly the size of West Virginia. In 2010, the government attempted to put the brakes on deforestation by exchanging a two-year moratorium on new logging permits for $1 billion in aid from Norway and the United States. But according to Susan Minnemeyer, a forest analyst at the WRI, that policy appears to have had the “perverse impact of accelerating [deforestation], because those with permits felt that they had to take action quickly or they would no longer be able to.”

This all adds up to global-scale pollution: Indonesia is the world’s fifth-ranking greenhouse gas emitter, coming in just behind Russia and India. In other words, we can’t stop climate change without saving Indonesia’s rainforests.

Indonesia is in the middle of a public health crisis from forest fire haze. The problem isn’t just deforestation, but how that deforestation is happening. In Indonesia, forests are often cleared out with fire. This can be done legally with a permit, but it’s often carried out illegally as well. This year, forest fires are also being fueled by El Niño-related weather patterns. The combination of El Niño and intentional deforestation has proven incredibly dangerous: The country has experienced nearly 100,000 fires so far this year, the worst since the last major El Niño in 1997. Fire activity typically ramps up in September and October, the end of the dry season, and over the last couple of weeks the conflagrations have grown to crisis proportions — hence Joko’s hasty return. The fires are so big they can be seen from space.

The greenhouse impact from those fires is staggering: On several days over the last month, emissions from Indonesian forest fires have exceeded all emissions from the U.S. economy:

To make matters worse, more than half of those fires occur on land made of peat, the thick, soil-like material made from decomposed plant matter. Peat is packed with carbon, and fires that occur on peatland can have a global warming impact 200 times greater than fires on normal soil, according to the WRI. Last week, Joko said the government would stop issuing new permits for commercial development on peatland, but that won’t stop the fires that are already burning.

Climate pollution is just part of the problem. Firefighting costs are pushing $50 million per week. The impact of this fire season on Indonesia’s economy could reach $14 billion. And the thick blanket of haze that is stretching from the country across Southeast Asia has caused at least 10 deaths from haze-related illness and 500,000 cases of acute respiratory illness.

Your snacks and makeup are part of the problem. Of course, Indonesians aren’t just chopping and burning down trees for fun. Besides logging, one of the main uses for cleared land is to plant African oil palm, the fruits of which are used to produce palm oil. Palm oil is the world’s most popular form of vegetable oil, and half of it comes from Indonesia. It’s also found in about half the processed food you encounter in a grocery store (as well as many cosmetics).

Palm oil has some advantages over other oils: It’s cheap to produce and doesn’t contain trans fats, and the trees yield far more oil in the same land area — using fewer chemical fertilizers — than soybeans or sunflowers. According to the World Bank, the increase in global demand for cooking oil by 2020 could be met with palm oil using one-seventh the land area that would be required to fill that demand using soybeans. For that reason, it could actually have many environmental advantages over other types of oil.

Unfortunately, much palm oil production now happens in highly vulnerable ecosystems, often in the former habitats of endangered animals such as tigers and orangutans. Pressure is growing on Indonesia’s palm oil producers to stop deforestation and stay out of sensitive areas. A handful of major U.S. food processors, including Nestlé and PepsiCo, have adopted commitments to rid their supply chains of palm oil linked to deforestation, according to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. But that report also that found many fast-food chains are lagging behind. Last year, an Indonesian court ordered the first-ever major fine — $30 million — for a palm oil company found to have cleared forest in protected orangutan habitat.

Indonesia’s climate test. For the international climate negotiations coming up soon in Paris, Indonesia has pledged to increase its emissions over the next 25 years by 29 percent less than it would have under a “business as usual” scenario. That won’t be possible without curbing forest fires and deforestation. So for Indonesia, getting a grip on palm oil producers will be even more important than going after power plants, as Obama is doing. Joko has been moving in the right direction, Minnemeyer said, but it’s unclear how his promises will hold up.

“Across the board, there has been very weak enforcement of Indonesia’s environmental laws,” she said. If they’re going to meet their climate target, “the fires are going to be a key part.”

(Grist)