It’s always good to have a story, especially one that upholds your political beliefs.  So, imagine my reaction upon reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.  I don’t know if Taubes himself has any leanings in the direction, but his book is the most compelling libertarian story of the past 50 years.

There are some basic principles of the libertarian critique of governmental policies designed to solve Pressing Problems.  These are, that those government policies often:

• mis-diagnose the problem
• makes decisions based on political realities instead of scientific ones
• crowds out competing (and potentially more accurate theories or solutions) either directly, by criticizing them, or indirectly, by denying them funding
• end up making the problem worse, or exacerbating a different problem via unexpected side effects
• cause a legion of special interest groups of corporations to arise to take advantage of (as well as reinforce, through their own interest) the government’s potentially wrong decision

If you’re not particularly disposed to these ideas already, this all sounds like wishful thinking about government incompetence.  Yet this is exactly the story presented by Taubes as the history of the fat vs. carb nutrition debate in the US over the past 50 years.

To sum up, without all the science (read the book, it has all the data you need), the story goes like this: about 50 years ago, a few prominent scientists, particularly Ancel Keys, decided, based on incomplete evidence, that fat was the cause of heart disease, and that carbohydrates were a good replacement for it in our diets.  Unfortunately, not only was the decision premature, it also was wrong, and here’s the most important part: it was wrong even based upon the evidence they had at the time — they simply ignored or dismissed it.  This isn’t a case of science improving and rendering an old government policy wrong, this is government policy making the wrong choice despite the evidence.

The anti-fat movement (led by Keys) then convinced the government and the media of the correctness of their case, which was then enshrined as policy by a government panel: fat bad, carbs good.  This is partly why the food pyramid’s base, the largest section, was all carbohydrate-rich breads and pasta.  The low-carbohydrate movement (the opposition of the anti-fat movement), despite having an increasing body of evidence that stated that fat was not bad, and carbs were not good (each subsequent study failed to prove the anti-fat hypothesis), were pushed aside, labeled as cranks or corporate stooges of the companies that produced high-fat food.  Billions of dollars of NIH funding flowed into anti-fat research, food manufacturers touted the heart-friendly effects of their products, and groups like the CSPI arose to plug anti-fat agendas.  Government policy and millions in advertising now set, Americans duly changed their diets to become more “healthy” — ushering in a wave of all the “diseases of civilization” that low-carb advocates predicted: diabetes, obesity and various forms of cancer.

Then, once the obesity epidemic (if not directly caused by the high-carb policy, certainly exacerbated by it) became the new threat, established policy and scientists blamed it on fat as well.

You probably could not invent a story that fit the libertarian critique so well.  Confirmation bias alarm bells went off the entire time I was reading; but the Taubes book is exhaustively researched and annotated — not just with the data (often based on studies that examined the results of low-tech societies, which ate mainly meat and other high fat diets, transitioning to the higher-carb diet of Western societies, and their subsequent explosion of diabetes and obesity — and cancer) but with the specific charges leveled at each by the anti-fat movement in an effort to erroneously discredit them.  Some people will write a book based on the results of a single paper, and present its conclusion as definitive proof.  This book presents the results of hundreds of papers and studies, all of which disprove the anti-fat hypothesis or support the low-carb one — every one dismissed and ignored.  It is also a devastating critique of academia, which, once a theory was established as the conventional wisdom, had no interest in examining data that might undermine it.

To recap: the government picked some bad science and enacted incorrect policies based on it, which damaged the health of millions of Americans, costing us billions of dollars in healthcare bills, millions of lives (here I merely repeat the government’s claims about the damage of the “obesity epidemic”) and did little to actually prevent the problem for which it was designed.  They suppressed, ignored and slandered those who disagreed, who had the data on their side both at the time, and today.  Then, when the damage reports came rolling in from their actions, promptly demanded that they were the only people capable of fixing this problem, and confidently prescribed the exact same medicine which had caused the problem in the first place: the low fat, high carb diet*.

How is this not the centerpiece of the libertarian argument for a less-activist government?

