Kruse Kronicle

Why Population Control Is Not The Answer to Climate Change

Population control is sometimes championed as a way to fight climate change. Bernie Sanders recently raised this idea. The world population is growing. There are 7.7 billion people today. There will be nearly 11 billion in 2100, according to United Nations estimates. Extra people mean extra CO2 emissions. While two children per woman may seem reasonable, women in the poorest countries can average five or sex. Sanders and others believe this excess fertility is why the world population is growing. Fewer children will mean less CO2. Unfortunately, this perception is decades out of date.

We are already at “peak children.” Globally, there are 680 million children under the age of five. U.N. projections show a peak of 700 million about 2060. There are projected to be 650 million children in 2100, less children than there are today. Yet the overall population will grow by nearly 50%. How can that be? It is the compounding effect of people already born that will drive population growth over the next century, not excessive birth rates.

Trends in Fertility

Assume women have two children over their lifetime. They replace themselves and one other. Population size will be stable from generation to generation. (The actual replacement fertility rate for an affluent nation is 2.1 children per woman.) Throughout history, the total fertility rate has been six or seven children. One quarter of children died before their first birthday. Another sizable percentage died before age five. Of those who made it past five, many died before marrying and having children. High fertility rates ensured a couple of children would survive to continue the family.

As affluence emerged and health practices changed (first in Europe and then spreading elsewhere) more children survived into adulthood. We needed fewer births to perpetuate a family but it took a while for customs related to fertility to adjust downward. That lag between declining death rates and declining fertility rates is what led to the population explosion that began two centuries ago. That growth accelerated into the twentieth century and continues into its final stages today. As recently as the 1960s, the global total fertility rate was as high as five children per woman.

Today, the global total fertility rate is about 2.4 and dropping, but the rate is not evenly spread throughout the world. Europe, the Americas, China, Japan, and other regions have fertility rates below the replacement rate, well below it in many nations. A handful of smaller poor countries have fertility rates of five or six, but they also have some of the highest child death rates. The world average is fast approaching the 2.1 replacement rate. However, because the global fertility rate has usually been higher than the replacement rate for most of us now living, it means the cohort of people born one year is usually larger than the cohort of people born the previous year. So let us think about what that means for the future.

The Compounding Effect in Future Fertility

To keep things simple, assume going forward that we birth the same number of children each year, the death rate stays the same, and no one lives past one hundred years. Now say there are 100,000 people age 100. By next year, all will have died. The group that was 99 will now be 100. Because more of them were born, there will now be, say, 105,000 people 100 years old. After two years have passed, the new group of 100 hundred year old people will be the people who are 98 years old today. They will be a still larger group. That will continue for one hundred years.

At the other end of the age continuum, we have the largest number of children ever born in a year and the largest age cohort alive. A year later, this youngest age cohort will replace a smaller cohort a year older than them. But keep in mind that for the next forty-five years the number of women of childbearing age will be increasing each year. Therefore, each year the total fertility rate will need to fall slightly more below the replacement rate if the population is to stabilize. It can then rise to the replacement rate after forty-five years. This will continue until 2120 when each age cohort is the largest age cohort that has ever existed for that age. This is the primary driver of population growth going forward but there is at least one other key factor. (Clearly, I am oversimplifying to illustrate my point. We are not down to replacement rate fertility, so there is still some marginal population growth due to “excess” fertility.)

Furthermore, actual global death rates are not constant. They are dropping. People are living longer. So not only is each age cohort larger than the one before, it is living slightly longer than the one before. This too contributes to population growth over coming decades.

Therefore, we would need considerably less than replacement-rate fertility to limit global population growth substantially. In fact, there are credible projections of a population peak at fewer than nine billion. Demographers once assumed transition to low fertility and death rates would stabilize at about the replacement rate. Instead, the fertility rate has dropped well below replacement rate in nearly every affluent nation, in some cases nearly one child per woman. From the narrow view of CO2 emissions, this may look like a good thing. From a holistic standpoint, many social scientists are troubled. Depopulation can be as destructive to human well-being as overpopulation.

The Depopulation Problem

A vibrant society needs a critical mass of productive workers relative to its dependents (primarily children and the elderly.) This is the dependency ratio (dependents divided by workers multiplied by 100). With excessively low fertility rates, it is possible to have a great imbalance with a large number of seniors and too few workers to provide for society. We have already seen that current UN projections say we will have nearly the same number of children now as in 2100 but the overall population will be nearly 50% larger at eleven billion. That growth is a consequence of a burgeoning number of elders. A smaller population of nine billion may mean fewer total people but an even worse dependency ratio.

Modest help may come from lengthening the number of years people work or a higher participation rate in the work force for working age people but at some point that will be insufficient. Then consider the possibility of medical breakthroughs that cure cancer or dramatically reduce heart disease. That means more people living longer, intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance.

As an ever shrinking number of people (potentially a minority of the population) is expected to support everyone else, improvement in living standards will begin to stall and possibly reverse, making the world ripe for any number of societal dysfunctions. It will not take eighty years for this challenge to become real. Japan is already struggling with these issues. China is already headed down this road. One can envision China opening up to immigration from the remaining regions with the highest fertility rate and investing there resources in growth economies, but if every nation is headed to fertility rates well below the replacement rates, that is only a temporary fix. The dependency ratio for a world with eleven billion people is already seen as a challenge. The only way to get a peak population under nine billion people is to achieve fertility rates well below replacement rates substantially intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance just a generation or two down the road. (For more detail see the Brookings' piece, How will we cope when there are too few young people in the world?)

Decoupled Economic Growth

At the most basic level, climate policy needs to be about economic growth decoupled from CO2 emissions. Population growth is one issue driving this need for economic growth. But also consider people are advocating for a $15 living wage for every worker in the United States. That would put nearly every US worker in the top 10% of wage earners in the world. Meanwhile, despite astonishing improvements in human well-being around the world and the dramatic reduction in extreme poverty, there are still hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty. A couple billion more have more stable lives but still live well below standards we would consider tolerable. If it is a matter of justice that everyone in the US has a $15 an hour living standard, then it is only just that all citizens of the world have something approximating that standard. The only way that happens is through economic growth. Measures like population control are shortsighted and potentially calamitous. The principle mission is decoupling economic growth from fossil fuel consumption, along with other disruptive measures like decoupling land use from agricultural production.

Recycle Or Not? The Need To Test Good Intentions

This article from October 2015, asks, Are We Recycling Too Much?

Our study made the first known attempt to combine these various costs and benefits into one analysis to estimate what recycling rate is best. Our conclusion was that recycling up to 10% appears to reduce social costs, but any recycling over 10% costs the environment and the economy more than it helps. The environment and economy suffer as we transport some recycled materials to destinations as far afield as China.

These provocative results certainly require confirmation from future independent and objective research before broad policy goals can be adjusted. Also, many of the benefit and costs associated with waste disposal and recycling vary across regions of the country and world, and thus optimal recycling rates may also vary. For example, we used municipal cost data from Japan for this study because the United States and most European countries do not keep such data.

But if these results hold for other developed countries, then society should collectively rethink how to approach recycling.

And

But the substantial environmental benefits outlined above of using recycled materials in production vary substantially across materials. Aluminum and other metals are environmentally costly to mine and prepare for production. Paper, too, is costly to manufacture from raw sources. But glass and plastic appear relatively easy on the environment when manufactured from raw materials.

These differences are vital. Although the optimal overall recycling rate may be only 10%, the composition of that 10% should contain primarily aluminum, other metals and some forms of paper, notably cardboard and other source of fiber. Optimal recycling rates for these materials may be near 100% while optimal rates of recycling plastic and glass might be zero. To encourage this outcome, a substantial subsidy offered only on those materials whose life cycles generate positive environmental benefits should be applied.

The article illustrates once again that whether we are talking tax cuts, living wages, rent control, tariffs, or recycling, good intentions unsupported by empirical evidence can be counterproductive.

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Anti-GMO: The Lethal Implications

Anthropogenic driven climate change is a fact. As the climate changes, the poorest of humanity will suffer the greatest. The most ardent climate activists tell us this is settled science. So settled that to question these conclusions puts you in a league with people who deny the Jewish Holocaust ever happened. It is science!

Well, there is another issue around which there is even more scientific consensus. Megan Molteni, writing for UnDark:

According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent of scientists believe these foods are safe to eat. Only 37 percent of the general public agrees. Republicans and Democrats are just as likely to be opposed to transgenic foods, as are people across different age groups. So why is it that we trust the National Academy of Sciences and the WHO when they say climate change is likely caused by humans, but not when they say these foods are safe?

Molteni highlights the recent development of goats modified to include an antimicrobial enzyme that helps human’s fight off bacterial cells that cause diarrhea and other infections. The milk from these goats aid children in fighting off these diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, 525,000 children under five died last year from diarrheal diseases, mostly in poor communities in developing nations where waterborne diseases are rampant and vaccines and antibiotic treatments are difficult to acquire and distribute.

The modified goats could reduce the suffering, even death, of millions of children. They were developed by a public university and have had nearly two nearly decades of testing and review. The goats could be distributed via whatever strategy seems most effective, even free. There is no sinister corporate entity lurking in the shadows. So why are the goats not in use?

First, regulation. Clearly GMOs must be evaluated and regulated but the present regulatory system is such a mishmash of regulation and entities that it is very costly and time-consuming to get approval. Consequently, the process is skewed toward large corporate entities who can work the system, provoking many anti-GMOers to make the regulatory process even more of a barrier.

Second, anti-GMOers have organized to oppose all GMO usage in developing nations, at times pitting well-funded European and American activists against poor agricultural workers who could benefit greatly from the technology.

But as scientists will tell you, “GMO” tells you zero about the merits of any particular product. What tells you about the merits is looking at the actual merits of the product!

Last month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report assessing all the science available on genetically engineered crops. It concluded that we shouldn’t be making generalizations about GMOs, but rather asking if a particular crop or GE product makes the world a better place or a more dangerous one, on a case-by-case basis. This was not exactly what people wanted to hear, the authors wrote: “We received impassioned requests to give the public a simple, general, authoritative answer about GE crops. Given the complexity of GE issues, we did not see that as appropriate.”

The goats are not the only product caught up in this controversy. The linked article suggests others. In addition to nutrition and health, GMOs also have a role to play in adapting to warmer temperatures, with crops that grow more food with less water and fewer nutrients, for example.

… improving food security and public health without harming the environment will require the concerted use of many methods, from traditional breeding to organic farming. Genetic modification can’t hold back rising sea levels or fill aquifers drained by years of drought. But there are important contributions to be made with problems that have been unsolvable by other means, the researchers say — if only regulations would allow it.

Climate activists routinely moralize about people who will not get on board with their initiatives, saying deniers are accountable for countless lives that will one day be diminished, even lost, due to our inaction on climate change. The poorest folks will suffer most. This is their scientific conclusion. Yet when the same scientific community says GMO technology is safe, with the potential to save millions of lives in the here and now, while enhancing the welfare of countless others, the activists rise up in opposition to the technology. What this tells me is that while there are some people who are genuinely knowledgeable about the science of climate change and are alarmed about the consequences, the concern by multitudes is less about science and far more to do with subjective narratives with which science (happily for them) agrees. When the “naturalist” narrative is not supported, they disregard science instead of modifying their narrative.

I’d invite to read all of Molteni’s article, Spilled Milk. In the meantime, my climate activist friends, unless you are willing to give full-throated support of GMOs here and now, do not let me ever again here you decry the “anti-science” climate deniers. You are no different. Subjective considerations drive you every bit as much as climate deniers. Right here and right now, people are suffering and dying because of your “anti-science” behavior.

Confronting Liberal and Conservative Biases on Science

New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter has an excellent piece about how ideology shapes our embrace/rejection of science. The left loves to harangue about the "anti-science" right when in fact the left participates just as much in the same anti-science behavior, and the left's anti-science behavior is every bit as destructive.

“The left is turning anti-science,” Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape who as a venture capitalist has become one of the most prominent thinkers of Silicon Valley, told me not long ago.

He was reflecting broadly about science and technology. His concerns ranged from liberals’ fear of genetically modified organisms to their mistrust of technology’s displacement of workers in some industries. “San Francisco is an interesting case,” he noted. “The left has become reactionary.”

Still, liberal biases may be most dangerous in the context of climate change, the most significant scientific and technological challenge of our time. For starters, they stand against the only technology with an established track record of generating electricity at scale while emitting virtually no greenhouse gases: nuclear power.

Only 35 percent of Democrats, compared with 60 percent of Republicans, favor building more nuclear power plants, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

It is the G.O.P. that is closer to the scientific consensus. According to a separate Pew poll of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 65 percent of scientists want more nuclear power too.

He goes on to note:

Research suggests that better scientific knowledge will not be sufficient, on its own, to overcome our biases. Neither will it be mostly about improving education in STEM fields. To defeat our scientific phobias and taboos will require understanding how the findings of science and their consequences fit into the cultural makeup of both liberals and conservatives.

Explaining in more detail:

It is not hard to figure out the biases. People on the right tend to like private businesses, which they see as productive job creators. They mistrust government. It’s not surprising they will play down climate change when it seems to imply a package of policies that curb the actions of the former and give a bigger role to the latter.

On the left, by contrast, people tend to mistrust corporations — especially big ones — as corrupt and destructive. These are the institutions bringing us both nuclear power and genetically modified agriculture.

“When science is aligned with big corporations the left immediately, intuitively perceives the technology as not benefiting the greater good but only benefiting the corporation,” said Matthew Nisbet, an expert on the communication of science at Northeastern University.

So when assessing the risks of different technological options, the left finds the risk of nuclear energy looming the highest, regardless of contrary evidence.

This doesn’t affect only beliefs about climate change and energy policy. The research identified similar distortions in people’s beliefs about the scientific consensus on the consequences of allowing concealed handguns. Biases also color beliefs in what science says and means across a range of other issues.

In the context of climate change, this heuristic presents an odd problem. It suggests that attitudes about climate change have little to do with education and people’s understanding of science.

Fixing it won’t require just better science. Eliminating the roadblocks against taking substantive action against climate change may require somehow dissociating the scientific facts from deeply rooted preferences about the world we want to live in, on both sides of the ideological divide.

And it is the last sentence that is key. How do we do that! It seems to me we have to create spaces for productive conversations. No matter how emotionally satisfying it may be to engage in tribal disdain for those of another tribe for being "anti-science," it is precisely this behavior that entrenches those we may wish to persuade. And the glaring truth is that very very few of us are pro-science. We are pro-ideology and pro-heuristics, and happy to embrace science when it meets these prior concerns. The reality is that there are multiple ways to frame an agenda. So another piece of the puzzle is to enter the mind of opponents and to figure out how to frame concerns in a way that resonates with things they value. But research shows, unsurprisingly, that we nearly always attempt persuasion from the angle that is most persuasive for us, projecting our values on to others. It usually has the effect of driving the opponent in further away.

I think the answer lies with these considerations. I didn't say it was an easy answer. What thoughts do you have?

Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe

Scientific American: Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe

... In the paper, we identify several intuitions that may affect people’s perception of GMOs.Psychological essentialism, for instance, makes us think of DNA as an organism’s “essence” - an unobservable and immutable core that causes the organism’s behaviour and development and determines its identity. As such, when a gene is transferred between two distantly related species, people are likely to believe that this process will cause characteristics typical of the source organism to emerge in the recipient. For example, in an opinion survey in the United States, more than half of respondents said that a tomato modified with fish DNA would taste like fish (of course, it would not).

Essentialism clearly plays a role in public attitudes towards GMOs. People are typically more opposed to GM applications that involve the transfer of DNA between two different species (“transgenic”) than within the same species (“cisgenic”). Anti-GMO organizations, such as NGOs, exploit these intuitions by publishing images of tomatoes with fish tails or by telling the public that companies modify corn with scorpion DNA to make crispier cereals.      

Intuitions about purposes and intentions also have an impact on people’s thinking about GMOs. They render us vulnerable to the idea that purely natural phenomena exist or happen for a purpose that is intended by some agent. These assumptions are part and parcel of religious beliefs, but in secular environments they lead people to regard nature as a beneficial process or entity that secures our wellbeing and that humans shouldn’t meddle with. In the context of opposition to GMOs, genetic modification is deemed “unnatural” and biotechnologists are accused of “playing God”. The popular term “Frankenfood” captures what is at stake: by going against the will of nature in an act of hubris, we are bound to bring enormous disaster upon ourselves.

Disgust also affects people’s attitudes towards GMOs. The emotion probably evolved, at least in part, as a pathogen avoidance mechanism, preventing the body from consuming or touching harmful substances. We feel repelled by things that possibly contain or indicate the presence of pathogens such as bodily fluids, rotten meat, and maggots. This would explain why disgust operates on a hair trigger: it is better to forego an edible meal under the misguided assumption that it is contaminated, than to consume sickening, or even lethal, food that is erroneously thought to be safe. Hence, disgust can be elicited by completely innocuous food. ...

