There is this awesome trend I spotted.
First I thought it was unreal, that there was no trend at all, just a random deviation from what I considered to be normal.
But then, in July, about the same time as this surge thing took off in Iraq, I started to make notes about this phenomenon. You know, really writing down my observation every day. Even more, I did it twice a day.
Every morning I wrote down the time the sun went up. Every evening I documented when it went down.
In mid July there were over 16 hours between sunrise and sunset. By mid September daylight was down to 12 hours, mid October to 10 hours and mid November to 8 hours per day. Those observations had me really concerned.
The consequences were obvious to me. If the speed of what happened had continued, we would be down to zero hours of daylight in mid March. Frightening thought, isn’t it?
Others have noted the trend too. When I was shopping today, everyone seemed to stock up on candles. No wonder, it is getting darker each day. One shop even had no candles left. Also people were buying lots of thick cloth. It will be cold when total darkness has finally fallen upon us. That day (will we still call it a ‘day’?) is near.
But here is good news. That is, good and bad news. In December the trend seems to have slowed down a bit, relieving some of my fears. Today we had about 7 hours of daylight. More than the 6 my first calculations had me expect.
But the daily trend in December is still downwards and there is no datapoint in my observations that supports any other expectation than eternal darkness. I gave this some additional thought.
Where there was a decrease of 2 hours of daylight from month to month, the trend has slowed to a 1 hour decrease per month. As we come near to zero sunshine, this slowdown is explainable. The loss in daytime from July to August was 2 of 16 hours, some 12.5%. The loss from November to December was about the same. 1 of 8 hours of daylight vanished – 12.5%.
Using some math wizardry, I recalculated my projections using that constant loss rate. My now refined trend evaluation points to 3 hours of daylight in March 2008 and only 1.5 hours of daylight twelve month from now.
So still bad news for all of us.
Other people are more lucky. Especially those in Iraq. There they have trends in the positive direction.
As noted above, my daylight observations started around the same time the U.S. surge in Iraq began to make a difference.
At the end of July O’Hanlon and Pollack wrote in the NYT about the surge success:
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, …
In mid September the President spoke to his people:
This week, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before Congress about how that strategy is progressing. In their testimony, these men made clear that our challenge in Iraq is formidable. Yet they concluded that conditions in Iraq are improving, that we are seizing the initiative from the enemy, and that the troop surge is working.
Unlike the ever increasing darkness around us, the peace trend in Iraq is upwards.
Just today the Fort Worth Star Telegram prints an interview with one of the commanders in Baghdad, Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell. The good general explains the trend:
Since the surge started, we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in the level of violence. It’s undeniable. There are several challenges out there, and we’re not declaring victory. But we’ve seen a lot of progress.
The General points to hard data:
There has been a 77 percent decrease in the number of attacks [on Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops] from June 2007 to the end of November. There has been an 88 percent decrease in casualties. There has been a 65 percent decrease in car bombs from December ’06 to November ’07.
All this data points into the same direction – a confirmed trend:
There is a little ebb and flow in each neighborhood, but for the most part, they’re all getting a little bit better. The key is the people. Ninety-nine percent of the people just want to get on with their lives. … In the past, you could not walk around the streets. Now, traffic is as bad as Washington, D.C. The markets are open and lively, all because the security has continued to get better.
With so much data, all confirming the trend, the extrapolation is easy to make.
Iraq has improved some x% per month. All the data points supports this. Iraq will continue to become better.
The trend in Iraq is up – up, up and away.
By the time we’ll need candle light for our lunches, Iraq will again have become the Garden of Eden.