* – to be fair, they also advocated good things, such as an increase in exercise, and a decrease in the consumption of sugars and soda.  The latter again points out the crazy logic of advocating high carb diets: those carbs roughly translate into the same end result in your body as the sugar.

This kind of debate is absolutely and endlessly fascinating to me.  Go ahead, read ‘em all.  I’ll admit that the original Landsburg example was very counter-intuitive to me, even though I generally agree with him.  But that’s not the interesting part — it’s that there is such an amazing divide.  And not a polite one either, Krugman actually implies that Landsburg doesn’t really deserve his Ph.D.

That there can be such a debate over (what seems to me) to be a very basic principle of the field is totally astonishing.  Physicists might argue over whether string theory is valid or not, but that’s pretty advanced stuff — they all basically agree on how simple stuff like inclined planes work.  Now, I understand that there are no political implications in the area of inclined planes — if there were, (is friction conservative or progressive?) there might be more debate.  But even in fields with heavily charged issues — take climatology or evolutionary biology — the tendency seems to be for the field to develop a consensus and then mock the outsiders who disagree.  But this seems to be a pretty bedrock disagreement amongst a number of well-respected (though politically opposed) industry insiders.

This seems to have pretty scary implications for the science.  And even if the debate is not over the actual theory and definitions, but rather over the potentially implied policies of that theory, that brings up an equally uncomfortable conclusion: that at least one side of this debate thinks that the theory must be presented in a way that supports their policy goals.

I really wanted to title this post: “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Tax Forms.”

Okay, so NASA released it, not google, but it’s basically the same thing: Eyes on the Solar System.  If you ever find yourself, as I often do, needing to know where the asteroid 25143 Itokawa is right NOW, then this is the tool for you.  I await the addition of turn by turn directions.

A few weeks back I thought that Stephen Hawking’s warning about not revealing ourselves to aliens was too late:

if highly infrequent Earth-like planets gave rise to even a few societies that needed a large quantity of those planets to sustain itself, they would already be here, subjugating us, because they would have had millions of years to search them out.

So it’s great to see Seth Shostak saying the same thing:

The earliest episodes of I Love Lucy have washed over 6000 or so star systems, and are reaching new audiences at the rate of one solar system a day. If there are sentient beings out there, the signals will reach them.

Detecting this leakage radiation won’t be that difficult. Its intensity decreases with the square of the distance, but even if the nearest aliens were 1000 light years away, they would still be able to detect it as long as their antenna technology was a century or two ahead of ours.

While I was focusing on “aliens who want Earth-like planets,” Shostak is talking about aliens who would be interested in (hurting) us specifically, which I think is even less likely (as I assume that earth-like-planets are more common than earth-like-planets-with-sentients), but the same logic applies: if humans (or Earth) are things that some malevolent alien force wants to have, there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent them detecting either our planet or our transmissions.

I don’t always agree with Mr. Zakaria, but this is the best take on the oil spill I’ve seen so far:

What worries me is that we have gotten to the point where we expect the president to somehow magically solve every problem in the world, appear to be doing it, and to reflect our anger and emotion. This is a kind of bizarre trivializing of the presidency into some kind of national psychiatrist-in-chief.

That’s just one good line; I basically agree with the rest too.

Update: I like this too. (Via Boing Boing)

I am apprehensive:

Livermore, California (CNN) — Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world’s largest laser — it’s the size of three football fields — to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.

I wish them the best of luck, but… I think I’ve heard this one before.

Obviously, anything with that title should be taken with a black-hole sized grain of salt!

I saw Hawking’s “Universe” special on Discovery.  It was pretty good, with one exception: his fear that intelligent aliens will be a threat to humanity.  I think the false assumption that leads to this conclusion, strangely, is exactly the one that Hawking describes earlier in the show: that we shouldn’t assume life (intelligent or otherwise) will be anything like us.  Indeed, he posits they may exist inside stars, gas-giants, or in deep space.  This seems to remove his need to fear aliens.