... The impact of intuitions and emotions on people’s understanding of, and attitudes towards, GMOs has important implications for science education and communication. Because the mind is prone to distorting or rejecting scientific information in favour of more intuitive beliefs, simply transmitting the facts will not necessarily persuade people of the safety, or benefits, of GMOs, especially if people have been subjected to emotive, anti-GMO propaganda.

In the long run, education starting from a young age and specifically targeted at tackling common misconceptions might immunize the population against unsubstantiated anti-GMO messages. Other concerns can be addressed and discussed in the wider context of agricultural practices and the place of science and technology in society. However, for now, the best way to turn the tide and generate a more positive public response to GMOs is to play into people’s intuitions as well. For instance, emphasizing the benefits of current and future GM applications — improved soil structures because herbicide resistant crops require less or no tilling, higher income for farmers in developing countries, reduced vitamin A deficiency, virus and drought resistance, to name a few — might constitute the most effective approach to changing people’s minds. Given the benefits and promises of GM technology, such a change is much needed.

This is one of the most insightful articles I've read on the topic. I think his advice in the last paragraph is particularly important and needs to be heeded when dealing with any number of unjustified oppositions to factual realities - from climate change, to vaccinations, to nuclear power. Yet our propensity is to just shout the facts louder and to use opposition to the facts as a rallying cry for our tribe versus the "anti-science" dolts from the other tribe.

Why "Sustainable Development" is Not the Answer

New York Times: A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development - Eduardo Porter

If billions of impoverished humans are not offered a shot at genuine development, the environment will not be saved. And that requires not just help in financing low-carbon energy sources, but also a lot of new energy, period. Offering a solar panel for every thatched roof is not going to cut it.

“We shouldn’t be talking about 10 villages that got power for a light bulb,” said Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University in India who was among the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

“What we should be talking about,” she said, “is how the village got a power connection for a cold storage facility or an industrial park.”

Changing the conversation will not be easy. Our world of seven billion people — expected to reach 11 billion by the end of the century — will require an entirely different environmental paradigm....

... The “eco-modernists” propose economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it requires dropping the goal of “sustainable development,” supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity’s footprint by using nature more intensively.

“Natural systems will not, as a general rule, be protected or enhanced by the expansion of humankind’s dependence upon them for sustenance and well-being,” they wrote.

To mitigate climate change, spare nature and address global poverty requires nothing less, they argue, than “intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world.”

As Mr. Shellenberger put it, the world would have a better shot at saving nature “by decoupling from nature rather than coupling with it.”

This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small-scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world’s surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water.

As the manifesto notes, as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity was supposedly in harmony with Mother Nature. Over the last half century, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed per average person declined by half. …

… Development would allow people in the world’s poorest countries to move into cities — as they did decades ago in rich nations — and get better educations and jobs. Urban living would accelerate demographic transitions, lowering infant mortality rates and allowing fertility rates to decline, taking further pressure off the planet.

“By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends,” the manifesto argues. …

Read the whole thing. Decoupling is essential. We have already seen this with land use. We are using no more land for agriculture in the United States than we were 100 years ago. Before that time it took a fixed amount of land to feed each person. That same decoupling is developing worldwide but it could be accelerated. The amount of energy consumed per unit of GDP has now begun to decline. We see this decoupling with other resources. Add a move to solar and nuclear power in combination with decoupling and we have a real chance to drive down carbon emissions drastically.

I haven't yet read the whole EcoModernist Manifesto linked in the article, but the parameters and reasoning laid here is the best articulation of my views on economic development and sustainability that I have read.

Groups Aim to Lure Conservatives Out of the Closet on Climate Change

Forbes: Groups Aim to Lure Conservatives Out of the Closet on Climate Change

This is an excellent article! Climate change and the left-wing narrative of "capitalism-is-exploitation" have been closely intertwined. Scientist tend to lean left-wing already, but when Al Gore became the official face climate change, that relationship of science and ideology became cemented. The problem is that whenever you wed a scientific challenge to an ideology in a deeply partisan culture, you guarantee rejection by half the populous. The challenge is to find ways to build coalitions across multiple political "tribes."

"A new Republican-led group, the ClearPath Foundation, is angling to breach those prison walls [captivity to climate change skeptics] — not just for members of U.S. Congress, but for moderates and conservatives everywhere who yearn for a meaningful role in the climate conversation. ...

... [Low engagement is] not for lack of understanding, Powell noted. The problem, rather, is that messages on global warming tend to come from groups associated with the far left, and to a lesser extent, the far right of the political spectrum. In between sits a vast audience comprised of political moderates and conservatives who understand the science and, when asked, support many economic and entrepreneurial initiatives that would help curb planet-warming emissions. And yet, no one is speaking directly to them, Powell said — a realization that has provided ClearPath with its mission. ...

And this is key:

... Evidence emerging from the social sciences suggests that the strategy makes some sense — not least because scientific literacy has been shown to be a poor predictor of whether or not most people consider climate change to be an issue of concern. Much more telling are the shared value systems and general world-views that act as both the glue for intellectual tribes within the larger community, and the filter by which those tribes ignore or discount messages emanating from the outside.

Virtually everyone is susceptible to this sort of motivated reasoning, according to one 2012 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, such that conservatives tend to hear undertones of “government overreach” in the words “climate change,” while liberals tend to hear “insatiable corporate greed” when the discussion turns to economic and market-driven solutions to the problem.

From that 2012 study:

“[P]eople who subscribe to a hierarchical, individualistic world-view — one that ties authority to conspicuous social rankings and eschews collective interference with the decisions of individuals possessing such authority — tend to be skeptical of environmental risks. Such people intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such risks would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior that hierarchical individualists value. In contrast, people who hold an egalitarian, communitarian world-view — one favoring less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to individual needs — tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, to which they attribute social inequity. They therefore find it congenial to believe those forms of behavior are dangerous and worthy of restriction." ...

YES! YES! A thousand times YES! Thus these attempts to frame climate issues in a way that energizes conservative and moderate involvement.

...That’s not to suggest, of course, that Republicans and Democrats won’t continue to disagree on the best strategies for addressing global warming. It’s a safe bet, after all, that many on the left will find GOP-sponsored solutions to be too slow, too shortsighted, or too mindful of industry interests — just as those on the right will view left-leaning initiatives as economically fraught, scientifically unwarranted and alarmist. Such is the cacophony of competing tribal values.

But for those seeking to bring Republicans more fully into the climate discussion, the efforts of ClearPath and other groups to nurture a conversation somewhere between the poles must be a welcome development. ...

I know my progressive and liberal friends don't want to hear it, and it irritates them every time I say this, but I am more convinced than ever that the more you insist on exclusively using capitalism-is-exploitation narratives to solicit support for climate change action, the more narrow will be the support. Many progressives are either so insulated that they cannot see how their ideology bleeds through, or they are aware of their science/ideology linkage and climate change as a tool for promoting an ideological agenda is higher priority than developing broad support for action. Good to see some activists trying to broaden the discussion.

Science and Political Hijacking

Wall Street Journal: Vaccines and Politicized Science

The people doing basic science should learn a well-proven truth about basic politics: Any cause taken up by politicians today by definition will be doubted or opposed by nearly half the population. When an Al Gore, John Kerry or Europe’s Green parties become spokesmen for your ideas, and are willing to accuse fellow scientists of bad faith or willful ignorance, then science has made a Faustian bargain. The price paid, inevitably, will be the institutional credibility of all scientists.

Bingo! Two groups have been central to the climate debate. There are scientists who study climate and then there is portion of society who view the modern economic order primarily as an exercise in exploitation and destruction. They are not one in the same group but there is considerable overlap.

Scientific evidence that our system is destroying the planet is an irresistible tool to this political community to advance their political narrative of the future. Science has seemed willing to partner with those who embrace this narrative as a way to address the real challenge of climate change, I suspect not in small part because many scientists already share a similar political narrative. Yet the challenge of climate change does not dictate one particular narrative. Consequently, people who do not share the political narrative do not see climate science as valid science with a problematic superimposed narrative. They come to see climate science as junk science manufactured by people with the political narrative.

Science is going to play a critical role with a host challenges in the future. We have to find a way to tap down the political hijacking.

Nuclear Power From Nuclear Waste

See this article for more detials: Back to the Future: Can Nuclear Energy Save the World?

 

Deforestation: Brazil is a success story for conservation

Christian Science Monitor: Deforestation: Brazil is a success story for conservation

"In the 1990s, tropical deforestation claimed 40 million acres each year, according to a report released in June by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Today, about 32 million acres of forests fall each year, a drop of about 19 percent. ...

...  The report cites a number of efforts that have led to deforestation’s decline. The researchers looked primarily at political policies, incentive programs, and economic reforms, limiting the scope of their study to countries and regions that displayed clear, tangible successes.

“Ultimately, the report shows that every euro, dollar, peso, rupee, dong, and African franc invested in these programs and policies is money well spent,” said Doug Boucher, the lead author of the study, in a news release. “The rewards far outweigh the costs.”

Brazil has effectively employed a suite of conservation methods. ...

How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen

The Atlantic: How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen

Environmentalists warn us that apocalypse awaits. Economists tell us that minimal fixes will get us through. Here's how we can move beyond the impasse.

This is an exceptionally good piece by Charles Mann on how we think and talk about climate change. It is a long article. Here are a few excerpts.

"... On the one hand, the transformation of the Antarctic seems like an unfathomable disaster. On the other hand, the disaster will never affect me or anyone I know; nor, very probably, will it trouble my grandchildren. How much consideration do I owe the people it will affect, my 40-times-great-grandchildren, who, many climate researchers believe, will still be confronted by rising temperatures and seas? Americans don’t even save for their own retirement! How can we worry about such distant, hypothetical beings?

Worse, confronting climate change requires swearing off something that has been an extraordinary boon to humankind: cheap energy from fossil fuels. ..."

"... Rhetorical overreach, moral miscalculation, shouting at cross-purposes: this toxic blend is particularly evident when activists, who want to scare Americans into taking action, come up against economists, with their cool calculations of acceptable costs. Eco-advocates insist that only the radical transformation of society—the old order demolished, foundation to roof—can fend off the worst consequences of climate change. Economists argue for adapting to the most-likely consequences; cheerleaders for industrial capitalism, they propose quite different, much milder policies, and are ready to let nature take a bigger hit in the short and long terms alike. Both envelop themselves in the mantle of Science, emitting a fug of charts and graphs. (Actually, every side in the debate, including the minority who deny that humans can affect the climate at all, claims the backing of Science.) Bewildered and battered by the back-and-forth, the citizenry sits, for the most part, on its hands. For all the hot air expended on the subject, we still don’t know how to talk about climate change.

As an issue, climate change was unlucky: when nonspecialists first became aware of it, in the 1990s, environmental attitudes had already become tribal political markers. ..."

He does a great job of recounting the history of the politics that has led us to where we are today.

"As an issue, climate change is perfect for symbolic battle, because it is as yet mostly invisible. ..."

Yes! And my conviction is that most conversations I encounter are far more about symbolic identification with a particular reference group, an expression of personal identity, and a means for ideological warfare, than a genuine appreciation for the nuances and risks of the human impact on climate.

In concrete terms, Americans encounter climate change mainly in the form of three graphs, staples of environmental articles. The first shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing. Almost nobody disputes this. The second graph shows rising global temperatures. This measurement is trickier: ... The third graph typically shows the consequences such models predict, ranging from worrisome (mainly) to catastrophic (possibly). ...

... The only solution to our ecological woes, McKibben argues, is to live simpler, more local, less resource-intensive existences—something he believes is already occurring. ...

... At base, he says, ecologism seeks not to save nature but to purify humankind through self-flagellating asceticism.

To Bruckner, ecologism is both ethnocentric and counterproductive. Ethnocentric because eco-denunciations of capitalism simply give new, green garb to the long-standing Euro-American fear of losing dominance over the developing world (whose recent growth derives, irksomely, from fossil fuels). Counterproductive because ecologism induces indifference, or even hostility to environmental issues. In the quest to force humanity into a puritanical straitjacket of rural simplicity, ecologism employs what should be neutral, fact-based descriptions of a real-world problem (too much carbon dioxide raises temperatures) as bludgeons to compel people to accept modes of existence they would otherwise reject. Intuiting moral blackmail underlying the apparently objective charts and graphs, Bruckner argues, people react with suspicion, skepticism, and sighing apathy—the opposite of the reaction McKibbenites hope to evoke. ...

Exactly!

Does climate change, as Nordhaus claims, truly slip into the silk glove of standard economic thought? The dispute is at the center of Jamieson’s Reason in a Dark Time. Parsing logic with the care of a raccoon washing a shiny stone, Jamieson maintains that economists’ discussions of climate change are almost as problematic as those of environmentalists and politicians, though for different reasons. ...

... If the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises only slightly above its current 400 parts per million, most climatologists believe, there is (roughly) a 90 percent chance that global temperatures will eventually rise between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit, with the most likely jump being between 4 and 5 degrees. Nordhaus and most other economists conclude that humankind can slowly constrain this relatively modest rise in carbon without taking extraordinary, society-transforming measures, though neither decreasing the use of fossil fuels nor offsetting their emissions will be cheap or easy. But the same estimates show (again in rough terms) a 5 percent chance that letting carbon dioxide rise much above its current level would set off a domino-style reaction leading to global devastation. (No one pays much attention to the remaining 5 percent chance that the carbon rise would have very little effect on temperature.)

In our daily lives, we typically focus on the most likely result: I decide whether to jaywalk without considering the chance that I will trip in the street and get run over. But sometimes we focus on the extreme: I lock up my gun and hide the bullets in a separate place to minimize the chance that my kids will find and play with them. For climate change, should we focus on adapting to the most probable outcome or averting the most dangerous one? Cost-benefit analyses typically ignore the most-radical outcomes: they assume that society has agreed to accept the small but real risk of catastrophe—something environmentalists, to take one particularly vehement section of society, have by no means done.

On top of this, Jamieson argues, there is a second problem in the models economists use to discus climate change. Because the payoff from carbon-dioxide reduction will occur many decades from now, Nordhausian analysis suggests that we should do the bare minimum today, even if that means saddling our descendants with a warmer world. Doing the minimum is expensive enough already, economists say. Because people tomorrow will be richer than we are, as we are richer than our grandparents were, they will be better able to pay to clean up our emissions. Unfortunately, this is an ethically problematic stance. How can we weigh the interests of someone born in 2050 against those of someone born in 1950? In this kind of trade-off between generations, Jamieson argues, “there is no plausible value” for how much we owe the future.

Given their moral problems, he concludes, economic models are much less useful as guides than their proponents believe. For all their ostensible practicality—for all their attempts to skirt the paralysis-inducing specter of the apocalypse—economists, too, don’t have a good way to talk about climate change. ...

Amen!

... let’s assume that rising carbon-dioxide levels will become a problem of some magnitude at some time and that we will want to do something practical about it. Is there something we should do, no matter what technical arcanae underlie the cost-benefit analyses, no matter when we guess the bad effects from climate change will kick in, no matter how we value future generations, no matter what we think of global capitalism? Indeed, is there some course of action that makes sense even if we think that climate change isn’t much of a problem at all? ...

Read the article to see how he answers the question. I pretty much agree. But I particularly like how he has framed our problem with the problem of climate change.

I've been saying this for years but I still think the best response is one of risk management. Risk involves factoring in both the likelihood something will happen and the significance of the thing happening if it does. Apocalyptic ecologism or dismissive economism gets us nowhere.

The World's Resources Aren't Running Out - Matt Ridley

Wall Street Journal: The World's Resources Aren't Running Out

As I listen to conversations about our economic future, I hear two visions of the future being articulated and I think both are inaccurate. First, there are what I call the Malthusians. They see a world of imminent collapse, limits to growth, exhausted resources, and such. We are warned that if we keep going the way we are, X will run out, or Y will be destroyed. And they are right ... if there "if" stays true. And that is just the point. We don't keep going they way we are presently going when challenges emerge. We innovate. We substitute better models of doing things for the old ones. We substitute more plentiful materials for ones becoming more costly or scarce. The Malthusians have been singing their chorus of collapse for 200 years and they have always been wrong. And we still at the beginning, not the end, of learning how to address a multitude of problems that have continually plagued us.

I call the second group the Cornucopians. They see a world of unprecedented technological breakthroughs that will effortlessly make the world of 2100s like a utopia compared to our day. Now I will confess that I lean toward the Cornucopian side of this continuum and I believe the world will be a much better place. But I also look back over the last 200 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and while I see unquestionable improvement in the world's standard of living that is in accelerated upward movement, I also see great wars, injustices, and waste that happened along the way. The future is likely to hold more of the same.

