zerospinzone

2011-09-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

They say that a picture is worth 1000 words:

2011-08-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

Michele Bachmann's Direct Line to God

Following the East Coast earthquake and Hurricane Irene, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's response was as follows:

“I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians,” Bachmann said to supporters. “We've had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here? Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.' ”

It must be great to have a direct line to God. It's strange, though, that God always seems to tell subscribers to the hotline exactly what they want to hear.

2011-08-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

Ignorance is even more blissful if you're sure you know

We at the institute want to draw attention to a notable victory in the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans.

A just-released Gallup poll finds that 96 percent of Americans believe that they know "something" or "a great deal" about global warming and climate change.

Contrast that 96 percent figure with the results of a Yale University study last year that found that 92 percent of Americans would receive a C, D or F on what they actually know about climate change. Fifty-two percent would flat-out fail.

For example, 55 percent don't know that carbon dioxide traps heat being radiated from the Earth's surface, 43 percent don't know what the greenhouse effect refers to, and 75 percent have never heard of ocean acidification or coral bleaching.

From a PR point of view, it's an accomplishment to convince people of your message--yet after all, that's what they get paid to do. But it's a work of art to do that and also make people think they really know what's going on.

Too bad there's no Oscar, Emmy or Nobel for the dedicated people who have pulled this off!

Nobel Medal Credit Chris Campbell/Creative Commons

High fives all around!

2011-08-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

Time for a New National Holiday -- Creation Day!

With Rick Perry's Day of Prayer and endorsement of the teaching of creationism in Texas schools, Michele Bachmann's links to Dominionism, and the Republican presidential candidates' near-universal rejection of climate science (what's with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman?), we thought it was time to pass on this timely proposal from The Committee for Creation Day:

August 23, 2011

The Committee for Creation Day

Washington, DC

“Creation Day: An Idea Whose Time Has Come”

Dear Senators

BARRASSO, BROWNBACK, CHAMBLISS, COBURN, CORNYN, CRAPO, DEMINT, HATCH, MCCAIN, RISCH, SESSIONS & THUNE

and Representatives
AKIN, ALEXANDER, AUSTRIA, BACHMANN, BISHOP, BLACKBURN, BLUNT, BOEHNER [and others]

and presidential candidates
BACHMANN, PERRY [and others],

First, we at The Committee for Creation Day want to congratulate those of you who have earned a Defenders of Liberty rating from the American Conservative Union. Your 100 percent advocacy of conservative values represents a remarkable intellectual, moral and political achievement, and is greatly appreciated.

Given your proven support for Christian values, we want to bring to your attention a proposal that we believe can help unify all right-thinking citizens behind God’s plan for the United States—Creation Day, a new national holiday.

As you know, in 1654 the great scholar Archbishop James Ussher calculated that God initiated Creation during the night preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.

What could be more important than officially recognizing that awesome moment, especially during these crucial and difficult times?

--Making Creation Day a national holiday would provide further proof that the United States is a nation founded on Christian principles and relying on God’s grace and guidance for its success.

--Federal recognition of Creation Day would provide invaluable support for the state-by-state, school-board- by-school-board battle to provide public school students with a balanced understanding of the scientific theory of intelligent design versus godless evolution, and balanced access to the truth about Creation compared to scientific theories claiming that the universe is billions of years old.

--Official establishment of Creation Day would bring some much-needed joy into these difficult years of economic crises, droughts, floods and other catastrophes that herald the End of Days. Environmentalists have their Earth Day. Why shouldn’t the rest of us have the right to unite in celebration of the Universe’s Birthday?

We understand that there may be some technical problems with the date of October 23. It falls right between Columbus Day, October 10, and Veterans Day, November 11. Some might think that having three Federal holidays in a month would be excessive. However, given the current insolvency of the government, not to mention our shared desire to cut government down to its lowest possible level, the more time Federal employees have off the better. We’re sure that, like the FAA employees who continued to work without pay during the recent debt ceiling crisis, other Federal employees will be happy to be furloughed without pay should October 23 fall on a weekday. Or perhaps Columbus Day and/or Veterans Day could be moved to some other dates, for example to March and April, which lack Federal holidays, or simply cancelled. After all, the discovery of America and even recognition of our brave veterans pale in importance to officially recognizing the Day It All Began.

We feel that it is worth noting that if making Creation Day a national holiday could be accomplished this year, then the very first celebration would fall on Tuesday, October 23, 2012. That's exactly two weeks before the general election. Enough said.

We think that we can accurately note that we represent tens of millions of voters, not to mention potential donors who are in a position to support Godly politicians generously, who would appreciate and applaud your advocacy for, and, God willing, creation of this new and vitally important national holiday.

Help us Ussher in a new, God-fearing era in America.

Sincerely,

The Committee for Creation Day

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2011-08-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

How much do you know about the state of the nation?

We're constantly exposed to one version or another of the idea of American exceptionalism. The politicians and advertisers remind us over and over again that the U.S. is number one, the richest country in the world, the most powerful, the shining “city on a hill” prophesied by our Puritan founders.

If you’re curious to see how well your knowledge about how the U.S. is doing matches what the statistics say, and if the U.S. still merits that number one spot, take this 20-item quiz.

1. Among the 23 richest countries (measured by GDP per person), where does the U.S. rank in
terms of life expectancy (1 = highest life expectancy, 23 = lowest)? _____

2. Among the 23 richest countries, where does the U.S. rank in terms of income

inequality (1 = lowest ratio between top and bottom 20%; 23 = highest ratio)? ____

3. Among the 21 richest countries for which data are available, where does the

U.S. rank on a health-and-social-problems scale that combines measures of

trust, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, infant mortality, life expectancy,

obesity, children’s educational performance, teenage births, homicides, rates of

imprisonment, and social mobility (1 = fewest problems, 21 = most problems)? _____

4. Among the 22 richest countries for which data are available, where does the U.S.

Rank on the UNICEF index of child wellbeing, a combination of 40 measures of

children’s health and wellbeing (1 = healthiest for children, 22 = least healthy)? _____

5. Of the 21 richest countries for which data are available, where does the U.S.

rank in terms of the percent of GDP spent on foreign aid (1 = highest, 21 =lowest)? _____

6. Of the 12 rich countries for which data are available, where does the U.S. rank

In terms of the percent of the population who have been mentally ill in

The past 12 months (1 = lowest percentage, 12 = highest percentage)? ____

7. Of 22 rich countries for which data are available, where does the U.S. rank in

terms of the United Nations index of illegal drug use (1 = least use, 22 = most use)? _____

8. Among the 23 richest countries, where does the U.S. rank in terms of infant deaths

per 1000 live births (1 = lowest infant death rate, 23 = highest infant death rate)? _____

9. Among the 21 rich countries for which data are available, where does the U.S. rank

In terms of the percent of people who are obese—body mass index over 30—

(1 = lowest percentage of obese citizens, 21 = highest percentage of obesity)? _____

10. Among the 19 rich countries for which data are available, where does the U.S.

rank in terms of the percentage of children who are overweight (1 = lowest

percentage of overweight children, 19 = highest percentage of overweight children)? _____

11. Among 22 rich countries for which data are available, how do U.S. 15-year-olds

Rank on an international test of math and reading skills (1 = highest, 22 = lowest)? _____

12. Among 21 rich countries for which data are available, where does the U.S. rank

In terms of the number of births among teens aged 15-19 (1 = lowest teen birth

rate, 21 = highest teen birth rate)? _____

13. Among the 23 richest countries, where does the U.S. rank in terms of homicides

per million people (1 = lowest homicide rate, 23 = highest)? _____

14. Among the 22 rich countries for which statistics are available, where does the U.S.

Rank in terms of the number of people in prison per 100,000 citizens

(1 = lowest rate of imprisonment, 22 = highest)? _____

15. Among the 11 rich countries for which data is available, where does the U.S. rank in

terms of social mobility, measured by how different a son’s income at 30 is from his

father’s income when the son was born (1 = high mobility, 11 =low mobility)? _____

16. Among 21 rich countries for which data are available, where does the U.S. rate

In terms of the percentage of children living with a single parent (1 = lowest

percentage, 21 = highest percentage)? _____

17. Among the 22 richest nations for which statistics are available, where does the

U.S. rank in terms of the number of patents issued per 1,000,000 citizens

(1 = highest number of patents per capita, 22 = lowest number per capita)? _____

18. Among the 11 rich nations for which statistics are available, where does the U.S.

rank in terms of the proportion of waste that gets recycled (1 = highest proportion

of waste recycled, 11 = lowest proportion of waste recycled)? _____

19. Among the 23 richest countries, where does the U.S. rank in terms of carbon

dioxide emissions per person (1 = lowest per capita CO2, 23 = highest per capita)? _____

20. Among the 25 richest countries, where does the U.S. rank in terms of the percentage

of children living in relative poverty--defined as below a country’s median income—

(1 = lowest percentage of children in relative poverty, 25 = highest percentage)? _____

You'll find the correct answers below.

These statistics (except for # 20, which come from UNICEF) are taken from the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. They lay out the case for the idea that, among rich, developed countries, it's not the amount of wealth but the degree of equality or inequality that makes the difference between a physically and mentally healthy, happy, well functioning and secure society and the opposite. They find that, among rich countries, those with high levels of income equality, such as the Scandinavian countries and Japan, do well on these measures of individual and social well being, while those with high levels of inequality, such as the U.S. and the U.K., do poorly. They think there is a cause-and-effect relationship between inequality and social problems, and that the most direct way to address this wide range of issues is to take steps to return the U.S. to a more equitable society.

Correct answers:
1.  20/23 (4^th lowest in life expectancy)
2.  22/23 (2^nd highest in income inequality)
3. 21/21 (highest level of health and social problems)
4. 19/22 (4^th lowest on child wellbeing)
5.  20/21 (2^nd lowest percent spent on foreign aid)
6. 12/12 (highest prevalence of mental illness)
7. 19/22 (4^th highest in illegal drug use)
8. 23/23 (highest infant death rate)
9. 21/21 (highest level of adult obesity)
10. 19/19 (highest percentage of overweight children)
11. 17/22 (6^th lowest math and reading skills at age 15)
12. 21/21 (highest teen birth rate)
13.  23/23 (highest homicide rate)
14. 22/22 (highest imprisonment rate)
15. 11/11 (lowest social mobility)
16. 20/21 (In a three-way tie for the highest level of children in single-parent homes)
17. 19/22 (4^th lowest number of patents per 1,000,000 population)
18. 9/11 (3^rd lowest proportion of waste recycled)
19. 22/23 (2^nd highest per capita CO2 emissions)
20. 25/25 (highest percentage of children in relative poverty)

2011-07-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

Empires of Illusion

A quirky, but striking piece of public art, leavened with a twist of Central European humor, marks a downtown street corner in the Slovakian capital city of Bratislava.

One comes across it suddenly, a life-sized bronze figure in a hard hat or helmet, head resting on hands, partly emerged from a man-hole in the middle of the sidewalk. A peeper peeking under womens’ skirts? A political satire on working life in this former Communist land, reflecting the old bargain that “we’ll pretend to work and you’ll pretend to pay us? A modern philosophical reference to Plato’s Cave? A playful reminder of the largely invisible underworld of pipes, sewers, power lines and workers it takes to sustain civilization? Perhaps just an artistic prank designed to add a distinctive flavor and draw tourism to this newly-independent, lesser-known half of the former Czechoslovak state?

Or is it, as I’m now thinking, a larger comment about the world of illusion in which we all live, and our only partly-successful efforts to pull ourselves out of individual or collective states of unconsciousness into the clear light of day or reason? Nearby Vienna, only a few miles up-river, after-all, was Freud’s hometown.

Often it takes a piece of absurdist art like this—or a view of staggeringly absurd political theatre like Communism in its dotage or Washington in its current debt-limit manifestation—to stop people in their tracks and cause them to reflect on where we are and what we have become.

Like the statue in the sidewalk, we’re in constant danger of being ignored, trampled or even swept away in the crowded rush of unfolding events and ever more manipulated images surrounding us. But look more closely at his pose and what he might have to say to us. A thoughtful, even faraway look and the curve of a curious smile animate his face. His left forefinger is slightly raised, as if to draw attention to a point or object he wants to discuss that has just come to mind.

This is definitely not Rodin’s Thinker, fully emerged, naked, alone and lost in profound thought on his rock, but perhaps an equally recognizable human reference. The anonymous individual, only partly visible or realized, taking time out to reflect, think, and most notably, engage in an ongoing dialogue both with unseen colleagues and with those of us willing to stop and listen.

