Archive for 2009

A tale of 2 insurance approaches

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

– Great article from the CBC in Canada about the U.S.’s new approach to health care and how it differs from Canada’s approach.    For me, the bottom line seems to be that the new U.S. health care approach is better than what the U.S. had before – but it is still a long way from what all the other advanced western nations have.

– The idealistic push by President Obama for real health care reform has run into the entrenched profit-centric corporations with financial skin in the game and the result is going to be a compromise that’s neither fish nor fowl.

– So far, it is better than what I feared and far worse than what I hoped for.

– And even saying this may be premature.  The long knives of the lobbyists and entrenched special interests will very likely come out in the murky adjustment processes as the Senate and the House work to meld their two version of the bill together.   These ninjas do their best work when the public’s not watching too closely.  And most of the public, at this point, think that the new face of health care is set.   But, cynics know that it is not.

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The U.S. Senate passed landmark health-care reform legislation on Dec. 24, a nearly $1-trillion bill pledging to extend coverage to an estimated 30 million Americans.

The bill still needs to go through the process of reconciliation, in which legislation passed in the House of Representatives is harmonized with the Senate’s bill. Negotiations could extend until at least February 2010. But U.S. President Barack Obama hailed the vote for bringing the country “toward the end of a nearly century-long struggle to reform America’s health-care system.”

Others say it ensured — for the most part — that the way health care is delivered in the United States would not change very much. What was approved by the Senate — and the House of Representatives before it — was not a march to Canadian-style “socialized medicine,” but rules that maintain the U.S. as the only industrialized nation in the world without universal health-care coverage.

The countries that make up the World Health Organization adopted a resolution in 2005 encouraging countries to develop health financing systems that would provide universal health care, which it defined as “securing access for all to appropriate promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative services at an affordable cost.”

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– Research thanks to Van!

Why Britain faces a bleak future of food shortages

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Britain faces a ‘perfect storm’ of water shortage and lack of food, says the government’s chief scientist, and climate change and crop and animal diseases will add to future woes. Science is now striving to find solutions.

It was an ecological disaster that occurred on the other side of the planet. Yet the drought that devastated the Australian wheat harvest last year had consequences that shook the world. It sent food prices soaring in every nation. Wheat prices across the globe soared by 130%, while shopping bills in Britain leapt by 15%.

A year later and the cost of food today has still to fall to previous levels. More alarmingly, scientists are warning that far worse lies ahead. A “perfect storm” of food shortages and water scarcity now threatens to unleash public unrest and conflict in the next 20 years, the government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, has warned.

In Britain, a global food shortage would drive up import costs and make food more expensive, just as the nation’s farmers start to feel the impact of disrupted rainfall and rising temperatures caused by climate change. “If we don’t address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move to avoid food and water shortages,” he told a conference earlier this year.

The reliable availability of food – once taken for granted – has become a major cause for alarm among politicians and scientists. Next month several of Britain’s research councils, together with the Food Standards Agency, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for International Development – will announce a taskforce that will channel the UK’s efforts in feeding its own population and playing a full role in preventing starvation in other nations.

The problem is summed up by Professor Janet Allen, director of research at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). “We will have to grow more food on less land using less water and less fertiliser while producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

No one said science was easy, of course. Nevertheless, the scale of the problem is striking. It is also unprecedented, says Professor Mike Bevan, acting director of the John Innes Centre in Norfolk. “We are going to have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as was produced over the past 5,000 years. Nothing less will do.”

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Can We Feed and Save the Planet?

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Challenges of population control and food production need to be tackled in tandem

We are eating ourselves out of house and home. Recently, in the September 24 issue of Nature, Johan Rockström and his colleagues proposed 10 “planetary boundaries” to define safe limits of human activity. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) Those limits include caps on greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, the global conversion of land cover to cropland, and other mega-impacts on the earth’s ecosystems. Yet humanity has already exceeded several of them and is on a trajectory to exceed most of the others. The rising demand for food plays a large role in those transgressions.