As someone who works continuously at integerating faith and economics, I am deeply persuaded that growth is going to happen, that innovation and substitution is going to trip up the Malthusians once again. But that doesn't mean the process change is always going to painless and without injustice. And if the church is to have a meaningful impact on shaping our coming world, it has to live in this reality. Regretably, most of my Mainline Protestant tribe has succombed to Malthusian visions, and rather than working as a force to shape the new world, equates working against its emergence as a prophetic witness. Meanwhile, more conservative Christians seem to carry on as if just implementing free markets and making America strong is all we need. Unless this changes, the church, in America at least, will find itself swept along by these economic and technological changes, not shaping them.

Matt Ridely recently wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal called The World's Resources Aren't Running Out. A very much resonate with what has written in this piece.

"Ecologists worry that the world's resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again.

"... But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this "niche construction"—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.

Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.

That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. ..."

Repackaging Climate Action

Over recent years I've posted about the messaging we typically get on climate change. (Most recently Global Warming Scare Tactics (They Usually Backfire)) The predominate approach is to hit people with dire visions of what is happening to the world, lecture on the evils of capitalism and consumerism, and then offer a few practical solutions. This resonates well with a minority of people. But effective change requires that a majority consensus be built around specific action. The lopsided attention to scare tactics over solutions tends to make many feel helpless so they chose to ignore the issue. Others are turned off by the not so subtle attacks on what they feel is a good a decent way of life, inclining them to not only reject solutions but the validity of the climate concerns at all.

Yet research shows that when the focus is solution oriented, optimistic, and seen as means of preserving a way of life, many more people warm to the cause. Upworthy recently posted a clip by Jason Silva about The Solutions Project. (I love Silva as the host of Nat Geo's Brain Games.) I think Silva has done his homework. Watch the video and see how he frames the message. Notice that he is much less interested in getting people to coalesce on ideologies of what is wrong and is far more interested in getting people energized about solutions. People can bring a variety of narratives to the project but the aim is to unite them in solutions. For the sake of this conversation, I'm not interested in whether we think climate change is a threat or if we think his solutions are realistic. I'm pointing to the messaging question.

(One caveat: At 1:14 he says "the smartest men in the world." He might want to include women in that statement. ;-) )

Global Warming Scare Tactics (They Usually Backfire)

New York Times: Global Warming Scare Tactics

This article confirms what I've been arguing for some time now:

... evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts. ...

... What works, say environmental pollsters and researchers, is focusing on popular solutions. Climate advocates often do this, arguing that solar and wind can reduce emissions while strengthening the economy. But when renewable energy technologies are offered as solutions to the exclusion of other low-carbon alternatives, they polarize rather than unite.

One recent study, published by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, found that conservatives become less skeptical about global warming if they first read articles suggesting nuclear energy or geoengineering as solutions. Another study, in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2012, concluded that “communication should focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better society” rather than “on the reality of climate change and averting its risks.” ...

There is going to be substantial economic growth in coming years. Presently, the global median income is about $1,000 per year. If we were to freeze the economy as is (impossible, but work with me here) we would have two alternatives: 1) leave billions living in poverty while a minority live with much higher income,  or 2) balance out global income to about $7,000 a year, meaning the standard of living of people in advanced nations would drop to a fraction of current standards. The first is immoral and the second, short of global totalitarian government, isn't going to happen. Therefore, there will be growth, growth will require energy, and present forms of energy are carbon based.

If we are serious about carbon being a problem and about the realities I just described exist, then we will pragmatically find ways to reduce carbon in ways that honor these realities, not just throw out idealistic ideas and scream "anti-science" and "denier" when people balk at them. The unwillingness of so many activists to pursue pragmatic solutions is to me one of the biggest indicators that this is more about ideological demagoguing in pursuit of other ends than it is about addressing any truly imminent threat.

My thoughts are that we need to work toward greater energy efficiency in both production and in final products. We need to ramp up use of natural gas as an intermediate energy source. It is still a fossil fuel but produces much less CO2. That would buy us more time to build more nuclear power plants and to bring renewable energy technology to a level where it will be able to make a cost-effective contribution.

Furthermore, while there is scientific certainty that humans have an impact on climate, the climate's sensitivity to human influence is not so clear. Neither are the environmental impacts clear. Buying more time allows us to improve our understanding of the climate, helping us better understand the risks and benefits involved. In essence we, are talking about prudence and risk management.

Air Pollution Replaces Poor Diet As World's Largest Preventable Health Risk

Forbes: Air Pollution Replaces Poor Diet As World's Largest Preventable Health Risk

Dirty air killed an alarming 7 million people – or, one of every eight human lives lost – in 2012, according to new estimates released today by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The new data shows that air pollution has become the world’s largest single environmental health risk.

n 2010, air pollution ranked as the fourth leading preventable health risk, behind poor diet, high blood pressure and tobacco smoke, according to a major study funded by the Gates Foundation.

Indoor air pollution, primarily caused by burning solid fuels for heating and cooking, accounted for slightly more than half – 4.3 million – of those deaths in 2012.

Outdoor air pollution accounted for the remaining 3.7 million deaths. ...

Is the Cognitive Consonance of Climate Activists Blocking Meaningful Action?

Nick Cohen has a piece in the Guardian The climate change deniers have won. He is mourning the fact the "climate deniers" seem to be winning the day and exlpores why that might be. He writes:

... Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of "cognitive dissonance", a condition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s . They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resign from their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the earth on 21 December 1954. They would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.

When 21 December came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair. Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the last minute not to flood the planet after all. Her followers believed her. They had given up so much for their faith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.

Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel. ...

Let me say at the start that I think there is considerable truth in what he says. A great many of those who reject climate change alarm do not do so because they have a detailed knowledge of science. It is because it poses a significant threat to their view of the world.

Now let me add that is also true that a great many of those who embrace climate alarm do so not because they have a detailed knowledge of science. They do so because it gives them cognitive consonance. It reinforces their view of the world.

The marriage of climate alarm to anti-market, anti-growth, pro-state ideology is powerfully real but it is not a conscious marriage. It is intuitive. It creates cognitive harmony. To campaign for one is to campaign for the other.

If the real issue is solving the climate problem, then the messaging must be realistic. Take anti-growth. The global median annual income is about $1,000 per person. If there is to be no growth, then we have one of two options. First, freeze the world as it is and billions of people continue to live indefinitely at just above subsistence levels. Second, we install a global government to equalize income across the world meaning that the average American or European family (median income approx $50,000) will see a 98% drop to $1,000 a year. (And of course the very notion that income exists independent of the economic arrangements generating the income, which would have to be disassembled to achieve this goal, is absurd, but you get my point.) The first is immoral and the second beyond unrealistic. Therefore, the economy must grow and any realistic attempt to meet a climate change challenge will incorporate this. Period! End of discussion.

Innovation, adaptation, and substitution, and the free economies these activities need in order to thrive, are critical to addressing challenges, but they are anathema to so many climate advocates that embracing them creates cognitive dissonance. There are studies that suggest that when climate change is framed a little differently ... for instance, as a threat to future prosperity and freedom ... it gets a broader hearing among more conservative populations. Take the same-sex marriage movement. Regardless of what you think of its merits, a primary reason the movement has been successful is because it was able to tap into widely shared values of freedom of choice, tolerance, and equality. So it could just as easily be argued that it is the cognitive consonance of advocates that is blocking realistic meaningful responses to climate change.

Science and Technology Links (Environment Edition)

I'm playing catchup with a backlog of links to be posted. This list pulls together a subsection of science and technology links dealing with the environment.

1. Bloomberg: Warring Dogmas Block Climate-Change Progress

... In 1981, [Julian] Simon proposed a bet. [Paul] Ehrlich could name any five metals, and by the end of the decade, Simon wagered, their prices would decrease, thus disproving Ehrlich’s claim that population growth would produce an increase in scarcity.

Ehrlich eagerly accepted. Working with like-minded scientists, he selected chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. In the 1970s, the market prices of all five had increased significantly (at least in nominal terms). Ehrlich was confident that as a result of population growth, the trend would continue.

But Simon won the bet, and it wasn’t even close. By 1990, the prices of each metal had decreased by an average of 50 percent, even though the decade had seen the largest global population growth in history (with 800 million additional people). To all appearances, Simon had been vindicated. ...

... As Sabin explains, it turns out that Simon was a lucky winner. Not long ago, economists ran a series of simulations for every 10-year period from 1900 to 2008. They found that with respect to the prices of the five metals on which Ehrlich and Simon bet, Ehrlich would have won 63 percent of the time.

But this doesn’t mean that Ehrlich was right. Because of macroeconomic factors, commodity prices are volatile, and they are a poor proxy for the effects of population increases. ...

... These decisions raise diverse questions, and each of them must be investigated on its own merits. For such problems, the noisy, headline-grabbing dogmas of Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon are a serious impediment to progress. The coming decisions will require careful exploration of costs and benefits, not abstract narratives about the supposed arc of history.

2. Nature: Climate change: The case of the missing heat

Sixteen years into the mysterious ‘global-warming hiatus’, scientists are piecing together an explanation.

The biggest mystery in climate science today may have begun, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, with a subtle weakening of the tropical trade winds blowing across the Pacific Ocean in late 1997. These winds normally push sun-baked water towards Indonesia. When they slackened, the warm water sloshed back towards South America, resulting in a spectacular example of a phenomenon known as El Niño. Average global temperatures hit a record high in 1998 — and then the warming stalled. ...

3. L. A. Times: A climate change of heart by the European Union?

Confronted by rising energy costs and international competition, the European Union's executive body has recommended relaxing rules on renewable energy with a plan that doesn't hold specific nations responsible for specific targets. The EU's member states and Parliament should reject it. The EU has been the leader on fighting climate change; if it shies away from its commitment now, similar efforts in the U.S. and around the world will almost surely suffer.

On a positive note, the recommendations call for creating an overall target of a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared with what they were in 1990. It's a worthy target, though environmentalists would like it to be even higher; the 28-nation bloc has reduced such emissions by 12% so far. By 2030, the EU is supposed to get more than a quarter of its energy from renewable sources. But the plan would eliminate binding agreements under which each member nation would have to meet certain targets. So which nations would be responsible for attaining the 2030 goal and how would they be held to it? That's unclear. In addition, the plan would loosen environmental regulations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas.

Driving the changes are concerns about the struggling European economy. With energy costs higher because of reduced reliance on cheaper fossil fuels, European businesses are in a weak position to compete with those in nations without strong environmental rules. ...

4. The American Interest: End Result of Germany’s Green Energy Policy: More Coal

Germany produced more energy by coal last year than it has in nearly a quarter century. King Coal’s return comes courtesy of the energiewende—the policy put in place following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The plan was to phase out the country’s numerous nuclear reactors and jumpstart its fledgling renewable energy industry, but coal has been forced to fill the gap. ...

5. The American Interest: Why Europe’s Greens Are Wrong, in Two Charts

Europe has so far snubbed shale gas and has been rewarded with rising electricity prices and a greater reliance on coal. The end result: America is reducing emissions faster than Europe:

If you go anti-science on nuclear safety, this is what you get. ;-)

6. Scientific American: New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions Drop 19% Since 2005

New York City's greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by 19 percent since 2005, outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday, putting the city nearly two-thirds of the way to meeting the goal that Bloomberg set five years ago.

7. BBC: Ethiopia's renewable energy revolution (Video)

In Ethiopia the government has recently announced major deals that should massively increase the amount of electricity generated from renewable resources.

The BBC's Emmanuel Igunza has been finding out how Ethiopia is leading Africa in the drive to exploit sustainable energy supplies.

8. USA Today: How fast is the Earth's climate actually changing?

How quickly parts of the Earth's climate are changing in response to added greenhouse gases and what's forecast for decades ahead is a mixed bag, a federal advisory council says in a report out Tuesday. ...

... "Research has helped us begin to distinguish more imminent threats from those that are less likely to happen this century," said James W.C. White, professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and chairman of the committee that wrote the report.

"Evaluating climate changes and impacts in terms of their potential magnitude and the likelihood they will occur will help policymakers and communities make informed decisions about how to prepare for or adapt to them," he added. ...

9. Forbes: Can Coal Feed The Global Energy Appetite In A Healthy Way?

It’s the ultimate paradox: How to feed the world’s energy appetite while ensuring the planet’s endless survival. Reducing the use of coal and using more sustainable energy forms is the ultimate answer, the International Energy Agency says. But until then, the global community must strive to make coal cleaner.

10. BBC: Has the Sun Gone to Sleep (Video)

Scientists are saying that the Sun is in a phase of "solar lull" - meaning that it has fallen asleep - and it is baffling them.

History suggests that periods of unusual "solar lull" coincide with bitterly cold winters.

Rebecca Morelle reports for BBC Newsnight on the effect this inactivity could have on our current climate, and what the implications might be for global warming.

11. Christian Science Monitor: Antarctica warming tied to natural cycle in tropical Atlantic, study says (+video)

Rapid warming along the Antarctic Peninsula and puzzling shifts in the distribution and extent of winter sea ice at the bottom of the world appear to have their roots in a natural climate swing centered in the tropical Atlantic, according to a new study by researchers at New York University.

The warming of the region is of concern because of its implications for sea-level rise, while the shifting and slight increase in winter sea ice has become a favorite talking-point among many of global warming’s political skeptics. ...

12. It has become gospel, based on the Cook study,  that 97% of scientist agree with the theory of human-caused global warming. Two stories:

Forbes: Global Warming Alarmist Trashes His Own Poll Of Meteorologists Showing No Climate Crisis

... Stenhouse, a psychologist and doctoral student in communications at George Mason University, emailed all full members of the American Meteorological Society for whom he could find an email address and asked them to fill out an online survey on global warming. More than 1,800 AMS meteorologists filled out the survey.

Only 52 percent said global warming is occurring and is caused mostly by humans – which is itself a far cry from having 52 percent say humans are causing a global warming crisis. The results were a huge blow to the mythical notion that all or nearly all scientists agree that humans are causing a global warming crisis. This is especially the case considering the AMS survey reflected the views of scientists with atmospheric science expertise. This wasn’t a survey of engineers or other non-atmospheric scientists with little if any atmospheric science expertise. ...

And Popular Technology.net, 97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists' Papers, according to the scientists that published them

The paper, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' searched the Web of Science for the phrases "global warming" and "global climate change" then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.

To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists' papers as "endorsing AGW", apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors. ...

The Alternative to Climate Alarmists & Deniers

Daily Tech: Climate Alarmists & Deniers: Please, Just Shut Up

Researchers at George Mason University and Yale University bring the grave news that "belief in global warming" is at a "six year low". 
 
I. Do You Believe?
 
The study [PDF] comes courtesy of principle investigator Professor Anthony Leiserowitz, an environmental scientist at Yale.  Other principle investigators include Professors Edward Maibach and Connie Roser-Renouf (GMU communications professors, specializing in climate).  Geoff Feinberg, a Yale university employee who lacks a Ph.D but was a private sector polling specialist on environmental issues also contributed to the work. 
 
Another odd addition was psychopathology researcher turned climatology investigator Professor Seth Rosenthal, a member of Yale's climatology team. Rounding out the team was Professor Jennifer Marlon, a PhD expert in geography who currently teaches climate science at Yale.
 
The first oddity -- which you may notice -- is that there's nary a Ph.D credentialed climatologist in the field.  I think this is worth noting as critics of the more alarmist brands of "global warming" rhetoric are often attacked for not holding climatology degrees, despite the fact that many of them hold master's degrees or doctorates in related fields, such as physics or civil engineering. ...

This is a rather lengthy article but it is the conclusion that caught my eye.

IV. More Science, More Debate, Less Politics
 
There's a need for research.  But surveys on public opinion asked in shrill black and white terms offer little help to a legitimate debate.
 
And as much as there's a need for research, there's an equal age to push to remove this issue from a political debate.  Until someone can come up with a financially sound approach to emissions control, the government needs to step back and let the private sector handle its own affairs.
 
Mankind is changing the climate in numerous ways, many of which surpass even strong warming on a local basis.  From desertification to water cycle changes due to deforestation, many serious manmade climate changes are overlooked due to global warming's chokehold on media attention.

Instead of focusing on querying public beliefs and condemning (or praising) "nonbelievers", let us instead focus the dialogue on constructive solutions to both adopt a sensible path to alternative energy (e.g. algae, nuclear power, solar), so that when fossil fuel supplies do near exhaustion, we're prepared.  And let's acknowledge that climate change -- manmade or not -- has always been occurring on planet Earth.

Last, but not least, let's not blame the media for putting things in alarmist or overly skeptical terms, when researchers themselves often resort to the same extremes for funding.  After all, most members of the media have at least a bachelor's degree in a technical subject.  Like many who publish climate research, we lack a Ph.D in climatology.  But so long as we express our opinions respectfully, keeping an open and questioning mind, I see no reason why the media's opinions are more or less valid than non-climatologist thinking heads in academia.  To suggest otherwise is simply elitist "ivory tower" type thinking.

