A Letter Home

Dear Mentor,

A while back (10 years ago now) you asked me to think about why scientists should study humanities and the arts.

I took this seriously, and have done a lot of reading and writing in the meantime. Im sorry about my progress being really slow, but the more you find out, the more you find out you really have no clue about what you just thought you had figured out, and that the entire thing is a whole lot more interesting than it first appeared.

Anyway, so far this is what I have.

If a scientist or engineer (or any technologist) makes a good faith effort to study the humanities, then they will not end up like, for example, Richard Dawkins. Thats pretty much it. Its really that simple. But, since you've already read this far, and hopefully dont feel like the idea is a waste of your time to read a page or two about, Ill go on.

Reading certain authors, whether they be Richard Dawkins, or Carl Sagan, or any one of a number of those permanently blinded by what-they-think-the-Enlightenment-is types, is like embracing a supermodel.

First, you run your hand down her very reasonable shoulder, past her sculpted upper arm, through the lovely enlightened inner elbow, letting your fingers massage the velvety soft skin of her perfect forearm. You long to hold her hand and run off into the sunset with her, feeling like you can understand your world with her, and that you will live happily ever after, secure in the knowledge that youre better than everyone else because youre a smarty-pants. Your life is truly better because youve been introduced to the supermodel. This is beyond question. Youre head and shoulders above where you were before.

Then, you come abruptly to the bloody stump of an amputation.

All the while the supermodel smiles at you, beckoning you to continue following her past the scientific method to empiricism or rationalism or secular humanism or atheism or pretty-much-any-ism. She reassures you that all is well, that all that mysticism and philosophical liberal arts mumbo-jumbo doesnt mean anything anyway, and is just a bunch of ignorant claptrap.

But she's bleeding to death, there on the couch.

The challenge to scientists is manifold. Scientific people have had a heck of a time this century. To go from the heady days of the 1920s, where science seemed to be on the verge of conquering all problems and would usher in a new modernity, free of toil and disease, to the Depression, where technological unemployment was (rightly or wrongly) blamed for much of the misery, to World War II, where scientists became associated with bombs, and weapons, and entered into an enduring symbiosis with the government, never to truly emerge as an independent class again, through decades of being portrayed as people who only memorize formulas, lack creativity, and have no fun, and finally to the present where they are all of the above and less - to go through all of this perhaps narrows the mind, creates a defensiveness, an over-reliance on empiricism, a replacement of a healthy worldview with nothing more than Occam's Razor as your weapon. Speaking as a technologist, its quite a tempting worldview.

At the very least, an effort made to study the humanities arms the scientist with a tourniquet to go with the razor.

As I remember, for the razor to cut, there must be some real solutions, and there must be some truly extraneous explanations. However, too often, I see surgery where none is required on the part of the scientist. This leads directly to bad science, not to mention the tendency to then liberally apply Occam's Razor to people, their identities, interests, orientations, beliefs, arts, and practices.

This can result in a world that not even the most hardcore scientist would truly want to live in.

Specifically, in the case of bad science - to pathologize something such as culture, homosexuality, religion, certain observable scientific realities, and then hack them off with your razor, to the delight of you or your audience, often results in a delay of discovery.

Who would have predicted that there would be thousands of studies showing the health benefits of religiosity, if everyone had believed Freud or if everyone went along with Dawkins? Surprise, being religious may be hard-wired into our DNA. Religiosity may actually have enhanced our evolutionary progress as humans, instead of hampering it.

The values of certain things wax and wane. There are as many fads in scientific thinking as there are in philosophy, or music, or fashion. If this is appreciated, a scientist becomes that much more powerful.

Scientific progress does not equate with or ensure social progress. It would be so nice if it did, but we can clearly see otherwise. The tendency of many scientists to take credit for the good while denying any culpability for the bad is something that can often be addressed through a study of humanities.

For all the attention paid to a separation between church and state - arguably a separation that has benefited US churches far more than the US government - precious little attention is ever given to a separation between science and state.


Government funds a lot of science. Government uses a lot of science. Money always comes with strings. Governmental motives are, I would argue, largely incompatible with pure research. It's worth asking whether or not tremendous distortions in the achievements of science have occurred with a lack of separation between science and government. Without an appreciation for political and social history, without an introduction to some of the basic philosophical concepts that lead to classical liberalism and the roots of our own Constitution, is it probable that the average scientist would see anything wrong with the current situation that they are ensconced within?

The great power of a scientist or engineer is often the sharpened curiosity and the years (or decades) spent becoming a better problem solver. Due to the realities of the division of labor, sometimes something has to be given up in order to allow the engineer or scientist to be an engineer or scientist. At some point, however, an integration and optimization has to occur at the grand systems level.

This is a fancy way of saying that at some point scientists (I'm speaking both of scientists in general and as a scientific person myself) really need to get a clue about what it means to be human. Otherwise, incurvatus est is their (our) destiny, and they (we) end up doubting every truth but their (our) own.

Hence, you have people like Richard Dawkins, who traversed the sky of his adult life from the rosy dawn of productive and positive pro-science writing to the smoggy sunset of anti-religious polemic, thus wasting years of his life expressing hatred at and for something that he claims is meaningless. Incurvatus est.

This is a great failing of intellect, not a triumph of it. Fundamentalism follows, and then fossilization sets in, only to be ruptured later by some sort of tectonic intellectual groundswell. A study of the humanities won't change the reality of the structure of scientific revolution, but my feeling is that it directly improves both the quality of the scientific work done as well as empowering the scientist to take a more active and more productive role in society.

Yours always,

-Mitch

philosophy
religion

Don't make me YAQ - Yet Another Quiz (religious humor)

Section 2: Short Answer

1. Define reality. Give two (2) examples.
2. Using only basic first order logic, develop a rational foundation from which to prove the truth of radical relativism.
3. Analyze the fundamental nature of being. Introduce new distinctions and obfuscatory neologisms.
4. Escape the hermeneutic circle with only fishing line and a Swiss Army knife.
5. Demonstrate the validity of the fallacy of composition.
6. Evaluate the following argument: "If conventionalism is true, it must be true by convention. We do not believe in conventionalism. Therefore, we should change our beliefs because conventionalism is self-evident."
7. Translate Heidegger's Being and Time into Latin and Aramaic. Provide an analysis of the nature of translation which explains why neither translation makes sense.
8. Assume solipsism to be correct. Explain why more people aren't solipsists.
9. Explain the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa without going into any intentional states, e.g. thinking of Descartes.
10. List three beliefs held by eliminative materialists.

See the rest of the quiz here.

religious humor

Six Saints of Separation

Most days, the conversations with my dad go something like this (my apologies to anyone offended by any perceived irreverence, please direct your complaint here ).

Roger Thompson says:
Hi!
Michelle says:
hi there! how's it going?
Roger Thompson says:
Tired, long day in meetings, 3 hours, 27 minutes drive home.
Michelle says:
you're home? excellent!
Michelle says:
welcome back
Roger Thompson says:
Thank you, we escaped Jackson.
Roger Thompson says:
What is going on there?
Michelle says:
lots of reading, plenty of nothing else
Roger Thompson says:
Not much to read here! Guess I'll have to do some lawn work tomorrow after work and Rotary.
Michelle says:
yay for rotary! you probably are going to take it easy tonight I bet
Roger Thompson says:
We get lots of church this week.
Michelle says:
we do too
Michelle says:
funny that
Michelle says:
we had palm sunday, holy monday-wednesday, tomorrow is chrism mass, holy thursday, vigil mass, then Good Friday 12-step-program through the stations of the cross, then Good Friday mass at night...
Michelle says:
I forget what saturday is... oh yes! Easter Vigil. The big one. Then Easter Sunday, the relaxed one.
Roger Thompson says:
I meant to say earlier, "Some people get lots of church this week."
Roger Thompson says:
We have it easy.
Michelle says:
you guys are busy too!
Michelle says:
you got some of this stuff
Michelle says:
"catholicism: every day is a feast day!"
Roger Thompson says:
Yes?
Roger Thompson says:
Catholics eat a lot?
Michelle says:
oh yeah
Michelle says:
I think "feast" is a great term...
Roger Thompson says:
We have some sort of dinner tomorrow night....
Michelle says:
some days are triple booked for feasts for various long-dead important people
Michelle says:
yum! food!
Michelle says:
i love feasts
Roger Thompson says:
Just think. Given no removal process for saints, etc., then you will have every day oversubscribed.
Michelle says:
totally. then jp2 added a whole bunch more.
Michelle says:
I heard a rumor that St. Christopher was getting removed because of some sort of problem proving he really lived.
Roger Thompson says:
Obviously a case for class definitions and modular techniques.
Michelle says:
hey! you are right!
Michelle says:
we have saints for both
Roger Thompson says:
Probably a saint for MSM.
Michelle says:
plus, don't forget the PASCAL sacrifice.
Michelle says:
I bet you thought that was something about lambs
Roger Thompson says:
Or doors or something.
Michelle says:
<checks for church survelliance>
Roger Thompson says:
What's that light in the western sky....
Roger Thompson says:
login:
Michelle says:
St. Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of the internet
Roger Thompson says:
ybkm!
Michelle says:
really!
Roger Thompson says:
What about Al Gore?
Michelle says:
he's the Patron Faint of the internet
Roger Thompson says:
snicker
Roger Thompson says:
I had no idea....
Roger Thompson says:
So, who is the patron saint of yagi antennas? Need info before next contest.
Michelle says:
I've always liked how Catherine of Bologna is the patron saint of the liberal arts.
Roger Thompson says:
Better yet, what about lotteries?
Michelle says:
"It's all balony"
Michelle says:
St. Notkar Balbulus is the patron saint of Stammering Children
Michelle says:
I'm not making this up, either
Roger Thompson says:
You must be.
Roger Thompson says:
Is there a saint reference book?
Michelle says:
there are four DIFFERENT patron saints of "disappointing children"
Michelle says:
* Clotilde
* Louise de Marillac
* Matilda
* Monica