The green revolution that made grain production soar gave humanity some breathing space, but the continuing rise in population and demand for meat production is exhausting that buffer. The father of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug, who passed away in September at the age of 95, made exactly this point in 1970 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize: “There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.”

That common effort was inconsistent at best and sometimes essentially nonexistent. Since 1970 the population has risen from 3.7 billion to 6.9 billion and continues to increase by around 80 million a year. Food production per person has declined in some big regions, notably sub-Saharan Africa. In India the doubling of population has absorbed almost all of the increase in grain production.

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Indonesian minister blames disasters on immorality

Monday, December 21st, 2009

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — An Indonesian government minister has drawn sharp criticism from earthquake victims and alienated some of his Twitter followers by blaming natural disasters in Indonesia on immorality.

Communication and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring linked disasters to declining public morals when he addressed a prayer meeting in the city of Padang to mark a Muslim holiday on Friday.

“Television broadcasts that destroy morals are plentiful in this country and therefore disasters will continue to occur,” national news agency Antara quoted Sembiring as saying in the Bahasa Indonesia language.

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This Is About Us

Friday, December 18th, 2009

– I’ve long been a fan of Monbiot’s writings.  Here he talks about the true significance of what’s going on in Copenhagen.

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The talks at Copenhagen are not just about climate change. They represent a battle to redefine humanity.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 15th December 2009

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.

The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.

The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accomodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

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A big picture snapshot

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

– A friend wrote me the other day about CO2 and said that most of the folks who are out there talking about CO2 and its dangers sound a bit like Chicken Little.  He said there must be places out there on the web where one can get a more balanced presentation of the issues.  And asked if I could direct him to such.

– I’m not sure I answered his questions as effectively as I might have.  I could have, for instance, done some research and tried to find web sites for him with more balanced presentations around CO2 and its issues.

– But, instead, I decided to tell him how and why the debate over CO2 has gotten to be so shrill and why many folks these days are sounding like Chicken Little.

– I think the explanation of why things have gotten so shrill is well worth repeating to a wider audience and so I’ve reproduced my friend’s questions and my responses below.

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Dennis,

I know your position on global warming.   Here are my thoughts:   First any thing that would get us untangled from the Middle East and every one else that we buy oil from would be a godsend.   Most people don’t realize that Canada and Mexico are our biggest suppliers.   Being tied to any other country the way we are is a bad thing.   I don’t think the oil/coal industries will are willing to have any change in the status quo until the last ounce of oil and coal is gone.   I think they control, to one extent or another, our government.   I believe that without their influence, we would have made massive changes by now.

Now, I would like to understand more about CO2.  I am not ignorant of the chemistry or of the geological history.   My problems is when I hear the side describing the downsides of CO2 they are so one sided that they sound like Chicken Little.

Even though the CO2 increase has great potential for mass disruption of the world’s ecological balance, there must be a little of this that is being balanced by natural processes.   Perhaps,  just not at a rate that we can accept.   Could you send me some web sites with a little balance?

Dave C.

=== and my response:

Dave,

You are right.  The oil/gas/coal industries are not going to recognize the global climate change effects their products produce.   If they did, it would cost them personally a pile of money.   And yes, they do have a huge effect on governments all over the world – especially the U.S. government.

Your question about CO2 is an excellent one and I wish I could do a better job of answering it.

When you say that the people describing the coming problems from rising CO2 levels sound like Chicken Little, I have to agree.   But, you need to also reflect on how the situation got to be like that.

First off, think about the fact that scientific discoveries don’t usually come up for public debate.

And consider that science comes up with some wild and almost unbelievable discoveries fairly often.   Take Dark Matter and Dark Energy for two things.   And Quantum Physics and all of its weird ideas like entanglement and action at a distance.   And the fact that really small things like electrons are not really in one place or another but rather exist in a small cloud of probability that hovers near where we think it actually is.  And how about relativity with its ideas that time slows down as your speed get closer and closer to the speed of light?