I have no doubt the climate is changing. I don't doubt that human activity plays a role. I am not certain how big that role is. Based on significantly errant predictions about climate (temps have remained stable for 15 years and are now outside the 95% confidence level of modeled scientific predictions), I don't have confidence that scientists have a good grasp on the climate yet. Some are suggesting the 15 year hiatus in warming could last another 15 years. Furthermore, calculations about CO2 emissions all assume GDP growth and energy use are perfectly coupled. Yet, evidence is emerging that the two are decoupling and that GDP is taking less energy per dollar of GDP. That means less than predicted CO2. As with the temperature predictions, my confidence level in scientists’ ability to predict specific impacts is not high, but it is not zero. In short, I'm not greatly worried ... yet.

With all that said, there is a lot in there I could be wrong about. Maybe by a little. Maybe by a lot. There are significant unknowns. And that means we are looking at a risk management question. Rather than feeling the need to cling exclusively to one pole or another ... alarm or denial ... I'm hedging my actions against the idea the the challenges are not threatening. It doesn't hurt that there are some significant advantages to nuclear and renewable energy beyond climate concerns. That makes me willing to hedge even more in that direction. What I find most disappointing is those who think total alarm or total denial are the only strategic options that may be considered. For them, it is most often about making ideology prevail versus dealing prudently with challenges.

What I am articulating is not a "moderate" position between two extremes or some attempt to find a "third way." I see at as realism ... decision-making in the face of uncertainty and recognizing climate change remediation is more than a one dimensional challenge. I see what I'm advocating as an alternative way to todays default option, unwavering allegiance to exaggerated claims of certainty by alarmists and deniers.

 

The (Mostly) Improving State of the World

Washington Post: 40 charts that explain the world

Our friend and colleague Max Fisher over at Worldviews has posted another 40 maps that explain the world, building on his original classic of the genre. But this is Wonkblog. We're about charts. And one of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are -- but how they're changing.

So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is -- but where it's going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome -- wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that's changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history. ...

As the author notes, we have challenges but we hardly descending into some global dystopia. I think these charts give a pretty holistic view. Here are a three examples.
It was commonly believed that primitive societies were more peaceful and that modern civilization gave rise to unprecedented violence. This chart compares death rates by war in primitive societies as calculated by anthropologists to the death rates for Europe/USA in the 20th century.
And then there is this:

The graphs point to environmental protection and adaptation as the biggest problems in the days ahead. Those challenges are not insurmountable. Energy sources like natural gas and nuclear power can be used in the interim on the way to practical renewable technologies. Genetically modified crops can help to reduce water consumption, increase yield, and improve hardiness. Innovations in fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing hold the promise of revolutionizing the world economy into a less wasteful and more affordable human existence for everyone. There is work to do but there is also much reason for hope of a better world.

 

Fewer people won’t save the planet, behaving better will

Conversation: Fewer people won’t save the planet, behaving better will

"... Does the earth have too many people for its own good? Can another three or four billion be added (the current United Nations projection for 2100) without fatally harming the planet?

The issue is not one of how many people the planet can support, but how wastefully and aggressively those people act.

Ten thousand years ago, with less than five million people on the Earth, large animals were already being hunted to extinction by aggressive humans. It was the domestication of plants and animals that filled the world with both humans and large herbivores. Today, with seven billion people, these herds of pigs and cattle satisfy our ever-growing demand for meat.

Untouched wilderness seems scarcer (although national parks in the US remain much as they were a century ago, once you leave the concession stands and roadside attractions). But true wilderness, untouched by humans, on Amazon rainforest and American plains ceased to exist thousands of years ago when human populations were a tiny fraction of what they are today. Native Americans burned, dug, and reshaped the forests and plains to suit their needslong before Columbus brought guns and horses to the New World.

Won’t too many people drain food supplies, produce poverty and damage the climate? Again, it is not the number of people but how they act that matters. Food supplies are fine – it is food distribution that is the problem. ...

... Fears of climate change now reverberate widely. But again, the problem is not too many people. ...

... People who fear overpopulation commit the fallacy of simply multiplying faults – they take the most harmful and wasteful actions of any set of people today and multiply it by the growing number of people in the world. ...

... Doing away with billions of people is no substitute for doing away with the vices in people’s behaviour. Instead we need to pursue cleaner, healthier, and more ecologically sound lifestyles and ways of satisfying our needs. For that we need more, not less, creative and passionate people to guide us to a better future. The planet can handle it, if we improve how we handle ourselves. ...

What an excellent essay!

Thoughts on the "The Limits to Panic"

Forty-one years after publication of the infamous Limits to Growth, Bjorn Lomborg offers this excellent piece, The Limits to Panic:

... But the report’s fundamental legacy remains: we have inherited a tendency to obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies.

In the early 1970’s, the flush of technological optimism was over, the Vietnam War was a disaster, societies were in turmoil, and economies were stagnating. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring had raised fears about pollution and launched the modern environmental movement; Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 title The Population Bomb said it all. The first Earth Day, in 1970, was deeply pessimistic.

The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. The only hope was to stop economic growth itself, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilizing society at a significantly poorer level.

That message still resonates today, though it was spectacularly wrong. For example, the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.

Instead, despite recent increases, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago. Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings, and thermometers: mercury consumption is down 98% and, by 2000, the price was down 90%. More broadly, since 1946, supplies of copper, aluminum, iron, and zinc have outstripped consumption, owing to the discovery of additional reserves and new technologies to extract them economically.

Similarly, oil and natural gas were to run out in 1990 and 1992, respectively; today, reserves of both are larger than they were in 1970, although we consume dramatically more. Within the past six years, shale gas alone has doubled potential gas resources in the United States and halved the price.

As for economic collapse, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over this century and 24-fold in the developing world.

The Limits of Growth got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness. Population growth has been slowing since the late 1960’s. Food supply has not collapsed (1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve). Malnourishment has dropped by more than half, from 35% of the world’s population to under 16%.

Nor are we choking on pollution. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse.

In 1900, when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost three million people – roughly one in 500 – died each year from air pollution, mostly from wretched indoor air. Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people. While pollution still kills more people than malaria does, the mortality rate is falling, not rising.

Nonetheless, the mindset nurtured by The Limits to Growth continues to shape popular and elite thinking. ...

... Obsession with doom-and-gloom scenarios distracts us from the real global threats. Poverty is one of the greatest killers of all, while easily curable diseases still claim 15 million lives every year – 25% of all deaths.CommentsThe solution is economic growth. When lifted out of poverty, most people can afford to avoid infectious diseases. China has pulled more than 680 million people out of poverty in the last three decades, leading a worldwide poverty decline of almost a billion people. This has created massive improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life. ...

The key issue here is innovation. Think in terms of a continuum. At one end is the ape from the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first human ancestor discovers the idea of using a large bone as a tool for manipulating his environment.

Further along the continuum might be simple tools like hammers and plows. They are extensions of the human body. Then come machines. Human beings are no longer wielding tools but are directing and servicing machines. Next there is artificial intelligence, where computers are able to make some decisions for us, as well as doing repetitive dehumanizing work. Finally, at the other end, might be something like the replicator in Star Trek, where you simply state your wish and a device rearranges atoms to create the desired object.

The problem with the Limits to Growth mentality is that it is locked into a current point along the continuum.  It correctly observes that there is a fixed amount of resources in the world but it incorrectly assumes that economic growth means increased use of a materials at rate proportional to the rate of economic growth. To get the depletion date for a resource you calculate the quantity of a material known to exist, calculate annual present usage of the material, project a rate of economic growth, and subtract the projected annual usages from the total.  

Total Resource/Current Annual Resource Usage = Years to Depletion (Increase economic growth and the years to depletion shrinks.)

Since the material quantities are fixed, the only variable is economic demand. Consequently, economic growth … whether the result of escalating wants and needs per capita or from increasing population … is unsustainable. (Similarly, take the current level of pollution and multiply it times the rate of economic growth to see how polluted the world will be.) Human innovation is nowhere in sight!  

But we are not frozen at a point on the continuum. Human creativity is constantly changing the equation. Here is how.

First, in the short run, there is productivity. As demand for a natural grows it becomes more profitable to go after previously unconsidered deposits of that resource. For example, copper is everywhere but it varies in its accessibility and quality. Quality accessible cooper is the first to be used. But as demand increases, new techniques are invented for finding cooper, accessing deposits, and processing cooper. The Limits to Growth report estimated available cooper in the world in 1972 and projected we would run out of cooper by 2000. Today, not only have we not run out, but we are using more annually and the amount of available cooper has grown magnitudes larger.

Second, economizing. Figuring out how to do twice as much (sometimes much more) with the same resource changes the equation. Household appliances today use less than half the power they did forty years ago and often have features that were not imagined then.

Third, substitution of less plentiful resources with more plentiful resources, especially renewable resources. It is true that over a long time horizon that cooper would one day be depleted barring changes in consumption. But as productivity and economizing gradually lose their ability to keep cooper plentiful, the price of cooper will begin to rise. Recycling cooper will become more attractive. But even more likely is replacement of cooper by other alternatives. Think how much of our communication now is done with sand (fiber optics are made from silica) versus cooper (our old phone lines.) Furthermore, virtually everything made of nonrenewable resources can eventually be made using renewable resources.

Fourth, nanotechnology. We are in the beginning stages of manipulating matter at the molecular level. Nanorobots, about fifteen times the size of an atom, that can disassemble molecules and assemble atoms into new molecules. 3-D printers are already “printing” a range of items, including human tissue and organs. Scientists are developing printed food for long-term space voyages. Something akin to a replicator is not that unthinkable. The range of materials we can use for particular applications, our ability to manipulate matter at the molecular level, and our flexibility at forming matter into useful forms continues to evolve.

A finite stock of materials is not a limit to economic growth. That is not to say to we are without challenges. While many resources can be made more plentiful over time it is true that the very near term there can be shortages and injustices. Extraction of raw materials without adequate consideration for environmental impact could lead to horrific consequences. I’m not making the case that everything will magically take care of itself. I’m making the case that opposition to economic growth based on static zero-sum perceptions of the world that sees inevitable depletion of resources or over-pollution is groundless.

US CO2 emissions per capita in 2012 were the lowest since 1964

Carpe Diem: US CO2 emissions per capita in 2012 were the lowest since 1964

"... Last year, CO2 emissions in the US fell to an 18-year low, the lowest level since 1994, and C02 emissions from coal fell to a 26-year low, the lowest since 1986. Further, as the WSJ reported this week (“Rise in U.S. Gas Production Fuels Unexpected Plunge in Emissions“) the US now leads the world in reducing CO2 emissions thanks to the shale revolution. At the same time that America is using less coal and more shale gas and reducing C02 emissions, Europe and Asia are becoming more coal-dependent for electricity generation, and increasing C02 emissions.

Compared to the last time that CO2 emissions were at 2012′s levels — back in 1994 — real GDP in 2012 was 55% higher and the US population was 17.5% larger, making the drop in greenhouse gas emissions to an 18-year low in 2012 even more impressive. Adjusted for the population, CO2 emissions per capita last year were the lowest since 1964, almost 50 years ago (see chart above, data here and here). According to Department of Energy forecasts, the decline in per capita CO2 emissions is expected to continue so consistently that within about 20 years, greenhouse gas emissions per person in the US will be below the level in 1949! ..."

Global warming: Apocalypse perhaps a little later

Economist: Global warming: Apocalypse perhaps a little later

Climate change may be happening more slowly than scientists thought. But the world still needs to deal with it.

IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.

It is not clear why climate change has “plateaued” (see article). It could be because of greater natural variability in the climate, because clouds dampen warming or because of some other little-understood mechanism in the almost infinitely complex climate system. But whatever the reason, some of the really ghastly scenarios—where the planet heated up by 4°C or more this century—are coming to look mercifully unlikely. Does that mean the world no longer has to worry?

No, for two reasons. ...

Here is a graph from the article:

Here is a another chart from The Mail Online showing actual temps versus the forecasted temps based on computer models. The article is written in the publications typical bombastic style but graph is nevertheless helpful:

I'm glad to see reputable publications like the Economist addressing this development. It is clear to even the most casual observer that a plateau is happening. To keep behaving as if it isn't there and that people who are drawing attention to it are sinister does not help the public discourse. In fact, embracing anomalies that are particularly problematic for a narrative you want to communicate is key to making winning broad public support. As I've said before, I don't question scientific thought that human behavior has an impact on the environment. I do question our ability, to date, to appreciate the complexity involved or the sensitivity to human behavior. Prudence is an important value here.

Are climate change models becoming more accurate and less reliable?

Scientific American: Are climate change models becoming more accurate and less reliable?

One of the perpetual challenges in my career as a modeler of biochemical systems has been the need to balance accuracy with reliability. This paradox is not as strange as it seems. Typically when you build a model you include a lot of approximations supposed to make the modeling process easier; ideally you want a model to be as simple as possible and contain as few parameters as possible. But this strategy does not work all the time since sometimes it turns out that in your drive for simplicity you have left a crucial factor out. So now you include this crucial factor, only to find that the uncertainties in your model go through the roof. What’s happening in such unfortunate cases is that along with including the signal from the previously excluded factors, you have also inevitably included a large amount of noise. This noise can typically result from an incomplete knowledge of the factor, either from calculation or from measurement. Modelers of every stripe thus have to tread a fine balance between including as much of reality as possibility as possible and making the model accurate enough for quantitative explanation and prediction.

It seems that this is exactly the problem that has started bedeviling climate change models. A recent issue of Nature had a very interesting article on what seems to be a wholly paradoxical feature of models used in climate science; as the models are becoming increasingly realistic, they are also becoming less accurate and predictive because of growing uncertainties. I can only imagine this to be an excruciatingly painful fact for climate modelers who seem to be facing the equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for their field. It’s an especially worrisome time to deal with such issues since the modelers need to include their predictions in the next IPCC report on climate change which is due to be published this year. ...

A very interesting piece showing the challenges of forecasting the future with mathematical models. I liked this paragraph.

... But the lesson to take away from this dilemma is that crude models sometimes work better than more realistic ones. My favorite quote about models comes from the statistician George Box who said that “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. It is a worthy endeavor to try to make models more realistic, but it is even more important to make them useful.

How Green Are Millennials?

New Geography: How Green Are Millennials?

"... President Obama was also right, from a Millennials’ perspective, to emphasize the need for America to become a leader in sustainable energy technologies. Seventy-one percent of Millennials believe America’s energy policy should focus on developing “alternative sources of energy such as wind, solar and hydrogen technology; only a quarter believes that it should focus on “expanding exploration and production of oil, coal and natural gas.” Similarly, the RICN’s “Blueprint for a Millennial America,” a report prepared by thousands of Millennials who participated in their “Think 2040” project, placed the development and usage of renewable sources of energy at the top of all other environmental initiatives.

The participants’ proposed solutions to the challenge, however, were not focused on the kind of top-down change so common to Boomers. .Instead the proposals  emphasized taking action at the community level. No one, the RICN blueprint said , should be asked to “make sacrifices without fully considering the cost to communities” whose “texture” is most likely to be impacted dealing with the challenge.

Many politicians fail to notice this unique Millennial perspective. Members of the generation disagree sharply with their elders on the best way to address environmental challenges, preferring to tackle them through individual initiative and grassroots action rather than a heavy-handed top down bureaucratic approach. ..."

That last sentence gives me hope for the future. ;-)

Saturday Links

Today is the day our advanced technological culture turns to a cute furry rodent in Pennsylvania for a weather forecast. (The only thing a groundhog foretells in my yard is that I'm probably going to need some new landscaping.) Happy Groundhog Day!

1. Strategic Planning and the "Vision Thing" -- Fire, Not Fluff.

"In the course of our strategic planning work with clients, we've identified the things that make the difference between visions that fall flat and those that turn on. Here's a no-nonsense summary of those elements that you can use as a guide when you develop your strategic plan."

2. Some good thoughts on strategies we should all consider in trying to address controversial issues. Five simple lessons from Shane Windmeyer’s friendship with Chick-fil-A’s Dan Cathy

3. Anticipating a move? Here's Everything You Should Consider Before Moving To A New City

4. Jordan Ballor has some thoughts on subsidiarity at Political Theology. Subsidiarity ‘From Below’

"In this way a conception of subsidiarity “from below” is focused on the location of sovereignty from the “bottom up” rather than on the delegation of authority from the “top down.” We see these variegated approaches to subsidiarity and sovereignty work out in diverse ways in later centuries. It is with these different lenses of subsidiarity “from above” and “from below” that we can better understand the developments of the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity as such and the neo-Calvinist articulation of “sphere sovereignty” in the late nineteenth century and beyond."

