Johann Hari

Thank god man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt NASA would be telling us that this year is now, so far, the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia’s vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world’s storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.

The world’s ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shriveled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 percent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen – with their pesky graphs and studies and computers – came to pass.

This all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It’s hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: there were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring “with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity” as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Center puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree celcius of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century.

Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the momentum to stop it has died. The Copenhagen climate summit evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government determined to pioneer a fuel – tar sands – that causes three times more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the connections. The Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has been opposed to meaningful action on global warming, until he found the smoke-choked air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be irreparable.

Given the stakes, the reasons why so many people still refuse to accept the evidence can seem oddly trivial. A common one is: “It snowed a lot in the US and Britain last year. Where was your warming then, eh?” But scientific theories are based on patterns, not individual events. You might know a 90-year old woman who has smoked a pack of cigarettes every day of her life, and is totally healthy. (I do.) It doesn’t disprove the theory that smoking causes lung cancer. In the same way, one heavy snow-fall doesn’t prove anything if it is part of a wider overall pattern of dramatic warming. And that snow provably was. While it snowed a lot in a few places, there were at the very same time harsher, more bitter droughts in many more places – making it globally the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (All the others were in the past decade). And that winter is your punchline proof that warming isn’t happening?

But the broader public mood, smeared like sun-screen over us all, isn’t active denial. No – it’s the desire to endlessly postpone this issue for another day. In 1848, a 25 year old man called Phineas Gage was working on constructing the American railroads. It was his job to lay explosives to clear rocks out of the way – but one day his explosive went off too soon, and a huge metal rod through into his skull and out the other side. Amazingly, he survived – but his personality changed. Suddenly, he was incapable of thinking about the future. The idea of restraining himself was impossible to grasp. If he had an urge, he would act on it at once. He could only ever live in an eternal present. As a civilization, we are beginning to look like Phineas Gage on a planetary scale.

Yet scattered among us there is a fascinating group of people who are offering a path to safety. Every summer since 2006, ordinary British citizens have built impromptu camps next to some of the most environmentally destructive sites in Britain, and taken direct action to shut their pollution down. So far, it has worked: they played a crucial role in the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and a big new coal power station at Kingsnorth.

That’s how earlier this week I found myself on a high wooden siege tower in a camp in the Scottish hills, staring down across a moat towards the glistening, empty offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). You own this bank: 84 percent of it belongs to the taxpayer after the bailouts. Yet it is using your money to endanger you, by funding the most environmentally destructive behavior on earth, like burning the tar sands. The protestors chose to come here democratically – everything at the climate camps is done by discussion and consensus – because they have a better idea. Why not turn it into a Green Investment Bank, transforming Britain into a global hub for wind, solar and wave power? Why not go from promoting misery across the world to being a beacon of sanity?

So the protesters risked arrest in marching on RBS’ offices because they know the stakes. As Professor Tim Flannery, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, explains: “My great fear is that within the next few decades – it could be next year, or it could be in fifty years, we don’t know exactly when – we will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf… I have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say [when a collapse happens] you’ll hear it in Sydney… Sea levels would rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We don’t know how much it would rise. It could be ten centimeters, or a metre. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts… Once you have started that process, we wouldn’t know when the next part of the ice sheet would collapse, we don’t know whether sea level will stabilize. There’s no point of retreat where you can safely go back to… I doubt whether our global civilization could survive such a blow, particularly the uncertainty it would bring.”

Nature doesn’t follow political fashion. Global warming may not be hot today, but the planet is – hotter than ever. When you stare out over the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks crazy – the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them?

An excellent source of clear, accessible videos debunking denialist claims can be found here.

To many people, the “war on drugs” sounds like a metaphor, like the “war on poverty.” It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death-toll in Tijuana – one of the front-lines of this war – is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of seventy mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando – an event that no longer shocks the country.

Mexico today is a place where the severed heads of police officers are found week after week, pinned to bloody notes that tell their colleagues: “This is how you learn respect.” It is a place where hand grenades are tossed into crowds to intimidate the public into shutting up. It is the state the US Joint Chiefs of Staff say is most likely, after Pakistan, to suffer “a rapid and sudden collapse.”

Why? When you criminalize a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from off-licenses, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs. In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs tool up - and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3000 percent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process taking over an entire nation, to turn it into as a massive production and supply route for the Western world’s drug hunger.

Why Mexico? Why now? In the past decade, the US has spent a fortune spraying carcinogenic chemicals over Colombia's coca-growing areas, so the drug trade has simply shifted to Mexico. It's known as the "balloon effect": press down in one place, and the air rushes to another. When I was last there in 2006, I saw the drug violence taking off and warned that the murder rate was going to skyrocket. Since then the victims have ranged from a pregnant woman washing her car to a four year-old child to a family in the "wrong" house watching television to a group of 14 teenagers having a party. Today, 70 percent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels.

