Archive for October, 2009

Climate change scepticism grows in United States

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

– Given where we are in human history, this is an amazing and rather depressing story.

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The number of Americans who believe there is solid evidence the Earth is warming because of pollution is at its lowest point in three years, a survey suggests.

A poll of 1500 adults by the Pew Research Centre found 57 per cent of Americans believe there is strong scientific evidence the earth has grown hotter in the past few decades.

As a result, people are viewing the situation as less serious – down from 77 per cent in 2006, and 71 per cent in April 2008. The steepest drop occurred during the past year, as Congress has taken steps to control heat-trapping emissions. International negotiations are also under way to agree a treaty to slow global warming.

At the same time, there has been mounting scientific evidence of climate change – from melting ice caps to the world’s oceans hitting the highest monthly recorded temperatures this northern summer.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Mental Irrationality, The Perfect Storm | 8 Comments »

Billions in US military aid wasted

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – The United States has long suspected that much of the billions of dollars it has sent Pakistan to battle militants has been diverted to the domestic economy and other causes, such as fighting India.

Now the scope and longevity of the misuse is becoming clear: Between 2002 and 2008, while al-Qaida regrouped, only $500 million (NZ$684 million) of the $6.6 billion in American aid actually made it to the Pakistani military, two army generals tell The Associated Press.

The account of the generals, who asked to remain anonymous because military rules forbid them from speaking publicly, was backed up by other retired and active generals, former bureaucrats and government ministers.

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PM warns of climate ‘catastrophe’

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

The UK faces a “catastrophe” of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change, the prime minister has warned.

Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming and break the “impasse”.

He told the Major Economies Forum in London, which brings together 17 of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas-emitting countries, there was “no plan B”.

World delegations meet in Copenhagen in December for talks on a new treaty.

‘Rising wave’

The United Nations (UN) summit will aim to establish a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto treaty as its targets for reducing emissions only apply to a small number of countries and expire in 2012.

Mr Brown warned that negotiators were not reaching agreement quickly enough and said it was a “profound moment” for the world involving “momentous choice”.

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Posted in CrashBlogging, Mental Irrationality, The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

Niall Ferguson: U.S. Empire in Decline

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Ah, the urge to say, “I told you so.”, is strong.   This fellow is saying exactly what I’ve been saying for sometime now – the obvious.   Seen on The Big Picture.

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To the video clip… ➡

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Got Gas?

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

– A good friend of mine sent me this article saying, “Interesting article on natural gas“.

– It is, indeed, an interesting article but I saw it in a different light than many perhaps do.

– My response to my friend:

—

D,

An interesting and potentially game-changing story, indeed.

But, it is a classic case of humanity’s inborn tendency to jump at the short term relief without fairly balancing it against the long-term consequences.

To see the consequences, I’d like to see someone make the assumption that ALL the fossil fuel we burn from here forward is this cleaner gas.   And, to be really fair, we can drop all considerations of the collateral damages associated with obtaining the gas that were mentioned in the article.

Just assume that the world will continue growing and producing and have more babies and all the rest of it for the next 20 to 50 years – all largely fueled by this gas.

The analysis should show what will happen to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere from consuming just this gas.  And then it should consider the consequences of this change in CO2 levels on global weather, ecosystems, environmental refugees, depleted glaciers and winter snow packs, increasing desertification, species die-offs and an entire host of follow-on consequences that will attend continued rising of global CO2 levels.

Short-term thinkers are enthusiastic about these new gas producing technologies because they allow us, for the moment, to avoid having to deal with the really tough long term questions regarding what we have to do to get into a sustainable long-term homeostatic balance with the planet’s ecosphere.

Long term, it’s really the only question that matters much.

Everything else is an avoidance or a denial that only take us further down the road wherein we do not solve this problem and cause a major crater in the Earth’s evolutionary history; killing many species, altering the weather for tens of thousands of years and killing the majority of the human beings alive and reducing the ones that survive to miserable circumstances.

Not an insignificant outcome – and all the more terrible because, difficult as it may be, we could avoid most of it if we had the grit and the will to do so.

Dennis

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conflict, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, Mental Irrationality, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Blog Action Day – Burn it Down and Salt the Earth

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

– Today is Blog Action Day.  It’s a good reason to post something about the mess we’re making of the world so here’s my offering – which I, in turn, pulled from Kevin Drum and Mother Jones.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the good times are rolling again:

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year — a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street’s pay culture.

….Total compensation and benefits at the publicly traded firms analyzed by the Journal are on track to increase 20% from last year’s $117 billion — and to top 2007’s $130 billion payout. This year, employees at the companies will earn an estimated $143,400 on average, up almost $2,000 from 2007 levels.

I sort of feel like I’ve run out of things to say about this.  There’s an insanity here that’s almost beyond analysis.  Wall Street can spark an economic slowdown that misses destroying the planet and causing a second Great Depression only by a hair’s breadth — said hair being an 11th hour emergency infusion of trillions of taxpayer dollars — and then turn around and use those trillions to return to bubble levels of profitability within a year.  And they can do it even though the rest of the economy is still suffering through the worst recession since World War II.  It’s mind boggling.