5. Business Insider offers 21 Surprising Facts About Illegal Immigration.

6. Sarah Posner has an interesting piece. ‘New Evangelical’-Progressive Alliance? Not So Fast

"Pally’s essay is framed around the thesis that these evangelicals have “left the right.” But left it for what? What she describes is really another vision of conservatism: church-based charity in lieu of a government safety net; exemptions from government regulation for religious groups; federal funding of religious activities; and persistent sexual puritanism. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’ve left the radical right and are in the process of creating a new religious right, stripped of harsh rhetoric but still undergirded by conservative ideology. Which is a movement worth chronicling, but not, as Pally intimates, as the new saviors of civility in our religiously-inflected politics."

7. What has the iPad meant to Apple? A picture says a thousand words. A decade of Apple 'computer' sales

8. Extinction of millions of species 'greatly exaggerated'

"In the past scientists have warned that up to five per cent of species are at risk of dying-out as a result of climate change, deforestation and development.

But a new analysis by the University of New Zealand found that this figure was five times greater than reality because the number of animals living in the wild in the first place had been over estimated."

9. Turns out once culprit in species extinction may be curled up in your lap. Cats Are Ruthless Killers. Should They Be Killed?

10. I've written before that fear is not an effective motivator for long term change. This is particularly true for some climate change and environmental activism. You need to make new behaviors fun and engaging. WWF appears to have taken this strategy to heart. (Hard to go wrong with anthropomorphized critters but maybe they should consider the article immediately above.)

11. The evolutionary plot thickens. Who Was the First Human Ancestor?

From the time of Charles Darwin science has painted a picture of our earliest ancestor in the image of a chimpanzee. Scientific American editor Katherine Harmon explains how new fossil evidence is redrawing the lines of human evolution.

Actually, I think we already know who our first ancestor was.

12. For the most part (with a few exceptions), when it comes to movies, if you can't tell your story in less than two hours, then I think you didn't edit the movie well. Hollywood would apparently beg to differ. Why Movies Today Are Longer Than Ever Before

"The average of the highest-grossing films from 20 years ago is 118.4 minutes compared to this year's 141.6 minutes."

13. More interesting findings early civilization in the Americas. Research Confirms Massive Louisiana Mound Was Built By Archaic Native Americans In Less Than 90 Days.

14. Melissa and I love history and we have always loved old cemeteries. This story makes me sad. Black history dies in neglected Southern cemeteries

15. Okay purists, Rule Change Eliminates a Fake Pickoff. Pitchers will no longer be able to fake a throw to third before throwing to another base. Good idea or bad?

Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection

Wall Street Journal: Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection

Fear-mongering exaggeration about effects of global warming distracts us from finding affordable and effective energy alternatives.

In his second inaugural address on Monday, President Obama laudably promised to "respond to the threat of climate change." Unfortunately, when the president described the urgent nature of the threat—the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms"—the scary examples suggested that he is contemplating poor policies that don't point to any real, let alone smart, solutions. Global warming is a problem that needs fixing, but exaggeration doesn't help, and it often distracts us from simple, cheaper and smarter solutions.

For starters, let's address the three horsemen of the climate apocalypse that Mr. Obama mentioned.

Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%. Estimates published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that even with global warming proceeding uninterrupted, the level of wildfires will continue to decline until around midcentury and won't resume on the level of 1950—the worst for fire—before the end of the century.

Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought. A study published in Nature in November shows globally that "there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years." The U.N. Climate Panel in 2012 concluded: "Some regions of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia."

As for one of the favorites of alarmism, hurricanes in recent years don't indicate that storms are getting worse. Measured by total energy (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), hurricane activity is at a low not encountered since the 1970s. The U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century—the last Category 3 or stronger storm was Wilma, more than seven years ago. ...

... In the long run, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide because it causes global warming. But if the main effort to cut emissions is through subsidies for chic renewables like wind and solar power, virtually no good will be achieved—at very high cost.

Instead of pouring money into subsidies and direct production support of existing, inefficient green energy, President Obama should focus on dramatically ramping up investments into the research and development of green energy. Put another way, it is the difference between supporting an inexpensive researcher who will discover more efficient, future solar panels—and supporting a Solyndra at great expense to produce lots of inefficient, present-technology solar panels.

When innovation eventually makes green energy cheaper, everyone will implement it, including the Chinese. Such a policy would likely do 500 times more good per dollar invested than current subsidy schemes. But first let's drop the fear-mongering exaggeration—and then focus on innovation.

Amen!

Climate change doesn’t have to be all bad - Zachary Krabell

Reuters: Climate change doesn’t have to be all bad - Zachary Krabell

... But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately improves life as we know it? ...

... It does not, however, follow that the future arc of these changes is disastrous. Unwanted, unwelcome and uneasy? For sure. Potentially lethal? Yes. But so much of the debate over the past 30 years has been over what is causing climate change, and how to prevent more change from happening, that comparatively less energy has been spent on adapting to it. In part, those most focused on these issues, from Green parties in Europe to environmentalists in the United States, have often believed that any discussion of mitigating the effects of climate change is tantamount to giving up on preventing it. That has led to a jeremiad mentality, epitomized by Al Gore and the scathing warnings of what lies ahead in his hugely influential 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.

The advantage of that approach was that it alerted many to the dangers of climate change; the disadvantage was that it scared people into passivity and closed fruitful avenues to policies focused on mitigating the effects rather than halting the trend. And while halting the trend might have been feasible (just) 20 years ago, the most we can achieve now is to reduce the rate and intensity of climate change until the world’s population levels off sometime in the middle of the 21^st century. Activists can and should still focus on reducing global emissions, but not at the expense of answering how we will live with the change.

Perhaps in recognition of the need of a new paradigm, “resilience” has quietly become a buzzword. The ever provocative Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his recent book Antifragile argues that only organizations capable of meeting crises can survive crises. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, counties and cities in the Northeast have been contemplating how best to prepare for future weather shocks. That has led to renewed appreciation for cities, such as Rotterdam, that have long undertaken environmental planning organized around the notion that floods will happen no matter what humans do. The challenge isn’t to find a way to prevent floods; it’s to find a way to live with them.

The two approaches could not be more distinct: One warns of catastrophe and attempts to steer away from it. One pragmatically accepts that some undesirable things will happen no matter what. Rotterdam has thus focused both on preventing as much flooding as possible (floodgates) and on urban infrastructure that is as flood-resistant as possible: power grids that have dispersed nodes, waterproof insulation, even floating parts of the city in case of truly severe inundation.

Far from signaling a resignation to climate change, resilience, adaption and mitigation all shift energy away from holding back the tide and toward innovation and creativity in meeting it. ...

I especially like the bolded portion below in thinking about complex human systems

... That approach is imperative not just for climate change but for multiple areas that generate such anxiety about the future. The imbalance of the financial system? Those are only made worse by the false belief that a system could be created where such risks don’t exist; better to find ways to mitigate the risks of a global interconnected financial system than seek, Don Quixote-like, ways to eliminate risk. ...

Some provoactive stuff! I may not entirely agree with his assessment of particular risks but I think his strategy for addressing risk is right on.

Environmentalist Mark Lynas Changes View on GMOs

Mark Lynas: Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference, 3 January 2013

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.

These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.

This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.

For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes. ...

Saturday Links

(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)

I hope you had a great Christmas and are enjoying the holidays.

1. The Huffington Post offers their top religion stories of 2012: 2012 Religion Stories: The Top 10

2. David Gushee reflects on Glen Stassen's A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age: The illnesses of American Christianity

"... The first kind of Christianity avoids reactionary authoritarianism but is often a therapeutic or vanilla mush that fails to ask anything of anybody out of fear of giving offense. The second kind of Christianity offers stern, clear moral directives that attract people seeking the “specific instruction, even confrontation that calls us to grow in discipleship” (p. 6), but disastrously embraces right-wing ideology and baptizes that as the content of Christianity.

Both of these versions of Christianity are so deeply flawed, says Stassen, that both are contributing to the alarming spread of secularism in the U.S. The first version of Christianity is so thin as to lack any particular reason why one would want to get out of bed on Sunday and go to church; the second is so reactionary as to drive thoughtful people into an anti-religious posture if they conclude that religion equals right-wing authoritarianism.

I believe this is a stark but actually quite accurate depiction of the primary problems afflicting the Protestantisms of the left and of the right in the current U.S. setting. ..."

3. When New England Progressives Won't Tolerate Evangelicals. "Once a center of 19th-century evangelism, Northfield, Mass., is unsettled by the prospect of a school with religious aims."

4. Peter Enns with yet another provocative post: What do Turkey, Bethlehem, and Tennessee Have in Common? They Don’t Bode Well for the Conservative Christian Subculture

5. Peter Liethart offers a book review of Peter Brown's new book, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 Ad, at Christianity Today: How the Early Church Made Peace with Prosperity. (And, no, I don't know why everyone seems to be Peter this week ... Enns, Liethart, and Brown.)

6. Why Latin Americans top the happiness rankings

"While not exclusive to Latin America, the culture of family, support, and living a life to spend time with your family, I think, is an important part of Latin American culture that keeps people positive. Being with those close to you and finding other friends and partners that value that way of life is a key part of Latin American culture. That might be the main reason why people remain positive: they are never truly alone. Interestingly, many discussions and documentaries about immigrant groups in the United States show an internal conflict among many who move to the US and who do not wish to lose their support systems in a new culture rooted in individualism. While being motivated and entrepreneurial is valued, a life being with your family, where you are never truly alone, is the basis for many cultures in many parts of the world. Many new Americans frown on the thought that children can detach themselves from their family at 18 years of age. They believe people can only truly thrive as a family."

7. In contrast to Latin American happiness based in family connection is this survey of British children that revealed that A 'dad' is tenth most popular Christmas list request for children.

8. Christian Science Monitor reports on Parental leave global comparison: US still among least generous

9. And in yet another story on familial collections China orders children to visit their elderly parents.

10. Scientific American reports some positive news: Early Childhood Obesity Rates Might Be Slowing Nation-Wide

11. Men may want to think twice before taking up yoga. It seems men are more prone to serious injury from yoga. Wounded Warrior Pose

12. What are the ten most popular books of all time? The 10 Most Read Books In The World

13. Traditional Books On Decline, Survey Says

"A Pew Internet Research Center survey released Thursday found that the percentage of Americans aged 16 and older who read an e-book grew from 16 percent in 2011 to 23 percent this year. Readers of traditional books dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent. Overall, those reading books of any kind dropped from 78 percent to 75 percent, a shift Pew called statistically insignificant."

14. Here are nine interesting findings about state by state data from the Census Bureau: Here Are The States Where People Are Leaving, Moving To, And Having Lots Of Babies

• Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Rhode Island are the only states (and territory) that saw a net decrease in population over the year.
• The fastest growing region was the South (1.06% population growth) followed by the West (1.03% population growth).
• North Dakota and the District of Columbia had the highest population growth, with 2.5% and 2.3% population growth, respectively. Texas, Wyoming, and Utah also saw major growth.
• West Virginia and Maine are the only two states where people are dying faster than they are being born, with 0.93 and 0.99 births for each death.
• Utah (3.44) and Alaska (3.33) had the highest birth to death ratio in 2012. That means 3.44 babies were born for each death in Utah.
• Domestic migration determines the rate that people leave and enter states to and from other states. Per capita, more natives left New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island to move somewhere else than any other states.
• On the other hand, people flocked to North Dakota, D.C., Wyoming and South Carolina.
• The states that had the highest rates of international migration — that is, the rate of immigrants coming in — were Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, New York and D.C.
• Puerto Rico is seeing a massive exodus — 1% of their population left last year.

15. When we think of transportation in the United States, few of us think about river and costal water transportation. Yet a great many goods and commodities are shipped on our rivers. The Midwest drought is having an impact on a major artery of that transportation network. The Mississippi River's Water Levels Are Dropping, And Could Shut Down Trade Next Week

16. Facebook?! Twitter?! Instagram?! We Did That 40 Years Ago. "Three decades before Yelp and Craigslist, there was the Community Memory Terminal. ..."

 

 17. America's Stuff Is Getting Really Old, And That's Bullish

"In other words, Americans are increasingly likely to have to purchase and replace these goods some time soon as they get more and more worn out.  That's bullish for spending, jobs, and the economy as a whole."

18.From right here in my hometown, just a mile or two from where I live: In a Kansas City Neighborhood, Deep Investments and an Uncertain Future. The Atlantic Cities reports on Kansas City's experiments with Green Impact Zones.

19. Why are men, in aggregate, better navigators than women? National Geographic: Of Men, Navigation, and Zits

"... Yet a few differences between the sexes do seem to hold up to scrutiny. One is spatial abilities. If men look at an object, for example, they are slightly faster at guessing what it would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees. There are plenty of women who do better than individual men. But overall there’s a stasticially significant difference in their average performance. This kind of difference carries over from one culture to another. It’s even detectable in babies. ...

... Whenever we reflect on human evolution, it pays to compare our species to other animals. And in the case of spatial abilities, the comparison is fascinating. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Helen Hubbet found that male rats could get through a maze faster than females. The difference can also be found in a number of other species. ...

... Clint and his colleagues propose a different explanation: male spatial ability is not an adaptation so much as a side effect. Males produce testosterone as they develop, and the hormone has a clear benefit in terms of reproduction, increasing male fertility. But testosterone also happens to produce a lot of side effects, including male pattern baldness and an increased chance of developing acne. It would be absurd to say acne was an adaptation favored by natural selection. The same goes for the male edge in spatial ability, Clint and his colleagues argue. They note that when male rats are castrated, they do worse at navigating a maze; when they are given shots of testosterone, they regain their skill. ..."

Saturday Links

(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)

1. Several articles I saw this week are reflecting on data presented in The Pew Forum's The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010. Here is one interesting chart from the survey, showing what percentage of each religions's adherents live in minority religious status in their own country.

2. This is really fascinating. Smithsonian: Why Japan is Obsessed with Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas. “Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii!” (Kentucky for Christmas!)

3. Four Harvard and MIT grads are experimenting with direct aid to the poor. "GiveDirectly, the brainchild of four Harvard and MIT graduate students, is so simple, it's genius. Give poor Kenyan families $1,000 -- and let them do whatever they want with it." Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever?

4.From the Guardian, Private healthcare: the lessons from Sweden

"... Despite its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of the health service.

Their success is envied by the centre right in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006. The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right government had been re-elected after serving a full term.

As the state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all welfare services are now owned by private equity firms". ..."

5. Scott Annan writes in The Future Of Business Is Morality, And The Future Is Now

"... We have reached a point in our economy where it is becoming increasingly clear that businesses are being measured not just for their profit, but also for their impact. And I’m not just talking about writing a check or funding a charity; I’m referring to business models for which community involvement and inspirational brand building are the profit centers. (Think Warby Parker, TOMS, and startups such as SOMA.) I recently went to a conference where the founders of a startup posited a powerful idea: the future of marketing is philanthropy. But I think the even bigger idea is the future of business is morality. My grandfather saw this early on.

At a time when the moral framework of America appears to be fractured – or at the very least confused – businesses are in the propitious position to espouse cultural standards that can help restore values that our youth can use to build the next generation of positive enterprise. In fact, whether businesses succeed in creating and promoting positive cultures might determine whether they stay in business at all. The future of business is morality, and the future is now.

Whether it’s the job of the corporation or not to set the moral tone for society, the expectation is trending towards companies setting the right example for others to follow. With the sharp rise in entrepreneurship, young companies have the opportunity to establish strong cultures early on and share them with their communities. Money must have a moral center, and from greater consciousness in business, greater profit will follow. ..."

6. Scientific American asks, After 40 Years, Has Recycling Lived Up to Its Billing?

7. AOL has a short piece about the rise of small nuclear reactors. The Next Big Thing in Nuclear Power: Going Small

8. Scientific American has a list of The Top 10 Science Stories of 2012.

9. Depression Surpasses Asthma as Top Disability Problem among U.S. and Canadian Teens

"New data show an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teens in the U.S. and Canada over the past two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe."

10. Robotic arm controlled by the mind allows paraplegic woman to feed herself

11. Interesting piece on Why We Prefer Masculine Voices (Even in Women).

12. Atlantic Cities looks into The Mystery of Our Declining Mobility.

13. People Are Leaving California In Record Numbers

More people moved out of California in 2011 than moved in, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau, signaling that the Democrat-run state’s economic woes continue to drive residents away.

Most statisticians attribute California’s net loss of 100,000 people last year to its high cost of living, increased population density and troubling unemployment rate.

The widening middle class in Mexico is also encouraging some immigrants to remain in that country instead of moving to California.

Texas — home to lower taxes, less regulation and what the Manhattan Institute calls a “labor pool with the right skills at the right price” — is one of the most attractive destinations for companies departing from California, according to the Census Bureau. ...

14. The United States Has Seen A Huge Drop In Executions Since 2000.

"The country reported 85 executions in 2000 but only 43 in 2012, according to a new report released by the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus, far fewer people are being sentenced to death row in the first place. The year 2000 saw 224 new inmates sentenced to death, while 2012 saw only 78, according to the report."

15. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had a great piece Why 'If We Can Just Save One Child ...' Is a Bad Argument, referring to a statement President Obama made at Newtown, CT. When we deal with complex topics like gun control, we are always talking about tradeoffs. For instance, I know how we can save more than 30,000 lives. The were 32,367 traffic fatalities last year. Let's set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. Nearly all those lives would be saved. Should we do this "if we can save just one more life"? I, like Friedersforf, am not advocating any particular policy. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of making statements like this, as politicians often do.

16. The New York Times has an opinion piece  by John Dickerson, The Decline of Evangelical America

"I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive. The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old evangelicalism whimper and wane."

He speaks of an Evangelical "collapse" having happened. That may be a bit premature but I think his articulation of trends is right.

17. I saw two interesting posts on the sociology Facebook this week. The New York Times had a piece about announcing bad news on Facebook: On Facebook, Bad With the Good. Mashable reports that Socioeconomic Status Predicts Number of Facebook Friends.

18. Gangnam Style hits one billion views on YouTube. K pop rules!

Anthropocene: Do We Need a New Environmentalism for a New Age?

A few days ago, Matt Ridley had a piece in the Wall Street Journal, Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change, in which he writes:

... In short: We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide. We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models. Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in "radiative forcing" (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC's current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

Mr. Lewis is an expert reviewer of the recently leaked draft of the IPCC's WG1 Scientific Report. The IPCC forbids him to quote from it, but he is privy to all the observational best estimates and uncertainty ranges the draft report gives. What he has told me is dynamite.

Tim Worstall at Forbes writes in Maybe Climate Change Just Really Isn't A Problem After All?

... That is an extraordinary claim and clearly requires extraordinary evidence to support it. Much as I like Ridley (we swap stories and information regularly) I’m not going to accept it on the basis of one newspaper column. And Ridley wouldn’t expect me or you to either.

But if it is true then climate change stops being a looming diaster threatening all we hold dear and becomes instead just a minor background effect. One that we really don’t have to do anything particularly active about at all: the advancing technologies of low or non-carbon energy generation will take care of it all for us. ...

I share Worstall's caution but I also think that to acknowledge that the earth is warming and humans play a contributing role, something for which there seems to be strong agreement, doesn't tell you the magnitude of the impact or what policy options are optimal. As I've pointed out in early posts, the global average temperature has plateaued for more than a decade. Violent hurricane activity has not increased. Arctic ice is melting, although, as I understand it, it is summer ice not winter ice where the change is being observed. Dueling scientists publish studies with partisans cherry-picking the elements that are most supportive of their narrative. I do not doubt that human behavior is having impact on the climate. But I am uncertain of how robust climate models are and how serious the challenges are likely to be.

One thing I do like is the following quote from Bryan Walsh, senior editor at Time. I take issues with some aspects of his article, Anthropocene: Do We Need a New Environmentalism for a New Age?, but I did like this.

... But Kloor isn’t really talking about politics. Rather, I think, it’s how we conceive of the environment and environmentalism. The message of the modernist greens is: in a world of 7 billion plus people, all of whom want (and deserve) to live modern, consuming lives, we need to be pragmatic about how we use—and how much we protect—nature. We don’t have any other choice, so we’d better start dealing with the realities on the ground.

The realist in me thinks the modernist greens are right. There are simply too many of us, and we want too much, for our footprint on the Earth to get anything but bigger. And I’m cheered by the scientists and thinkers who suggest that we might be able to have it all—a huge, thriving human population, and an environment that can support it—as long as we plan right. What’s more, I’m very conscious that industrialization and globalization have largely been forces for good, expanding human access to wealth, health and longevity. There’s no better time in history to be human being. Industrialization is not going to be rolled back—and it shouldn’t be.

There’s also a larger social shift at work that’s altering our concept of nature. Today more human beings live in cities than live in the countryside, and that proportion will only grow in the future: by 2050, as many as three-quarters of the estimated 10 billion people on Earth will live in urban areas. This is a historic change—as recently as 1800 just 2% of the world’s population lived in cities—and it’s a sign that humanity, inevitably, is decoupling from nature. I suspect that’s true even of environmentalists, who are just as likely as anyone else to come into contact with what passes for wilderness these days more  in a managed park than untrammeled rainforest or woodland. For a lot of us, “environmental issues” increasingly have to do with improving urban life—think cleaner mass transit or access to organic food in farmer’s markets. As the writer Emma Marris argued in her book Rambunctious Garden, environmentalism needs to stop drawing simplistic lines between what’s natural and what’s manmade—with the former always good and the latter always bad—and learn to celebrate the biodiversity that’s in our backyards. ...

Amen.

"Peak farmland" is here, crop area to diminish: study

Reuters: "Peak farmland" is here, crop area to diminish: study

(Reuters) - The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.

Their report, conflicting with United Nations studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7 billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland".

More crops for use as biofuels and increased meat consumption in emerging economies such as China and India, demanding more cropland to feed livestock, would not offset a fall from the peak driven by improved yields, it calculated.

If the report is accurate, the land freed up from crop farming would be some 10 percent of what is currently in use - equivalent to 2.5 times the size of France, Europe's biggest country bar Russia, or more than all the arable land now utilized in China.

"We believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York.

"Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and Development Review. ...

Why the recent increase in belief in global warming isn't good news for science

Results of an Associated Press – GfK poll about climate change was reported on last Thursday (AP-GfK Poll: Science doubters say world is warming):

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds. …

… The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it. That's up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009. …

“Good news! People are finally coming around to believing what scientists have been telling us all along!” I can just hear some folks declaring. Hold that thought for a moment. The article goes on to say:

… The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that category. …

… [John] Krosnick [Stanford social psychologist], who consulted with The Associated Press on the poll questions, said the changes the poll shows aren't in the hard-core "anti-warming" deniers, but in the next group, who had serious doubts.

"They don't believe what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say," Krosnick said. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along." …

The rise in belief in global warming does not stem from science, but inductive reasoning based on heuristics … relying on personal experience as evidence of a broader reality. It is possible this will be the warmest year on record in the United States but more moderate globally. People in the United States look at their thermometers and see warmer temperatures. The news shows super-storm Sandy. Therefore, from experience in our particular context it is reasoned  that there is a global trend.

The irony is that average global temperatures haven’t changed much for more than a decade. Global hurricanes and cyclones that make landfall are not more prevalent, as has been predicted. In fact, the last four years have been quite mild. I’m not making the case that climate change isn’t happening. Climate models don’t necessarily preclude plateaus in change. Rather I’m saying that if you are a skeptic, then recent trends should bolster skeptical interpretations. Yet, because of personal experience, some science skeptics are extrapolating from their narrow context to global realities. Furthermore, another survey finds that One in three Americans see extreme weather as a sign of biblical end times. This is not good news for science.

But I want to suggest that there is more to the story than this. Many true believers in climate change insist that the science is settled on this matter and no further dissent may be tolerated. Yet, as I have written about earlier, some of these folks are staunch skeptics about the safety of genetically modified crops and nuclear power, despite what the scientific community says. (see Why Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions? and The Anti-Science Left) The issue is not so much that they are persuaded by science, as it is that claiming scientific authority for conclusions reached by other means (heuristics? ideology?) is rhetorically useful. This is not good news for science either.

Any number of futurists have written about this challenge. For our entire human history, individual lives were consumed with challenges that were immediately present to us … like shelter from the elements and not becoming prey for some animal. But with the recent explosion in knowledge, technology, and economics, many of the imminent threats we face have been tamed and the new challenges we face are vastly more complex. Over reliance on heuristic models and rigid ideological sense-making strategies, once essential, can become obstacles to good decisions. The challenge for the next several generations is going to be learning how to develop social institutions that effectively reflect on and address complex challenges.

Conservationists team up with ranchers, loggers

Kansas City Star: Conservationists team up with ranchers, loggers

... Across the nation, conservation groups in partnership with ranchers are using cattle to restore native plant species by grazing invasive grasses. Other groups are working with fishermen to fish sustainably, and using logging and mining profits to pave way for forest and salmon restoration.

"There's been a shift to working more with industries," said Lynn Huntsinger, professor of rangeland ecology at the University of California, Berkeley. "This is a human landscape. We need food, we need wood, people are crazy about eating salmon. Working closely with those who produce on the land offers opportunities for ... teaching them about conservation."

In the past, conservationists relied on purchasing land and setting it aside, away from human activity. Logging, ranching or mining were seen as harmful and incompatible with preservation.

But in recent years, the use of conservation easements to retire development rights on private land has exploded. The easements, which cost a fraction of what it would cost to buy the property, allow landowners to continue working the land. ...

ead more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/12/15/3967248/conservationists-team-up-with.html#storylink=cpy

Saturday Links

(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)

1. Pray for Egypt Today!

More than 50 million Egyptians are voting today on a constitution that would be a giant step backward for Egypt and much of the Middle East, marginalizing women and religious minorities. A nation that has historically been a voice of moderation, the largest Muslim nation in the region, will likely move toward becoming an Islamist state. Remember to pray for Egypt. (See the Economist's The Founding Brothers)

2. Our prayers are with families of the victims at the Sandy Hook elementary school. Grace and peace to the entire community.

In the wake of the horrific shooting, more debate about gun control is certain to surface. The Atlantic has some useful charts showing the nuanced take Americans have on gun rights and gun control. Do Americans Want More or Less Gun Control? Both, Actually The Christian Science Monitor also has this piece: What gun control laws might US voters support?

3. Traffic deaths in 2011 fewest in six decades

Traffic deaths in the USA continued their historic decline last year, falling to the lowest level since 1949, the government announced Monday.

A total of 32,367 motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians died in 2011, a 1.9% decrease from 2010. Last year’s toll represents a 26% decline from 2005, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said. ...

4. Obesity in Young Is Seen as Falling in Several Cities

... The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011....

5. In Girl’s Last Hope, Altered Immune Cells Beat Leukemia

....The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells. ...

... The research is still in its early stages, and many questions remain. The researchers are not entirely sure why the treatment works, or why it sometimes fails. One patient had a remission after being treated only twice, and even then the reaction was so delayed that it took the researchers by surprise. For the patients who had no response whatsoever, the team suspects a flawed batch of T-cells. The child who had a temporary remission apparently relapsed because not all of her leukemic cells had the marker that was targeted by the altered T-cells. ...

6. The CDC says Chlamydia, gonorrhea cases increasing

....In 2011, 1.4 million chlamydia infections were reported to the CDC. The rate of cases per 100,000 people increased 8%, to 457.6 in 2011 from 423.6 in 2010.

The CDC reported 321,849 gonorrhea infections. The rate increased 4% to 104.2 cases per 100,000 in 2011 from 100.2 in 2010. Like chlamydia, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, a major cause of infertility in women.

Last year, 13,970 primary and secondary syphilis cases were reported. The rate of 4.5 cases per 100,000 was unchanged from 2010. ...

7. You may be bilingual but can you write in two languages, one with each hand, at the same time?!

8. Washington State Senate: Republicans Claim Majority After Democrats Defect. That makes two states were Democrats have won majorities in the state Senate and then a small number of Democrats decide to caucus with Republicans, giving Republicans the majority. The same thing happened in the New York Senate last week.

9. One-party dominance grows in states

10. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones speculates on why liberals have more exaggerated perceptions of political differences. We Are More Alike Than We Think

11. A surprising "right to work" bill was signed into law in Michigan, of all places. That has spurred a lot of debate about unions and the right to work. Michael Kinsley wrote a thoughtful piece opposing RTW, The Liberal Case Against Right-to-Work Laws. David Henderson has piece in support of RTW, The Economics of "Right to Work".

12. Slate has a piece about The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement. Keith Kloor opines on the division between mondernist environmentalists (or eco-pragmatists) and conservation traditionalists.

... Modernist greens don't dispute the ecological tumult associated with the Anthropocene. But this is the world as it is, they say, so we might as well reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. To this end, Kareiva advises conservationists to craft "a new vision of a planet in which nature—forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems—exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."

This shift in thinking is already under way. For example, ecologists increasingly appreciate (and study) the diversity of species and importance of ecosystem services in cities, giving rise to the discipline of urban ecology. That was unthinkable at the dawn of the modern environmental movement 50 years ago, when greens loathed cities as the antithesis of wilderness. ...

13. One of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes I remember from my childhood was when this woman ends up trapped in a department store at night. The mannequins begin calling to her. She discovers she is actually a mannequin who has over stayed her time out in the world and it is time for the next mannequin to spend some time outside the store. This story confirms my worst nightmares: In Some Stores, the Mannequins Are Watching You

14. Carpe Diem: World manufacturing output, 2011

15. One of the biggest concerns about fracking technology is the enormous amount of water it uses. A company has figured out how to recycle water so that far less water is used in the fracking process. Solving fracking's biggest problem

16. Scientific American has a interesting article on the potential impact of 3-D Priting: Why 3-D Printing Matters for "Made in U.S.A."

... 3D printing represents the latest version of what industry experts call "additive manufacturing" — a way to turn practically any computer designs into real objects by building them up layer-by-layer using plastics, metals or other materials. The technology could end up affecting every major industry — aerospace, defense, medicine, transportation, food, fashion — and have an even bigger impact on U.S. manufacturing than the robot revolution. ...

17. Popular Mechanics is celebrating its 110th anniversary. In celebration, they are publishing 110 Predictions For the Next 110 Years.

18. Scot McKnight has a great post reflecting on the (false, IMO) equation of progressive with prophetic: The Prophetic is the Progressive

19. Dirk Kurbjuweit offers some interesting insights into Why Germany Can't Shed Its Troubling Past.

20. Michael Cheshire has a great piece in Leadership Journal on "What I learned about grace and redemption through my friendship with a Christian pariah." Going To Hell with Ted Haggard

".... A while back I was having a business lunch at a sports bar in the Denver area with a close atheist friend. He's a great guy and a very deep thinker. During lunch, he pointed at the large TV screen on the wall. It was set to a channel recapping Ted's fall. He pointed his finger at the HD and said, "That is the reason I will not become a Christian. Many of the things you say make sense, Mike, but that's what keeps me away."

It was well after the story had died down, so I had to study the screen to see what my friend was talking about. I assumed he was referring to Ted's hypocrisy. "Hey man, not all of us do things like that," I responded. He laughed and said, "Michael, you just proved my point. See, that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys can't forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you talk to me about God, you explain that he will take me as I am. You say he forgives all my failures and will restore my hope, and as long as I stay outside the church, you say God wants to forgive me. But that guy failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to him." Then he uttered words that left me reeling: "You Christians eat your own. Always have. Always will."

He was running late for a meeting and had to take off. I, however, could barely move. I studied the TV and read the caption as a well-known religious leader kept shoveling dirt on a man who had admitted he was unclean. And at that moment, my heart started to change. I began to distance myself from my previously harsh statements and tried to understand what Ted and his family must have been through. When I brought up the topic to other men and women I love and respect, the very mention of Haggard's name made our conversations toxic. Their reactions were visceral."

21. Leonardo Bonucci got a yellow card for faking collision during a soccer game. It should have been a red card. No one deserves to be a professional soccer player with acting skills this bad!

 

U.S. Carbon-Dioxide Emissions Are Improving

Business Insider: There's Been An Incredible Drop In Projected US Carbon-Dioxide Emissions

... From 2009 to 2013, key changes in the AEO [Annual Energy Outlook] include:

• Downward revisions in the economic growth outlook, which dampens energy demand growth
• Lower transportation sector consumption of conventional fuels based on updated fuel economy standards, increased penetration of alternative fuels, and more modest growth in light-duty vehicle miles traveled
• Generally higher energy prices, with the notable exception of natural gas, where recent and projected prices reflect the development of shale gas resources
• Slower growth in electricity demand and increased use of low-carbon fuels for generation
• Increased use of natural gas

Power sector transformation, based on decarbonization of the generation mix, occurs because natural gas and renewables gain market share at the expense of coal, reflecting:

• Resource economics—high domestic production of natural gas at historically low prices, reflecting increased production of shale gas
• Regulation—updated state renewable portfolio standards and efficiency standards, and cap-and-trade provisions of California Assembly Bill 32, as well as implementation of federal policies to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and other policies and measures at local, state, and federal levels

 

Global Trends 2030

AP: Report: Asian economies will surpass US, Europe

AP has a story summarizing Global Trends 2030, a report put out by the U.S. Intelligence community.

... The study said that in a best-case scenario, Americans, together with nearly two-thirds of the world's population, will be middle class, mostly living in cities, connected by advanced technology, protected by advanced health care and linked by countries that work together, perhaps with the United States and China cooperating to lead the way.

Violent acts of terrorism will also be less frequent as the U.S. drawdown in troops from Iraq and Afghanistan robs extremist ideologies of a rallying cry to spur attacks. But that will likely be replaced by acts like cyber-terrorism, wreaking havoc on an economy with a keystroke, the study's authors say.

In countries where there are declining birth rates and an aging population like the U.S., economic growth may slow.