The gangs offer Mexican police and politicians a choice: plato o ploma. Silver, or lead. Take a bribe, or take a bullet. President Felipe Calderon has been leading a military crackdown on them since 2006 – yet every time he surges the military forward, the gang violence in an area massively increases. This might seem like a paradox, but it isn’t. If you knock out the leaders of a drug gang, you don’t eradicate demand, or supply. You simply trigger a fresh war for control of the now-vacant patch. The violence creates more violence.

This is precisely what happened – to the letter – when the United States prohibited alcohol. A ban produced a vicious rash of criminal gangs to meet the popular demand, and they terrorized the population and bribed the police. Now a thousand Mexican Al Capones are claiming their billions and waving their guns.

Like Capone, the drug gangs love the policy of prohibition. Michael Levine, who had a thirty year career as one of America's most distinguished federal narcotics agents, penetrated to the very top of la Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world in the 1980s. Its leaders told him "that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it... On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it 'a sham put on the American tax-payer' that was 'actually good for business'."

So there is a growing movement in Mexico to do the one thing these murderous gangs really fear – take the source of their profits, drugs, back into the legal economy. It would bankrupt them swiftly, and entirely. Nobody kills to sell you a glass of Jack Daniels. Nobody beheads police officers or shoots teenagers to sell you a glass of Budweiser. And after legalization, nobody would do it to sell you a spliff or a gram of cocaine either. They would be in the hands of unarmed, regulated, legal businesses, paying taxes to the state, at a time when we all need large new sources of tax revenue.

The conservative former President, Vicente Fox, has publicly called for legalization, and he has been joined by a battery of former Presidents across Latin America – all sober, right-leaning statesmen who are trying to rationally assess the facts. Every beheading, grenade attack, and assassination underlines their point. Calderon’s claims in response that legalization would lead to a sudden explosion in drug use don’t seem to match the facts: Portugal decriminalized possession of all drugs in 2001, and drug use there has slightly fallen since.

Yet Mexico is being pressured hard by countries like the US and Britain – both led by former drug users – to keep on fighting this war, while any mention of legalization brings whispered threats of slashed aid and diplomatic shunning.

Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday. They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition. This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is to criminalize and militarize, then blood is on your hands. How many people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment of reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs?

To support the right side in the referendum to decriminalize cannabis in California this November - one of the most important moves on drugs in the world at the moment - please donate or volunteer for the campaign here.

 ...and was interviewed today on Democracy Now, the best news show in the world. It's worth a listen. Thank you to everyone who wrote demanding his release. 

In the long fake boom of the Nineties and Noughties, we were sold a thousand scams. End government regulation of the financial system! Turn banks into casinos! Pay CEOs 500 times more than their staff! Bow, bow, bow before our mansion-dwelling overlords and the Total Efficiency they will bring! Yet from under the rubble left by these delusions, one of the greatest scams has skipped out unscathed, and it is now successfully selling itself as a solution to the fading of the boom-light. It is probably in your workplace now, or coming soon. Its name? Management consultancy.

There are now half a million management consultants in the world, and they all grumble that they face one question wherever they go: yes, but what is it that you actually do? They claim to be able to enter any organization, watch its workers for a short period, and then - using graphs, algorithms, and a jargon that makes quantum physics look like Sesame Street - render it dramatically more efficient, for a fee. They are everywhere: in the US, AT&T (to pluck a random company) spent $500m on them in just five years, while the British state will soon be spending more on management consultants than on upgrading its nuclear weapons.

Yet the process of management consultancy has always been shrouded in priestly secrecy. Over the past few years there has been a string of memoirs by highly successful former management consultants, finally pulling back the flow-charts.

David Craig gives a typical explanation of what the consultants Actually Do. After getting a degree specializing in romantic poetry, he was astonished to be hired by a prestigious management consultancy, given three weeks training, and then dropped into major corporations to tell them how to run their oil rigs, menswear stores, and factories, for tens of thousands of pounds a pop. In his brave memoir "Rip Off!" he explains: "We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along... It's like robbing a bank but legal. We could take somebody straight off the street, teach them a few simple tricks in a couple of hours and easily charge them out to our clients for more than £7000 per week." It consisted, he says, of "lies, lies and even more lies."

He worked to a simple model, which is common in the industry. He had to watch how a workforce behaved for a week - and then tell the company's bosses, every time, that they had 30 percent too many staff and only his consultancy could figure out who should be culled. If he calculated they actually had the right amount of staff, he was told by his bosses not to be so ridiculous and do his sums again: where was the money for them in a properly-staffed company? The company had to be POPed - People Off Payroll.

Of course, this advice was often disastrous. His company was sent into a chain of 500 menswear shops. They advised them to cut staff by (surprise!) 30 percent, and to replace most full-time staff with part-timers. The result? The full-time employees had been highly motivated, because they wanted a career in the company; the part-timers only wanted a little extra cash. So motivation levels in the company collapsed, and with it the standard of service. The company was bankrupt within a few years.