If a star-dwelling culture spread out around the galaxy, they would be no threat to us.  They would consider the rocky Earth to be a boring, useless place, far away from the warm, energy rich homes that they need.  And that’s the entire problem — a certain level of similarity is necessary for conflict.  Humanity fights amongst itself for power, resources and ideology.  Aliens are likely to be, well, too alien to necessarily value the things that Earth is rich in.  Plus, by definition, if highly infrequent Earth-like planets gave rise to even a few societies that needed a large quantity of those planets to sustain itself, they would already be here, subjugating us, because they would have had millions of years to search them out.

Even on Earth, we can see this.  Hawking makes the analogy between Columbus and the Native Americans, and points out how badly that went for them.  But the two most devastating weapons the Europeans brought were products of their extreme similarity with the Native Americans: their disease and their desire for similar resources, such as land and control of belief systems.  If Columbus were the vanguard of say, a tiny, relativistically slowed species that evolved a hive mind with no concept of individualism and lived in underground warrens where they leeched geothermal energy, the Native Americans may not have even noticed their “invasion.”

And here’s another major flaw: even if we assume, beyond all likelihood, that an alien race exists that is so similar to us that they utilize the same resources, and will actually want what’s on Earth, what’s to say that their brain will even be similar enough to ours to facilitate this war?  Even on Earth, our physiological differences are very small (both from each other, and from our ape relatives) compared to the differences in how our brains work.  They may just show up, land in all our cities, perform ritual dances for a few years, then leave.  Why do we even assume “war for conquest” is an idea that another species would share?  Just because all human ones do?  All humans also have two legs — yet we consider silly two-legged aliens to be the height of unoriginality.

Finally, there’s one last problem.  Hawking’s suggestion is that we may not want to advertise our presence to any would-be alien Columbuses.  But if you are a magically-similar-to-humans alien race bent on interstellar conquest, your plan better not be: “wait around for radio wave transmissions from aliens and then go conquer them.”  Because as we’ve noticed, there don’t seem to be any radio wave transmissions bouncing around the universe.  (This may be, as many people have suggested — a fatal flaw in SETI: the assumption that societies stay in the radio-wave-emitting part of their evolution for any appreciable amount of time)  You better have a pro-active plan to satisfy your Earth-like-planet-hungry society (we assume of course).  In that case, they’ve already found Earth in their hyper-advanced Hubble-like space telescopes and have an invasion fleet on the way — or more likely, would have already digested it with a cloud of planet-eating nanites eons ago.  I suppose a Silver Surfer or Unicron reference would be appropriate here.

And for one final problem with this astronomically unlikely scenario: even if this similar alien race has only just now noticed Earth and magically arrives in our orbit at the same precise moment as our civilization happens to make lots of popular movies about aliens doing this, we are simply doomed.  There won’t be any spaceships over Manhattan, or alien legions trooping up and down the streets that our valiant Earth patriots can throw molotovs at.  Because if you have the power to cross the distances between stars, once you have arrived in Earth orbit, even if you have pathetically simple technology, like say a few chemical rockets, you have an impossibly strong tactical advantage — so strong, in fact, that any puny Earthling resistance would be snuffed out faster than you could say “John May Lives.”

Let’s use a good analogy for the advantage this gives: imagine a fight between two people.  One person lives at the bottom of a giant, funnel shaped well.  The other person lives at the top, and has lots of really big rocks.  The top person can throw these rocks in any general direction, and thanks to the sloping walls of the well, the rock will roll down and land squarely on the head of his enemy.  And just to accurately model the potential energy here, let’s assume that each time a rock is thrown from above, a magical group of gnomes pop into existence and tape thermonuclear warheads to the rock, which explode on contact with the well-dweller.  How long do you think this fight would last?  What chances do you give the guy at the bottom of the well?  ’Cause that would be us.  If hostile aliens ever do show up, I am surrendering (with Kent Brockman) as fast as I can — because there really is no hope of winning.