Michelle says:
yes, there sure is. catholics create references for everything.
Michelle says:
http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/indexsnt.htm
Michelle says:
see, that's why children are so difficult. They have FOUR different saints on their side
Michelle says:
FOUR!
Roger Thompson says:
I'm overcome.
Michelle says:
wait, how many do "parents" have.
Roger Thompson says:
I was checking migraine sufferers, should be the same.
Michelle says:
Great. Gerard Majella. A man is the patron saint of motherhood.
Michelle says:
I guess this is payback for Mary being the mother of the church.
Roger Thompson says:
Peoria has a saint, but not Mississippi. This could be serious.
Michelle says:
wait! Gerard is just for expectant mothers!
Michelle says:
moms are totally unguarded by patron saints
Michelle says:
unless they're expectant. This is obviously a conspiracy.
Michelle says:
Mississippi is saintless?
Michelle says:
this could definitely be serious
Roger Thompson says:
mothers
Anne
Gerard Majella
Monica

Michelle says:
whew!
Michelle says:
ok 3 against 4, that's more like it
Michelle says:
Is there a patron saint of triangles? maybe that could cover the Mississippi delta.
Roger Thompson says:
accountants
Matthew the Apostle
Roger Thompson says:
Cannot be . Check lawyers.
Michelle says:
ok, that makes sense. make the guy that gave away all earthly possessions to follow some carpenter the patron saint of accountants.
Roger Thompson says:
The record is incomplete as to the receiver of the possessions.....
Michelle says:
PATRON SAINT INDEX TOPIC

attorneys, lawyers, barristers

* Catherine of Alexandria
* Genesius
* Ivo of Kermartin
* Mark the Evangelist
* Raymond of Penyafort
* Thomas More
Michelle says:
SIX!
Roger Thompson says:
Needed.
Michelle says:
and they need all the help they can get
Roger Thompson says:
diocese of San Diego, California
St. Diego

Michelle says:
San Diego... St. Diego - how original.
Michelle says:
Saint Nicholas of Myra - Patron Saint of Pawnbrokers
Michelle says:
Saint Blandina - Patron Saint of those Falsely Accused of Cannibalism
Michelle says:
Saint Drogo and Saint Germaine - Patron Saints of the Really Ugly
Michelle says:
There are 16 Patron Saints for Bachelors. 16.
Roger Thompson says:
No patron for beer.
Michelle says:
Four Patron Saints for those Rejected by Monks and Nuns

Believe it or not, there was once a time in which there was a surplus of people wanting to be monks and nuns. People actually gave up everything they owned, left their families, trudged off to convents or monasteries, and were turned down. Not only that, this apparently happened often enough that there are four patron saints, just for these
Michelle says:
well, there is one for alcoholics
Michelle says:
Saint Monica - Patron Saint of Alcoholics
Michelle says:
Saint Clare of Assisi - Patron Saint of Television
Michelle says:
television sort of goes along with beer
Roger Thompson says:
Well, I hope the tests on this are easy.
Michelle says:
there's only about 5000 saints.
Michelle says:
it was fairly easy to memorize <twitch>
Roger Thompson says:
Yes........I guess.
Roger Thompson says:
I can see there was too much time on someone's hands.
Roger Thompson says:
So who got the nod on the elections?
Michelle says:
ah HA
Michelle says:
PATRON SAINT INDEX TOPIC

brewers

* Amand
* Arnulf of Soissons
* Augustine of Hippo
* Barbara
* Boniface
* Dorothy of Caesarea
* Florian
* Lawrence
* Luke the Apostle
* Medard
* Nicholas of Myra
* Wenceslas

Michelle says:
12!
Michelle says:
two six-packs of patron saints for BREWING!
Michelle says:
no one won a plurality in the election.
Roger Thompson says:
Luke?
Michelle says:
so, we have a run-off election on June 6th between the top demopub and the top republicrat.
Michelle says:
Now, this election will elect someone for the remaining 7 months of Duke's term.
Michelle says:
it will also be the same election for the next term.
Roger Thompson says:
So the winner could get two boats?
Michelle says:
so we're electing the replacement, and the replacement for the replacement, in the same election, on the same day.
Michelle says:
yes! the winner could get TWO boats!
Michelle says:
plus a 7-month headstart on the antiques
Roger Thompson says:
Only in California.
Michelle says:
only here!
Michelle says:
Gabriel the Archangel is the patron saint of radio
Roger Thompson says:
Well, Duke had airplanes, too.
Michelle says:
maybe save that for the third term
Roger Thompson says:
I shall name my next radio computer Gabriel.
Michelle says:
St. Roch is the patron saint of dogs
Michelle says:
St. Patrick is the patron saint of engineers. Patrick Gabriel has a nice ring to it
Roger Thompson says:
Yes.
Michelle says:
St. Zita is the patron saint of lost keys
Michelle says:
Ken is quite familiar with her.
Roger Thompson says:
Hattie, at the doggie day camp tonight, wishes for a patron.
Roger Thompson says:
So what about the pasta?
Michelle says:
St. Amand is for vintners. Apparently, they need a little extra help over and above the 12 brewer saints.
Roger Thompson says:
Isn't zita a pasta?
Michelle says:
I think it is!!
Michelle says:
the keys are obviously related to the pasta
Roger Thompson says:
Keys lost in attempt to recover lost pasta...
Michelle says:
ok here's a good combo
Roger Thompson says:
Well, perhaps we should return to discussions of immigration or national defense.
Michelle says:
St. Elmo is the patron saint of ammunition, explosive workers, ordnance, sailors, women in labor
Michelle says:
somehow, all of these things go together...
Roger Thompson says:
Hmmm.
Roger Thompson says:
Is this a joke book?
Michelle says:
nope!
Michelle says:
all real
Michelle says:
St. Genevieve is the patron saint of both paris AND disasters.
Roger Thompson says:
Same.
Roger Thompson says:
Makes perfect sense.
Michelle says:
it does make a strange sort of sense!
Michelle says:
St. Vitus is the patron saint of comedians, dancers, and epilepsy
Michelle says:
St. Willirbrord is the patron saint of epilepsy, Netherlands
Michelle says:
thus linking dancing with the Netherlands
Michelle says:
and comedy
Michelle says:
this is like the six saints of separation

And so we bid each other good night.

religious humor

Iraq War Costs Too Much and is Fundamentally Wrong

The Iraq war will have cost $315 billion by September 30, 2006, the end of fiscal year 2006.

From
http://www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/book/sect5.pdf

"The United States spends roughly $100 billion per year on homeland security. This includes the services of federal, state, and local law enforcement and emergency services but excludes most spending for the armed forces. The cost is great, and we will strive to minimize the sacrifices asked of Americans, but as a Nation we will spend whatever is necessary to secure the homeland.

In recent years, the federal government has allocated considerable resources to homeland security. Including supplemental funding, the federal budget allocated $17 billion to homeland security in Fiscal Year 2001. This amount increased to $29 billion in Fiscal Year 2002. In Fiscal Year 2003, the President budgeted $38 billion for homeland security activities. These budget allocations must be viewed as down payments to cover the most immediate security vulnerabilities."

2006 budget proposal for DHS is $41 billion.

Spending "whatever is necesary to secure the homeland" is exactly the sort of thinking a traditional Republican opposes. "Whatever is necessary" is hardly ever "what is truly needed".

Spending "Whatever is necessary to educate our children" or spending "whatever is necessary to defeat poverty" or spending "whatever is necessary to win the war on drugs" or spending "whatever is necessary to defeat the North Vietnamese" should all sound really familiar by now. All have resulted in massive cost overruns, high and continuing tax burdens, extensive collateral damage, earmarking and interest-group hijacking, and have delivered minimal positive effects. Good intentions are really difficult to implement correctly when it's all someone else's money.

In reality, there is no way to spend ourselves into security. It's a charade of security addiction. In fact, real security improvements can be purchased with a whole lot less money that what we're spending to continue to occupy Iraq.

From
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/09/08_402.html

Bush administration officials used to say that the war on terrorism had to be fought "in Baghdad, not Boston." You don't hear that line much anymore, yet it's clearly reflected in the administration's spending priorities. The war in Iraq so far has cost $150 billion; for the Department of Homeland Security, the administration has allocated $27 billion this year, with the bulk of that going to the routine operations of agencies like the Customs Service. When it comes to new programs to make planes, trains, ports, and urban centers safer, there's precious little left over—which is why a range of critics, from local firefighters to Republican members of Congress, have lambasted Bush for shortchanging the nation's true homeland security needs. Below, a sample of those needs, along with Bush's budget allocations, compared with the time it takes to burn through the same amount in Iraq.

Amount needed for basic security upgrades for subway and commuter trains in large cities: $6 BILLION
(Iraq spending equivalent: 20 days)

Bush budget allocation for train security: $100 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 8 hours)

Amount needed to equip all U.S. airports with machines that screen baggage for explosives: $3 BILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 10 days)

Bush budget allocation for baggage-screening machines: $400 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 32 hours)

Amount needed for security upgrades at 361 U.S. ports: $1.1 BILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 4 days)

Bush budget allocation for port security: $210 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 17 hours)

Amount needed to buy radiation portals for U.S. ports to detect dirty bombs in cargo: $290 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 23 hours)

Bush budget allocation for radiation portals: $43 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 3 hours)

Amount needed to help local firefighters preparefor terrorist attacks: $36.8 BILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 122 days)

Bush budget allocation for firefighter grants: $500 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 40 hours)

Amount needed to get local emergency medical crews ready for terrorist atttacks: $1.4 BILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 5 days)

Bush budget allocation for emergency medical training grants prior to eliminating program altogether: $50 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 4 hours)

Sources:

All Bush allocation figures taken from administration estimates of FY 2005 budget

Subway and rail security upgrades
Amount needed: Statement by William W. Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association, 5/20/04

Baggage screening
Amount needed: Government Accountability Office, "Aviation Security: Challenges Exist in Stabilizing and Enhancing Passenger and Baggage Screening Operations" [PDF], 2/12/04, p. 28

Port security upgrades
American Association of Port Authorities, "AAPA Concerned FY '05 Lacks Funds For Port Facility Security", 2/2/04

Radiation portals
Amount needed: Calculation based on figures from House Committee on Appropriations (Total cost of radiation portals: $495.5 million. Amount already spent: $205.5 million. Remaining amount: $290 million)

Firefighter preparedness
Amount needed: Council on Foreign Relations, "Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Underprepared", p. 34

Emergency medical preparedness
Amount needed: Council on Foreign Relations, "Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Underprepared", p. 37

Being categorically opposed to pre-emptive laws - let alone pre-emptive war - it should be no surprise to anyone that I completely oppose the occupation of Iraq, which was presented by the Bush Administration as a pre-emptive war. This unmitigated disaster of a decision will have long-term consequences for the nation, none of which can be easily rectified.