Is there any silver lining here?  Probably not, but I’ll try: If Wall Street can shrug off the worst recession of our lifetimes as if it’s a minor fender bender and get the party rolling all over again in less than 12 months, it means the next bubble is already in the works and its collapse will be every bit as bad as this one.  That in turn means it will almost certainly happen while today’s politicians are still in office.  So maybe news like this will finally spur lawmakers to realize once and for all that the financial industry needs to be cut down to size.  Half measures won’t do it.  Self-regulation won’t do it.  Compensation limits won’t do it.  Byzantine, watered-down rules won’t do it.  Something like a Morgenthau Plan for Wall Street is the only thing that has even half a chance of working.

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Having A Higher Purpose In Life Reduces Risk Of Death Among Older Adults

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Possessing a greater purpose in life is associated with lower mortality rates among older adults according to a new study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center.

Patricia A. Boyle, PhD, and her colleagues from the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, studied 1,238 community-dwelling elderly participants from two ongoing research studies, the Rush Memory and Aging Project and the Minority Aging Research Study. None had dementia. Data from baseline evaluations of purpose in life and up to five years of follow-up were used to test the hypothesis that greater purpose in life is associated with a reduced risk of mortality among community-dwelling older persons.

Purpose in life reflects the tendency to derive meaning from life’s experiences and be focused and intentional, according to Boyle.

After adjusting for age, sex, education and race, a higher purpose of life was associated with a substantially reduced risk of mortality. Thus, a person with high purpose in life was about half as likely to die over the follow-up period compared to a person with low purpose. The association of purpose in life with mortality did not differ among men and women or whites and blacks, and the finding persisted even after controlling for depressive symptoms, disability, neuroticism, the number of medical conditions and income.

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Posted in Philosophical, Science | No Comments »

Global Warming – and denial

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

We watched a segment on 60 Minutes last night about how much worst forest fires have gotten in the Western U.S, in the last 10 to 20 years.   They were interviewing the fellow who is the top firefighter after working his way up from the lines for 30 years – a guy who’s seen it all first hand.

He said that a decade ago, of they had a fire over 100,000 acres, it was big news.   Now, we had two at over 500,000 acres last year and one of those was over 600,000 acres.   The fires are so big and the resources so small to fight them, that they have to let many of them just burn and the only time they will really focus and fight is if a town is under threat.

They asked him, directly, if he thought Global Warming was a factor in all of this and he said it would be hard to find a man on the front lines fighting these fires who doesn’t think so.   He also said that high fire season has increased by 78 days per year and that fires in the high mountain areas are much more common because the higher temperatures are drying things out now that used to remain damp and incombustible for a much long part of the year.   Some of the forests that are burning are burning so thoroughly that they will not be back in our life times.   And that in 100 years, half of the forest in the western U.S. that’s standing now – could be gone.

Deniers ought to take a look at this piece.  These are not pointy-headed intellectuals from the universities talking here.   these are the folks who are looking at and fighting the consequences of the climate change happening around us everyday.  Chilling stuff.

Check it out: ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Why We Spend So Much

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

This from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones – excellent stuff.

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Bob Somerby wants to know why the media isn’t a wee bit more interested in why the United States pays far more per person for medical care than other rich countries.  Here’s the rough answer:

  • We pay our doctors about 50% more than most comparable countries.
  • We pay more than twice as much for prescription drugs, despite the fact that we use less of them than most other countries.
  • Administration costs are about 7x what most countries pay.
  • We perform about 50% more diagnostic procedures than other countries and we pay as much as 5x more per procedure.

Underlying all this is the largely private, profit-driven nature of American medicine, but regardless of how you feel about that, the main lesson here is how hard it would be to seriously bring these costs down.  We can jabber all we want about incentives and greed and systemic waste, but the bottom line is that if we want to do anything more than nip around the edges, we’d have to pay doctors and nurses less, pay pharmaceutical companies less, pay insurance companies less (or get rid of them entirely), pay hospitals less, and pay device makers less.  That’s a lot of very rich and powerful interests who will fight to the death to prevent any serious cost cutting, and it’s why Obama and the Democrats in Congress have largely chosen to buy them off instead.

If you’re curious about this in slightly more detail, the chart on the right comes from a McKinsey Global Institute study of healthcare costs.  (An older but more interactive version is here.)  Healthcare spending tends to be higher in richer countries, and since the U.S. is a very rich country it’s unsurprising that we spend a lot on healthcare.  However, even when you account for that, McKinsey figures that we still spend about $2,000 more per person than we should, a total of about $650 billion.  The chart shows where this extra expense comes from: the dark blue areas are places where we spend more than expected and the orange areas show where we spend less than expected.

No matter how you slice the healthcare pie, though, compared to other rich countries we spend far more, cover fewer people, get hassled a lot more, and don’t get much better outcomes.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who profit handsomely from this state of affairs, so it’s not likely to change radically anytime soon.  Baby steps, my friends, baby steps.

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