If pro-war people ever want to criticize my Quisling stance, now would be the time.  If you think Obama is insufficiently hostile to Iran, and that bowing to Chinese leaders is a reprehensible act of submission, then surely you’ll be happy to attack me for pre-surrendering to aliens we haven’t even met yet!  Go ahead.  Think how beautiful that campaign ad would be.  Even France waited ’til people declared war on them to actually surrender.

Update 1: “Centauri Dreams” (great name) discusses the exact same thing.

This is the kind of shit that drives me up a wall:

The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.

Except for one little problem: salt isn’t bad for you — if you have normal kidney function.  It isn’t bad for you.  Say it with me again, all together now: salt is not bad for you.  The entire premise of this massive intervention is wrong — and the only person they thought to interview to say this was the “Salt Institute” rep.

Also in health news, awhile back there was this article out of China bemoaning how fat their kids were getting, because they wouldn’t be able to die gloriously in service of their stupid government.  I scoffed at them, arrogantly assuming that my country couldn’t be so horrible.  Obviously I was an idiot:

School lunches called a national security threat

WASHINGTON – School lunches have been called many things, but a group of retired military officers is giving them a new label: national security threat.

That’s not a reference to the mystery meat served up in the cafeteria line either. The retired officers are saying that school lunches have helped make the nation’s young people so fat that fewer of them can meet the military’s physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy.

Yup, the reason the military recruitment quotas are in jeopardy isn’t because kids don’t want to get their legs blown off in Iraq; it’s because their school lunches make them fat.  That’s totally it.

What kind of fucked up, insane world do we live in where this is not an Onion headline?  How is “school lunches a national security threat” not instantly laughed off the stage?  What kind of twisted person looks at the pudgy 8 year old and sees a wasted military resource?

For the MSNBC Health “News” Shit Trifecta:

Going tanning as addictive as drinking

1 in 3 college students who tan could be hooked, study says

Some people’s indoor tanning habits qualify as an addiction similar to being hooked on alcohol or other addictive substances, a new study suggests.

Let me issue a carefully reasoned, well-researched rebuttal: No, it isn’t.  You are stupid for printing this tripe.

… this is a perfect example.  Now, I don’t know for certain that the author’s logic is correct.  But I do know that what he describes is a very easy-to-make type of error, and shows just how much our assumptions affect our results.

I think most laymen believe that studies like this are like a black box.  You just assemble a lot of data, push it into the black box of a statistical analysis, and out comes the irrefutable results.  This is to be expected, because that’s basically how scientists and our educational system describe the process.  What is not expected by the layman (of which I am most definitely one), and is the primary point of the post, is that many of these scientists also don’t understand that stats aren’t a black box: (stat details removed)

The authors didn’t consider it necessary to report what type of regression analysis they performed; they reported only the computer program (STATA) and the command (“metareg”).

[...] it would have been impossible to put the data [from this study] into a form that metareg can use.  So what test, exactly, did the authors perform?  And what do the results mean?  It remains a mystery to me – and, I’m willing to bet, to every other reader of the paper.

To sum up: the statistical methods used by the authors of the paper could not accurately model the behavior of their data.  Not “did not” but “could not.”  This means that the authors were just like the ignorant layman: their stat program was a black box before which they placed some data on the altar, and they quickly retired while it did it’s dark mathematical voodoo.  (insert snippy computer programmer joke at the expense of research users here)

Little errors like this are why laymen are often confused by headlines that say things like “Eggs Are Good For You” and “Eggs Are Bad For You” and simply conclude that scientists are stupid.

Look, I’m as much (or more) of a sci-fi, futurist geek as anyone.  The Apollo moon landing actually chokes me up with how amazing it is.  But at the end of the day, my childhood dreams are just that.  It’s kind of callous of me to demand that the government take other nice people’s tax dollars just to make those dreams reality.

The whole getting into orbit thing was understandable — there are lots of very productive things that we can do in orbit, like satellites.  But the whole moon/Marsbase thing drives me up a wall.  Here’s the thing that most people don’t understand: planets and moons are like the galactic equivalent of potholes — they are the annoying inconveniences you try to navigate around.  With the exception of the one we currently live on, and which therefore has quite a bit of infrastructure already in place, the rest of them are pretty crappy places.  There’s really nothing to recommend living at the bottom of stupid gravity wells.