Yes, some good has been done in the process. However, from where I sit, the good does not and can not balance out the bad. It's not simply that the ends doesn't justify the means, it's the fact that the means naturally causes more evil than the good that happens to come from the means. Pre-emptive wars never liberate, they only enslave. They enslave the warring nation to a degree that is equal to or greater than the resulting enslavement of a population to a foreign occupier. People simply don't like being occupied, regardless of the reason. Occupation never results in a society flourishing. To expect otherwise is be in the grip of a special kind of egoistic denial.

Perhaps, relatively improbably, democracy will take root in Iraq and then spread around to other nation-states in the region. Recently, The Economist magazine declared this to be about the only thing that Bush got right in Iraq - the need for democracy in the Middle East as a way of solving global tension and conflict.

This would require a heretofore unknown process of externally forced culture-to-government creation.

Democracy at gunpoint has worked in what other situation? None that I can find. In fact, there are plenty of examples of failure of trying to force democracy along with violence.

The war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, interventions in Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, and the invasion of Grenada are all sobering examples of what happens when you try to either institute democracy by force, or pre-empt another nation's politics. In the case of each of these examples, the "democracy excuse" was in hindsight either remarkably and unjustifiably idealistic, or a relatively weak public relations excuse for military action. If there is a situation where a pre-emptive war created a democratic system of government where it didn't exist before, I'd like to know about it.

From
http://www.cato.org/dailys/11-30-03.html

"British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who declared in his famous 1946 Iron Curtain speech that "we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man," but that "it is not our duty ... to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries."

Churchill urged the Free World to lead by principled example, not to impose such principles by force; adopting the latter course risks subverting these principles from within, and thus eroding the foundations of our own democracy as we propose to build new democratic foundations abroad. The reality is that the ingredients for successful democracy are found in domestic political kitchens. Democracy is a dish that Iraqis and others throughout the Middle East must prepare for themselves."

This war costs too much and is fundamentally wrong.

iraq war

politics

economics

Is Economic Growth Bad?

Is Economic Growth Bad?

No. But if economic growth depends on the conversion of natural resources through a manufacturing process into products that are then used by people or businesses, and if those natural resources are finite, then the faster we grow, the sooner we run out.

Since there is no end-state, no winning condition, of capitalism, and since there are conditions where productivity gains can ratchet upwards without much in the way of control, it would make sense to actually start thinking about what "winning" or "success" in capitalism means.

A long list of people have tried to answer this question. Everyone's version of a sucessful life is different. Behaviour of people in aggregate, however, shows little to no possibility of ending the consumerism without some sort of external or internal intervention. So, what to do?

If defined only in relative terms (standard of living compared to a baseline, or how much more money you make than average) then the ratcheting continues unabated. If everyone strives to make more money than average, and then succeeds, then inflation follows. Everyone would like more for less.Capitalism very often delivers exactly that - more for less.

The barbed hooks hidden in the velvet pillow are the depletion of finite resources, exploitation of the less powerful leading to amazing amounts of wealth disparity, and epic greed crimes.

What about a separation of business and state? A real one, modeled after the separation of church and state, which has served both spheres quite well in the US. Would it work?

economics

Evolution Debate as Red Herring?

My take on the creation science debate being a red herring is actually not entirely original. I’ve long considered the creation vs. evolution debate it to be a solved legal problem that requires maintenance, sort of like weeding a garden after you’ve done all the work planning, and planting, and pruning. What do you do when you have weeds? You pull them, of course.

However, once you start pulling up these particular weeds in the garden you realize that the weed is actually not the problem.

Being from a state with quite the history of dealing with the controversy (Arkansas) is both an advantage and a disadvantage here.

It’s a disadvantage because it can polarize to the point of paralysis and the extremists get most of the press. The debate monopolizes your attention to the point that you think the debate is the issue. Constantly being made fun of by people from other states or regions gets old fast. You can start to fall for the inferiority complex. You begin to self-flagellate. You go on crusades. You get taken advantage of, which is what this essay ends up being about.

It’s an advantage because of the opportunity, if you made the effort, of being able to observe something truly devious, elegant, and deceptively complex in practice. And you also get to practice debating. A lot.

I’m going to start with a political assertion from Thomas Frank (“What’s the Matter with Kansas”). This expands the creation science debate by quite a bit. Instead of it being simply a conflict of ideology (“defend science against those in-denial bible-thumpers!” or “defend our faith from the heresy of the dogma of atheism!”), the debate can be explained as a conflict that exploits the emotions of both sides for tremendous political capital, which is then spent in an entirely different direction. Frank identifies three issues that are most likely to be used in this manner. Abortion, Homosexuality, and Evolution. I’d add Flag Burning and English as the Official Language as supporting case members.

The recipe for Applied Republicanism that follows is from the point of view that capitalism is the most important activity that government can support, and that capitalism solves all problems. Capitalism and free markets are more efficient for solving social problems than government. Government is the problem, not the solution, unless you are rich, and then it is the solution.

People that aren’t participating in capitalism are not generally good consumers. People that aren’t good consumers are not patriotic because they are not supporting capitalism. People that are not patriotic are dangerous. Dangerous people must be neutralized.

This is the dominant view of the Republican Party in America. There are exceptions and modifications to this general attitude, e.g. moderate Republicans that understand regulation of industry is of huge social value. However, a tenet of the Republican faith is the primacy of capitalism. Capitalism made the country great. Opposing capitalism, in whole or in part, means you oppose Republicans. Or worse, you’re defined as opposing Freedom.

“In the book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman presents his view of the proper role of competitive capitalism - the organization of the bulk of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market - as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.” -from the Book jacket.

The equation of free markets to democracy and national security is clear, even from the most deliberately inoffensive, blandest of the bland document in politics. The Party Platform.

2004 Republican Party Platform excerpts:

“Republicans applaud President Bush for launching groundbreaking efforts to address the needs and hopes of the world’s poor, cutting across traditional boundaries to focus on what works. We agree with President Bush that the United States must use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe – by actively working to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.”

“Republicans know that a strong world economy enhances our national security by advancing prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world. Economic growth supported by free trade and free markets creates new jobs and higher incomes. It allows people to lift their lives out of poverty, spurs economic and legal reform, enhances the fight against corruption, and reinforces the habits of liberty.”

“Republicans support efforts by the President, Vice President, and Republican Congress to ensure that America takes the side of reformers who are committed to democratic change. We support doubling the budget for the National Endowment for Democracy and focusing its new work on bringing free elections, free markets, free speech, and free labor unions to the Middle East. We support the President’s expansion of America’s public diplomacy efforts, including the use of radio and television to broadcast uncensored information and a message of tolerance in Arabic and Persian to tens of millions of people.”

See also “The Anti-Capitalism Virus” for a particularly strong screed.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA536AntiCapitalism.html

Is freedom necessarily dependent on free markets? Perhaps, in certain cases, it can be a powerful tool for enabling freedoms. However, the application is far from universal. In other words, not every culture, not every country, and not even our own country derives universal freedom from free markets.

Free markets (especially unregulated ones but even regulated ones in a world with non-homogenous ethical behaviour) can indeed reduce freedoms and reduce standards of living for some while ensuring freedom and a higher standard of living for others. Free markets require certain things in order for them to not be destructive. The original concept of Capitalism is based on progress, defined as the production of wealth through economic growth. Economic growth has no end state. Government should support capitalism because the creation of wealth is assumed to benefit all citizens, and this benefit is assumed to continue linearly with wealth creation.

The person to elucidate this the best was the person most often credited with the codification of capitalist ideas, Adam Smith (who wrote Wealth of Nations).

Is the US Republican version of free-market Capitalism entirely authentic? To me, Republicans seem to currently champion a flavor of capitalism that benefits the most powerful entities in the country at the expense of both the worker and the environment. Instead of benefiting all, we clearly have a problem with government benefiting particular groups at the expense of others. In the case of the environment, this type of wealth creation harms everyone, even the very wealthiest. While the very wealthy can delay drinking the same water, breathing the same air, and suffering health effects from pollution and climate change that the “rest of us” suffer from, there isn’t enough money in the world to put off the inevitable economic damage from degenerated capitalism, which I’ll call consumerism.

Republicans Don't Understand Capitalism
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/11/con04501.html

“It's clear that Bush's idea of "capitalism" consists of socialism for the rich, and brutal, dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us. As a result, in Bush's America, U.S. corporations pocket over $300 billion a year in corporate welfare. And over 60 percent of corporations pay zero income taxes.
Meanwhile, small mom-and-pop businesses across the land are struggling to compete with the likes of corporate-welfare-collecting giants like Wal-Mart. As a result, Wal-Mart's success in crushing its smaller rivals has nothing to do with "the free market" or "capitalism."

Republicans know nothing about capitalism. And the fact that they control all the levers of power in this country at the moment is worrying for anyone who's concerned about America's economic health.”

The wealthy are a minority. Most people do not benefit from the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer or the middle class declining in relative wealth and number. Claiming that the poorest of the poor are better off now than hundreds of years ago is not real progress. It might even be true, but is not a justification for the disparity in economic progress across society, or the damage incurred so that a few can have most.

Obviously, Capitalist Republicans controlling all levers in the country requires a large number of people voting against their economic self-interest.

These large numbers of ordinary people that voted in their economic self-interest (gee, no thanks, I don’t want my standard of living lowered or environment trashed to make a few people even wealthier, but thanks anyway) kept the Capitalist Republicans at bay, by the way, for decades.

Democrats firmly controlled Congress and routinely, if not entirely effectively, identified with and represented the much more numerous workers rather than the much more prosperous owners.