Les Adler

for the institute

2011-07-28T02:56:00.000-07:00

Fire threatens the Arctic tundra for the first time in 11,000 years

As reported in the 24 July, 2011 issue of Nature, a research team studied the aftermath of a large, unprecedented wildfire that scorched Alaskan tundra in 2007. Tundra fires, in which the carbon-rich soil actually burns, have been small and infrequent for the last 11,000 years. This fire, however, released a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere, as much as the entire tundra biome, which stretches across the far north of Alaska, Canada and Eurasia, stores in a year.

You can read more about this fire and its implications for climate change in the Arctic and globally at Suite101.
You can access the abstract of the original Nature article here.

2011-07-17T23:44:00.000-07:00

Last year a team of researchers managed to decode two-thirds of the Neanderthal genome. They also found that contemporary non-Africans share more genetic markers with Neanderthals than contemporary Africans do. Their conclusion was that early modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, and that a few percent of the genes of all non-Africans come from Neanderthal ancestors.

A new, independent study, looking at one particular X-chromosome marker, confirms that finding. You can read the full story here.

2011-07-13T04:49:00.000-07:00

Declining winter snowpack across the western U.S. threatens the water supply of 70 million people

Writing in Science, a multidisciplinary team of researchers reports that the snowpack in the Yellowstone watershed, the northern Rocky Mountains, and the southern Rocky mountains, are all declining rapidly. They connect this with rising temperatures across the region stemming from human-caused climate change. If the decline continues, they say, it has serious implications for people, farmers, ranchers and industries across the western United States.

You can read more about this at:

http://www.suite101.com/content/unprecedented--rocky-mountain-snowpack-decline-threatens-millions-a379215

Or you can find the original article at: http://news.opb.org/media/uploads/pdf/2011/snowpackpaper%5B1%5D.pdf

Robert Adler
for the Institute

2011-07-10T23:22:00.000-07:00

Debt Debate

On July 4, 2011, Riley McGowen, a 20 year old student at NG State University, was flying home from vacationing at his uncle’s ranch when he experience a life-changing epiphany.

As a new member of the Young Republicans at NG State, he had recently signed a pledge to support the proposed 28^th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The amendment simply stated:

The Government of the United States of America

shall, by spending no more than it receives in

revenues, balance its budget every year.

Riley was a double major (Economics and Political Science) at NG State, and he was proud to support a Constitutional Amendment that required the Federal Government to display the same fiscal responsibility its own citizens were. In fact, Riley had signed an accompanying petition that was to be sent to every US Senator and Representative as well as all senior members of the President’s administration stating the obvious:

Dear _____________:

For too long, the United States Government has served as a poor example to the rest of the country. While its citizens, families, organizations and businesses do not accumulate increasing amounts of debt by borrowing money, the Federal Government continues to spend far more each year than it takes in in revenues. This must stop. The United States must be held accountable, just as all persons and private enterprises within its borders are.

Sincerely

Riley McGowen

Young Republicans

NG State University

Riley had engaged in heated arguments with his classmates who opposed the proposed Amendment, but he knew that given the unswerving support from the Republican leaders in Congress that he would win the debate. America, like all Americans, had to balance its budget each and every year.

Members of the campus’ Young Democrats had countered by asking, “Does that mean that your uncle will no longer be able to take special tax deductions for the corporate jet he uses to fly you across the country all the time?”

Riley was outraged, “How dare you touch those tax provisions that are written into law. Take them away and my uncle’s petroleum exploration company could not create the jobs America needs.”

But Riley was taunted further. “Does your uncle’s company balance its budget each year?”

“Certainly. Its shareholders and bondholders wouldn’t allow it to do otherwise. Haven’t you taken a business class yet?”

However, Riley couldn’t seem to get away from the barrage of questions. “Aren't the shareholders and bondholders exactly the people the company is borrowing from?”

“You might say that,” responded Riley. “But whoever invested in the company gets bonds or shares of stocks in return—so the company’s Annual Statement shows that its accounts are balanced.”

“So all you’re asking is that the US Government also issue bonds to whomever it borrows money from?”

“Hey dude, it does.”

“We’re getting nowhere fast,” interjected another Young Democrat. “What we need to know from Riley is . . . Riley, you tell us. Do you support the Amendment because the Federal Government is not balancing its books each year like American families have to?”

“Now, that’s the right question,” replied Riley.

“What about students (you excepted) who have to take out student loans to go to college? Aren’t they accumulating debt—just like the Federal Government?”

“They are,” Riley responded. “And they better be able to pay back those loans.”

“But you aren’t going to make all of us balance our budgets each year by not going into debt, are you?” asked one Democrat.

“My single mom has a car and she didn’t pay cash,” said another Young Democrat. “Does that mean she’s making the same mistake the Federal Government and your uncle’s business are?”

“Doesn’t everybody pay cash for their car?” Riley asked.

“My parents say they own our home, but I know they took out a mortgage to buy it,” said another Young Democrat.

“It’s like I know all these people and businesses are in debt. It’s just that the Federal Government has to balance its budget so it won’t go further into debt,” Riley responded.

“Since your Republican leadership is basing its arguments concerning a balanced budget Amendment on the idea that all the rest of us have to balance our budgets—does that mean all the rest of us will have to balance our budgets, and I don’t mean by borrowing money, each year?”

“Hey,” said another Young Democrat. “If you’re advocating that when the Amendment goes into effect and the US Government can no longer borrow money to balance its budget, and you’re saying that all of us will have to live up to the example we are already supposedly setting for the government—that means I won’t be able to go into debt to continue my education.”

“And I won’t be able to borrow to buy a house,” said another.

“To live up to the ideals you are setting up for the Federal Government, we will need to have a cash only economy—or if anyone borrows from anyone else, they have to pay back the money by the end of the year to balance their household budgets,” said another Democrat, summing up the group’s argument.

The epiphany young Riley McGowen had that July 4, 2011 as he was flying home in his uncle’s tax subsidized private jet was that as soon as he landed he was going to reregister as a Democrat.

After all, while the US Federal debt stands at about $14.5 trillion, US citizens owe around $16 trillion of mortgage, consumer, credit card and student loan debt. Riley realized that just like households and businesses, the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate all debt but by limiting our military ventures and tax loopholes, borrow wisely and keep it to a minimum.

2011-06-14T20:47:00.000-07:00

Human activities emit far more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that volcanoes do

A new study in Eos, published by the American Geophysical Union, shows that human activities currently pump 135 times more CO2 into Earth's atmosphere than volcanoes do in an average year. In fact, our yearly production of CO2 equals that of one or two supereruptions like the one that created Yellowstone two million years ago, every year.You can read the details on Suite101.

Robert Adler
for the institute

2011-05-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

The Dark Side of Happiness

Recent research documents something that has been noted before--that countries whose citizens consider themselves particularly happy paradoxically often have high rates of suicide. An international team of social scientists traced this surprising correlation in statistics from western nations, and independently within the 50 states of the US. The researchers' explanation, based on their findings and on other work on how potent interpersonal comparisons can be, is that unhappy people who see others around them as much happier may feel the pangs of unhappiness much more acutely. The worst place for a deeply depressed person to be, it appears, is among happy peers.

You can read more about this study on Suite101 at this URL.

Robert Adler

2011-04-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

It takes a thief

If it takes a thief to catch a thief, perhaps it takes a PR expert to catch others at work to create and fuel the well-funded and so-far successful campaign to bamboozle the public about climate change.

James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, with the respected Vancouver PR firm Hoggan & Associates, have done the spadework and present it in the form of a well researched, fact-based page-turner. In Climate Cover-Up they unveil, name-by-name and dollar-by-dollar the coal, oil and other deep pockets behind the cover-up, and the spin doctors, well-paid mouthpieces, and willing politicos who have convinced much of the public that there is a scientific controversy about climate change, and have successfully blocked national and international action to protect the planet for the last two decades. You can read my full review of Climate Cover-Up on Suite101.

2011-03-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

A new archaeological excavation in central Texas provides a trove of artifacts proving that humans lived in North America 15,500 years ago, driving a particularly solid nail into the coffin of the "Clovis-first" hypothesis. Details on Suite101, "Hunter-gatherers Roamed across North America 15,500 Years Ago."

REA for the institute

2011-03-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

How to Monitor US Radiation Exposure Yourself

As the plume of radioactive debris from the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors approaches the U.S., there are resources besides official reports that will let ordinary citizens track radiation levels.

You'll find a map with nine or ten active monitoring sites across the U.S. here:
http://radiationnetwork.com/
This site updates automatically every three minutes. Note that its readings are in counts per minute, or CPM.

I've been tracking the readings on this site from British Columbia, Washington, California and Arizona since March 14, 2011, before any radiation from Japan would have made it to the West Coast. As of noon on March 17, the readings from the four sites have averaged 23.6 counts per minute with a standard deviation of 1.76 counts per minute. The author of this site says that "it would be unusual for those levels to exceed 130 CPM," and sets this as the alert level. This should provide a baseline for readings on and after Friday March 18, when the plume is predicted to reach the U.S.

I've located another site with fifteen active monitors here:
http://www.blackcatsystems.com/RadMap/map.html.
This site updates every fifteen minutes. Please note that its readings are in micro Roentgens per hour, and so differ from those of the first network. A note on this network's webpage says that typical readings across the U.S. range from 5 to 28 micro Roentgens per hour, with a standard deviation of around four.

Both networks take pains to point out that readings from a given monitor can vary widely over time, due to the random nature of radioactivity.

I, for one, feel a bit more comfortable knowing that I have two independent sources of information apart from whatever reports government agencies chose to release.

Robert Adler
for the institute

2011-03-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

Denial runs deep

Zerospinzone co-founder Les Adler has published an essay on denial on the blog of the Whitman Institute that is well worth reading. He provides a historical and linguistic analysis of the powerful river of climate change denial that is being fomented and exploited by special interests, most notably the fossil fuel industry. His conclusion is that the presentation of facts and reasoned arguments will not be sufficient but that instead, ". . . attention also must be paid to the slow and careful psychological work of bringing unconscious fears and feelings to consciousness in order to promote creative change."

2011-01-29T06:41:00.000-08:00

Science is not a four-letter word

Zerospinzone co-founder Lou Miller takes Senator James Inhofe and other climate change deniers to task for demeaning climate science and science in general at a time when the U.S. is more in need than ever of home-grown scientists and scientific expertise. His critique appears in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat of 1/28/10.

2010-12-09T06:49:00.000-08:00

December's Deadly Forest Fire in Israel Confirms Climate Change Predictions in 2000 Report

Smoke from Mt. Carmel fire, from Haifa, Israel

A raging forest fire early this month killed 42 people, destroyed hundreds of homes, and consumed much of the forest that carpeted Mt. Carmel, near Haifa, Israel. The deadly fire was a predictable--and clearly predicted--effect of human caused global warming and climate change, according to the author of an official climate change report that was submitted to the U.N. in the year 2000.

The 2000 report said that rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases would create overall hotter and drier conditions around the Mediterranean, with delayed winter rains and a shorter rainy season, but also cause more extreme climate events such as heat waves, heavy downpours and floods. Combined, the predicted changes would significantly increase the risk of severe fires, like the one of December, 2010, threatening the survival of many forests in the Mediterranean region.

More about the 2000 report and the current comments of its co-author, Guy Pe'er at Ben Gurion University, at this Suite101 page.

In my opinion, it's long past time for climate change deniers worldwide to shut up. But even for those of us who have been following the climate change research and "debate" for years, it's time to stop piously saying that we need to act now to protect our children and grandchildren. We need to act now to protect ourselves.

Robert Adler
for the institute

avandia

2010-12-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

An Aspirin a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

Baby Aspirin Reduces Cancer Risk

It's well documented that taking low doses of aspirin every day reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes. That's why millions of people worldwide are prescribed their daily baby aspirins.

A new analysis combining the results from eight long-term studies of the effects of low-dose aspirin now finds a significant reduction in deaths from a variety of cancers, most notably those of the digestive tract, but also cancer of the brain, lungs, prostate and pancreas.

Overall,taking low-dose aspirin for five years or more appeared to reduce the overall death rate from cancer by more than 20 percent.

You can read a summary of these findings on Suite101.

And, if you're interested, you can read the original paper in The Lancet.