Yes, you might say, but surely he was just a bad management consultant. The rest must get results. The evidence suggests not. The Cranfield School of Management studied 170 companies who had used management consultants, and it discovered just 36 percent of them were happy with the outcome - while two thirds judged them to be useless or harmful. A medicine with that failure-rate would be taken off the shelves.

Matthew Stewart, another former consultant, summarizes his high flying years in the industry by saying: "I felt like a snake oil salesmen without snake oil." When he was sent into a company, he was told to use complex formulae to analyze the productivity of its staff, but he soon realized that the results were "nearly random... Similar results could have been achieved by having four monkeys throw darts at a few matrices." Yet on this basis, he was taking a fortune in payments, and firing thousands of productive people.

The recession has given a fresh burst to this industry, as corporations beg to be told where to apply the leeches. The number of senior consultants has swollen by 10 percent in the past year, while the number employed by local government has grown by 11 percent.

But there is a growing body of academic research showing that the strategies pushed by these consultancies are in fact disastrous - and hasten the collapse of a company or service. Professor Wayne Cascio of the University of Colorado has studied the relative costs and benefits of POPing your workforce. Corporations and governments are receptive to the idea that the quickest, easiest way to save money is to fire workers. But Cascio has shown that, most of the time, the costs outweigh the gains. Obviously, you have to immediately find large amounts of redundancy and severance pay. But the costs don't stop there. Your workforce becomes very nervous - and a nervous workforce is dramatically less productive and less innovative. The best people leave. The service to the customer deteriorates - so they abandon you even more.

The facts backing this up are striking. The OECD has studied developed economies over a 20-year period, and it found labor productivity growth was much higher in the countries where it is hardest to fire people. The better you treat a workforce, the better they work. Professor Peter Cappelli studied 122 companies and found that lay-offs most often shrank their future profitability, instead of swelling it.

Yet this is the antithesis of the management consultancy mindset. Stewart says "consultants are the cattle prods of the modern corporation. The chief message to be communicated, in almost all situations, is that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you have ever imagined." It's a dark, dehumanized vision of workers as cogs in a machine - and it's been there from the beginning. Frederick Taylor, the founder of management consultancy, compared workers to "an intelligent gorilla" and said "our scheme does not ask for any initiative in a man. We do not care for his initiative."

When challenged, the paltry evidence base of this industry soon becomes clear. Tom Peters, the author of management consultants' bible 'Excellence', snapped at an interviewer who asked about his way of analyzing businesses: "Of course, we all know this is to some extent phoney baloney."

David Craig suggests a simple way to call out this scam. Insist that, from now on, all management consultants are paid by their results. If they promise greater productivity or higher sales, fine: don't pay them until it comes through. Today, almost no management consultancy works on this basis. If they did, they'd all be bankrupt.

And yet, and yet... you almost have to admire the rancid chutzpah of it. As the management consultant Bruce Henderson once sniggered: "Can you think of anything more improbable than taking the world's most successful firms and hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their businesses - and [getting them] to pay millions of pounds for this advice?" It's tempting to chuckle at the absurdity - until you realize the cack-handed consultants' scythe could come for you.

 and why they're so bad here.

Some people who have read my article about error (see below) have asked if its argument for humility and awareness of our own propensity to err is more compatible with an old-fashioned kind of conservatism, represented by somebody like Michael Oakeshott, than with my left-wing collectivist approach. It’s an interesting and sincere question.

Some people argue that since we can’t, as individuals, know very much, we shouldn’t try to do very much. If we only view the world through a drinking straw, isn’t it folly to try to alter it? Shouldn’t we err on the side of inaction, since the chances of us getting the effect we desire are slim, while the chances of unintended negative consequences are high?

But here’s why I think they are wrong. The reality is that we all live in a world where other people are acting all the time, making changes to everything around us. The world is being restructured, whether we like it or not. For example, huge amounts of climate-changing greenhouse gases are being released into the atmosphere as you read this. I could respond by saying, “Well, what can we know? I want to be humble, so I’ll stay in my house, marinated in doubt, and be silent.” But that is simply ceding the ability to act to other people, who will carry on making change, on their terms, and in their interests.

The reality of living in a world with lots of people who are acting on imperfect information is that you, too, must act on imperfect information.

This should change your political behaviour in crucial ways: you should keep testing your views against the evidence every day, and scrupulously monitor that you are having the effects you think you are, without harmful side-effects you didn’t anticipate. It should lead to humble action – but that is different to inaction. As the psychologist Rolly May put it, “the seeming contradiction [is] that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time we might possibly be wrong.” I think a humble, non-utopian, evidence-based left is the only kind worth having, and it is a world away from an accept-the-world-as-it-is conservatism.