All that stuff was discovered by science and it beggared the imagination for most of us.  But people (most of them anyway), didn’t stand up and begin to argue passionately against these new findings.

And almost EVERYTHING you and I see around us in the world today is the product of science.   Telephones, electronics, plastics, microwaves, space shuttles, nylon and the list could go on and on for years.  It is hard to find much that we use that isn’t in some way or another the direct product of science and scientific research.   Not many people will stand up and claim that the chemistry that led to developing nylon is wrong.  Or that the laws describing voltage, current and resistance are wrong.

So what’s different about science’s findings about global climate change?

Well, you already said it.   It’s the money.  It’s the vested interests.  It’s what folks will stand to lose if the theories about CO2 and global climate change are true.  And it is big.  If this stuff is true, it means nothing less than that we have to simply reorganized how we do business on this Earth.  Almost everything about how most of us live is going to have to change some if we want to continue to live on this planet without turning it into a hell.

So, that’s a big big change that will result if we listen to what the scientists are saying.  It’s going to cost big oil/gas/coal billions of dollars.  It’s going to change the geopolitical balance between nations, it’s going to mean that ordinary folks like you and I and Joe Six-pack are all going to have to do things differently.

But nobody likes to lose money, nobody likes to lose political power and nobody likes to change their familiar and comfortable life-style.   Joe Six-pack doesn’t want to hear that his big two smoke-stack turbo diesel truck is bad for the planet and we can’t afford to have it running around any more.  The folks making money cutting down the Amazon rain forest don’t want to hear it.  The fishermen fishing the fish in the sea into extinction don’t want to hear it.   The folks buying cheap shit at Wal-Mart, don’t want to hear it.

And that brings these findings of the scientists right smack up against human nature.

And that human nature doesn’t want to change and it will begin to squirm and look for every reason and excuse it can to dodge the bullet and to avoid having to change, or lose money or whatever it is.

When the scientists decided that 70% of the entire universe was made of dark matter a few years ago, no one demonstrated in the streets or began to talk against it on the Rush Limbaugh show.   It didn’t get into anyone’s back pocket – so they didn’t care.

But CO2 and Global Climate Change is going to get into all our back pockets – big time.

Let me take you back and give you some history.   I learned what I’m going to tell you from a book entitled, Red Sky at Morning by Gustave Speth.

In the 1970’s, environmentalists in the U.S. were just beginning to push their efforts to get laws passed like the Clean Air Act and the Food and Drug Laws.  The public was mildly interested and industry was ignoring all of it.   Then Three Mile Island and a few other things all happened at about the same time and suddenly the public was very hot to support environmental protection laws.  The result was that a lot of laws about protecting the air and the water and such were all passed at once before the industry folks were really awake to what was happening.

Industry lost a lot of money because of all of these new laws and they vowed to never be asleep at the wheel again.

About 10 years later, in the 1980’s, the environmentalists began to realize that they could not protect the entire world by just passing good laws in the U.S.   They needed to expand their efforts and begin to fight for environmental protection laws that would be international in scope.  By the early 90’s the alarms were being sounded that we needed to do some things internationally or we, as a species, and as a planet, were going to have big problems.

But this time industry was not asleep.   They’d been burned once by not paying attention.   Now, every time an effort was mounted to increase environmental protection globally, industry looked at the proposed laws and if they could see that such a law was going to cost them big money, they mobilized to confuse people and to prevent the political will from developing to pass such a law.

This cat and mouse game has been going on for two decades now.   At first the scientists simply published the results of the scientific research in papers.  They trusted that people would be smart enough to see the writing on the wall.   But, industry confused people and confused the issues.  They published counter studies that seemed to show the opposite conclusions.

So scientists and environmental activists began to talk louder trying to get their messages and warnings out.  And industry fought back harder.  And the entire thing escalated up and up.

Most scientists now think that the entire “Global Climate Change is because of CO2” issue has been definitively proven over and over beyond the shadow of any doubt.   But the public doesn’t think that.   They are still deeply confused by the mis-information industry has been putting out for just that purpose – to confuse them and to therefore prevent political will from developing that could result in some real laws getting passed.