Robert Adler

2010-12-03T15:06:00.000-08:00

Pesticide Exposure, Cognitive Decline and Dementia Risk

When I worked as a neuropsychologist, I got to see first hand how even mild cognitive impairment could wreak havoc in a person's life. Of course Alzheimer's disease or other full-fledged dementias are even more destructive.

That's why a recently published study linking long-term pesticide exposure to cognitive impairment and, the researchers suspect, upping the risk of a person developing dementia, caught my attention.

You can read a summary of the research, which tracked over 600 French vineyard workers over time, on Suite101, by clicking here.

And, if you want, you can download the original article, in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, at this URL.

Robert Adler

2010-11-26T06:44:00.000-08:00

A simple intervention can inoculate female college students against the stereotype that they can't do well in science

New research by a team at the University of Colarado, in Boulder, adds to the growing number of studies showing that surprisingly minimal interventions -- in this case having university students in an introductory physics class write two 15-minute essays about the values that are most important to them and why they are personally important -- can boost the grades and achievement levels of students whose performance would otherwise be stunted by the debilitating effects of negative stereotypes.

You can read about research on the surprisingly powerful effects of negative stereotypes in this New Scientist article.

And about some of the research on simple interventions to inoculate the targets of negative stereotypes against them, here.

And about the most recent research in my Suite101 posting, here.

Robert Adler

avandia

2010-11-10T12:09:00.000-08:00

Good News for Chocolate Lovers -- Now We Know How Chocolate Protects the Heart

Research just published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Phamacology reveals one of the key ways in which chocolate or cocoa protects the human cardiovascular system. It turns out that pure cocoa and dark chocolate contain substantial amounts of an enzyme that inhibits ACE, which in turn has the effect of lowering blood pressure. The lead author says that this adds to the growing body of data showing that a diet rich in naturally occurring protective substances can help "prevent cardiovascular diseases."

More details about the study at Suite 101: http://www.suite101.com/content/news-for-chocolate-lovers--why-chocolate-protects-the-heart-a307018.

Robert Adler

2010-11-06T23:41:00.000-07:00

Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal reveals GOP game plan for next two years

Kim,

Your piece, "The GOP's 2012 Game Plan" in the WSJ on Mitch McConnell lifted my spirits.

It's always comforting to know we have you and a resident realist in Washington who put the Republican Party above the unnecessary liberal "needs" of the country. Without Mitch we would never have taken back so many seats in Congress. The Republican strategy of the past two years has been the best I've seen in my lifetime as a Republican--take a President who offers hope and bipartisanship and just say no to everything. Limit his accomplishments and register our opposition. The 'green behind the ears' Obama was caught completely off guard--he came into office thinking he could do something for the country! We showed him otherwise. Now, with good game-planning we'll keep him hopping another two years and then we'll put Sarah in office and be able to get those tax cuts back for us rich people. I don't know about you, but I HATE to give money to the government. How else could I have become the multi-millionaire I am?

I can't tell you how excited I am--and that goes for my family too. We flew to France yesterday to look at a new villa (it's 15th century, but new to us). I know we will be able to afford it now. And we stopped by the Caymans on the way home (I'm glad airport security checks for liquids but not for greenbacks--if you get me drift). Boy are we going to have fun, and we can count on Maria and Jose to take care of the place "on the Sound" while we're away.

I don't know what America would do without true Republicans like you to protect the interests of us on Wall Street. Two years ago we thought it was over. And thanks to you and leader Mitch, we're raking it in once more.

I am so sincerely indebted to you and Mitch, I am at a loss for words. Still, you can be sure that I'm not at a loss for other ways to show my appreciation. Now that the Supremes have granted my corporation its free speech rights, I'll be able to help the cause in hundreds of thousands of ways.

Yours truly,

P.S. Did you hear that rumor that Obama is going to be spending $200,000,000 of your money and my money on a junket to India. Hey, me and my buds went there just last year and it didn't cost half that much. We have to put some breaks on that bozo in the WH before he gets out of control--so good luck to you and our Resident Realist.

Lou Miller
for the institute

avandia

2010-11-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

Leading geologists warn, "Stop pulling carbon trigger."

The 200 year old Geological Society of London has issued a clear, eminently readable, fact-based statement summarizing what the geological record has to say about climate change. Their understated bottom line is that it would be "unwise" for humanity to continue pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and oceans. Nature ran that experiment 55 million years ago, and the world that resulted would not be suitable for our current civilization. The president of the GSL was a bit more unspoken, writing, "Stop pulling the carbon trigger."

You can read more about this report by clicking here.

Robert Adler
for the institute

2010-10-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

Valuing Natural Resources and Ecosystem Services for Sustainable Development

Economists moved a step closer to implementing the crucial concept of including the value of natural resources and ecosystem services onto the balance sheets of companies and countries. A new report, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature (TEEB) details why this is so vital to sustainable development, and to the wealth and well being of the world's poor today and everyone in the future.

You can read more about these issues and the TEEB report at Suite101: How Much is the Earth Worth? Valuing Resources and Ecosystems

You might also like my January, 2010 post on some earlier research in this area.

Robert Adler
for the institute

2010-10-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

"Need, not Greed”

The national media announced yesterday that the nation’s top bankers treated themselves to a whopping $144,000,000,000—that’s 144 billion dollars--in pay and bonuses this year. That is quite a nice reward for a bunch of people who should be held responsible for the financial mess we’re in.

It seems to me that most people do not remember that it was these very same bankers who created and invested in the bundled, unsecured mortgages that just over two years ago pushed the financial and stock markets into freefall. Instead of directing their rage at the people who are responsible, millions of Americans are now taking out their anger at the Obama/Pelosi “axis of evil,” as if they were responsible for the 14,800,000 people who are still officially unemployed in the United States.

It’s not unusual for the public to resort to irrational anger during economic downturns. The question is why the ultra-right-wing Tea Party has been able to energize and direct this outrage. Where have the Democrats, the party of the people, been as lines at food banks and unemployment windows grow?

When Democrats were Democrats, FDR declared a “Bank Holiday” to brake the bank panic of 1933. My proposal for such a holiday is, admittedly, a little different than FDR’s. I propose that the ultra-rich on Wall Street take a holiday and forego their outrageous pay for one year. I propose a total holiday because these bankers argue that if they pay their top talent less, they will jump ship to another firm. So if all these investment geniuses earn the same – nothing -- for a year, none of them will be tempted to jump ship.

It is not that they—prudent, conservative, upstanding, and financially responsible individuals that they are—don’t have some money in the bank for this rainy day holiday. After all, this year’s $144 Billion was preceded by last year’s $139 billion.

What would this accomplish?

The US median income is a mere $43,317 in comparison. Simple division demonstrates that we could create 3.66 million more jobs, cutting the ranks of the unemployed by almost a quarter. If instead we picked the median wage for women we could cut unemployment by almost a third. On the other hand, if the unemployed accepted the minimum wage, $15,080 a year, we could get 64.5% of them back to work.

With all these people back to work, they would be buying goods and creating even more jobs. Pretty soon the federal government would not be paying out unemployment claims and could, responding to recent Republican demands, start balancing the budget. And states, receiving revenues once more from the sales and income taxes on the newly employed wouldn’t have to lay off teachers, nurses, police and firefighters.

Of course, we should not take this proposed “holiday” seriously for a moment. The high finance paper-shufflers and computer wizards on Wall Street would not, for a moment, agree to such an arrangement. Silly me. The Wall Street elite are where they are, doing what they are doing, and pulling in the money they are pulling in because they would never for a moment consider sacrificing for the good of the country or their fellow Americans.

However, engaging in a moment of fantasy does force one to look more closely at reality. Why are these very people who brought economic tragedy upon so many still reaping outlandish financial rewards? Why is all the outrage coming from the Far Right? Where are the political leaders who are willing to stand up to these parasitic financiers and serve the needs of the common, hard working (if jobs were available) individual?

The Founding Fathers were wrong: not all people are created equal. It is true that we still operate in a profit and loss economy—only the profit part is going year after year after year to the very rich and the loss is going to the growing proportion of people at the bottom who continue to lose their jobs, homes and hope for the future.

I’m certain that those who would get jobs under this proposal would not complain about working on a “holiday.”

Lou Miller, Ph.D.

avandia

for the institute

2010-09-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

Wake-up call for climate change doubters

Maybe climate change skeptics, most of whom seem to be of the conservative persuasion, would think twice if they knew that many of the biggest countries and industries in the world are taking climate change very seriously.

We're not just talking dotcoms like Google, which have invested heavily in sustainable enterprises, but great grey eminences including major insurance companies and banks. I guess being realistic about the risks from global warming and climate change, and being alert to the enormous growth potential in conservation, green energy and sustainable businesses makes sense when you're responsible for billions or trillions of dollars of investments.

One of those financial heavy hitters, Deutsche Bank,commissioned an independent study from a group of climate experts at Columbia University. The bank asked the experts to look at the scientific evidence for or against the major arguments raised by climate change skeptics in recent years. You've read or heard most of these arguments, for example in George Wills' influential columns in the Washington Post.

The Columbia Unversity team basically concluded that although it's true that Earth's climate is extremely complex and the scientific community's ability to predict exactly what will happen as we continue to pump greenhouse gases and aerosols into the atmosphere, cut down forests, etc., is necessarily imperfect, human-caused climate change is real and serious.

The implication is that any enterprise that wants to succeed in the real world needs to take climate change seriously.

You can read more about the Deutsche Bank study in a recent Suite101 article here.

2010-08-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

Thinkin' about Climate Change Risks

I recently had the opportunity to interview George Backus, a nuclear engineer, systems researcher and economics expert who leads a team at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose job it is to evaluate and detail the risks to the United States from climate change.

Bachus has a deep and unique understanding of complex systems, not just Earth's climate, but how climate changes could interact with our equally complex -- and probably much more fragile -- economic system.

I recently posted two stories about Backus and his team's work on Suite101: "Rethinking Climate Change Risks -- National Lab's Approach," and "National Lab Calculates State-by-State Climate Change Risks."

Climate change skeptics often argue that the uncertainties in even the most advanced climate models mean we should do nothing about climate change -- no investments, no new regulations, no new laws, no new treaties; just business as usual.

Bachus turns that argument upside down. The greater the uncertainty, he says, the greater the risk. If climate scientists could tell us that sea levels would rise by no more than six inches by 2050, every region could know if it was at risk and take appropriate steps. However, if the best models can do is tell us that a six-inch rise is slightly more likely than any other number, but that the actual change could be anything from one inch to three feet, planners have to take into account the unlikely, but potentially catastrophic impact of that three foot rise.

Like a scorpion, it's the tail end of the distribution of possible climate change outcomes -- the Katrinas and the ten-year droughts, plus their impacts on the economy, jobs and security -- that really stings.

For the details, please take a look at those two stories.

Robert Adler
for the institute

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2010-06-26T03:06:00.000-07:00

Global warming threatens the American West

This week two climate researchers warned of a particular threat to the western United States from global warming.

Writing in the 25 June, 2010 edition of the journal Science, Jonathan Overpeck, at the University of Arizona, and Bradley Udall, at the University of Colorado,say that the impacts of global climate change are already being felt throughout the West,as shown by soaring temperatures, the worst drought since systematic records were started, reduced spring snowpack, reduced river flow and reduced water storage in the region's reservoirs.

In addition, they point out that tree ring data show that America's West is prone to episodic mega-droughts that can last not for years but for decades.

Rather than waiting for more studies and more data to determine if the current drought conditions are natural, man-made, or a witch's brew of both, Overpeck and Udall say that planners and decision makers throughout the region need to identify and develop ways to adapt to significantly hotter and drier conditions.

A "no regrets" approach to planning requires that steps be taken soon to make the region and its burgeoning population sustainable within the likely range of climatic conditions during the next decades.

On a more positive note, the authors cite the region's vast potential for solar, wind and geothermal power production. Tapping these green resources, they say, may help the region pay for the inevitable costs of adapting to years or decades of drought.

For more details, click here to see my Suite101 story on this subject.

Robert Adler
for the institute

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2010-06-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

Chimps kill their neighbors—now we know why

Since Jane Goodall first described it in 1979, scientists have known that chimpanzee bands make organized raids into neighboring territories where they attack and kill chimpanzees from other groups. What they didn’t know was why.

Some researchers speculated that the goal of these raids was to seize territory; others thought that it might be a way of recruiting females from a victimized group into the raiders’ band. Some anthropologists argued that such attacks only took place in chimp communities that had been disturbed by human interventions such as providing food.