So, how do you get people to vote against their economic self-interest? After all, with all that time on their hands, and Democrats becoming used to the status quo, you have a lot of time to come up with political strategies. The winner? Classic bait and switch.

1. Deliberately choose an emotional, already-lost culture war issue. Don’t pick a real issue. If you do, then the electorate will expect progress to be made on it once you are in office. The issue selected has to be a loser, previously settled, but emotionally powerful, and complex enough to generate “new” developments that will soak up the energies of people that would otherwise be standing in the way of capitalism.

2. Fuel it with funding, prop it up with legal teams, and encourage activity by leveraging particular (usually protestant literalist) religious beliefs at the expense of others (catholic, Unitarian, Judaic, eastern, other).

3. Wait for Defenders of the Ideological Faith to show up and protest. They will find it irresistible to swoop in and fight a can’t-lose battle like going to bat for evolution against intelligent design. This is so clearly a separation of church and state issue that it seems like a waste of time. But, the feeling of being obligated to defend what is clearly the right path is just too strong to resist.

4. Denigrate the Defenders of the Ideological Faith as “liberal elite”. They are the perfect foil.

5. Capitalize on the latent anti-intellectual bias that links “liberal” with “intellectual”.
Since the “liberal elite” and “intellectuals” are poorly defined but ubiquitous and possessing of a negative connotation in political language, and it’s been this way for quite a while, otherwise moderate voters begin to trend towards the right. And they keep going to the right.

6. Win elections due to the fact that you’ve successfully captured moderates.

7. Get back to work promoting capitalism, especially the military-industrial complex, because national defense is a priority.

8. Dismantle regulatory laws that impede capitalism.


What should be an obvious question is where American anti-intellectualism comes from. Especially since anti-intellectualism allows the recipe to work so well against the scientists defending evolution.

The golden age of the social status of science and scientists in the United States was the 1920s. Tennessee vs. John Scopes (aka The Scopes Monkey Trial) occurred in 1925. To call the trial anything but a circus in atmosphere would be the understatement of the century. Public attention was riveted, famous people traveled from far away to participate. It was cast as a battle royale between the forces of the archaic and the ignorantly hidebound, and the forces of progress and the scientifically knowledgeable.

From
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm

“The Scopes Trial had its origins in a conspiracy at Fred Robinson's drugstore in Dayton. George Rappalyea, a 31-year-old transplanted New Yorker and local coal company manager, arrived at the drugstore with a copy of a paper containing an American Civil Liberties Union announcement that it was willing to offer its services to anyone challenging the new Tennessee anti-evolution statute. Rappalyea, a modernist Methodist with contempt for the new law, argued to other town leaders that a trial would be a way of putting Dayton on the map. Listening to Rappalyea, the others--including School Superintendent Walter White--became convinced that publicity generated by a controversial trial might help their town, whose population had fallen from 3,000 in the 1890's to 1,800 in 1925.

The conspirators summoned John Scopes, a twenty-four-year old general science teacher and part-time football coach, to the drugstore. As Scopes later described the meeting, Rappalyea said, "John, we've been arguing and I said nobody could teach biology without teaching evolution." Scopes agreed. "That's right," he said, pulling a copy of Hunter's Civic Biology--the state-approved textbook--from one of the shelves of the drugstore (the store also sold school textbooks). "You've been teaching 'em this book?" Rappalyea asked. Scopes replied that while filling in for the regular biology teacher during an illness, he had assigned readings on evolution from the book for review purposes. "Then you've been violating the law," Rappalyea concluded. "Would you be willing to stand for a test case?" he asked. Scopes agreed. He later explained his decision: "the best time to scotch the snake is when it starts to wiggle." Herbert and Sue Hicks, two local attorneys and friends of Scopes, agreed to prosecute.”

The trial opened with drama. The transcript is on the web, of course. After opening statements, the defense moved to cancel the indictment on both state and federal constitutional grounds. The goal was not to win, but rather to get the issue before a higher court, like the U.S. Supreme Court that would once and for all clearly state that laws censoring the teaching of evolution were flatly unconstitutional.

At the end of the trial, Darrow, representing John Scopes, asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver a closing speech he had labored over for weeks. The jury complied with Darrow's request, and Judge Raulston fined him $100.

A year later, the Tennessee Supreme Court did indeed reverse the decision. However, it was over a technicality regarding who set the fine!

The case was not sent back for further action. Instead, the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the case and stated "Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case." Bummer.

Forty years after the trial, John Scopes wrote an essay about his impressions of it all. Here is the end of his essay. The writing of the essay occurred at about the same time of Epperson v. Arkansas - Supreme Court of the United States (1968), which did indeed settle the constitutionality questions that the Scopes trial was aiming for.

“The defense had hoped to call a number of scientists as witnesses. They were to testify in regard to the erroneous belief that there was an irreconcilable conflict between the theory of evolution and the Genesis account.

One scientist made it to the stand, but Judge Raulston shortly ruled that scientific testimony was not admissible. I think that was a defeat for us, but only in the terms of our legal goals. The material sent out from Dayton through the news media included the interviews and the affidavits of the scientific witnesses; these made a tremendous impact on the science education of the country and the world.

A second accomplishment was the limiting of the passing of anti-evolution bills in other states. This was achieved through the activities of six groups of people; the defense team and their aids who organized and presented our case; scientists; theologians; educators who worked then and are continuing to work for a better concept of education and the freedom of inquiry; the large numbers of ordinary citizens who thought or were capable of learning to think by the simple process of reasoning from cause to effect; and last, buy by no means least, the news media. The efforts of these groups, I think were responsible for limiting the passing of anti-evolution bills to only two additional states, Mississippi and Arkansas.

The trial created a better climate for understanding divergent points of view. The intermingling of a great number of people from all over our country (where did they find accommodations?) and the news gathered and sent out by reporters from the North, East, South, and West lowered to some extent the barriers of misunderstanding that separated the different sections of our country. By no means were these barriers demolished but the top rails were removed or splintered.

The trial marked a beginning of the development of a national consciousness of the roles played by religion, science, and education. I think the importance of communicating the thinking of the professionals in these fields to the general public was first generally appreciated during and immediately after the trial.

I believe that the Dayton trial marked the beginning of the decline of fundamentalism. Each year—as the result of someone’s efforts to better interpret what the defense was trying to do—more and more people are reached. This, in conjunction with the labor of scientists, educators, ministers and with the dissemination of the results of their efforts through books and news media, has retarded the spread of fundamentalism.

But most importantly, I feel that restrictive legislation on academic freedom is forever a thing of the past, that religion and science may now address one another in an atmosphere of mutual respect and of a common quest for truth. I like to think that the Dayton trial had some part in bringing to birth this new era.

I have had a continuing interest in the issues of the trial but never as a participant. Many times I have been asked why I have had no further role to play relative to the issues—even why I did not at least capitalize on my publicity and reap the monetary harvest that was close at hand. Perhaps my best answer is to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge’s “I do not choose to run”, for me it would be, “I did not choose to do so.”

Thus, 1926 was most likely the year of greatest positive momentum for science.

However, the first few signs of a developing economic disaster were being reported. The phrase “technological unemployment” and evaluations of the rate of it happening. Technological unemployment at this time meant that machines were replacing men. This by itself is not bad. Machines free us from dangerous, repetitive, dirty work and allow great increases in productivity.

However, the rate of technological unemployment had never been this high, for this long, and in this many industries.

As many as 200,000 workers a year are replaced by automatic or semi-automatic machinery during the decade, and it wasn’t just one field, it was almost all fields, except those that couldn’t be easily automated. Like, scientists and engineers.

In the pre-computer era, anyone that did “computer” work, or was a knowledge worker, was largely immune. The good times rolled for the capitalists at the top of the food chain, who directly and hugely benefited from the productivity gains, and the people coming up with the ideas for the machines. Protests from the proletariat were ignored, even as creative and highly-skilled people were summarily thrown out of work on an ever-widening basis.

Not even farming, the ultimate generalist activity, was immune from mechanization.

From
"Recent Social Trends," by O. E. Baker of the United States Department of Agriculture:

“The five years from 1922 to 1926 [he writes] are in several ways the most remarkable in the history of American agriculture. Agricultural production increased about 27 per cent, while crop acreage remained practically stationary and labor engaged in agriculture declined.”

The causes of the Depression are of course several and complicated. However, the primary reason most often given is due to grossly inequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920's followed by stock market speculation.

From The Technological Unemployment and Structural Unemployment Debates by Gregory R. Woirol

From 1923 to 1929, corporate profits increased 62%, this wealth went mostly to upper brackets. Tax policies of government favored wealthy; workers real income increased by 11%, and most of this increase in purchasing power was caused by the lowered price of food--paid for by poverty of farmers. The top 5% of wealthy took one third of all increased wealth.

A major reason for this large and growing gap between the rich and the working-class person was the afore-mentioned increase in productivity that allowed manufacturing to dramatically increase output.

Scientists both took credit and allowed credit to be given to them, as this increased output was directly enabled by huge technological advancements. A cursory reading of any archived newspaper or magazine of the decade reveals article after article reflecting this positive glow.

The promise of science and technology was ubiquitous in advertisements, articles, editorials, dinner-table conversations, and in real life. Real changes were taking place and they were not just modernizations. The promise of science, as the swirl around the Scopes Trial shows, was of a new golden era enabled by science.

The absolute enormity of the unemployment during the 1930s soon turned the aura of science from gold to lead, in a weird sort of anti-alchemical process. Rapidly, even scientists were out of work. Shocked, they had to form or join relief societies of their own, or take whatever work they could find. A 33% unemployment rate for engineers and scientists was not unusual.

The accusation that technological unemployment, foisted on the country by scientists, was made by many people, at many levels. Scientists defended themselves publicly, often denying any negative effects from scientific advancements, and generally sticking to a very unapologetic stance. Many of the speeches at the time made from conventions and meetings are excerpted in “Beyond the Laboratory” by Peter Kuznick, as well as in The New Republic’s archives, and archives of other newspapers. There was an active science media service at the time that promoted scientific news.

Debates definitely raged. Whether true or not, there was definitely a shift in public opinion concerning science and technology. On the heels of (or perhaps solving) the Great Depression, came World War II.