What’s going on in Copenhagen now is a great example.   Many people think that awareness of our environmental problems has finally gotten to the point where the world’s leaders might actually come together and try to do something real to prevent a major environmental and climate disaster.   And then, two weeks before the conference, the other side unleashes a major campaign to throw doubt on the scientific conclusions and to mess the entire conference up.

And, I fear, they are doing a pretty good job.   Frankly, I think we’re toast and I’ve thought so for a long time.   Human nature is just too predictable and to easily manipulated.   Those who want to convince the public that the climate science is wrong actually have a pretty easy time of it because Joe Six-pack and folks like him would prefer to believe that nothing’s going on because it is way easier than thinking about the fact that they might have to change their consumerist lifestyles.

So yeah, some folks are sounding like shrill Chicken Littles.  Why?  Because it is a damn desperate situation and the world is likely to go into the toilet in spite of the very best efforts of the environmentalists.  And they are worried about it.

After reading over what I’ve written here, I realize that I’ve only partially answered what you actually asked.  You asked for some balance on the question of how CO2 is processed by the environment.

There are a lot of answers to that because, as you can imagine, the world’s climate and biosphere is a wickedly complex system.   But, here are a few of the high points:

– The level of CO2 in the atmosphere hasn’t been this high in 6 million years.

– The current swift rise in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is faster than anything we can see in the climate records back for 6 million years.

– This rise corresponds with the rise of industrial civilization.   It begins in the climate record just about the time industrialization began when the English started building factories in the 1840’s or so and it increases in the climate record in pace with the increasing rise in industrial production.

– The denialists say that the rise in CO2 is a natural thing and has nothing to do with the CO2 humans are putting into the air.   I find that an amazing idea.   It’s like saying, “I just tromped down on the gas pedal and now the car is going really fast.”   And then having someone tell you that it’s just a coincidence and that the gas pedal has nothing to do with the acceleration.  Yeah, right.

– Nature does have some ability to absorb excess CO2.  The ocean absorbs a lot of it.  But, it cannot keep up with the rate we’re adding it to the air.   And, as the ocean absorbs it, the water becomes more acidic.  As it becomes more acidic, it makes it harder for ocean animals that have shells to make their shells because the acidification interferes with their chemistry.  At some point, this rise in dissolved CO2 is really going to mess with some huge food chains in the ocean.

– Plants and trees like CO2 and use and absorb it.  To a point.  Add a little more CO2 and a little more heat and they thrive.    But, add a bit more and they begin to weaken and wilt and their ability to absorb CO2 lessens.   This is true for the majority of plants and trees.   There are some exceptions but they are a minority and what really matters is what the majority of the world’s plants and trees are likely to do.  And what they are likely to do it not good.

– Big coal has been yammering on for years about CO2 sequestration.  But, in spite of many big public relations splashes, no one yet has made a full scale carbon sequestration plant that works.   In the mean time, China is building one or more coal fired dirty power production plants a week!   Much of the public thinks “clean coal” is either a done deal or very close.   It truth, it is miles and mile off and maybe we’ll never have it.

– The problem is bigger that just how much CO2 we’re putting into the air.  That’s bad and we can see it ramping up.  But, it is causing other problems much as one fire creates others as the embers fly.

– The arctic ice is melting and as it does, the white snow and ice disappear and the darker sea and land underneath become visible.  The white reflected heat back into space.   The darker stuff being exposed absorbs it.  So there’s more heating going on because of this and it, in turn, causes more ice and snow to melt.  It is a positive feed back cycle and it is beginning to get up onto legs of its own.

– Glaciers all over the world, with very few exceptions, are melting.  The winter snow falls that used to stay in the mountains and then melt in the summer are going away and that’s going to have a huge impact on human beings.  The summer water that millions need to grow crops and survive is going away, soon.  We’re talking most of the west coast of South America, the Southwestern U.S., Northern India and a huge swath across Central China from east to west.  We’ve never seen anything like the disruption and starvation that will result.