Researchers Sylvia Amsler, a biological anthropologist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, David Watts, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and John Mitani at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, say that they’ve proved that the goal of this form of chimpanzee aggression is to take over territory.

They describe their findings in the June 21, 2010 edition of Current Biology.

Amsler and her colleagues studied a large band of chimpanzees—the Ngogo group—in Uganda’s Kibale National Park for more than ten years. They observed dozens of organized raids, usually by large numbers of adult and adolescent males, although occasionally with females as well. The Ngogo band’s raids were focused on a region to the northeast of their home range. In ten years of what the researchers refer to as “patrols,” the Ngogo chimps killed 21 individuals from that neighboring band.

That represents a very high mortality rate—some 5 to 17 times higher than has been measured among human hunter-gatherer societies, and 23 to 75 times higher than what’s been seen in other chimpanzee studies.

The researchers identify two factors that may account for this unusual rate of violence and killing. The Ngogo habitat is unusually rich, so the band has grown to some 150 individuals, about three times larger than the average chimpanzee band. That means that there are a lot more adult and adolescent males available to form large and successful raiding parties.

Amsler and her colleagues believe that their findings rule out the theory that chimps only kill each other as a result of human interference. They point out that neither the Ngogo band nor its neighbors have ever been provisioned by humans, and that the raiding they’ve observed is clearly adaptive. The Ngogo band has increased its territory by some 22 percent at the expense of its neighbors. As a result, more of its members are likely to survive and reproduce.

Although the chimpanzee raids are eerily similar to human intergroup aggression and violence, the researchers are reluctant to discuss any linkage.

They do speculate, however, that the high level of within-group cooperation that lets chimpanzees form these patrols and carry out lethal raids on their neighbors may tell us something about the evolution of high levels of cooperative behavior within human groups.

It would be ironic if the researchers are right, and that it was our primate ancestors cooperating among themselves in order to compete aggressively with outsiders that made us as cooperative as we are today.

Journal reference: John C. Mitani, David P. Watts and Sylvia J. Amsler, “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees,” Current Biology Vol. 20 No. 12.

For a more in-depth read, click here to see my Suite101 story about this research.

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Robert Adler

For the institute

2010-06-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

Americas Settled Twice, New Study Finds

A new round has been fired in the long-running controversy about who first settled the Americas.

An international team of researchers compared the shape of more than 1100 skulls from South America, Asia and Australo-Melanesia dating from 11,500 years ago to the present. They found that they could account for the marked differences between the skulls of early and more recent Americans only if there were two founding waves of migration from Asia separated by several thousand years.

Luzia, facial reconstruction by Dr. Richard Neave of 10,500 year old skull from Lagoa Santa, Brazil, published with permission from LEEH-IB-USP

Their conclusions disagree with recent genetic studies, most of which conclude that just one wave of migration from eastern Asia can explain the genetic diversity of American indigenous groups.

Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen, Germany and one of the lead authors of the new study says that their results make the one-entry model improbable and refute the widely accepted argument that the differences between early and more recent indigenous Americans can be explained by genetic drift or other evolutionarily neutral processes.

“The two-migration model is the only one whose predictions matched the observed differences,” Harvarti says.

Morphing Skulls through Time and Space

Harvati, along with Mark Hubbe, at the Catholic University of the North, in Chile, Walter Neves, at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, used previously published measurements of 1178 skulls, including 69 from South America that were older than 7000 years—the largest sample ever studied--as the basis for their analysis.

Researchers have pointed out since the 1990s that the skulls of the earliest Americans, or Paleoamericans, differ markedly from those from more recent times and those of current indigenous groups, or Amerindians.

“Paleoamerican crania do not look particularly similar to recent Native American groups [but] similar to African and Australian populations,” says Harvati. “Whereas recent Americans resemble Asians more closely.”

Harvati and her colleagues found that for Amerindians to have descended directly from Paleoamericans would have demanded a very unlikely rate of change of skull shape “For the [one migration] scenario to have been true there would have had to have been some unique circumstances and strong selection pressure different from selection to climate,” says Harvati.

The one-entry model also predicts substantial correlations between how close two sets of skulls are geographically and how similar they are in shape. In contrast, if nearby populations descended from different founders, that correlation breaks down.

That’s just what the researchers found. Two founding waves reproduced the observed correlations significantly better than just one.

Controversial but Important

Ted Schurr, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, finds the study worth paying attention to. Although his own genetic studies have suggested that a single expansion from Northeast Asia can explain the genetic variation among Native Americans, he does not rule out the group’s conclusions. . “I am willing to accept that there were pulses of migration into the Americas from Northeast Asia at different times, such that a pattern which Hubbe et al. identify might emerge,” he says.

Dennis O’Rourke, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, Utah, agrees. “More recently, a number of genetic analyses have demonstrated that two, and perhaps more, migrations are more likely given the current understanding of genetic diversity in the Americas,” he says. “Contrasting the results from morphometric and molecular studies is one way to sharpen our perspective and refine hypothesis for future tests.”

It’s those further tests that Harvati and her colleagues hope to spur. “Currently there seems to be a gap in our understanding of the peopling of the Americas,” says Harvati. “I hope that our work will prompt others to revisit these questions with renewed interest and will help resolve that gap in our knowledge.”

Journal reference: Mark Hubbe, Walter A. Neves & Katerina Harvati, “Testing Evolutionary and Dispersion Scenarios for the Settlement of the New World,” PLoS ONE, 14 June 2010.

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For a more detailed description of this research, click on my Suite101 article here.

2010-05-27T14:56:00.000-07:00

Eyjafjallajokull and climate change--Response to "The futility of man"

Knowing that I’m passionately concerned about climate change, a friend forwarded the following piece to me, something that apparently has been circulating on the internet. He added, “I don’t know if this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was.”

To respond to my friend, and because the piece contains many of the themes and distortions that seem to energize the anti-climate-change community, I wrote a detailed reply. You can read the commentary and my reply below:

-----------------------------------
The futility of man

Didn't we ALL know this but were just afraid to say something.....

All of you out there across the globe who have fought so hard to tackle the hideous enemy of our planet, namely carbon emissions, you know ....that bogus god you worship of "Climate Change" or "global warming" ....well, I feel it is necessary to inform you of some bad news. It really does pain me to have to bring you this disappointing information.

Are you sitting down?

Okay, here's the bombshell. The current volcanic eruption going on in Iceland, since its first spewing of volcanic ash this past week, has, to this point, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past ten years to control CO2 emissions on our planet.

I know, I know.... (group hug)...it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of: driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kid's "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, going on vacation to a city park instead of Yosemite, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your $1 light bulbs with $10 light bulbs, participating in "earth day" ...well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just the past four days.

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in the past four days has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And, those hundreds of thousands of jobs you helped move to Asia with expensive emissions demands on businesses... you know, the ones that are creating even more emissions than when they were creating jobs here, well I just know that seems worthwhile now.

I'm so sorry. And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud but the fact of the matter is that the brush fire season will start in about two months and those fires will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two years.

But hey, grab a Coke, give the world a hug and have a nice day!

So true, and this has been going on thousands of years. Long, long, long before, combustion engines, or cattle herds were around to expel carbon dioxide. There is nothing new about climate change on Earth. It's been going on since the flood and it will be going on for years to come.

Man is not in control.
Only in arrogance... does he think he is.

---------------------------------------

Response to "The futility of man"

Dear _____,

I don't know who initiated this email, but please send my reply back down the line of email recipients.

Whoever is the author has a point--a lot of CO2 was emitted by this volcano, according to the best scientific estimates about 150,000 metric tons per day. The author does not include this quantitative figure, although knowing the actual amount is important.

The volcano to compare Eyjafjallajokull with is Pinatubo which in 1991 pushed somewhere around 42 million metric tons of CO2 into the air. So scientists refer to Eyjafjallajokull as only a "cough" in comparison.

Averaged over time, volcanoes pump some 200,000 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year while human activities contribute almost 30 billion metric tons--according to the US Energy Information Agency--almost 700 times as much.

It’s important to note that the author of this post doesn't claim that Eyjafjallajokull dwarfed human emissions, only that it surpassed the very small amount we have been able to cut back those emissions.

The meager success so far of the climate community to cut worldwide greenhouse gas emissions is due in large part to lack of public support which is due in large part to unsubstantiated information such as is presented in this email. One almost has to laugh at such logic. It’s a tragic example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A couple of other points need to be made.

The eruption of Eyjafjallajokul will have some warming and some cooling effects, both of which scientists are able to estimate. The estimated amount of CO2 reductions that came from flights being grounded due to the ash is 2.8 million metric tons, and it will take Eyjafjallajokull quite some time to make up for that.

Mt. Pinatubo actually lowered global temperatures by about one degree Celsius for most of two years because of the sulfur it placed up to 20 miles in the atmosphere (sulfer dioxide reflects sunlight and has been proposed as a geoengineering "solution" to global warming--not my choice for a number of reasons). But Eyjafjallajokull did not release as much sulfur as high as Pinatubo, so it will probably not contribute significantly to global cooling, just as it probably will not contribute much to global warming.

Charles Keating started very accurate measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere in 1959 and those measurements have continued to this day. They show a zig-zag pattern that reflects spring and summer decreases in CO2 while plants in the northern hemisphere are breathing it in, and increases in fall and winter when they are producing CO2, mostly through decay.

But Keating's chart shows an inexorable rise in emissions over the past half century. Comparing natural and human emissions, measured atmospheric CO2 did not increase due to Pinatubo in 1991 as much as decreased during times of economic recession--sort of like the aircraft being grounded, but more globally.

So compared with Pinatubo (they call the geoengineering idea of shooting sulfur into the upper atmosphere the "Pinatubo Option") Eyjafjallajokull was very small, and smaller still compared to human emissions.

So if you can get past phrases like “hideous enemy,” "bogus god" and "evil beast" which are designed to play to your emotions, and the “group hug” comment which is meant to categorize everyone concerned about climate change as, I suppose, soft-headed, overly emotional ex-hippies, stop for a while and investigate whether this hyperbole is based in fact, or whether its purpose is to make us all feel better while we—and more importantly the corporations that really profit from it--continue to engage in activities that emit significant amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere.

Because if science (by that I mean all the science academies in countries that have them, and all the meterological associations in the world) are right and we do have a serious problem on our hands, it may just be time to pay attention. It’s worth noting that Insurance companies, investors, and militaries on both sides of the Atlantic are taking climate change very seriously because their business is managing risk and they will take some of the biggest initial hits.

The future scientists forecast, if we do not lower emissions very quickly, will not be a pleasant one for our kids or their kids, or even for us--so let's check the facts.

One argument that this piece uses, and that appears over and over in similar pieces, is that climate change is nothing new. “It’s been going on since the flood and it will be going on for years to come.”

The implication, which is hardly ever spelled out, is that since there has been natural climate change—something that we know about in great detail because of the work of thousands of scientists—there can’t be human-caused climate change. Or, even if there is human-caused climate change, it can’t be important compared to natural changes.

That’s like saying that since lightning causes fires, people don’t. Try convincing youl fire department, police department, or insurance company of that one.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of the anti-climate-change pieces, like this one, say that it is arrogant to think that mere humans can have a significant impact on nature or Mother Earth. “Man is not in control. Only in arrogance . . . does he think he is,” this piece says.

The themes of humility before God and the ultimate futility of human understanding and action run very deep in most religions. The awesome power of God or nature is something that most people—even probably most scientists--would agree on. So tossing it into discussions about climate change can seem pretty convincing.

The trick is that the 6.8 billion people alive today, multiplied by all the mining, agriculture, industry, heating, cooling, transportation, etc. that keep us alive and support our lifestyles obviously are having huge impacts on the Earth, impacts that are easily seen and measured in terms of land use, water use, deforestation, depletion of fisheries, loss of biodiversity, and climate change.

We’re not at all humble about our lifestyles and what it takes to support them. So it seems very self-serving to suddenly be humble about taking responsibility for their impacts on the Earth. It reminds me not at all of humble, God-fearing adults but of spoiled children who feel free to make any kind of mess knowing that Mommy or Daddy will clean up after them.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing about the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull to suggest that we're not making a mess or that God is going to clean it up for us.

If you want more facts regarding climate change, please do not hesitate to let me know. There are lots of excellent books and articles on the subject, and I’ll be happy to refer you to them.