Scientists were gainfully employed to make better weapons. The government hired wholesale the services of thousands of scientists and engineers who, virtually to a man, went along with the idea of making and dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, or whatever else they were tasked with doing.

The resulting atomic age was not an optimistic one, nor did the social status or trust in science return to anything like the pre-war, pre-depression era. There was a stigma associated with science. My grandmother, for example, doesn’t trust scientists because she doesn’t believe that they care about the results of their work. Hers is not an unusual sentiment. She also is not a fan of space travel or astronomy due to the space race with Russia that had definite threatening military overtones. People don’t like feeling threatened.

Reading through many memoirs of the many famous wartime scientists, you get a feel for the nostalgia of a simpler time, when they were more respected, less “used”, and had a clearer conscience.

Scientists, through Roosevelt’s adroit playing of the Blue Ribbon Panel tactic and wartime activities, were now cemented to the government. In the 1920s, industry and academia employed them. Industry rapidly figured out that pure science was a relative waste of time and started paying only for targeted research, but in a post-war US, things would only get worse.

One of the only standouts of pure research was Bell Labs, for a time. The existence of this group was most likely due to the luxury that a monopoly has, instead of any altruistic industrial reasoning.

Therefore, it’s my feeling that the anti-intellectualism is really anti-scientism leftover from the Depression and WWII, and it’s due to the perception that scientific optimism is naïve, and that scientists are arrogant about their work being primarily good. The application of knowledge can never be assumed to be good by its discoverers. In fact, the scientist doesn’t have much control over what other people do at all with their findings.

The scientist may not be able to imagine how their particular chemistry oddity ends up – they may assume it has application as a new medication that dramatically improves the very ill, but instead it ends up being used in a weapon that renders soldiers permanently blind. Who gets the blame? Should scientists deny all culpability or not?

The pendulum definitely swung against science for a while. It didn’t help much for the major representatives of science to publicly ask for special government assistance at the start of the Depression because they were somehow more special than others. Nor did it help for them to publicly deny any responsibility for technological unemployment right after claiming so much credit for technological advancements. As is the case in most of reality, it is probably somewhere in between. You cannot eat your cake and have it too. Either share the blame, or share the credit.

Hence, American anti-scientism or anti-intellectualism, ripe for the picking, as it’s filtered through several decades of political and social progress, and the hopes that John Scopes expressed are again a bit delayed by opportunism.

The moral of the story according to Michelle? Resist the temptation to be played like a drum. You may not simply be pulling weeds. You may be playing a part scripted for you by people much more manipulative than you’d expect. Play your part in civil discourse and support efforts to get the issue resolved in court. Other than that, how about fixing American capitalism?

evolution
creation science
religion
politics
science

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Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

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Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

Energy - Overview

I'm going to make an attempt at looking at all the sources of US energy, give a brief evaluation of whether or not they're renewable, when they'll run out, and what will be the result. The resulting shift in world-view and lifestyle may actually be better for humans in the long run, if much less convenient, and much different than what many of us are used to.



environmentalism

Energy - Hydropower

As of 2003, the sources of US energy included the following

* Oil 39%
* Natural gas 24%
* Coal 23%
* Nuclear 8%
* Hydropower 3%
* Other 3%

The only "renewable" resources on this list are Hydropower and the mysterious "Other". Hydropower is used to create electricity, and therefore contributes very little to the energy required to move cars, trucks, and machinery around.

Sadly, Hydropower isn't exactly renewable, unless you are capturing energy without a dam at natural waterfalls. When is the last time you saw a working water wheel producing electricity?

The reason dams are often considered non-renewable is that all resevoirs behind dams fill with sediment over time. This happens in every resevoir, although the rate that this happens varies by quite a bit, depending primarily on the size of the resevoir compared to the amount of sediment flowing into it. A small resevoir on a muddy river, for example, compared to a large resevoir fed by a clear river will have very different rates of sedimentation. However, the clear river resevoir will still lose capacity over time.

The build-out phase of dam projects in the US is drawing to a close. We've captured pretty much all the energy we can capture from rivers.
Hydropower dam projects will continue to provide a fraction of power for the US, but since almost all available sites are already constructed, and some major sites will not have the lifespan originally predicted, this proportion cannot truly grow and may actually contract.

It sounds, therefore, somewhat hypocritical to come out against hydropower projects in other countries since we've managed to "tame" almost every river at home.

The largest and most high-profile dam project would probably be the Three Gorges Dam in China.

"The Three Gorges Dam is designed to operate under conditions practically untested in the world and never before tested in such a large structure. Projections of controlling sedimentation within the reservoir are subject to significant uncertainties. China has about 83,000 reservoirs built for various purposes, of which 330 are major in size. Sediment deposition in 230 of them has become a significant problem, resulting in a combined loss of 14 percent of the total storage capacity. In some, more than 50 percent of the storage capacity has been lost." Hu Chunhong, 1995, Controlling Reservoir Sedimentation in China, Hydropower and Dams, March issue, pp. 50-52.

Flood control is a tremendous advantage of large dam projects. The number of people affected and killed by flooding in China below the site of the dam is tremendously high.

Both India and China also are planning very large river diversion projects that are intended to solve water shortage/surplus issues based on geography. In some analyses, though, the cost of moving the people to the water is less than moving the water to the people.

Despite the flood control advantages, a dam site has a limited lifespan for energy production. The local geography changes quite a bit with sedimentation of the resevoir. There is no guarentee that the site can be used forever, again, or even as long as the dam structure lasts.

Can a dam be reconstructed? In theory, yes. Dam reconstruction means either raising the body of the dam or dredging out the resevoir behind the dam. Successful dam reconstruction projects usually include replacement or rehabilitation of smaller collapsed structures. Reconstruction of a large dam, like the Hoover Dam, is in a different category. I can't find an example of it ever having been successfully done.

environmentalism

The Greenhouse We Don't Want is Here

From one of my favorite books comes the "call to environmentalism" theme of this collection of essays. The book is The Cannibal Queen, which is a memoir about restoring an old plane and then flying her to each state of the United States, and the observations along the way.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671038494/sr=8-2/qid=1144287756/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-1831096-2236938?%5Fencoding=UTF8

From pages 251-253





Years later, Thomas Frank gives another description of the expression of our times in “What’s the Matter with Kansas”. This book isn’t about the environment, at least not directly. However, like “The Cannibal Queen”, an introspective writer examining other things manages to capture something critical to our future as a species.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805073396/qid=1144288586/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-1831096-2236938?s=books&v=glance&n=283155







If you haunt cnn.com or any other major news source, you would have probably seen an article last week about coral dying off in the Caribbean. I’m very much reminded of the insidious invasion of Caulerpa taxifolia in the Mediterranean, which is an ecological disaster that few people seem to be very much worried about. Possibly, like the Caribbean coral holocaust, because it occurs beneath the waters of the oceans, and is therefore completely invisible to all but a few observing eyes and instruments.

"Meinesz's fight against C. taxifolia—and against the arrogant ill-informed oficials who allowed it to prosper—may be a lost battle, but his combat journal is enormously valuable. We will never have any such well-documented record of how the gypsy moth, the whelk tingle, or the house sparrow established their beachheads and rolled on to conquest."— from the foreword of Killer Algae by David Quammen

Link to check out the book “Killer Algae”

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226519236/qid=1144289307/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-1831096-2236938?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Unprecedented die-off of Caribbean coral reefs

The barriers, which limit damage from weather, are key to the region's tourism and fishing.

By Seth Borenstein
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.

Researchers from around the globe are scrambling to figure out the extent of the loss. Early, conservative estimates from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands find that about one-third of the coral in official monitoring sites has recently died.

"It's an unprecedented die-off," said Jeff Miller, a National Park Service fisheries biologist, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef... . We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months."

Some of the devastated coral can never be replaced because it grows only the width of one dime a year, Miller said.

Coral reefs are the basis for a multibillion-dollar tourism and commercial-fishing economy in the Caribbean. Key fish species use coral as habitat and feeding grounds. Reefs limit the damage from hurricanes and tsunamis. More recently they have been touted as possible sources for new medicines.

If coral reefs die, "you lose the goose with golden eggs" that are key parts of small island economies, said Edwin Hernandez-Delgado, a University of Puerto Rico biology researcher.

On Sunday, he found a colony of 800-year-old star coral - more than 13 feet high - that had just died off Puerto Rico.

On Wednesday, Tyler Smith, coordinator of the U.S. Virgin Islands Coral Reef Monitoring program, dived at a popular spot for tourists in St. Thomas and saw an old chunk of brain coral, about three feet in diameter, that was at least 90 percent dead from the disease called "white plague."

The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans where mortality rates - mostly from warming waters - have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.

And with global warming, scientists are pessimistic about the future of coral reefs.

"The prognosis is not good," said biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. In early April, he will investigate coral-reef mortality in Jamaica. "If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won't survive in their current state."

New sea-surface temperature figures show the sustained heating in the Caribbean last summer and fall was by far the worst in 21 years of satellite monitoring, said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch.

The heat causes the symbiotic algae that provides food for the coral to die and turn white. That puts the coral in critical condition. If coral remains bleached for more than a week, the chance of death soars, according to NOAA scientists.

Our culprit is global warming, which was almost immediately discarded as a myth, mainly by people with a vested interest in the consumption continuing. Pressure was applied to government, the issue politicized, those who wanted reductions in greenhouse gases were patronized as washed up hippie environmentalist fruit cakes, and those that quietly insisted that the caring for all creation was a religious duty shared by all humanity and that the place of man was as a servant to the earth and not the center of it were dismissed as socialists or irrelevant.

Worse, the issue was portrayed here in the U.S. as one of defending American sovereignty, patriotism, and authenticity. Images of rugged individualism were ordered in by the generals of capitalism against the latte-sipping limousine liberals that were out of touch with ordinary Americans. The only trouble is, anyone with any amount of analytical skill, could read and slowly appreciate that the trend was not good. In the 1990s, a wait-and-see approach was commonly adopted by even ardent environmentalists. No one wants to be the one that cries wolf. And, you only have so much reputation capital as an activist. But now, I think we have a consensus.