"Aging countries will face an uphill battle in maintaining living standards," Kojm said. "So too will China, because its median age will be higher than the U.S. by 2030."

The rising populations of disenfranchised youth in places like Nigeria and Pakistan may lead to conflict over water and food, with "nearly half of the world's population ... experiencing severe water stress," the report said. Africa and the Middle East will be most at risk, but China and India are also vulnerable.

That instability could lead to conflict and contribute to global economic collapse, especially if combined with rapid climate change that could make it harder for governments to feed global populations, the authors warn.

That's the grimmest among the "Potential Worlds" the report sketches for 2030. Under the heading "Stalled Engines," in the "most plausible worst-case scenario, the risks of interstate conflict increase," the report said. "The U.S. draws inward and globalization stalls." ...

Here is the overview from the report:

Over the next two decades, the relative power of major international actors will shift markedly.  Around 2030,  after nearly a century as the preeminent global economic power, the United States will be surpassed by China as the world’s largest economy. With its trade in goods expected to nearly double that of the U.S. and Europe, China’s international economic clout will reach new heights.  By 2030, India will become the world’s most populous country and third-largest economy, while Brazil’s economy will rank fourth in size.  India and Brazil will join China at the high table of 21^st century international politics alongside the United States, even as the relative weight of Russia and Japan diminishes.  The European economy will remain in the top tier, but it is not clear whether Europe will be able to act with common purpose to leverage this source of strength.

With its enhanced economic base, Beijing could rival Washington in overall military spending, even as a slowing Chinese economy and internal political conflict complicate China’s ability to lead internationally.  The United States will remain primus inter pares in light of its continued advantages across the full spectrum of national power and the legacy benefits of its leadership.  It will, however, be operating in a post-Western world in which the bulk of global economic power is held by countries whose per capita incomes are far below those of the traditional great powers.  This reality will leave China, India, Brazil, and other players focused on internal development and domestic challenges, torn between their desire to be global powers and their interest in free-riding on Western management of the interna­tional system.

How will the rise of the rest impact the international system?  The National Intelligence Council’s draft Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds maps out three broad scenarios:

Reverse Engines. Under this scenario, the international system would consist of several powerful countries — but no single state or bloc of states would have the political or economic leverage to drive the international community toward collective action. Such a world, characterized by a global vacuum of power, assumes that the United States will no longer be willing or capable of sustaining the predominant leadership role it has assumed since 1945.   With no other country able to step in to replace the U.S. as a global leader, the resulting diver­gence of interests would lead to fragmentation and the inability of great powers to work cooperatively to solve global issues.  Mercantilism and protectionism could lead economic globalization to go into reverse, constraining technological breakthroughs required to manage scarce global resources.  Conflict and disorder would follow.

Great Power Convergence.  An alternative scenario is what the NIC calls a “fusion” world, in which major powers work together to adopt and enforce a set of globally accepted rules and norms. As U.S. predominance over the international system recedes, other emerging powers would step in to assume greater responsibility for the management of international affairs commensurate with their swelling economic might.  Emerging powers emerge as full stakeholders in a global order that is transformed by power shifts but remains liberal and pluralistic.  Great power concert (perhaps enabled by democratization in China) to meet global challenges increases the stability of the international system even as power is diffused within it.  U.S. resilience enables it to create enduring partnerships with rising powers to sustain the basis of liberal order.   Technological advances create new possibilities for joint management of key global challenges, rewarding positive-sum behavior by the great powers.

Multipolar Divergence—U.S. Primacy.  A third scenario, one the NIC calls “fragmentation,” involves a multipolar system characterized by a divergence of views among great powers that challenges global governance.  The United States would continue to maintain disproportionate global influence and leverage that influence to address global challenges by working through coalitions of like-minded states.  A multispeed global economy accelerates the diffusion of power but an alternative coalition to the West does not form, with developing giants consumed by their domestic challenges – even as the global middle class explodes in ways that transform politics within the rising powers.  With inclusive global institutions effectively stalemated, the United States instead turns to its old and new allies in Europe and Asia, who would continue to see Washington as their partner of choice in advancing the norms and rules of a liberal order.  The risk of conflict increases with the continued rise of new powers like China and the rapid pace of technological change.

One key conclusion of the NIC study is that the future role of the United States in the international system is a decisive variable in determining what kind of “alternative world” will exist in 2030.  The choices U.S. leaders make – about how to marshal (and preserve) domestic resources, how vigorously to assert U.S. military and economic leadership overseas, and how much to invest in alliances old and new – will be central to determining which of the above pathways the international system will follow over the coming 20 years.  To a certain extent, the answer to the question of how the “rise of the rest” impacts the U.S.-led international system is that it is not up to them… so much as it is up to us.

Are There Too Many People on the Planet?

Conservation Magazine: Are There Too Many People on the Planet?

... Here’s what I bet goes on when this question is posed—and I want to say up front that I think this way myself. I do not like long lines and traffic jams. I do not like that I have to drive 60 minutes to get to a decent natural area or that when I get to the Cascades for my hike, I’m likely to run into dozens of others on the same trail. I do not like how built up our coastline has become and how hard it is to get access to beaches. And so on.

In other words, I do not like the impact of “too many people” on my personal happiness. Rarely do we admit that this is the basis of our concerns about human population. Instead, we couch them in terms of “exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity” or “causing the extinction of species.” ...

... And when we so easily jump to the conclusion there are too many people on the planet, what solutions does it suggest? Who should be eliminated? Who should not be allowed to have children? And who gets to decide? Is it really that there are too many people on the planet? Or is it more about the kinds of settlements and economies we have built?

Lastly, the entire notion of too many people neglects those studies showing that large numbers of people, especially concentrations of people in cities, are engines for innovation and cultural advances. (4) For example, new patents and inventions overwhelmingly come from cities—and the larger the city, the more patents and inventions are produced. ...

... More importantly, the question of whether there are too many people is the wrong one for conservationists to ask. The right questions are: What quality of life do we want all people on the planet to share? And how can we achieve that quality of life while preserving as many species and ecosystems as possible?

Conservation of nature has a lot to contribute to answering those questions and to enhancing that quality of life. So don’t automatically nod in agreement when a colleague says: “The problem is, there are too many people on the planet.” People can be the solution as well as the problem.

It is popular these days to decry consumerism ... and rightly so. Voices in our world tell us that our life consists of the products we buy and the things we own. It is materialism.

But the irony is that many consumerism critics fall prey to is their own form of materialism. They see human beings primarily as subtracting from a fixed stock of resources. Human beings are parasitic, adding nothing. Reduce the number of humans and you save the planet.

Human beings do not just consume, though that is part of our reality. All forms of life consume. But human beings also add to the world in a way that other beings in the created order do not. They add creativity and intelligence to the world. With creativity and intelligence come beauty, ingenuity, community, and flourishing.

There are challenges. Through unlocking powers of productivity and exchange we have found we can radically improve the material status of people around the world. But we find we have to adapt our methods and perspectives to sustain the changes we have made ... doing more and more with less and less, as we minimize our destructive impact. We have to find ways to be stewards of the world that recognize more than just our material quality of life. As Christians, we know that sin often twists our creativity and intelligence toward destructive behavior. The answer to these challenges is not to dehumanize people by framing them in materialistic terms as consumption units. Rather it is to work toward unlocking and unleashing the creativity and intelligence of everyone as we work for a flourishing shalom-filled world.

Supporting Climate-Friendly Food Production

Worldwatch Blogs: Supporting Climate-Friendly Food Production

This [United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization] report, Innovations in Sustainable Agriculture: Supporting Climate-Friendly Food Production, discusses six sustainable approaches to land and water use, in both rural and urban areas, that are helping farmers and other food producers mitigate or adapt to climate change—and often both. They are:

• Building Soil Fertility: Alternatives to heavy chemical use in agriculture, such as avoiding unnecessary tilling or raising both crops and livestock on the same land, can help to drastically reduce the total amount of energy expended to produce a crop or animal, reducing overall emissions.
• Agroforestry: Because trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, keeping them on farms whenever possible can help mitigate climate change. Agroforestry also keeps the soil healthier and more resilient by maximizing the amount of organic matter, microorganisms, and moisture held within it. Agroforestry also provides shade for livestock and certain crops, and creates habitats for animals and insects, such as bees, that pollinate many crops.
• Urban Farming: Growing food in cities can mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions released from the transport, processing, and storage of food destined for urban populations. Urban agriculture also increases the total area of non-paved land in cities, making urban landscapes more resilient to flooding and other weather shocks, while improving the aesthetic value of these landscapes.
• Cover Cropping/Green Manure: Cover cropping, also known as green manure, is the practice of strategically planting crops that will deliver a range of benefits to a farming system, and often plowing these crops into the soil instead of harvesting their organic matter. Planting cover crops improves soil fertility and moisture by making soil less vulnerable to drought or heat waves. Cover crops also serve as a critical deterrent against pests and diseases that affect crops or livestock, such as corn root worm or Rift Valley fever, particularly as warmer temperatures enable these organisms to survive in environments that were previously too cold for them.
• Improving Water Conservation and Recycling: Innovations in water conservation, including recycling wastewater in cities, using precise watering techniques such as drip irrigation rather than sprinklers, and catching and storing rainwater, all help to reduce the global strain on already-scarce water resources.
• Preserving Biodiversity and Indigenous Breeds: Growing diverse and locally adapted indigenous crops, such as yams, quinoa, and cassava, can provide a source of income and improve farmers’ chances of withstanding the effects of climate change, such as heat stress, drought, and the expansion of disease and pest populations. Preserving plant and animal biodiversity also reduces farmers’ overreliance on a small number of commodity crops that make them vulnerable to shifts in global markets.

By tapping into the multitude of climate-friendly farming practices that already exist, agriculture can continue to provide food for the world’s population, as well as be a source of livelihood for the 1.3 billion people who rely on farming for income and sustenance. If agriculture is to play a positive role in the global fight against climate change, however, agricultural practices that mitigate or adapt to climate change will need to receive increased research, attention, and investment in the coming years.

Global water crisis

Christian Science Monitor: Global water crisis: too little, too much, or lack of a plan?

This is a good piece about the growing challenges of fresh water supplies around the world. After detialing at length the challenges the article concludes:

... But the picture may not be as bad as it seems. While the projections about the growing global water crisis drastically underestimate how bad things really are, says Upmanu Lall, director of the Water Center at Columbia University, they also underestimate the scale of waste and the water efficiency improvements that could make adaptation easier.

"Things could actually be worse than what these guys are putting out," says Professor Lall. "They are too optimistic about the current situation compared to what it actually is. And they're too pessimistic about the situation for the future ... I do see a way to get there."

That's what he's learned from much of his work on water issues in India, which he calls "a basket case for water." He adds: "You could actually eliminate water stress in India if you were just a little bit smarter about which places you were procuring which crops from."

Science, he says, is part of the solution: Agricultural efficiency can be drastically improved with a better mix of what is grown where, accounting for geography, water constraints, and income; governments will have a role to play in setting economic signals to promote conservation and the right mix of crops, and regulation to ensure access in urban and rural areas; cheap soil-moisture sensors could improve agricultural water efficiency by 10 to 15 percent by reducing waste in irrigation systems; recycled waste water could save in the billions of dollars that the US spends purifying water up to drinking quality even though only 10 percent is used for drinking and cooking; flood-control systems can be repurposed to store water.

But most important, says Lall, "the economics of it has to be sorted out." Water allocations for personal consumption and ecological preservation should be protected, he said, but about 75 percent of water consumed globally should be subject to more competitive pricing. In a sense, he argues, water should be treated like oil, allowing developers a guaranteed allocation as an incentive to develop it. About a quarter of water supplies should be protected to ensure people have water for drinking and to preserve ecology, he says. But everyone – from the home-owner watering the lawn to big industry and agriculture – should pay more for water.

Instability, conflict, and economic stagnation may be the prod societies need before they adapt, says Lall.

He deems the US system for allocating water rights as "not too bad." Where those rights were not tradable, he says, "things are a mess."

Some states – Arizona, California, Idaho, and Texas – have water banks that facilitate leases between rights-holders and users. But since these water banks don't incorporate forecasting, they fail to make deals until a drought begins. What the US needs, says Lall, is a national water policy that incorporates forecasts, trading mechanisms, options, and the coordinated use of both surface and ground-water resources.

While the tools and strategies exist to cope with the impending pressures of a warmer and more populous planet, Lall says, "the question is, will we do it right?"

I think another possibility as that as water prices rise, desalinization technologies beceome more attractive. A high percentage of the world population lives withing 100 miles of an ocean. The technology is not capable of addressing our present challenges but as technology advances and water costs rise, I suspect this will become part of the solution as well.

Saturday Links

Here are the links. BTW, if you haven't already, you can "like" the Kruse Kronicle Facebook page and see daily links in your Facebook feed.

1. When I was a kid, I used to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Saturdays. That was the beginning of my life-long appreciation for big cats. One of the organizations we support is the Turperntine Creek Wildlife Refuge for big cats in Arkansas. Check out this Nat Geo super slo-mo video of a running cheetah. Be sure to go to minute 5:00, and see him from the front. His head barely moves. Just amazing!

Cheetahs on the Edge--Director's Cut from Gregory Wilson on Vimeo.

2. Good news! Charitable giving increased slightly in 2011

3. Counting sheep not putting you to sleep? Eat These Foods For A Better Night's Sleep

4. Tiny Swarming Robots Play Beethoven.

5. Just a reminder. That Ebook you bought? You don't own it. That Barnes & Noble Ebook is Only Yours Until Your Credit Card Expires

6. Speaking of books, how about a Book-Scanning Robot Reads 250 Pages Per Minute?

7. If you are a man, getting along with the in-laws means you have 20% higher chance of not getting divorced. If you are a woman, getting along well the in-laws makes you 20% more likely to get divorced. Getting Along With The In-Laws Makes Women More Likely To Divorce

8. Could the first billion dollar athlete be less than a decade away? Why the World's First Billion-Dollar Athlete Is Just a Few Years Away

9. A business icon died this week. Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar dies at age 86.

10. This was pretty cool. An Inspiring Story Of A Grocery Store Owner Who Gave His Business To Employees

11. One of the challenges of colonizing the moon or Mars is all the supplies you would need to bring along to construct a habitat. 3D-printing may help solve that problem. 3D printer on moon or Mars could make tools from local rocks

12. Give us this day our monthly bread? "American company has developed a technique that it says can make bread stay mould-free for 60 days." Bread that lasts for 60 days could cut food waste

13. The Next Web has an interesting piece on the history of 3d-Printing. The Rise of 3D Printing

14. Supreme Court to Decide if Human Genes Are Patentable

"The Supreme Court announced Friday it would review a case testing whether human genes may be patented, in a dispute weighing patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer. A 2009 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed among other things the First Amendment is at stake because the patents are so broad they bar scientists from examining and comparing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes at the center of the dispute. In short, the patents issued more than a decade ago cover any new scientific methods of looking at these human genes that might be developed by others."

I am guessing there are some bioethics questions to consider here as well. ;-)

15. 4.5 billion years of the earth's evolution in as if it happened in 24 hours.

16. The Real Story on the Falling U.S. Birth Rate

"The Pew Research Center announced Nov. 29 that the U.S. birth rate fell to its lowest level since at least 1920, when reliable record-keeping began. That was true—but not news. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that way back on Oct. 3.

What was news was Pew’s analysis of the government data, which showed that the birth rate decline was greatest among immigrant women. “We were the first to point that out,” Gretchen Livingston, the lead author of Pew’s report, said in an interview. ..."

17. Small-business optimism is tanking. Gallup

18. Also from Gallup. As it turns out, maybe Democrats really are socialists.

19. What's Driving Evangelical Enthusiasm?

"Data shows growing Catholic-evangelical "intensity gap"—but it doesn't indicate exactly why. ...

... New research shows that Catholics now report the lowest proportion of "strongly affiliated" followers among major American religious traditions, while the data indicates that evangelicals are increasingly devout and committed to their faith.

According to Philip Schwadel, a sociologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in the 1970s there was only a five-point difference between how strongly Catholics and evangelicals felt about their religion.

By 2010, he said, that "intensity gap" had grown to around 20 points, with some 56 percent of evangelicals describing themselves as "strongly affiliated" with their religion compared with 35 percent of Catholics. Even mainline Protestants reported a higher level of religious intensity than Catholics, at 39 percent. ..."

20. For Amish, fastest-growing faith group in US, life is changing.

"Indeed, for America’s Amish, much is changing. The Amish are, by one measure, the fastest-growing faith community in the US. Yet as their numbers grow, the land available to support the agrarian lifestyle that underpins their faith is shrinking, gobbled up by the encroachment of exurban mansions and their multidoor garages.

The result is, in some ways, a gradual redefinition of what it means to be Amish. Some in the younger generation are looking for new ways to make a living on smaller and smaller slices of land. Others are looking beyond the Amish heartland of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, seeking more space in states such as Texas, Maine, and Montana."