Lou Miller

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2010-05-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

Denial runs deep

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
--Frank Herbert

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
--Mark Twain

Whether or not Twain or Herbert ever read Freud, both writers would have seen and understood the inability or unwillingness to face reality or admit obvious truths that so characterizes the angry tone of our current debates.

More than just an “inconvenient truth” as Al Gore describes it, human-driven climate change challenges some of the most basic Western assumptions about progress and purpose. Not only does it threaten the dominance of deeply rooted and interrelated economic and political interests but the psychic structures and societal self-images which sustain them as well.

What will we become if our carbon-based economy in its multiple manifestations has to be phased out? What will be left of our identity if the glories of expansion, conquest and mastery have to give way to humble sustainability?

The confluence between powerful vested interests and psychologically driven denial and anger powers the regressive counter-reformation being mounted by climate skeptics, ideologues and their paid media flacks aimed at undermining and discrediting both the science of climate change and its scientific proponents.

Politicians like Sarah Palin and Jim Inhofe are adept at both fomenting and cashing in on this reservoir of frustration and anger, and so are savvy advertisers.

A telling twist to the anti-limits crusade is captured in a recent TV ad for the Mazda3. At the conclusion of the ad, a self-confident, slightly rebellious male voice vows, “I will not sacrifice fun at the altar of practicality.” The Canadian version runs, “Between fun and practicality there are victors and victims.”

The ad captures perfectly the anger aimed at public figures like Al Gore or Bill McKibben when they warn that because of climate change, environmental degradation, peak oil, or other limiting factors, we need to cut back now on our lavish, high consumption lifestyles.

Emotionally, which one do you want to be—fun-loving rebel or drab do-gooder, victor or victim?

Not surprisingly the dominant reaction seems to be to let someone else throttle back. It’s zoom-zoom-zoom for me. Fun as usual. Business as usual. CO2 as usual. Oil guzzling as usual. Environmental catastrophes as usual. And defiant anger at anyone who says otherwise.

What lies under the denial, beyond the anger? Just the quiet voice of that inner self. Hopefully, it will be heard.

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2010-05-13T10:04:00.000-07:00

Emergent misbehavior

How would you like a beer? How about a beer company along with it?

On Thursday, the 6th of May, for a few minutes, you could have bought a delicious Sam Adams plus a substantial interest in its maker, the Boston Beer Company, all for the price of a pint. Boston Beer stock, along with dozens of others on the major U.S. stock exchanges, plummeted to zero, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average nosedived 700 points in a matter of minutes.

To the great relief of most traders and to anyone whose financial well being is linked even indirectly to the stock market—and that’s pretty much all of us--the market rebounded almost as quickly. Still, the wild ride left even seasoned traders in shock.

It’s hard to overstate how much value was at risk during this ten-minute event. As just one example, Exelon, a utility worth about $30 billion at 2:49 p.m. was worth nothing three minutes later. It’s estimated that one trillion dollars of value evaporated during the “flash crash.” That’s three times what the U.S. spends on public education per year, $300 billion more the U.S. government bailout of the banking system in 2008, and about equal to the current European package to rescue Greece.

The grab-your-airsick-bag crash and rebound was an anomaly, but that’s not the same as saying that it was an error, in the sense that it was caused by some specific mistake or malfunction.

Economist and market analyst John Hussman points out that U.S. stock markets have hit similar “air pockets”-- in 1955, 1987 and 1999. Like the Thursday event, those episodes resulted in roughly ten percent losses. The big difference is that they played out over weeks rather than minutes.

Since the Thursday debacle there’s been no shortage of fingerpointing.

Early speculation centered on a so-called “fat-fingered trade” as the trigger for the selloff. Instead of offering to sell a few million shares of Procter and Gamble, rumor had it that a trader mistakenly put up a few billion shares. Lacking buyers, the stock tumbled, starting a panic that took the rest of the market down with it.

The theory got a lot of attention, but like the infamous weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there’s no evidence for it.

The most recent theory is that as the market started to drop, a particular hedge fund placed a $7.5 million bet that it would continue to fall. Other hedge funds immediately followed its lead, pushing the market over a cliff. Do lemmings come to mind?

One suspect that most market gurus agree on is high frequency trading. Multiple firms now trade using high speed computers linked directly to the stock exchanges. These constantly analyse massive amounts of data and exploit fleeting opportunities by buying and sell huge quantities of stocks and futures in milliseconds. Experts estimate that these automated agents now make from sixty to seventy percent of all trades.

The existence of these computerized agents goes a long way towards explaining what happened, and the absence of an identifiable trigger.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about complex systems since chaos theory pioneer Edward Lorenz popularized the idea of the “butterfly effect” in the 1960s, it’s that they are capable of amplifying the tiniest perturbation to virtually any scale. It takes just one last snowflake to unleash an avalanche.

The stock market is a classic example of a highly dynamic system driven by multiple independent but interacting agents. One state it’s capable of occupying—what system theorsists refer to as an attractor-- is when the tug of war between buyers and sellers arrives efficiently at a stock’s current value. That’s the state that economists tell us represents the stock market’s raison d’etre.

It would be great if that were the only way the system functions. Unfortunately, history shows that the stock market can also wander into at least two other states or attractors. It’s prone to huge bubbles, in which contagious enthusiasm drives the prices of most stocks well above their “true” value, and, as we’ve just seen, “air pockets”, in which contagious panic does the opposite.

That was bad enough when human traders were the ones calling the shots. Presumably they had some sense that a company valued at $30 billion one minute couldn’t really be worth zero a few minutes later. Their interaction led to dramatic booms and busts, but at least these had believable tops and bottoms and unfolded on a human time scale.

Over the years the markets have instituted various fixes to try to keep the market from stumbling into its most unattrractive attractors. After the global “Black Friday” market crash of 1987, The New York Stock Exchange, for example, put in place “circuit breakers”—trading curbs that snapped into place when the market fell too quickly that were supposed to slow panic selling and so prevent a full-scale crash.

Some market analysts are blaming the circuit breakers themselves for the Thursday meltdown. They think that when the NYSE circuit breakers clicked in, the effect was to shunt the flood of sell orders to other markets that were even less able to find buyers for them .

(Just as a star needs to maintain a continuous flux of nuclear fusion to keep from collapsing under the force of gravity, stock markets need to maintain a continuous matching of sellers and buyers. If there are no buyers, stock prices start to fall. We now know that computerized trading can drive a sagging stock to zero in minutes, and can threaten to implode the entire market).

The circuit-breaker problem has gained traction. Six major exchanges have now agreed to strengthen and coordinate their circuit breakers. New rules are currently being negotiated and should be in place within a few weeks.

Those fixes may be good ideas, but they almost certainly are nothing but temporary patches. The system remains as complex, dynamic, and unpredictable as ever. It’s still shuttling hundreds of billions of dollars form buyers to sellers at inhuman speeds every day, impelled not just by humans vacillating between greed and fear, but increasingly by computerized agents impelled by abstruse algorithms. There’s no “beta testing” for these patches, which leaves all of us as guinea pigs in a very high-risk experiment.

Regulators and investors would like to believe that the proposed fixes will result in an efficient, reasonably stable market. I think it’s more accurate to view the market as something like a manic-depressive chef on speed—brilliant at what it does but capable of cooking up a disaster at any time.

Thursday's collapse and rebound, and the current fix-it-on-the-fly patches, ought to make normal investors think hard about their nesteggs. Harry Truman's aphorism about politics seems even more appropriate for investors. "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

Robert Adler
For the institute

accutane lawsuit

2010-05-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

Let's BOINC!

How would you like to do something that really feels good? Something that costs you nothing and actually contributes to important scientific projects?

If that sounds like fun to you, then I suggest you click on over to the BOINC Project at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/. BOINC stands for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. It's an easy-to-use interface that links your computer, along with thousands of others, with one or more research projects of your choice that require enormous computing capacity but can't afford to buy time on a supercomputer.

By dividing computations into lots of small pieces and distributing those pieces to hundreds of thousands of small computers to work on when they would otherwise be idling, BOINC creates an amazingly powerful virtual supercomputer, of which your desktop, laptop or even your PlayStation can be a part. You can do this individually, or, just to add to the fun, join an existing team or create a new one.

As I write this, BOINC has 573173 computers humming away, with a combined capacity of 5.552 petaflops. (A petaflop is a million billion--10 to the 15th--floating point operations per second.) That makes the BOINC network three times faster than the world's current fastest stand-alone supercomputer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar. Not bad for a bunch of volunteers!

In a few minutes you can download BOINC to your computer and chose from among 36 projects that tap into the BOINC network. These cover a remarkable range of scientific challenges, including helping CERN's Large Hadron Collider determine stable orbits for the particles it's accelerating and smashing together (LHC@home), detecting gravitational waves from neutron stars (Einstein@home), studying the evolution of our home galaxy (Milkyway@home) or of the entire universe (Cosmology@home), figuring out how best to stop the spread of malaria (Malariacontrol.net), protein structure and function (Rosetta@home), comparing climate models (Climateprediction.net), and dozens of others.

I've picked two so far--Einstein@home, looking for gravitational waves, and SETI@home, looking for technologically-created signals from outside our solar system. A few minutes after I stop working at my laptop, one of these programs automatically starts up. If I wander by after a bit I'll find one of their colorful displays on the screen, along with an indication of how much calculational support I've contributed to that product so far.

Einstein@home screensaver

The next two on my list are Malariacontrol.net and either Milkyway@home or Cosmology@home.

BOINC-ing turns out to be ridiculously easy, fun, and it lets me contribute effortlessly to important scientific research. What more can I say except let's BOINC!

Robert Adler
for the institute

avandia lawsuits

2010-04-08T11:25:00.000-07:00

New addition to the human family tree

Two-million-year-old “mother and child” fossils found in

South Africa

Fossilized bones representing a new species of likely human ancestors were described today in the journal Science.

The remarkably well preserved fossils were of an adult female and a pre-adolescent male who shared a unique checkerboard mixture of apelike and human features. They were discovered in August, 2008 in a remote site in South Africa by a team led by Lee Berger at the University of Witwatersrand.

Remarkably, the fossils were first spotted by Berger’s son Matthew. “It was a child, found by a child,” says Berger. The Government of South Africa and the University of Witwatersrand are sponsoring a contest among South African children to name the child.

Berger, the study’s lead author, stopped short of saying that the pair were in fact a mother and her child, but said that his team will be using a variety of techniques to try to answer that question. “They were almost certainly part of the same troop,” he says. “So there’s a very high probability that they are related to each other.”

Geologist Paul Dirks, part of the group that studied the fossils and the setting in which they were found, thinks that the two died together, probably in a major flood or mudslide that washed their bodies down into the depths of a cave, where their remains were safe from scavengers and rapidly turned into fossils.

Berger and his colleagues spent the past year and a half studying the fossils of these two individuals, along with the bones of hundreds of animals found near them, and the geological layers above and below them.

This allowed them to pin down the time when these creatures lived extremely accurately. “Our ability to date these sites in southern and eastern Africa has become more and more precise,” says Berger. They almost certainly lived 1.95 million years ago, give or take a few thousand years.

These are not the oldest probable human ancestors. For example, two members of the species Australopithecus afarensis left a trail of surprisingly human-like footprints in a bed of volcanic ash in Laetoli, Kenya 3.6 million years ago, and the tool-using Homo habilis lived some 2.5 million years ago.

However, the new species, which Berger and his colleagues have named Australopithecus sediba, presents a surprising mix of ancient and more modern traits, as if a snapshot had caught the species in the awkward process of morphing from ancient apelike predecessors to more recognizably human ancestors.

“Australopithecus sediba is undoubtedly a highly transitional species, with a mosaic of characteristics shared with later hominids but with other features typical of the australopithecines,” says Berger. Hominids include humans and their direct ancestors or very close relatives, while the australopithecines were earlier small-brained but bipedal species, one of which is thought to have evolved into the first bigger brained, walking and tool using human species.

Berger believes that Australopithecus sediba is either a direct ancestor of one of the earliest members of our genus, Homo, or a very closely related side branch.

The new species studied by Berger and his colleagues had long legs and human-like hips, so they could walk easily. At the same time, they had very long arms and short, but very strong hands and fingers that meant that they were still at home in the trees. “They were very competent walking bipeds,” says Berger, “but with these backup, parachute arms that allowed them to climb trees.”