Powerless in the face of corporatism, most people in America seem to not have many choices when it comes to causing the emission of so-called greenhouse gases. Sure, everyone could cut their energy consumption in, say, half. But we love using electricity, and we love oil. We are also not unique. Everyone on the planet loves using electricity and loves consuming oil. We in the U.S. just seem to have perfected the conspicuous consumption of it.

There is little incentive to walk instead of drive when no one else in the neighborhood walks the 40 minutes to the grocery store. There is little incentive when it’s actually physically unsafe to walk the 40 minutes to the grocery store. And that is if you happen to have a grocery store relatively close to you.

The “town square” mentality of new construction doesn’t help either. It’s mostly a charade. An unintentional charade that was probably executed with the best of intentions, of course, but it is still a charade. Those Town Squares, where walking paths occupy otherwise unbuildable space, and a nod is made towards public transit, still require almost every resident to own and operate a car. They’re ornamental and not functional. The bedroom community reigns supreme, and is remarkably intractable when it comes to modification.

The older neighborhoods aren’t a sure bet either. Move to them, and see your local shopping evaporate because a Wal-Mart was built 24 miles to the south-east. The scythe-wielding harbinger of completely empty Main Street business districts has been silently and darkly standing sentry over all of us for at least two decades.

Is Wal-Mart and the centralization of shopping necessarily a bad thing? No. Maybe in the case of greenhouse gas emissions we cause less damage with centralized shopping than we would with decentralized shopping, where every place requires shipping to and from, and every little store duplicates the overhead of waste. I don’t know which is environmentally better, but I wouldn’t be surprised either way. All I know is that I’m chained to a car of some sort, and unless technology gets a move on, we’ll run out of oil before having anything close to an equivalent ubiquitous replacement for transportation.

Why every single home in Southern California does not already have solar panels on the roof yet, I don’t know. Is it simply cost? Is it because it’s not “cool” enough? Too much trouble? Why in the world every single large commercial building isn’t required to have co-generation on their vastly spreading flat roofs, to reduce the need to burn coal or natural gas for electricity, defeats my minor-league brain. It would seem to make perfect sense.

This brings up the question, however, of whether or not it’s really worth it to be able to drive when the biodiversity of the planet is failing all around us. Here’s a series of essays that document some of the damage.

COMMENTARY
Feeling the Heat: The World Wakes Up
By Jim Motavalli

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3136&src=QHAEN

Two thousand and six is emerging as the year Americans finally wake up to the reality of global warming. Of course, E has been hammering away at the issue for six years or more, but now it has momentum, with the release of several new books and a Time magazine cover story ("Be Worried, Be Very Worried") April 3.

An ABC/Time/Stanford University poll accompanying the article confirmed that Americans are finally focusing on the problem. Today, 85 percent of Americans believe that global warming is occurring, versus 13 percent who don't. Sixty percent of respondents admit to worry about it either "a great deal" or "a good amount." Sixty-eight percent think the federal government should do more to combat it. (It's doing virtually nothing now.)

But Americans remain pretty confused. A stunning 64 percent in the poll think there's "a lot of disagreement" among climate scientists on the reality of global warming, when there's actually a near total consensus. And 54 percent think climate change is "a problem for the future," versus only 44 percent who think it's already a serious problem.

Given that misconception, we thought it might be helpful to provide some examples of climate change that are happening right now. Let's make this clear: We are already causing major disruption to the Earth's weather patterns, and we're seeing huge effects, from melting polar ice to shifting species, from rising seas to dying coral. For humans, this poses grave dangers, but for some species it means extinction. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."

Imperiled polar bears.
© Gary Braasch
These excerpts are from E's book Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change (Routledge). Our report on ongoing climate change came out in 2004, before Americans were as focused on global warming as they are now. But much of the evidence cited in the Time article and in other, more recent books first appeared between covers in Feeling the Heat. The book would probably have sold better if we simply sat on it for two years! Here's some of what we saw around the world in 2004, from the pages of Feeling the Heat (which is illustrated, as is this article, with dramatic photographs by Gary Braasch):

The California Coast: Migrating Species

In 1949, a combination of state and federal organizations began monitoring physical, chemical, biological and meteorological facets of the California Current under the auspices of the California Cooperative Oceanic and Fisheries Investigations program, known as CalCOFI. It was designed in part to track many factors affecting commercially important fish species such as mackerel and sardines. The data gathered under CalCOFI include air temperatures, wind speeds, nutrient levels, salinity, water temperature on the surface and deep below the surface, and the abundance of larval fish and zooplankton--the smallest marine animals.

What happens if you watch those data change over the years? Your findings might echo those of John McGowan, an oceanography professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego: As water temperatures have risen, the base of the marine food chain off the coast of California has crashed. And one by one, the fish and birds farther up that food chain are crashing, too.

Life in the ocean begins with tiny plants known as phytoplankton. Like all plants, phytoplankton need light to drive photosynthesis and nutrients to feed the process. Although it's somewhat counter-intuitive, the richest and most nutritive ocean waters are the coldest and heaviest. Strong winds do the work of stirring the system and pulling the nutrient-rich waters up toward the light.

The first problems showed up because of El Niños, short-term changes in ocean temperatures that tend to increase the warm water along the western U.S. coastline, reducing the food that boosts the phytoplankton. But researchers like McGowan noticed a difference between the early El Niños and the later ones. Numbers of zooplankton--the tiniest animals in the food chain, which depend on the phytoplankton--dropped during the El Niño of 1957-1959 and then quickly rebounded. But after subsequent El Niños during the 1983 to 1984 and 1997 to 1998 seasons, the zooplankton didn't come back.

California's tidepools are changing.
© Gary Braasch
In 1995, going back through the accumulated years of data, McGowan reported a staggering finding in Science: Zooplankton numbers in the California Current had dropped by 70 percent. "It's the largest change ever measured in plankton productivity in the ocean," McGowan says. "This enormous change in the zooplankton in the California Current could not be detected from year to year. It took several decades before we discovered this big drop, by at least 70 percent or even up to 80 percent."

With that huge loss at the base of the food chain, reverberations throughout the system that depended on it were inevitable. Since McGowan's study came out, declines of species throughout the area have been attributed to the loss of zooplankton and the warming water.

The crash showed up in fish, although it's often tough to tell if such declines come from too many nets or too little fish food. But even when researchers look at species for which human markets have no appetite, they find precipitous declines. The larvae of Leuroglossus stilbius--a fish of so little market value that it doesn't even have a name in English--historically are the third most abundant in the California Current. Larvae counts for it dropped 50 percent after 1977. Another similarly ignored species with no common name, Stenobranchus leucopsarus, saw its larvae drop 42 percent after the sharp temperature rise. Its larvae are typically the sixth most abundant in those waters.

In 1967, aerial surveys found 70 square miles of kelp forests along the long California coastline. In 1989, that number dropped 42 percent. By 1999, the most recent year for which data are available, the total plummeted to just 17.8 square miles--down 75 percent from the 1967 survey.

George Divoky with a Black Guillemot, whose population crash has been related to global warming.
© Gary Braasch
But the most dramatic decline came to the sooty shearwater, a predatory seabird at the top of the marine food chain. "In the 1960s and 1970s they were present in the tens of millions," McGowan says, "the largest population of pelagic [marine] seabirds in the entire California Current. They dominated it. Millions and millions of them." The birds feed on juvenile fish and larger zooplankton. Researchers began looking at the birds regularly in 1987. By the 1990s, the population of sooty shearwaters had crashed, with numbers down 90 percent. —Orna Izakson

New York: The Virus Specter

Heat stress is probably the most obvious thing people think of when global warming comes up. Other effects are more subtle, but no less deadly. Higher rates of ground-level ozone are a major respiratory irritant, and vector-borne diseases thrive in warmer temperatures. And that's the problem that's keeping the city's public health officials up nights.

New York City had never had a case of West Nile encephalitis before 1999, but that hot summer--the hottest and driest in a century--62 cases were reported in the region. In all, 8,000 New Yorkers were infected, and seven people died.

Between August 12 and 23, six people were admitted to Flushing Hospital in the borough of Queens with high fevers and headaches. Routine culture screens for bacterial or fungal microbes were negative, leading to a growing consensus the patients were suffering from an encephalitis-like disease of viral origin. Within three weeks, three elderly patients died.

Tests at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and Fort Collins, Colorado revealed that the illness was close to the St. Louis encephalitis, which had never previously touched New York City. By September 6, there were five confirmed victims of the new virus, and 34 suspected cases. By September 9, exotic birds began dying in the Bronx Zoo. A general health warning was issued, and city residents began to get used to helicopters overhead spraying clouds of malathion and pyrethriod pesticides. By September 21, scientists had isolated and identified the specific virus, not St. Louis encephalitis but West Nile.

West Nile is spread by a mosquito, Culex pipens, which breeds in stagnant pools of water. According to several prominent scientists, drought is the key factor in spreading West Nile virus. Outbreaks require an unfortunate series of events, they say. According to Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, Culex mosquitoes often live in close proximity to people because of the stagnant water they carelessly let stand. While the mosquitoes' favorite prey is birds, periods of high heat and drought send such common urban-dwelling species as crows, blue jays and robins out of the city in search of fresh water. City bird populations are further reduced as unlucky individuals are bitten and killed by West Nile infection.

"By reproductive imperative the mosquitoes are forced to feed on humans, and that's what triggered the 1999 epidemic," Despommier says. "Higher temperatures also trigger increased mosquito biting frequency. The first big rains after the drought created new breeding sites." It took Hurricane Floyd, which passed through New York on September 16, to break the weather cycle that led to the outbreak.

Despommier says this same pattern is also discernible in recent West Nile outbreaks in Israel, South Africa and Romania. In Bucharest, Despommier's investigation turned up abandoned buildings whose basements were full of water, a perfect Culex breeding ground.

Another prominent proponent of the West Nile global warming connection is Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard University. "Droughts are more common and prolonged as the planet warms," he says. "Warm winters intensify drought because there's a reduced spring runoff. The cycle seems to rev up in the spring, as catch basin water dries up and what's left becomes organically rich and a perfect mosquito breeding place. The drought also reduces populations of mosquito predators."