Dave, I’ve been reading this stuff for years and this is just a part of what I’ve read.  Scientists have no reason to make this stuff up.  But, folks who make big big bucks by keeping the world running as it is now have a huge motivation to not see and react to the coming global climate changes.  These folks have a lot of money and they think that even if there are big problems, they will have to money to hang out in nice villas up in the Alps and where ever while the rest of use starve and fight it out in the streets.

All they have to do is keep us confused so we won’t shut their party down.

Dennis

Albinos hide in fear of their lives

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

– Education is the future.  There are those who think that a good look at their holy book will be sufficient to keep them safe and the world running right.  But it isn’t so.

– This kind of cultural backwater stupidity could be wiped out in time if  we, as a species, would create societies with our own collective good as their highest priority.

– But, we create societies that consider profit, political and military domination and the promotion of one set of spiritual beliefs over another as their highest goals.  And most of us suffer as a result.

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NAIROBI – The mistaken belief that albino body parts have magical powers has driven thousands of Africa’s albinos into hiding, fearful of losing their lives and limbs to unscrupulous dealers who can make up to US$75,000 ($105,000) selling a complete dismembered set.

Mary Owido, who lacks pigment that gives colour to skin, eyes and hair, says she is only comfortable when at work or at home with her husband and children.

“Wherever I go people start talking about me, saying that my legs and hands can fetch a fortune in Tanzania,” said Owido, 36, a mother of six.

“This kind of talk scares me. I am afraid of going out alone.”

Since 2007, 44 albinos have been killed in Tanzania and 14 others have been slain in Burundi, sparking widespread fear among albinos in East Africa.

At least 10,000 have been displaced or gone into hiding since the killings began, says report released by the International Federation for the Red Cross and Crescent societies.

East Africa’s latest albino murder happened in Tanzania’s Mwanza region in late October, when albino hunters beheaded 10-year-old Gasper Elikana and chopped off his leg, the report said.

Readings from on the road

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

“What if there is no holy life?” asked Buddha.  …  “You see,” said Buddha, “even holiness has become food for your ego to feed on.  You want to be different.  You want to be safe.  You want to have hope.”

“Why is that wrong?” asked Assaji.

“Because these things are dreams that lull you,” said Buddha.

“What would we see if we weren’t dreaming?”

“Death.”

“The five monks felt a chill pass over them.  It seemed pointless to deny what their brother said but hopeless to accept it.   Buddha said, “You are all afraid of death, as I was, so you make up any story that will ease your fears, and after a while you believe the story, even though it came from your own mind.”   Without waiting for a reply, he reached down and picked up a handful of dust.  “The answer to life and death is simple.  It rests in the palm of my hand.  Watch.”

He threw the dust into the air, it remained suspended like a murky cloud for a second before the breeze carried it away.

“Consider what you just saw, ” said Buddha.   “The dust holds its shape for a fleeting moment when I throw it into the air, as the body holds its shape for this brief lifetime.  When the wind makes it disappear, where does the dust go?  It returns to its source, the earth.   In the future that same dust allows grass to grow, and it enters into a deer that eats the grass.   The animal dies and turns to dust.   Now imagine that the dust comes to you and asks, ‘Who am I?’  What will you tell it?   Dust is alive in a plant but dead as it lies in the road under our feet.   It moves in an animal but it is still when buried in the depths of the earth.   Dust encompasses life and death at the same time.  So if you answer ‘Who am I’ with anything but a complete answer, you have made a mistake.

I have come back to tell you that you can be whole, but only if you see yourself that way.  There is no holy life.  There is no war between good and evil.   There is no sin and no redemption.   None of these things matter to the real you.   But they all matter hugely to the false you, the one who believes in the separate self.   You have tried to take your separate self, with all its loneliness and anxiety and pride, to the door of enlightenment.  But it will never go through, because it is a ghost.

– from Buddha by Deepak Chopra

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.

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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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