Even their skulls show a peculiar mixture of features. Their brains were small, around 420 cubic centimeters—less than one third of the volume of modern human brains. However, their faces had many human-like features, including a well-developed nose, well defined cheeks and a sloping but somewhat bulging forehead.

“They would look dramatically different [than other ancient human ancestors]” says Berger. “They would have long, apelike arms but with short, powerful, human-like hands. They would have human shaped hips and long legs, and a modern-like face, but with a very small head.”

A. sediba skull
photo by Brett Eloff, courtesy Lee Berger, Univ. of Witwatersrand

Berger is also intrigued by the fact that the adult female was nearly as tall as the predicted full height of the male. This similarity in size between males and females might be associated with human-like families and groups, in contrast to the extreme male-female size differences found in primates such as gorillas with a single dominant male guarding and dominating a harem of females.

“Sediba has taken a leap toward a social structure where you don’t have a dominant alpha male and you are lowering competition between males, who live together with females and their offspring in a social group,” Berger says.

He compares this new species with its odd mix of ancient and modern features to the Rosetta Stone that first let scholars make sense of Egyptian hieroglyphics. “These are a remarkable sample of fossils,” says Berger. “They’re going to answer a great many questions about human evolution during the period from 2 million to 1.7 million years ago, a period that is very poorly represented in the fossil record.”

Even if long-legged but small-brained Australopithecus sediba didn’t quite make it into the genus Homo, I for one am happy to welcome them to our ancestral family tree.

Robert Adler

for the institute

accutane lawsuit

2010-03-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

The Climate: It is a-changin’

In searching for the right metaphor to explain the crazed nature of politics at present in America, perhaps "climate change" comes the closest. For at least the past two decades, we have been undergoing an accelerating process of 'heating' the atmosphere, driven in this case by powerful, underlying social, cultural, technological and economic changes which have unsettled the 'climate' mechanisms that usually moderate and modulate political expression and behavior.

The consequences are even more rapid, unpredictable flows of energy producing unseasonable storms, unusual shifts in the deep currents of political organization, further melting of established structures--in general, increased overall instability and therefore mistrust in and reactions against systems, leaders, 'elites' and accepted understandings in general.

This helps explain the wild swings in popular opinion ranging from the high of unrealistic 'hope' in 2008 which led to Obama's election, to the current low of disillusion and despair, scarcely a year later, when unreal expectations have been unfulfilled.

The responses on the right, anti-evolution, anti-climate change, anti-science--and anti-historical, as the founders are now being portrayed as believers in a 'Christian' nation--all fall under the heading of "denial." Denying the realities of an increasingly globalized, wired, mediated, environmentally-challenged world in which the accepted truths: American dominance, economic growth, expectations for the future, economic and military 'security', cultural values, faith in traditional leaders are all crumbling.

Thus the grasping for simple answers, the popularity of people like Palin, Beck, and others. Are they really different from the Huey Longs, Dr. Townsends, Charles Lindberghs, Father Coughlins of the 30's, or the Free Silver and Single Taxers of the 1890's? The question for us, however, --and increasingly for the planet as a whole---is whether the political system can adjust and stabilize again, as it did through Progressive and New Deal reforms, or whether, like the climate, we've passed the 450 point, after which there is no return from growing unpredictability and instability.

Les Adler for The Institute

2010-03-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

Climate change, meet Camelot

“It’s true! It’s true! The crown has made it clear.

The climate must be perfect all the year.

A law was made a distant moon ago here:

July and August cannot be too hot.

And there’s a legal limit to the snow here

In Camelot.”

--Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner & Frederic Loewe

The Legislature of the State of South Dakota distinguished itself by passing an anti-climate change resolution--House Concurrent Resolution No. 1009--late last month,

No, the legislature did not follow King Arthur’s lead by attempting to stabilize the state’s climate by decree. Instead, it called for “the balanced teaching of global warming” in South Dakota’s public schools, borrowing the language and tactics of the ongoing campaign to force the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in America’s schools.

On a 36 to 20 vote, South Dakota’s House of Representatives urged the state’s schools to teach that global warming is a theory rather than a proven fact. Teachers are to impress on students that the significance and “interrelativity” of the “variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological [sic], thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics” that determine global weather patterns are “largely speculative”, and that the scientific investigation of global warming has been “complicated and prejudiced” by “political and philosophical viewpoints.”

The resolution concludes with a seemingly innocent statement urging that “all instruction on the theory of global warming be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.” The phrase I’ve italicized is a coded way of warning teachers not to present climate change in a way that might anger students or parents who believe that climate change is a hoax hatched by the U.N. to frighten ordinary citizens, justify draconian laws and enrich greedy scientists. It’s similar to language advocated by the right-wing group Students for Academic Freedom in its “Academic Bill of Rights”, which has been used to attack and even sue college professors whose teaching goes against the beliefs of conservative students.

It’s all too easy to trivialize the South Dakota House Resolution and poke holes in the facts and reasoning advanced to support it. The resolution’s use of “astrological” instead of “astronomical”, the flawed list of anti-climate-change evidence it presents — that the earth has been cooling for the last eight years, that there is no evidence of warming in the troposphere, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but “the gas of life”— and the argument that the existence of naturally driven climate change in the past rules out human-caused climate change today, makes for a document that’s hard to take seriously.

Even South Dakota’s senate seems to agree. They stripped out the most embarrassing verbiage before passing their own version of the resolution on 24 February.

Unfortunately, the resolution has to be taken seriously. It stands as the latest—but by no means the last--skirmish in a long and continuing battle for the minds as well as the hearts of America’s children. As reported by New Scientist, the Texas school board-- whose annual purchase of some 48 million textbooks allows it to determine what most of the nation’s children study—voted last March to require textbooks to question the existence of global warming, and, in an astonishing kowtow to “young-earth creationists”, deleted the 14-billion-year age of the universe from the science curriculum.

It’s not just climate change, evolution, or the age of the earth which are in the crosshairs in this battle, but science as a whole. The religious-conservative movement that helps elect creationist school board members across the country, State legislators like Resolution 1009’s author, Don Kopp, the 110 members of the United States Congress who win perfect ratings from ultraconservative groups, or Senator James Inhofe who now wants to file criminal charges against U.S. and British climate scientists, has a far more ambitious agenda—nothing less than to replace the pluralistic “secular humanism” that most people think has defined the United States since its inception with religious fundamentalism.

The movement dates at least to the 1980s, when the Rev. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition with the stated goal of advancing a Christian agenda nationwide through grassroots activism. This still growing movement has made it clear that it is determined to redefine America in the light of the “truth” that the nation was founded not on the basis of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but on fundamentalist Christian beliefs. They see the Bible as true and the wall of separation of church and state as a dangerous myth. Be it evolution, global climate change, or embryonic stem cell research, when science gets in the way, it will be attacked.

As reported in the New York Times, attacking climate change along with evolution may be a way to get around court rulings that so far have found that singling out evolution for so-called balanced presentation in textbooks and classes is clearly religiously motivated and violates the separation of church and state. By also targeting global warming, the age of the universe, or the origin of life, anti-evolutionists can claim that they are merely advocating academic freedom and fair play.

And I suppose it doesn’t hurt that the same politicians who seek the votes of true believers are often funded by corporations that are strongly motivated to keep pumping --and spilling-- crude, mining coal, or pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

At least in the United States, this is not a challenge to which scientists and those who recognize that science can only thrive in an environment that values facts and reason over Bible-based belief and God-given truth can remain indifferent or uninvolved. A war has been declared, and scientists and their supporters can no more wish it away than South Dakota’s legislators can resolve away global climate change.

Robert Adler

for the institute

2010-01-19T09:32:00.001-08:00

The real wealth of nations: Can economists see green beyond the greenback?

Ever since Homo habilis first shaped stones into tools and left the flakes where they fell, we have extracted value from the natural world and relied on it to deal with our waste.

It’s not news that nature has been the primary source of our wealth and the major sink for our waste. What is remarkable is that from the Pleistocene to today, we’ve never actually accounted for the value of the resources we exploit or the services nature provides.

We can hardly fault H. habilis bands for failing to apply econometrics to their budget of stone tools and edible plants and animals. However, at a point when the well being of most of the world’s inhabitants can crash along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, when every nation’s status. stature and prospects are measured by the rate of change in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and when individuals and nations are arguing fiercely about how much we can sustainably extract from or dump into the environment, maybe it’s time we start to evaluate—and hence properly value--what nature provides.

That’s certainly the opinion of Partha Dasgupta, a professor of economics at Cambridge University and the University of Manchester. In a recent paper in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0231), he argues that neither the GDP nor indices like the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), which measures human factors such as health, education and standard of living, even begin to measure whether or not a nation or region is truly getting richer or poorer, or developing in a way that can be sustained.

“None of the development indicators currently in use is able to reveal whether development has been, or is expected to be sustainable,” he writes. One result is that nature is both underpriced and overexploited. Dasgupta has been trying for years to get his colleagues to start to measure what he calls the comprehensive wealth of nations, including the heretofore uncounted value of aquifers, fisheries, forests, estuaries, the atmosphere, and ecosystems, and fold those measurements into mainstream economic models, planning, and decision making.

Economics has been phenomenally successful in shaping the way decision makers at all levels think about and evaluate progress, Dasgupta says. In particular, GDP has become the canonical measure of development and the wealth of nations, and guides the economic choices and policies of every country.

The problem with GDP, says Dasgupta, is that it’s both inadequate and misleading.

It’s inadequate in that, although it is used to measure of the wealth of nations, it leaves out a vital part of that wealth--natural capital. It’s misleading because nations relying on GDP to measure progress can easily find themselves looking richer on paper, while in fact they are becoming poorer by degrading their natural resources. While conservationists have been warning of this for years, Dasgupta is one of the first economists to have the data to prove it.

In his recent article, Dasgupta traces the development of five countries, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and China from 1970 through 2000. All five show seemingly healthy growth as measured by GDP, per capita GDP, and even HDI (Human Development Index, a composite measure of GDP per person, life expectancy, and education).

The catch is that when Dasgupta includes even a partial evaluation of the wealth lost through depleted natural resources and degraded ecosystem services, the balance sheets of four of those five countries shift into the red. Even as their GDPs and HDIs told these nations that they were getting richer, they were actually getting poorer; their development was unsustainable.

Research in this area has been surprisingly sparse, but consistent in showing that even valuing a small subset of their natural resources reveals that many nations are buying GDP growth at the expense of real wealth. “If I had all the numbers,” Dasgupta says, “it would be even worse.”

Although Dasgupta says that some of his colleagues continue to view nature as if it were an infinite source of resources and an equally infinite sink for waste products, most now accept that, in principal, it’s important to value natural capital. And most economists, he says, now grasp something he proved mathematically a decade ago, that it’s possible to develop a measure of comprehensive wealth that would incorporate nature and reflect human well being better than the GDP or the HDI.

This represents progress, but it seems painfully slow as forests continue to be razed, fisheries depleted, and carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere at a record pace.

The good news, says Dasgupta, is that the World Bank and UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme, are just now starting a project that will produce a world wealth report every two years. Initially this report will include just a few of the better-measured aspects of natural capital such as fisheries, but it will add other natural resources and ecosystem services over time. “This is the first systematic attempt to value natural capital for the whole world,” says Dasgupta, “It has never been done before.”

If all goes well, in a few years we may be able to punch a few keys and retrieve some realistic measures of the value of our natural resources and ecosystems. More importantly, decision makers will have actual data to show if their nation is developing sustainably or needs to change course.

If Dasgupta and his colleagues are right, it’s a vital step that comes not a moment too soon.

Homo habilis Homo economicus

REA for the institute

2009-12-18T16:56:00.000-08:00

Goodbye, Gorillas

The already threatened gorillas of Africa are likely to be wiped out by even the two degree Celsius temperature rise set in Copenhagen today as one of the goals of the world community.

Dr. Amanda Kortjens, of Bournemouth University in the UK, and her colleagues based their conclusions on studies of the need for gorillas and other leaf-eating primates to have enough time to forage, socialize, and rest. Gorillas are forced to rest when temperatures get too high, which reduces the time available for them to find food and maintain social ties.

Coupled with the intense threats gorillas already face from habitat loss and hunting as "bush meat", even this seemingly modest rise in temperature will put them at risk of extinction.

This piece of research, which will appear in Animal Behaviour, December, 2009, serves as yet one more example of how seemingly innocuous or supposedly acceptable levels of global warming can have unacceptable, even non-survivable, effects on certain populations or in certain regions.