In 2002, West Nile spread across the country, appearing in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Five provinces of Canada were also affected. In a growing scientific consensus, public health officials believe the next drought will give this serious virus even a wider reach. Spraying certainly hasn't stopped these infectious bugs. Researchers at France's University of Montpellier said in mid-2003 that a mutation in the West Nile mosquitoes' genetic code resulted in their singular resistance to pesticides. —Jim Motavalli

Florida: Dying Coral

Florida's vulnerable coastline.
© Gary Braasch
I first heard about coral bleaching from Billy Causey, the manager of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. We were sitting in his office deep in a 67-acre hardwood hammock on Marathon Key. It's a place where ospreys, egrets, cormorants, fat black snakes, hermit crabs, parrot fish, even an old tropical fish collector like Billy can still find refuge from the Kmart mall sprawl out on Route One. Thick set with iron-gray hair and sea-gray eyes, Causey, who moved to the Keys in 1973, sounds like some Old Testament Jeremiah as he recalls the gradual decline of the reef during the years he's been here.

Unfortunately, while among the most diverse of marine habitats, the world's massive coral colonies are also fragile structures, living within a narrow range of clarity, salinity, low-nutrient chemistry and temperature.

"Throughout the '70s we saw various problems but constantly clear waters with typical hundred-foot visibility," Billy recalls.

"In 1979, we had a warm water spell and big vase sponges started dying," he continues. "In June of 1980 we had a pattern of slick calm weather and thousands of fish were killed. This was the first signal to me that things were tilting the wrong way. Then in 1983, with an explosion of onshore development, there was an urchin die-off. In 1984, there was another doldrums and the reefs bleached down to Key West. Maybe five percent of the coral died. In May of 1986, when we had hardly seen black band disease [characterized by dark bands of dead coral on otherwise healthy specimens], I went out to take a picture of it. I saw four-dozen massive outbreaks within an area about 400 feet in length."

Causey pauses to listen to a passing bird cawing over the still, aquamarine waters of the Gulf a few yards away. Further north I've noticed the fringing waters of Key Largo have taken on a greenish lime Jell-O hue.

"In June of 1987 we got a slick calm," he continues. "On July 13 we went out and saw all the corals turning mustard yellow. Then they went stark white. Then we began getting reports of similar bleaching in the Caribbean and on the Indo/Pacific reefs and we realized something global was going on. We began looking at this as the canary in the coal mine. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was reporting 1987 as the hottest year on record and the 1980s as the hottest decade." These records would all fall in the 1990s.

The bad news multiplied, Causey says. "In 1990, we had the first big losses linked to bleaching where the coral didn't come back. We lost most of our fire coral that year. There was another benchmark year in 1997, with coral bleaching all around the Caribbean. Lots of living coral just went away in 1998, a catastrophic bleaching event. But remote reefs in the Pacific were also being lost, so it gave me a sense that this wasn't an isolated event--the result of our failure to act. There were back-to-back severe bleaching in 1997 and 1998, then Hurricane George hit."

Causey shakes his head, as if unwilling to believe his own unremittingly bleak narrative. "You look at old photos and film of the reef and you realize what was lost," he says. "If you were lucky enough to be here 20 or 30 years ago, you know."

I do. As a teen I got to snorkel through Keys' waters so clear and vibrant with exotic life and color they were almost scary.

After talking with Billy I'll do some diving in the Keys, including a couple of dives down to Aquarius, the world's last underwater research habitat, seven miles off Key Largo. The habitat is a 48-foot cylindrical structure resting on four steel legs planted on the bottom in 60 feet of water. Its yellow body is rusting in spots and encrusted with weedy growths being grazed by roving schools of fish. A couple of large tarpon in the 100- to 150-pound class circle it curiously, shadowing me as I swim under the metal skirt of the habitat, popping up in the wet room where a school of yellowtail snapper huddle discreetly at the edge of the entry pool. Beyond the wet room there is a lab, shower and toilet, kitchen and berthing area with two sets of triple bunks. Scientists, living here for up to eight days at a time, have a unique opportunity to study the world's third-largest reef system.

Unfortunately the reef they're studying is also dying. Where once branching corals grew I find only skeletal sticks in faded rubble fields. Many of the abundant rock corals are being eaten away by diseases that have spread in an epidemic wave throughout the Keys. The names of the diseases tell the story: black band, white band, white plague, and aspergillus, a fungus normally found in agricultural soils that can shred fan corals like moths shred Irish lace. The corals are also being smothered under sediment and algal growth linked to polluted runoff and are periodically bleaching white as a result of warming ocean temperatures. —David Helvarg

Pacific Northwest: The Incredible Shrinking Glaciers

Edith's checkerspot butterfly is a global warming victim.
© Gary Braasch
It feels as if a giant meat locker has swung open, sending a cold, yet thin, wind blowing down South Cascade Glacier just outside North Cascades National Park in northern Washington. The sun glares. Everything is white. The expanse of snow acts like a big reflecting basin. Bob Krimmel, a scientist in a broad-brimmed hat and gloves, is initially winded by the altitude change, but spends much of the day trudging through brush to get to this spot--the longest-studied glacier in the northern Cascade mountains, the nation's most heavily glaciated area outside of Alaska. So much snow. And yet, the glacier is shrinking.

"It's very easy to see the glacier is much, much smaller," Krimmel says later, back at his office at U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Seated at a computer, he looks at the side-by-side images--a photo taken in 1928 and another 60 years later. "In the last century, it's retreated about 1.2 miles," says Krimmel, a hydrologist and the glacier's leading researcher. "Right now, it's about 1.5 miles long. It's lost about half of its length and half its volume."

South Cascade Glacier has become the poster child for global climate change in the Pacific Northwest, contends Jon Riedel, glacier researcher for North Cascades National Park. It is thinning so much, Riedel points out, that between 1953 and 2000 it lost the equivalent of 72 feet of water in thickness off its surface. That's about as tall as seven basketball hoops stacked on top of each other.

Call it the case of the incredible shrinking glacier. In this icy high country, 46 of the 47 Cascade glaciers observed by Nichols College researcher Mauri Pelto were found to be retreating. Riedel, meanwhile, personally backpacks several miles to monitor four glaciers; he notices the lower-elevation, smaller glaciers on the west side of the Cascades are shrinking, a pattern also found farther south.

This melting promises to change the very image of the Pacific Northwest. Montana's Glacier National Park in 30 years may need to be renamed "the park formerly known as Glacier," as Seattle-based writer John C. Ryan puts it. A hundred of its 150 glaciers have vanished, and the pace is hastening. Or take Washington's white-capped Mount Rainier, that looming symbol of the Northwest depicted on Washington license plates and the label of a venerable local beer. The vast majority of Rainier's glaciers are receding, says Andrew Fountain, researcher and Portland State University geology professor.

"They don't recede because they're getting colder, you know what I'm saying?" Fountain says. Whatever the ultimate cause, he says: "That's global climate change--right there."

In scene after scene played out around the Pacific Northwest, researchers are uncovering surprises that appear linked to the past century's average one-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature and, based on what has happened so far, they predict serious problems to come in the next century. The surprises are as varied as the region itself, from the dangerously delayed spawning of salmon in British Columbia to the practically regionwide shrunken snowpack and perhaps happier news--such as the discovery of a butterfly that has colonized Oregon and Washington from the south as temperatures warmed.

"We're seeing things that never happened before to our knowledge," says Elliott Norse, of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Redmond, Washington. "These things are consistent with what we would expect in a world that is warming. It would be, in many cases, surprising if this weren't human-caused." —Sally Deneen

Antigua: Stronger Storms

I am standing on the shoreline at Runaway Bay. It is mid-January, the height of the tourist season in the Caribbean tropical islands. The sea, as its groundswell rushes in, retains those same wondrous shades--the navy-blue, the turquoise, the cobalt. Something is missing: there is no sand. No sand, no tourists. The effect is not so much unreal, as surreal.

Lionel Hurst, since 1988 Ambassador to first the United Nations and then the United States for Antigua and neighboring island Barbuda, points to the waves crashing against a metal wall just below the concrete patio of the Sunset Cove hotel. "The owner put in that barrier to try to save his property after Hurricane Luis came ashore in September 1995," Hurst says. "The waves used to break 23 feet further out to sea. But that entire stretch of beach just disappeared, overnight, and it's never returned. So nobody wants to stay here now. The hotel's clients used to walk up a little further and swim. But you can see the same thing has happened in that half-moon area there. Basically, about 1,000 feet of sand has eroded along what used to be one of our most idyllic areas."

Hurricane Luis was the most devastating storm the island had ever seen. With gusts approaching 200 miles an hour and sustained winds of more than 140, Luis damaged 90 percent of Antigua's homes, 65 percent of its business sector, and left 7,000 people unemployed. In a small country now dependent on tourism for 70 percent of its income, virtually all such facilities along the coast needed extensive repairs.

Clearly, something new was in the wind. "A signal," as Ambassador Hurst puts it, "that something is terribly wrong." Simply stated, warmer ocean temperatures put greater moisture into the atmosphere, two variables that work to power hurricanes. Caribbean-wide, as Hurst would summarize in March 2003 at the World Water Forum in Japan, storms and hurricanes have risen from an average of 3.5 events per year between 1920 and 1940, to 5.5 events per year between 1944 and 1980, to 13 events per year ever since 1990.

More hurricanes and volcanic eruptions are just the most extreme manifestations of what is happening to the leeward islands of the West Indies. Make no mistake: Antigua is still achingly beautiful. Including day-trippers from the cruise ships, more than half-a-million visitors still arrive annually to vacation at places like the Jolly Beach Resort, enjoying wintertime temperatures in the 80s and cool rum punches before an evening feast of fresh grouper against a backdrop of Caribbean steel drums. But there is trouble in this Westerner's paradise, and local Antiguans sense it all around them in myriad ways. —Dick Russell

I’m a big fan of Edward O. Wilson. He is one of my favorite scientists. He is an ultimate interdisciplanarian. Reading his CV is a tour-de-force of legitimate modernity. He is the champion of many people like me, who do not see religion and science being intractably opposed, who see biodiversity as the greatest wealth of the planet, and who see culture being primarily responsible for our success in evolving as a species.