They don’t have atmospheres (or they do, and they are super-hazardous) — if you have to build a contained environment to live in, it might as well be in space away from planets.  They require tons of energy to land on without smashing yourself apart, and then they require even more energy to take off from again — the vast majority of energy expended by moon missions is burnt in the first few miles getting away from the annoying pull of Earth’s gravity.  The rest of the way is relatively smooth sailing.  What’s worse, when they don’t have atmopsheres and have pesky gravity, this means they basically attract all kinds of interplanetary buckshot at you — there’s a reason the surface of the moon is pockmarked with craters.  And even the gravity that exists is problematic — unless you get a planet that has similar-to-Earth values, people find it hard to work.  But it’s trivial to make a space habitat have precisely the same effective gravity as Earth — just make it a cylinder and spin it at the right speed, then walk around the inner surface.  Then, there’s the dust.  Planets are not hospitable islands in the hazardous sea of space — they are obstacles to be avoided.

The one and only advantage that planets have over nice, empty space is mineral resources — and here, despite having tons of them, it’s still hideously expensive to have to lift them off the surface and back into space for transport home.  It will be a very, very long time before we’ve mined Earth to an extent that it’s cheaper to get it from the moon.  In fact, one of the only things silly space exploration shows on Discovery can come up with to mine on the moon is helium-3, which will be very useful… once we invent fusion power.  And even in the case of moon-mining, it might be cheaper to just run out to the asteroid belt, which has all kinds of pre-chopped up chunks of ex-(pre?)-planets for mining.  Once we get to the point where we’re desperately combing the solar system for mass,  we should just blow up the planets to get at them, instead of going down to their icky gravity covered surfaces.

And finally, if we just have to go all Star Trek and explore these useless chunks of rock, let’s just do it with remote controlled robotic probes, like we’re doing with Mars right now.  I don’t say this in order to protect our noble astronaut explorers, but rather because taking them (and all the equipment to keep them alive and useful for Science) along is energy-expensive and acceleration-restrictive — two things you don’t want when exploring space.

(more…)

Paul Krugman is very smart.   But here’s why you can’t trust him:

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

[...]

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Okay, so this is a perfect mirror of the PATRIOT Act.  Existential threat posited by supporters?  Check!  Bill that does lots of things but might not help?  Check.  Accusing those who vote against of being traitors?  Check.  Immediate association of “no” votes with “denial of problem?”  Check.  We’ve even got more reasonable individuals complaining about casual use of the word “treason” while still accepting that a problem exists.

But the most hilarious part is:

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Krugman even knows what he’s doing!  This is the problem, and what makes someone a hack: when you use the exact same slimy tactics as you criticized your opponents for using, that means you aren’t looking at things objectively.  Very intelligent, very talented people have become convinced of wrong things simply because they were emotionally invested in it — Krugman may in fact be right in this, but no matter how much evidence he lays out, its clear that he’s emotionally attached to the concept of his opponents being traitors to the planet.  If opponents of the PATRIOT Act or Waxman-Markey really are traitors bent on destroying America/Earth then you should lie, cheat and steal (or more accurately, call them traitors, ignore evidence that supports them, and tar their motives with broad strokes) to defeat them.  Even if he’s supporting the right side, Krugman’s obviously not looking over the facts and coming to their logical conclusion.  Why should he?  The other side is a bunch of traitors bent on — in his own words — destroying the world.

For example, I generally opposed the bailout of GM.  But if I describe every politician who voted for it as a bunch of evil, no-good communistic traitors who are leading this country to ruin, rather than simply wrong, you would question my objectivity in dealing with the subject.  You will think, “hmm, if he thinks the other side is evil, how likely is it that he has calmly and rationally assessed the pros and cons of the situation?”  And so it is with Krugman.