Robert Adler

for the institute

2009-09-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

Vast underground ice sheet found on Mars

NASA image shows water ice fading between October, 2008 and January, 2009

I've just finished listening to a NASA press conference announcing that nearly half of Mars has a layer of nearly pure ice just under its surface.

The NASA scientists estimate that this represents about one million cubic kilometers of ice, or about twice the amount of ice that covers Greenland here on Earth.

The Martian ice was exposed to view by meteorites that blasted out small craters--a few meters in diameter and from half a meter to two-and-a-half meters deep--and, much to the scientists' surprise, revealed a layer of 99 percent pure ice that they think ranges from 1 to 10 meters (33 feet) thick.

These underground ice sheets appear to extend from the Martian poles to about 45 degrees north and south--that is, halfway from each pole to the Martian equator.

Three different instruments in orbit around Mars on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter allowed the scientists to detect five newly formed craters, photograph bright, bluish-white material in or splashed out around them, material that quickly faded away during the Martian summer, and finally identify that material as nearly pure water ice by its spectrum.

"We found a beautiful water ice signature," said Selby Cull, from the Compact Reconnaisance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars team. "Crystal-clear-no-doubt-about-it water ice."

The ice is amazingly recent--around 10,000 years old--the scientists say. It dates from a period when Mars was wetter and had much more water vapor in its atmosphere than it does today.

According to the researchers, the discovery sheds light on the recent climate history of Mars, during which water vapor has shuttled out from and back to the polar regions as the Martian climate has warmed and cooled due to changes in the amount of sunlight the planet receives.

This plus earlier studies have led scientists to conclude that Mars had far more water in the distant past--several billion years ago--but has cooled and dried out over time. Some of the water is now locked up in minerals, some has been lost to space, and some remains in the form of ice.

In contrast, Earth has managed to keep most of its water.

Mars is now too cold, and its atmosphere is too thin, to allow liquid water to exist at the surface. However, these new findings suggest that water may still percolate underground, coalescing to form these newly discovered underground ice sheets.

Ironically, the Viking II spacecraft landed in the region where this ice was found in 1976, and scraped down into the soil, but not quite deep enough to find the ice.

"If Viking II had been able to dig down a few more inches, we could have made this discovery 30 years ago," said Shane Byrne, with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment.

The NASA scientists say they were not surprised to find ice under the surface of Mars, but were amazed to find that it was so pure. "We expected it to be a 50-50 mix of ice and dust," Byrne said. This has sent them back to their blackboards to try to explain what they found.

It may be decades or even centuries before humans set foot on Mars. The good news is that when we do get there, there will be plenty of water waiting for us just under Mars' cold and dusty surface.

Robert Adler
for the institute

2009-09-14T09:08:00.001-07:00

An ill wind . . .

Third Roadsign Report from the institute

We sailed past yet another warning sign on our crash course towards irreversible climate change a few days ago.

As reported by the AP, two German-flagged cargo ships navigated the "northeast passage," powering their way from South Korea to Siberia (and on towards Rotterdam) via an arctic route that until now has always been blocked by ice.

Scientists cited in the AP story say that this is a clear indication of human-caused climate change, which has long been predicted to show up most dramatcally in Earth's arctic and antarctic regions.

It may be good news for shippers and other business interests who are eager to exploit the arctic, but it's not good news for the rest of us.

Earth's rapidly melting ice is thought to be one of the most likely triggers for irreversible climate change. Since ice reflects the sun's energy back into space, it helps to keep the planet cool. When ice is replaced with open ocean or terrain, solar energy is absorbed and retained. This sets up a feedback loop that melts more ice, which means more energy is absorbed--you get the idea.

At least, with President Obama rather than Bush in the White House, the U.S. is no longer actively blocking progress towards international agreements to fight climate change. However, the political will and skill to attack this enormous global problem still lag dangerously far behind the accelerating pace of global warming and climatic disruption.

Robert Adler

for the institute

2009-07-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

Comment: No defense to torture

In a recent letter to its 150,000 members, the American Psychological Association (APA) took its strongest stand ever against psychologist involvement in torture or other illegal forms of interrogation.

“Torture in any form, at any time, in any place, and for any reason, is unethical for psychologists and wholly inconsistent with membership in the American Psychological Association,” the association wrote. “The APA Ethics Committee will not accept any defense to torture in its adjudication of ethics complaints.”

This unequivocal stance was not achieved easily. It took years of divisive private and public debate, which culminated in a September, 2008 vote by the entire membership on a resolution forbidding psychologists from working in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution.”

Responding to that nearly 60 percent vote in support of the resolution, the APA leadership, which for years had argued that psychologists could play valuable roles in interrogations in support of national security and even as protectors of detainees, has made a decisive about-face.

“Let’s set the record straight,” wrote APA president James H. Bray in April of this year. “It is a clear violation of professional ethics for a psychologist to have played a role in the torture of CIA detainees, as described in the recently released Bush administration memos.”

Among other revelations about the Bush-era torture practices and how the Bush administration tried to justify them, those memos, made public by the Obama administration, documented what anti-torture advocates had said for years, that some psychologists were implicated in torture.

American psychologists contributed substantially—and ethically--to the US military’s SERE (for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) program. SERE, which started in the 1950s following the Korean War and expanded during the Vietnam War, tried to prepare potential captives to cope with the kinds of abuse and torture that US military personnel had been subjected to during those conflicts.

However, under the Bush administration, SERE was “reversed engineered” to devise “softening up” and “enhanced interrogation” techniques that were inflicted on US-designated “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and CIA-operated “black sites” in Afghanistan and several Eastern European countries.

A number of media reports have documented that psychologists advocated or were involved in adapting and transferring SERE techniques to Guantanamo and other US-controlled sites.

In other words, the US turned the torture techniques that had been used against their soldiers—decried at the time as brainwashing—on its own captives, and psychologists were involved.

In New Scientist of September 29, 2007, I argued that psychologists ought to find involvement in such activities particularly abhorrent. Psychologists define themselves as practitioners of a healing profession, and decades of their own research has shown how easily ordinary people can be influenced to hurt others and be corrupted by involvement in abuse seemingly sanctioned by authorities.

APA President Bray now strongly condemns such misuse of psychological expertise. “These techniques, when applied in this manner, are tantamount to torture as defined by APA and international law,” he writes. “APA stands ready to adjudicate reports that any APA member has engaged in prohibited techniques.”

Even the argument that military psychologists were simply obeying orders will not stand. “There is one ethical response to an order to torture,” Bray writes. “Disobey the order” (emphasis his).

The APA deserves praise for the exceptionally clear stance it has now taken. With an estimated 500,000 torture victims in the US alone, APA members now have the chance, if not the obligation, to try to ease the lifelong emotional pain carried by torture victims.

And, hopefully, never again will psychologists help create more victims.

President Obama likewise deserves credit for his reversal of many of the Bush-era practices and attempts to legitimize torture, announced on Obama’s second day in office.

However, the battle against torture is by no means over.

As has been widely reported, ex-Vice President Cheney continues to advocate torture—or rather, “enhanced interrogation" by the US as both necessary and useful.

New Scientist recently reported that 104 out of 150 nations studied by Amnesty International continue to practice torture. There are millions of torture victims worldwide.

It is likely that the US continueS to outsource torture—that is play an active role in abusive interrogations carried out in countries with fewer scruples about torture such as Bangladesh or Pakistan.

Despite calls for accountability from many sources, most recently the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the US is not showing any significant willingness to investigate, much less prosecute officials who instigated, developed, justified and utilized torture.

If government-sponsored torture is ever to be stopped, not only psychologists and practitioners of other healing professions, but everyone who agrees that torture is indefensible, needs to press for an end to thIS abhorrent practice and accountability for those who ordered and carried it out.

Robert Adler

for the institute

2009-05-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of "Road Sign" commentaries designed to bring under-noticed events that may turn out to be of global significance to public attention.

Road Signs: Climate change

Kiss your coastline goodbye

Climate scientists have predicted for many years that rising sea levels caused by melting ice and warming oceans will threaten and eventually inundate low-lying islands and coastlines—including parts of Florida, the Eastern and Western seaboards of the U.S., and the Gulf coast.

Worldwide, large coastal cities, home to hundreds of millions of people, are at risk.

Residents of Pacific islands such as Kiribati have already seen the ocean erode beaches and kill crops, and have understandably been among the most vocal advocates for global action to slow human-caused climate change.

Now, however, the Carteret Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea have become the unfortunate poster child for climate change. As reported in The Guardian/UK, the Carteret’s 2600 inhabitants are in the process of abandoning the island, their ancestral home, to the encroaching Pacific. They are being moved, five or ten families at a time, to Bougainville, also part of Papua New Guinea.

Given that millions of people have been displaced over the centuries because of floods, droughts and famines, the inhabitants of the Carterets are not the first climate-change refugees, nor even the first to be displaced by human activities—human-caused deforestation and desertification have been taking place for centuries.

They are, however, the first community who, as a whole, are being uprooted due to one of the predicted impacts of modern, man-made climate change.

Since atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising more rapidly than ever, ice in Antarctica and elsewhere is melting even faster than predicted, and atmospheric and oceanic warming are expected to create stronger and more destructive hurricanes and storm surges, the residents of the Carterets will definitely not be the last climate change refugees this century.

We ignore their plight at our peril.

Robert Adler

for the institute

2009-05-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of "Road Sign" commentaries designed to bring under-noticed events that may turn out to be of global significance to public attention.

Road Signs: The Middle East

Recent largely unnoticed reports of what an Associated Press source labels an “unprecedented” public rebuke of Iranian President Ahmadinejad by the country’s supreme religious authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over a seemingly-minor domestic dispute, may, in fact, reflect a much more significant shift underway, not only in Iran’s political leadership but in its relations with the Western world.

With national elections scheduled for June 13, scarcely a month away, such public disapproval of one of Ahmadinejad’s actions by the ruling clerical authorities could well have a decisive effect in undermining the President’s remaining support within the Iranian power structure.

While the global economic downturn and consequent decrease in oil revenue have stirred public discontent, further tarnishing his public image, Ahmadinejad has, until this point, managed to retain the critical backing of Iran’s religious leadership. The current dispute over his dismissal of the chief official responsible for managing the Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization, important though it may be in an Iranian domestic context, potentially provides the ruling ayatollahs the opportunity to demonstrate a new flexibility in foreign relations—the area in which Ahmadinejad has played a particularly provocative and controversial role .

What has changed most notably in recent months is the foreign policy of the United States, with strong signals being sent by the Obama Administration that it is interested in pursuing a new relationship with Iran following more than a quarter-century of mutual hostility. In that context, Ahmadinejad, whatever his domestic virtues, is a definite liability, having positioned himself as an extreme hard-liner on relations not only with Israel—whose very legitimacy he has denied—but with the US and West whose values and policies he has repeatedly demeaned and attacked.

While the ayatollahs may share many of his opinions, and have clearly found it convenient to use him as a lightning-rod for international opprobrium, the diplomatic opening offered by the Obama Administration to initiate a new and less-rancorous relationship with the US and its Western allies may outweigh any lingering loyalty they may feel to Ahmadinejad himself. In short, he may have outlived his usefulness. And the upcoming election may provide the perfect opportunity to bring in new and less polarizing leadership.

Reading Iranian tea leaves is a notoriously difficult art, but in addition to this largely unreported public scolding of Ahmadinejad, two other recent events: the announcement by Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, that the organization had stopped firing rockets at Israel for the time being; and the sudden release of Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi, should be taken as serious signs that Iran is rethinking its options on multiple fronts, and carefully testing the temperature of the international waters.

In contrast to the previous events, however, Saberi’s case did capture public, media and diplomatic attention with both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama denouncing the obviously trumped-up nature of the charges against her. While important, and a likely further signal of Iranian interest in pursuing better relations with the United States, the Saberi case should not be seen in isolation. Taken as one more step in the delicate diplomatic dance occurring between Iran and the United States, it is part of a much larger drama, which, if successful, may help defuse one of the world’s potentially most explosive situations.

Les Adler for The Institute

2009-03-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

"Humans have always walked this way because that is the way we were 'designed'"

I recently wrote an online news story for New Scientist about 1.5-million-year-old footprints discovered in Kenya. I found some of the readers' comments disturbing. It took me a while to figure out why.

The research article appeared in Science on February 27, 2009. It described the discovery and study by an international team of researchers of the second oldest footprints left by human ancestors--the oldest showing unambiguous evidence of modern foot anatomy and our efficient way of walking.