21. Finally, one of the things I found interesting about the presidential election was Team Romney's seeming confidence they were winning. I think every candidate who is losing often tries to spin things positively until the very end but I had the sense that Team Romney wasn't faking it. They believed they were winning. I think post-election analysis is revealing that was true. From The New Repbulic The Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He'd Win

Finally, a Victory Against Mountaintop Removal

Slate: Finally, a Victory Against Mountaintop Removal

The first crack in a firewall that has protected big coal for decades.

Since the 1990s, small bands of Appalachian residents, regional environmental groups, and more recently the EPA have fought what often seemed like a futile battle against mountaintop-removal mining, the radical practice of blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal seams underneath. The coal companies, backed by local political establishments and conservative jurists skeptical of possible regulatory overreach, have fended off multiple attempts to shut down mountaintop operations. As a result, an ever-widening swath of Appalachian peaks and valleys has been obliterated: approximately 2,200 square miles, according to the EPA, in what is likely a conservative estimate because the footprint often extends beyond the permit zones. That’s an area almost the size of Delaware.

That expanse kept growing as the battles mostly went in coal’s favor. Until this month, that is, when environmental groups won a decisive legal victory over a coal company. It may prove to be turning point in the war over the mountaintops, and for the future of coal.

On Nov. 15, St. Louis-based Patriot Coal agreed to phase out its mountaintop excavations and redirect its efforts back to underground mining. Adding a symbolic punch, Patriot agreed to decommission its two draglines—enormous boom excavators that do the actual mountaintop demolitions—and can sell them only on the condition that they’re never used in the Appalachian coalfields again. Coal executives usually shrug off complaints about mountaintop-removal impacts as the grumbling of dilettantes and naysayers who don’t understand the need for mining jobs. Yet here was the practically unheard-of spectacle of Patriot’s CEO, Ben Hatfield, acknowledging that mountaintop removal affected both people and ecology: “Patriot Coal recognizes that our mining operations impact the communities in which we operate in significant ways, and we are committed to maximizing the benefits of this agreement for our stakeholders, including our employees and neighbors," Hatfield said in court. "We believe the proposed settlement will result in a reduction of our environmental footprint." ...

Two weeks ago I posted this graph in my post Divergent Life Expectancies in the U. S.

As you can see, some of the worst declines in life expectancy are in moutain top mining areas of Kentucky and West Virginia. Allen Johnson of Christians for the Mountains makes the, as does this article, that this strongly connected to the mining operations.

Welcome the Negawatt Revolution

Slate: Welcome the Negawatt Revolution

Finally, the United States is beginning to take energy efficiency seriously. ...

... The Negawatt is the general principle of cutting electricity consumption without necessarily reducing energy usage through things like energy efficiency. Lovins first introduced it in the keynote address to the 1989 Green Energy Conference in Montreal:

Imagine being able to save half the electricity for free and still get the same or better services! … You get the same amount of light as before, with 8 percent as much energy overall—but it looks better and you can see better. … In the space conditioning case—heating and cooling—you get improved comfort. ... It is doing more with less.

The Negawatt itself is a theoretical unit of power measuring energy saved—Lovins came up with the idea after seeing megawatt misspelled with an n and deciding that this was a potentially useful conceptualization. It sounds self-evident now that you could reduce electricity consumption not by cutting back on energy usage but by improving energy efficiency standards and modernizing antiquated power sources. But the concept was revolutionary at the time. A major problem with getting people to understand the environmental and cost-savings benefits of energy efficiency was a perverse incentives structure that rewarded power companies based on amount of electricity sold, not for how much of a needed service it was providing. Lovins described the dilemma as such:

There isn't any demand for electricity for its own sake. What people want is the services it provides. … Nonetheless, most of our utilities have gotten into the habit of thinking they're in the kilowatt-hour business, so they should sell more. … For some reason, it's hard for them to get used to the idea that it's perfectly all right to sell less electricity, and so bring in less revenue, as long as costs go down more than revenues do.

Though Lovins brought the idea to the fore of the environmental policy discussion, he wasn’t the first to articulate the issue: In 1982, California devised an inspired solution, called decoupling, to this problem. The idea was that the state would reverse the incentive structure by establishing the revenue rate that the power company would need to meet in order to return a profit, along with a separate target for electricity production needed. Any revenue over the target amount would be returned to customers, while anything below would be added on to the following year’s bills. This meant that greater efficiency could actually return greater profit.

Decoupling is largely credited with making California the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly state in the country. But a mere disincentive to keep utilities companies from pegging profits to electricity usage was not enough, so the state launched a second program called “decoupling plus” in 2007 in order to incentivize power companies to lower their electricity production. Through this program, regulators set savings targets, and customers are asked to pay fees to help provide the down payment for power companies to meet these targets. Regulators then calculate long-term economic savings of this efficiency. If the utilities meet or surpass their targeted electricity savings, they get a cut of the projected savings. If they don’t meet the targets, the utilities pay a fine.

In 2007, California was still the only state in the union to have even a basic decoupling system in place. In the last five years, though, there has been a decoupling revolution across the country. By the start of 2011, 27 states and the District of Columbia had adopted gas decoupling, electric decoupling, or both. While the incentive programs are not yet in place in the vast majority of these states, at least the initial roadblock of the bad incentive structure has been largely removed.

Is There Global Warming? No and Yes

The Telegraph has an article today, Doha: Global warming is slowing down, says Met Office, which contains this graph:

The article explains:

Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said the past decade has been the warmest on record.

But he pointed out that warming has slowed down since 2000, in comparison to the rapid warming of the world since the 1970s.

“Although the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record, warming has not been as rapid since 2000 as over the longer period since the 1970s,” he said.

Scott is hedging with "... has not been as rapid ..." In short, the warming trend line from 2001 to 2012 is negligible to none. So if by "global warming" we mean a more or less relentess upward trendline over a period of a few years ...a decade in this case ..., then there was no global warming.

However, Scott also reminds us:

“Dr Stott warned that global warming could speed up again at any time, and insisted that the general pattern of warming is not in doubt."

A momentary plateau of a few years does not negate a long-term trend. So if by "global warming" we mean a more or less relentess upward trendline over a period of more than a few years, then there is global warming. So is there global warming? No and yes.

But this raises an important question? When does a short-term trend become a long-term trend, prompting a rethink about climate models? Ten years? Twenty years? Fifty years? Last month, Judith Curry, in response to constroversial reports about the global warming plateau, explained that climate models typically do not predict decade long stalls in global warming. (See: ‘Pause’ : Waving the Italian Flag) She reports that prominent scientists have said that a plateau or decline in global temperatures of fifteen or more years would be grounds for rethinking climate models. The last eleven years have been flat, and even going back fifteen years to 1997, the rate of warming is much slower than models suggested they would be. She is not disputing long-term warming but she is suggesting that climate models may not be as robust as advertised. It will be interesting to see how the climate science community responds if the trend of the past decade continues for three or four more years, or how skeptics respond if temperatures begin to soar in the same timeframe.

Anti-nuclear madness grips developed world

Orange County Register: Anti-nuclear madness grips developed world

Gwynn Dyer, an independent journalist, writes:

After the loss of 10 million American lives in the Three-Mile Island calamity in 1979, the death of 2 billion in the Chernobyl holocaust in 1986 and, now, the abandonment of all of northern Japan following the death of millions in last year's Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, it is hardly surprising that the world's biggest users of nuclear power are shutting their plants down.

Oh, wait a minute. Nobody died in the Three-Mile Island calamity, 28 plant workers were killed, and 15 other people subsequently died of thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl holocaust, and nobody died in the Fukushima catastrophe. In fact, northern Japan has not been evacuated after all. But never mind all that. Governments really are shutting down their nuclear plants. ...

She explains that Japan has closed their 50 nuclear reactors for inspections and the government promises to close them permanently by 2040, replacing them with renewable energy. Angela Merkel wants to close German plants by 2022. France is proposing to scale back their nuclear sector.

She concludes:

The Greens prattle about replacing nuclear power with renewables, which might happen in the distant future. But the brutal truth for now is that closing down the nuclear plants will lead to a sharp rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Fortunately, their superstitious fears are largely absent in more sophisticated parts of the world. Only four new nuclear reactors are under construction in the European Union, and only one in the United States, but there are 61 being built elsewhere. Over two-thirds of them are being built in the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), where economies are growing fast.

But it's not enough to outweigh the closure of so many nuclear plants in the developed world, at least in the short run. India may be aiming at getting 50 percent of its energy from nuclear power by 2050, for example, but the fact is that only 3.7 percent of its electricity is nuclear right now. So the price of nuclear fuel has collapsed in the past four years, and uranium mine openings and expansions have been cancelled.

More people die from coal pollution each day than have been killed by 50 years of nuclear power operations – and that's just from lung disease. If you include future deaths from burning fossil fuels, closing down nuclear power stations is sheer madness. Welcome to the Middle Ages.

Many of the existing plants, like Fukushima, are second generation nuclear power. Third generation nuclear power is much safer. Fourth generation, projected to come online in about twenty years will be even safer, more efficient, and generate wasted that must be protected a few hundred years instead of millennia. There is reason to believe that even better methods are in the offing. What an irony that those countries that have been the most adamant about reducing greenhouse gas emissions may become the biggest stumbling block to curbing them.

The Global Reality of Reducing CO2 from Coal.

The Atlantic: Why the U.S. Can't Stop Climate Change Alone (In 2 Graphs)

In recent months, I've linked a graph that shows that CO2 emissions from energy production have dropped to 1990 levels in the United States, mostly because of natural gas replacing coal power. That's the good news if you want to reduce CO2. But here is the challenge presented in the two graphs by Jordan Wiessmann.

The Anti-Science Left?

Two weeks ago I published a post Why Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions? referencing an article written by envrionmentalist Fred Pearce. I read this book review in Forbes over the weekend.

Forbes: Enviro-Romanticism Alert: Obama Won, But Can He Shake the Anti-Innovation, Junk Science Beliefs of His Base?

A polemical new book, Science Left Behind, argues persuasively that there is less than meets the eye in self-righteous claims by Democrats that they represent the “pro-science party.” Jon Entine,  Director of the Genetic Literacy Project, reports:

The debate over which political party, Democrat or Republican, is more faithful to science has been a hot button topic since the 1990s. ...

... A slew of books and articles from left-leaning science writers—which means most of the science journalism establishment—has elevated the popular narrative that Democrats adhere faithfully to the inspiration of Newton, Galileo, Bacon and Darwin while Republicans look more to ethereal authorities for their application of the scientific method.

But now, Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, co-authors of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, make a nuanced and convincing counter argument: Ludditism is not a partisan issue. In fact, on many of the most critical issues of our time, the “progressive” perspective is often rooted in out-dated, anti-empirical, junk science paradigms that threaten innovation—and are beginning to unnerve the most scientifically minded thinkers on the left. ...

... The central thesis of Science Left Behind—that the left’s view of science has drifted decisively from empiricism into ideology—has now emerged as a genuine debate within the left community. This contentiousness became very public over the past month as “progressives” debated the merits of California Proposition 37, which would have mandated labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms.

For the political left, suspicion of biotechnology in general and more specifically the rejection of genetically modified crops as environmentally hazardous and GM foods as health hazards are now canonical. Almost every major activist environmental NGO supported Prop 37. But their contention that biotech crops and foods posted unusual environmental or health hazards is not based on science. In fact, fanning fears about biotech crops and foods has become a scandalous leftwing obsession. It’s an anti-science mindset, argues Keith Kloor, a frequent contributor to the Washington Post-owned, liberal online magazine Slate:

“[F]ears are stoked by prominent environmental groups, supposed food-safety watchdogs, and influential food columnists; that dodgy science is laundered by well-respected scholars and propaganda is treated credulously by legendary journalists; and that progressive media outlets, which often decry the scurrilous rhetoric that warps the climate debate, serve up a comparable agitprop when it comes to GMOs,” Kloors wrote. “In short, I’ve learned that the emotionally charged, politicized discourse on GMOs is mired in the kind of fever swamps that have polluted climate science beyond recognition.”

This soft conspiracy, promoted by mainstream Democrats, infects a broad array of science issues and highlights the religious-like iconic beliefs of the left (as Kloor has noted): Nature is sacred, big business is dangerous and corrupt, technology can cause more problems than it helps solve, the world is on the verge of an eco-apocalypse, and we need more precaution, regulation and legislation. I call it enviro-romanticism, a criticism documented in distressing detail in Science Left Behind. ...

... As George Monbiot, one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent environmental writers recently concluded when discussing the left’s contradictory and increasingly anti-environmental energy policy, “[T]he environmental movement to which I belong has done more harm to the planet’s living systems than climate change deniers have ever achieved.” We could all benefit from the emergence of what I call “science independents”—those who base their views on data and evidence rather than partisan leanings and litmus tests. ...

I think the challenge is that all of us tend to latch on to science that confirms our experience and ideology. We are dismissive when it doesn't. We need better models for incorporating science into discussions in the public square.

Ancient flood path triggered Big Freeze

TG Daily: Ancient flood path triggered Big Freeze

After 30 years of debate, scientists believe they've discovered the trigger for the last great freeze of the Earth, some 12,900 years ago.

They say they've established that the flood waters from the melting of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet flowed northwest into the Arctic first, weakening ocean thermohaline circulation and cooling global climate.

If instead it had flowed east into the St Lawrence River valley, they say, Earth's climate would have remained relatively unchanged.

"This episode was the last time the Earth underwent a major cooling, so understanding exactly what caused it is very important for understanding how our modern-day climate might change in the future," says University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientist Alan Condron. ...

... "Our results are particularly relevant for how we model the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice sheets now and in the future. It is apparent from our results that climate scientists are artificially introducing fresh water into their models over large parts of the ocean that freshwater would never have reached," says Condron. ...

Why Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions?

Environment360: Why Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions?

On issues ranging from genetically modified crops to nuclear power, environmentalists are increasingly refusing to listen to scientific arguments that challenge standard green positions. This approach risks weakening the environmental movement and empowering climate contrarians.

From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to James Hansen’s modern-day tales of climate apocalypse, environmentalists have long looked to good science and good scientists and embraced their findings. Often we have had to run hard to keep up with the crescendo of warnings coming out of academia about the perils facing the world. A generation ago, biologist Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and systems analysts Dennis and Donella Meadows’ The Limits to Growth shocked us with their stark visions of where the world was headed. No wide-eyed greenie had predicted the opening of an ozone hole before the pipe-smoking boffins of the British Antarctic Survey spotted it when looking skyward back in 1985. On issues ranging from ocean acidification and tipping points in the Arctic to the dangers of nanotechnology, the scientists have always gotten there first — and the environmentalists have followed.

And yet, recently, the environment movement seems to have been turning up on the wrong side of the scientific argument. We have been making claims that simply do not stand up. We are accused of being anti-science — and not without reason. A few, even close friends, have begun to compare this casual contempt for science with the tactics of climate contrarians.

That should hurt.

Three current issues suggest that the risks of myopic adherence to ideology over rational debate are real: genetically modified (GM) crops, nuclear power, and shale gas development. The conventional green position is that we should be opposed to all three. Yet the voices of those with genuine environmental credentials, but who take a different view, are being drowned out by sometimes abusive and irrational argument. ...

The environmental movement is a diverse coalition of people. You can't make a blanket statement about any movement this large. There are two significant groups that make up this coalition that I expect explain this inconsistency between embracing science on some things and not on others.

First, I think there is a segment that is simply anti-technological, anti-21st Century living. They have a natural aversion to much of 21st Century existence and want to return to a far less technological (read "natural") existence. That climate science (and the frequently attached moralism about the evils of consumerism) would dovetail with their ideology of bucolic bliss is a welcomed happenstance. It gives legitimization to their cause against those who embrace the modern socio-economic order. GM crops and nuclear power do just the opposite. These would enable the current despised structures to continue and grow. Thus, their embrace of climate change science has little to do with a rigorous understanding and commitment to science.

Second, there is another segment that sees economic freedom as unjust and destructive and wants more centralized control over the global economy. Climate science can be effectively be used to support that vision. The case is made that our current competing economies are leading us to global catastrophe. Political and economic freedom need to be curtailed on a global scale by centralized authorities who will rationally manage world affairs. GM crops and nuclear power offer the opportunity to adapt to current challenges without a significant reordering of the world order. Once again, the commitment is not so much to science as it is to using science as debate tool to achieve an ideological end.

I'm not saying that these are by any means the only two groups backing environmental measures. I am saying that these are two groups that do have meaningful influence on what happens within the environmental movement.

An author who makes a case in book length form, similar to what Fred Pearce is making here, is Seymour Garte in Where We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet. He is another scientist who is fully persuaded about anthropogenic global warming. He is optimistic about solutions but sees the anti-science, anti-technology, crowd as a real problem.