Shorter Krugman: “demonizing political opponents as traitors is bad when Bush does it, but good when I do it.  Also they’re traitors against the entire planet, which is totally worse than just America.”  Where’s Captain Planet when you need him?

This stuff is really interesting:

THE SCARIEST THING about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.

Apparently proposed anti-climate change responses are estimated to be super-cheap — within the range, as the article notes, of wealthy individuals, and even the smallest countries.  Lots of the solutions are pretty scary in their potential to go horribly, horribly wrong — but if there is some gradualist solution (some presented seemed to fit this bill) that can be slowly enacted to gauge their response, why shouldn’t we try it?

My only quibble with the piece is how it seems to imply that the risks of standard methods of dealing with climate change are not themselves extremely high.  Any plan to cut carbon emissions by enough to severely curtain warming is going to negatively impact the development of many countries — especially India and China.  Their massive uptick in pollution has directly led to much of the economic growth in those countries — pulling billions out of poverty.  What’s the cost of preventing the next billion from achieving the same?

Either way, given the likelihood of any comprehensive climate change plan ever being put in place, eventually we will be forced to consider geo-engineering.  Even if the US adopts a vastly more stringent form of the current Waxman-Markey bill at some point, for any of this to matter, India and China need to be on board.  If the US is barely managing to keep W-M alive today, the governments of India and China certainly aren’t going to do something even more radical.  And in reality, by “we” I am almost certainly referring to the Chinese government.  If it comes to a point where climate change is creating unmanageable problems, they will definitely use some form of geo-engineering to combat it.  Hopefully they won’t call their device the Annihilatrix.

It’s a big hat, okay?

So here’s the thing.  This CNN headline reads:

Climate ‘catastrophe’ killing 300,000 each year

And follows up with:

LONDON, England (CNN) – The first comprehensive report into the human cost of climate change warns the world is in the throes of a “silent crisis” that is killing 300,000 people each year.

If you release a report saying that “climate change is killing 300,000 people” then it would strike the average reader that you were saying that climate change is the determinate thing that is making them die.  But then we get:

Of the 300,000 lives being lost each year due to climate change, the report finds nine out of 10 are related to “gradual environmental degradation,” and that deaths caused by climate-related malnutrition, diarrhea and malaria outnumber direct fatalaties from weather-related disasters.

Oh.  So 270,000 people are dying of climate-related malnutrition, diarrhea and malaria.  If only we had cures for those things.  Oh wait, we do!  Here’s more:

The vast majority of deaths — 99 percent — are in developing countries which are estimated to have contributed less than one percent of the world’s total carbon emissions.

The article makes it seem like “developing” countries are just like that.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  ”Being developed” is a state they could transition into.

So the question then is, if developed countries are able to prevent 99% of deaths from climate change, then isn’t it really more accurate to say “not being developed is killing 297,000 people per year?”  The question becomes more heated when you notice that those 3 first order causes of malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition are killing quite a few other people as well:

- Each year, there are approximately 350–500 million cases of malaria,^[1] killing between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in Sub-Saharan Africa.^[2] 

- 1.8 million people die every year from diarrhoeal diseases (including cholera); 90% are children under 5, mostly in developing countries.

- In 2006, more than 36 million died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients”^[27].

So there really isn’t a comparison.  Let me ask you this question.  If you had scarce resources, and could only solve one problem afflicting the world, which would it be:

Option 1: Saves 40,000,000 people

Option 2: Saves 300,000 people, however, if you choose option 1, you will save 270,000 of these people as well.

Well, gee, I don’t know!  This is completely ignoring all the other deaths from war, lawlessness, violence, and other diseases that would be prevented by the development of these nations.  They also make the 300,000 number look pretty small.  It would certainly prevent a large number of those weather-related deaths as well, for example — as bad as Katrina was, it didn’t really compare to the loss of life in the Southeast Asian hurricanes.