He is the reason that I developed a renewed interest in biological science, after being simply and flatly disgusted by both sides of the Creation Science debate. You can only take so much of rigid fundamentalism, whether it be scientific, or protestant. When they seem to be two sides of the same coin, it can be depressing. However, having been introduced to another coin, I now am able to give my two cents worth.

Biodiversity is key. The loss of it only happens when really bad things occur. Like, the big impact that killed off most of the dinosaurs. Or the other 11 or so mass extinctions that have been identified in the distant past, which occur (very roughly) every 26 million years or so.

Here’s the seminal paper on the issue of periodicity of mass extinction events.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/81/3/801.pdf

Wilson writes that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event now. We very well may see what a mass extinction looks like, from the infinitesimally small blink of time that a human life-span allows.

This begs the question. If species are dying off around us, and it’s due to global warming, then are we dying off as well?

If you are like me, you grew up with scary stories of exploding population growth and how it would only go up and we would soon be doomed by overcrowding. There have been some interesting developments. When I was born in 1972, the global fertility rate had just climbed to 5 births per woman. It didn’t look like it was going to come down. The articles below discuss what has happened since then, and what the thinking is now going forward. Understanding what affects population size, which naturally affects energy consumption, is vital to identifying what we need to do next.

World Population in 2300
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/subcategory.php/248.html
The United Nations Population Division (UNDP) released its first projection of population trends to the year 2300. According to its medium scenario, the UNDP predicts global population will increase from approximately six billion persons in 2000 to nine billion over the next 75 years. Global population will then decline to about eight billion by 2175 and then increase again to nine billion by the year 2300.
Because population grows at exponential rates, small increases of decreases in the growth rate would result in significant differences in long term population trends. For example, in its low growth scenario, UNDP projects that global population could decline to 2 billion in 2300; under its high growth scenario, as many as 36 billion people could populate the globe. All of these projects have a considerable degree of uncertainty; they are based on current population trends, but the world could be a very different kind of place three centuries from now. After all, three centuries ago, the Industrial Revolution was many decades away, and it was another century and a half before Louis Pasteur published the germ theory, which led to a revolution in health and the increase in longevity that has led to the current increase in global population.
The UNDP's projections are based on its revised predictions for global population trends over the next five decades. During the past fifty years, there was an unprecedented increase in global population as mortality rates declined almost worldwide. This rapid increase in population raised concerns that population growth in many developing countries would outstrip the countries' ability to feed their population. That concern, however, has been reduced because of another unprecedented trend: Developing countries are experiencing a transition from high to low fertility rates much faster than occurred in Western nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Total fertility rates are declining almost worldwide. The concern in many developed nations is that total fertility rates have dropped so low that populations will begin to decline significantly.

There are several clear population trends. First, the global population is getting older. Because longevity is increasing almost worldwide, and birth rates are declining, the age distribution of the population is changing. UNDP projects that 40 percent of the world's population will be over 60 years of age in 2300. The global distribution of population will also change, if present trends continue. Almost every countries' total fertility rates will decline over the next century; more than half of the positive population growth will be in three countries: Yemen, Uganda, and Niger. India will bypass China to become the most populace country. Together, India and China will account for 48 percent of positive population growth.

The key factor is whether current population trends continue or not. The UNDP significantly revised their last population growth predictions in 2002 because demographers did not foresee the rapid transition to lower fertility rates in many developing nations. There is also a considerable lag in obtaining population statistics for some countries; countries that are politically unstable, war-torn, and host to large refugee populations may lack the capacity to collect adequate birth and death rate data for their populations. Moreover, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is taking a larger toll on populations in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and China than was previously predicted. How current trends will change in response to numerous unforeseen factors is a matter of considerable uncertainty. For more on population, see the following:

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Long_range_report.pdf


Population Dynamics
From
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/subcategory.php/30.html

It is estimated that the world population reached 6 billion at the end of the 20th century, a remarkable expansion. While historical records are inexact, it is believed that at the beginning of the 20th century, the world population was approximately 1.6 billion, which means that global population nearly quadrupled in just 100 years. Most of this expansion in population occurred in the fifty years following World War II.

This unprecedented increase in global population is due to the dramatic decline in mortality worldwide. The agricultural revolution, the availability of antiobiotics, vaccines, and pesticides has all contributed to the increase in life expectancy. Life expectancy is estimated to have more than doubled over the course of the 20th century, from approximately 30 years to nearly 65 years.

It is expected that the population will continue to grow over the next two decades, because a large percentage of the population in the most populated countries are of, or will reach childbearing age during this period, a phenomenon known as population momentum. According to most recent estimates, the population will continue to increase by 1.3 percent per year, adding about 78 million people each year.

However, another remarkable demographic transformation is underway. Worldwide, the total fertility rate is declining and a demographic transition is taking place. Total fertility rate is the average number of children that a woman has over her lifetime. Demographic transition is the term demographers use to describe the change a nation undergoes from experiencing high mortality rates and high death rates to low death rates and low birth rates. Most western industrialized nations began to undergo a demographic transition after the Industrial Revolution. Now evidence indicates that most developing nations are undergoing a similar transition. Almost every region, except Africa, has experienced a sharp decline in fertility rates; it appears that a decline in fertility is occurring in Africa as well. The worldwide total fertility rate was estimated to be 5 births per woman when total fertility rates peaked during the period from 1965 to 1970; it is now estimated at 2.7 births. A replacement fertility rate would be 2.1 births per woman, or one child to replace each parent (taking into account premature deaths). Almost half of the world's population lives in countries in which the fertility rate is below replacement rates. These below replacement rate countries include not only Western developed nations, but developing countries such as China,Thailand, and Sri Lanka.

Additional demographic trends are emerging: the aging of the population. People are living longer and having fewer children. As a result, the average age of the population is increasing, with a larger percentage of the population aged 65 years or older. The aging of population will strain the ability of nations to finance social security programs for the elderly in coming decades, because the number of people working and paying taxes to support these programs is shrinking in relation to the number of people these programs must support. It is not clear how nations will deal with these demographic trends.

Although the global population growth rate has slowed, the population is estimated to continue to grow over the next two decades. Most of the increase will occur in nations that have the lowest income levels, depend heavily on natural resources and in areas of rich biological diversity where deforestation for fuel wood and cropland is a serious concern.

The decline in fertility rates seems directly related to the level of education women get, and the availability of contraception. There have been a lot of studies, but this seems to be the key. When women are educated and have control over their biology, birth rates go down. And they decline fast. If this is true, then the reality and requirement of global assistance for the education and health support to women everywhere especially becomes an absolute imperative.

Does this mean requiring women in poor countries to use contraception? Pushing it on them as some sort of string tied to aid money? No, not at all. Simply the process of improving education and allowing families access to the tools that enable their right to choose their own size, from NFP to Norplant, is all you need to reduce fertility rates. This works, where lectures and smug superiority from the Northern Hemisphere do not. Some would argue that this is already happening on its own.

What will the world look like in 300 years? Will there be less of us? One way or another, there might be. Plague (waves of bird flu), major events (supervolcano, asteroid impact), the end of oil (that 40 year reserve is looking kind of thin), shock waves from the loss of biodiversity (our current mass extinction event), and the natural decline of fertility rates (education and contraception effects) could all play a role in creating an earth where people depopulate. Will we live like Isaac Asimov (everyone in cities while massive machines farm the empty lands for us?) or will we live like Jean Auel (decentralized tribes wandering the renewing earth?).

I wish I could be here to see it.

What next in the short term?

Reduce your energy consumption.
Talk about the issue.
Take as radical steps as you can in your own life.
Recycle.
Vote with the survival of the earth first, not last, on your priority list. This does not necessarily mean Democrat. Nor does it mean a Republican can’t qualify.
Write letters to companies and congress-critters alike.
Compliment progress when you find it.

Support legislation like this:

California aims to limit emissions of gases
Mon Apr 3, 2006 11:33 PM BST164

SACRAMENTO, Calif (Reuters) - California on Monday stepped up efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

State assembly members introduced a bill that would make California the first state to set a limit on emissions of heat-trapping gases.

The bill, which aims to cut emissions by 25 percent, or 145 million tons to 1990 levels by 2020, was drafted by Democrat Speaker Fabian Nunez and Democrat Assemblywoman Fran Pavley.

Pavley also wrote a state law ordering the reduction of emissions from cars and light-duty trucks.

A "Climate Action Team" of environmental advisors also recommended a series of new clean-air programs to Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"We cannot continue to ignore the threat of global warming to our environment because it isn't just about the future, it's about the impact that it's already having on our public health. It's about the impact that it's already having on our planet, our natural resources," Nunez said at a news conference.

The climate report to Schwarzenegger said the emissions reduction target for 2020 "should be the basis for an emissions cap in the development of the program." The report urged a program beyond California's borders to include other states in the West "to minimize emissions leakage."

It also called for mandatory reporting of emissions levels by the largest polluting industries -- oil and gas exploration and production, oil refining, electric power, cement manufacturing and solid waste landfills.

"Mandatory reporting will ensure an accurate inventory of emissions, which is critical to ensure that decision-making is based on emissions and emission reductions," the report to the governor said.

The climate advisors also said California should develop a "market-based program which considers trading, emissions credits, auction and offsets" and recommend the program to the governor by January 1, 2008.

A cap-and-trade market system would establish financial incentives to reduce emissions. Such programs are used extensively by electricity producers in the European Union.

Another key recommendation would require new electricity in California to come from sources with emissions equivalent to or less than new combined-cycle natural gas-fired plants. All utilities, whether publicly or privately owned, would have to meet state energy efficiency goals.

A spokesman for PG&E Corp.'s Pacific Gas & Electric unit, the state's biggest utility, said the company had not reviewed the Assembly bill and could not comment specifically on an emissions limit.

PG&E spokesman John Nelson said "we are not talking just about greenhouse gases emitted by utilities. This is something that all significant emitters of greenhouse gases need to address and on a regional basis."

The company has been reporting its emissions levels to a state climate registry.

The End.

environmentalism