And here’s the real kicker: by the fact that we have developed nations on this earth, we can be certain that one can prevent these things.  Obviously large chunks of humanity are already doing so, despite once having been undeveloped nations ravaged by the very same problems.  Approximately two billion people in China and India are proceeding along this course quite nicely.  The path for preventing climate change is not so well-lit.  Plus, even this article tells us that at least some of the climate change is irreversible at this point:

The Global Humanitarium Forum says that temperatures will rise by almost two degrees celcius, regardless of what’s agreed in Copenhagen. [the United Nations Climate Conference, in December]

So we have to take steps to enable developing countries to defend themselves not only from climate change, but a host of other problems as well.  And we really do have scarce resources — especially since, as everyone acknowledges, many of the solutions for stopping climate change actually reduce the amount of resources that developing countries have.

Could we do both?  Sure.  But right now, spending 1 dollar on climate change prevention is drastically less effective than spending it on, well, nearly anything listed here.  So until we get to the point where spending on these things is starting to hit diminishing returns (while also preventing 99% of the deaths from climate change) then I vote our money gets spent on the former.

Disclaimers:

- Yes, I realize the impact of climate change is going to go up.  But the other issues listed here kill millions every year, right now, and have been doing so for centuries.  We’ve come a long way, especially with the rehydration steps necessary to prevent a large amount of the diarhhea deaths.  These are not radical steps.  Again, my primary contention is that achieving development will not only enable these countries to fight those issues, but defend themselves against climate change as well.  Most importantly, perhaps, this will actually enlist the citizens of these countries into environmental affairs.  It is hard to be worried about global warming when you are dying of malnutrition.  Wealthy Americans and Europeans are interested, because they don’t worry about the other things.  Making developing nations wealthy will grant them with the luxury of worrying about the future.

- Anthropogenic global warming is real, and I don’t deny it.  I just think that many of the current proposals for dealing with it won’t help, will hurt more than help, or, as I argue here, ignore solutions that could provide even more far-reaching benefits.  Take this analogy: one can be opposed to methods for dealing with drug usage (such as say, executing dealers and users, or even just criminalization) without necessarily denying that drug usage is a problem with real costs.  So too with climate change.

- If you find yourself saying “you’re just a do-nothing crazy libertarian who wants to ignore global warming,” then imagine me saying “you’re just a do-nothing crazy whatever-your-political-persuasion who wants to ignore global undevelopment.”  My soap-box issue is a lot more serious.  It’s just less cool right now.

Via The Agitator, I will now unavoidably think of this situation whenever I am in an elevator:

Elevators are relatively recent inventions, but the social challenges they pose are nothing new. Close proximity to other people in restricted spaces is a situation that has occurred millions of times in the history of humankind.

Imagine two Paleolithic cavemen who follow the tracks of a large bear into the same small, dark cave. There is no bear in there, only the other hungry caveman ominously waving his club: clearly an awkward situation that requires an exit strategy. In those Paleolithic days, murder was an acceptable way to get out of socially awkward situations, much in the way we use an early morning doctor’s appointment as an excuse to leave a dinner party early. In the cave, one of the cavemen whacks the other over the head with his club and the party is over.

Similarly, when male chimpanzees in Uganda encounter a male from another group, they slash his throat and rip his testicles off — just in case he survives and has any future ambitions for reproduction.

And they say society hasn’t advanced.  Thanks, Dario Maestripieri, for making me thankful every time an elevator trip does not end in my murder/castration.

I’m glad that someone besides Militant Skeptic and my bullshit-meter finally took a hard look at this stuff:

There was an early sighting of this “Obama Effect” earlier this year, as I blogged at the time, when scientists led by Ray Friedman of Vanderbilt University  reported that Obama “had a profound beneficial effect on Black-Americans’ exam performance,” something they attributed to “the powerful impact of in-group role models.”

Not so fast. In research supported by the National Science Foundation and scheduled to be published in the July issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psychologist Joshua Aronson of New York University and colleagues come to the opposite conclusion. 

Good, ’cause I didn’t think it made any sense at the time.  Just needed a few people with PhD’s to back me up.

Link via Ta-Nehisi Coates.