Although bipedalism dates back several million years earlier, the footprints reveal that our ancestors--from foot size and shape almost certainly early Homo erectus--had evolved anatomically modern feet and a springy stride like ours by 1.5 million years ago.

At first I was pleased to see that the story generated lots of comments. It's good to know that people are reading what one writes.

The first few comments were fine, but I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the conversation quickly devolved into an exchange between creationists and supporters of evolution.

I had several reactions. The first was irritation, like finding that an uninvited guest has crashed your party. The second was frustration, even anger, at the creationists' glib dismissal of the dozen scientists who had discovered, painstakingly excavated, and carefully analyzed the footprints, not to mention a century or more of physics, geology, paleontology and, of course, evolution.

Everything was fair game, from the identification of the footprints--"The look like gorilla prints to me,"--to the dating--"1.5 million years ago? Was someone there to make a record of the date?"--to the theory of evolution as a whole--"None of which is supported by any evidence except what men decide to believe."

It was obvious that when any mere field of science got in the way of creationism, the science had to be trashed.

In the end, however, I realized that my strongest feeling was boredom. When I tried to read the creationists' comments, my attention wandered, my eyes glazed over, and I wanted to be doing anything other that trying to make sense of comments like "All features of a species have an ability to adapt to an environment . . . but that is a far cry from turning a fish into a bird."

Creationism, I realized, is God-awful boring.

Creationsim collapses the vast grandeur of the cosmos into a morality play about--you guessed it--us.

Not counting old-Earth creationists, who accept a geological time scale but still reject evolution, creationists pancake the universe's nearly 14 billion year history into a few thousand years.

Here on earth, creationists replace the chaotic creativity of more than four billion years of geological, chemical, and biological churning with six days of check-list Creation.

In the end, creationism answers every question about how we and everything we find around us got that way with, "God (excuse me, the Intelligent Designer) made it that way."

How did those footprints end up buried under layer after layer of distinct, datable sediments? God put them there.

What does it mean that, suitably measured, the ratio of argon-40 to argon-39 in the volcanic ash above the footprints is a tad lower than in the ash below them? Could it mean that the lower layer is a few hundred thousand years older? Nope. God salted those isotopes in just that way.

What can we learn by comparing these footprints to the 3.7-million-year-old Laetoli prints? Could their differences shed light on the evolution of our feet and walking style? Nah. God made the Laetoli prints smaller, wider and flatter, and these new prints longer, slimmer and more arched. Don't ask why.

What's the relationship between the increased mobility of Homo erectus that these prints confirm and the fact that it became the first hominin to leave Africa and thrive across Europe and Asia? Hmm. Must have something to do with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. Check out Genesis 1:26 through 3:24 for the details.

It's not that an omnipotent Intelligent Designer isn't a good-enough answer to such questions, it's that it is way to good an answer. It's a game ending, that's-all-she-wrote, one-size-fits-all, alpha-to-omega, end-of-story, let's-all-go-gome, hydrogen bomb answer.

By answering everything, it answers nothing.

I obvioiusly don't understand the need for capital-C Certaintly and capital-T Truth that creationists seem to share.

I'm much more curious about what the next dig will turn up, how the next fossil or footprint of flower-strewn burial will change our understanding of our past, what a more detailed understanding of the changing geology and climate of east Africa two or three million years ago will tell us about the challenges our ancestors faced and why some of them survived and reproduced (and yes, evolved), while others faded away.

I know that I'll never get Certainty or Truth from science. What excites me is what science gives us every day--new and better answers to old questions, and answers that provoke new and better questions.

God may be The Answer, as the bumper stickers and billboards tell me. Perhaps to some people and some questions, but just not to the questions that science and scientists ask.

Robert Adler

for the institute

2009-01-05T10:42:00.000-08:00

Economics—the infantile science

At the start of the 21^st Century, it shouldn’t take a Nobel-Prize-winning mind to understand that all dynamic systems need regulation in order to function and last.

The first steam engines ran away with themselves and blew up. Physicists and engineers came up with a simple, elegant, and totally non-controversial solution. They added a governor, a device that throttled back the flow of steam into the engine when it revved up too much.

No 18^th Century Ronald Reagan emerged, to my knowledge, to argue that steam engines were being over-regulated, and that the world could power more trains and ships by de-regulating their engines and pouring on more coal.

Biologists and physicians have learned that the human body is an intricate network of dynamic systems, every one of which is held closely in check by one or more “governors”—negative feedback loops.

Flexing your biceps stretches your triceps. That sends a nerve signal that keeps your biceps from contracting too much. If that feedback fails, your muscles can break your bones.

Down a sugar-laden dessert and your blood sugar level surges. In response, your pancreatic islet cells pour insulin into your bloodstream. The insulin drives your blood sugar back into a healthy range. If the feedback fails, you develop diabetes.

Did you ever wonder how it is that your body temperature stays so close to 98.6 degrees? Or how all those variables that show up on your blood test results stay in a normal range?

It doesn’t happen by accident, nor from the intervention of some “invisible hand.” It happens because every system in your body is regulated, kept within its functional range, by negative feedback loops.

Cells in your skin, your gut, your liver and your bones are constantly dying and being replaced. Those billions of reproducing cells are held in check by multiple inhibitory loops. If enough of those feedback loops fail, the result is cancer, and often, death.

Do doctors wish away these intricate regulatory pathways? Do they yearn for the days when they didn’t have to think about how the body regulates itself? Do they encourage you to eat all the sugar you want, spend unprotected hours in the sun, or dose yourself with carcinogens?

Of course not. They devote themselves to understanding and working with those vital regulatory loops. If systems are out-of-whack, they try to tweak them back into range. If they are broken, they try to replicate their functions with carefully controlled doses of medication.

Is this news to anyone? It was, when the dynamics of diabetes were first understood. That was in 1901.

Actually, you don’t need to know anything about physics, biology or medicine to understand the need for regulation.

Think about any game, from marbles to NFL football. Every game has its rules and regulations, and—beyond the elementary school playground—its referees and commissioners. Without rules, and rules that are enforced, games stop being fun or even playable. They degenerate into chaos.

So how is it that the brilliant minds that have been in charge of our markets—arguably the biggest and most important game around--over the past 30 years convinced themselves and tried their damnedest to convince the rest of us that markets not only could function without regulation and regulators, but would automatically create more and more wealth and prosperity as more and more regulatory loops were disabled?

As an aside, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time that experts got important things dead wrong.

Learned doctors kept bleeding patients, and supporting rivers of blood-letting with elegant arguments, for centuries.

Other leading physicians shunned the innovator Ignaz Semmelweis and his reality-based demand that they scrub their hands on the way from the autopsy table to the delivery room. By doing so, they condemned hundreds of thousands of women to needless death from “childbed fever,” a deadly disease whose occurrence they “explained” without reference to their filthy hands by a plethora of passionately defended theories.

One of America's “best and brightest,” Robert McNamara, truly believed that revving up the bombing of Vietnam would win the war. The more it didn't work, the more he believed it.

And of course we should not forget the highly experienced, Olympic Class Captain, Edward J. Smith, whose “full speed ahead” order doomed the Titanic.

Many pundits have offered “explanations” for the expert insanity of the people who have just run the global financial system into the iceberg of reality.

--Greed, for one, and short-sightedness for another. By report, the entire system was rigged to grossly reward people for any scheme they could come up with that would produce impressive short-term gains and disguise risk.

To hell with the future, and the public be damned.

--Others have noted a self-reinforcing coterie of economists pursuing the same agenda and lauding each other’s brilliance, up to and including the experts who have awarded a series of Nobel Prizes in economics for a set of abstruse theories about how markets function and how risk should be calculated, all of which were based on the assumption that market moves follow a normal distribution, like height, weight, or IQ.

Unfortunately, that fundamental assumption is blatantly wrong. As we have just seen for ourselves, market moves can be enormous, the equivalent of finding a person who is a mile tall, or has an IQ of 10,000.

The result, it seems, was a self-reinforcing system of theories and the financial instruments that flowed from them, all based on a grossly flawed assumption. Both the theory-builders and the traders who applied them were, and continue to be, more-than-amply awarded.

--Not to mention that even the scattered and tattered regulations that had survived thirty years of regulatory clear-cutting were not enforced for the biggest players, for example, Bernard Maddoff and his $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Too bad that it was all a house of cards, and that the house collapsed, and that we all live in that house.

Although greed, short-sightedness, and institutionalized arrogance all played their role, I think that a more accurate assessment of how our economic and financial experts got all this so very wrong is that economics remains not just a dismal but an infantile science.

Infants live in a world of magical thinking. They imagine that they have unlimited power to shape reality to their will; that every wish will be fulfilled. If they were infant philosophers, they might even invent an “invisible hand” that feeds them when they are hungry, sooths them when they are upset, and will continue to do so forever.

Growing up means leaving magical thinking behind, accepting that people can’t fly (at least without building airplanes equipped with thousands of carefully designed feedback loops), that there’s no Santa Claus, no free lunch.

Growing up means living within the limits of nature and accepting the need for rules.

That’s pretty much what the great deregulator, Alan Greenspan, admitted when he told Congress on October 23, “I made a mistake.”

That mistake, by this very brilliant and remarkably wrong-headed man, and his colleagues, cost U.S. investors about $7 trillion, and investors worldwide perhaps $30 trillion, so far.

That’s almost $23,000 for each man, woman and child in the U.S., or $4,450 for every inhabitant of the world.

During the last few weeks of 2008, the S&P 500 index jittered around a 40% loss for the year.

That means that 40% of the value that almost everyone believed those stocks represented on January 1, 2008, was hot air.

If the stock market was a gleaming, 100-story tower on January 1, 2008, with more floors fully expected, on December 31 it was a smoldering wreck, with the top 40 stories pancaked into shards and dust.

And, as we saw on September 11, 2001, it will be something of a miracle if the whole tower doesn’t come crashing down.

(Note March 10, 2009) As of the stock market close yesterday, the major indexes have lost over 25% of their value so far this year. So make that 55 stories gone; 45 to go. In the crash of 1929, the market pancaked to 10% of its pre-crash peak, and took until the 1950s to climb back to that level!

If the current financial collapse teaches us anything, it’s that it is time for economists, theoretical and applied, to grow up, and fast.

Want a watch that keeps good time? Buy one with good feedback loops.

Want a car whose engine doesn’t blow up? Buy one with good feedback loops.

Want your computer to keep working? Buy a good voltage regulator.

Want traffic to keep flowing? Keep paying for those pesky traffic lights and peskier cops.

Want the world’s financial markets to work long term?

We, voters and investors, need to grow up and not buy castles in the air.

And, to make sure that the world’s markets and the people who run them act like grownups, regulate them, regulate them well, and enforce the damn rules, especially for the biggest players.

2008-10-10T15:09:00.000-07:00

How much atmospheric CO2 can we live with?

That’s the question James Hansen, director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, addressed on October 7 at the Joint Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Houston, Texas.

His short answer is less than 350 parts per million—the level Hansen believes will preserve Earth’s ice sheets, mountain glaciers, and head off a devastating sea-level rise.

The fact that we have now surged past 387 parts per million of CO2, with no effective control in sight, is alarming.

A state of emergency

“I believe we’ve reached a state of emergency,” Hansen said, “although it’s not easy to see. But if you look at the science, it becomes clearer and clearer.”

It’s enough of an emergency to force him to rethink nuclear power, an issue on which he’s previously been “an agnostic.” Renewable energy alone in sufficient quantities, he said, would be too costly.

Hansen walked the audience through the science—ice cores that reveal CO2 levels over the past 800,000 years, microscopic shells from under the sea floor that track ocean bottom temperature and salinity for the past 35,000,000 years, reconstructions of past glaciations and sea levels, the current rates at which the Earth is warming and its ice sheets disintegrating, and computer models of the climate system.

The bottom line is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere drives Earth’s climate, and that we are driving CO2 off the charts.

“All we have to do is graph the greenhouse gas forcing over the past several hundred thousand years,” says Hansen. “When we choose the right scale, it’s a hand and glove fit. Humans are now completely in charge of the composition of the atmosphere. CO2 and methane are far outside the range they’ve been in for millions of years.”

We’re in charge but out of control

Did you catch that—“Humans are now completely in charge of the composition of the atmosphere.” In charge, but out of control, like airplane without a pilot.

We’re not even close to heading in the right direction. Even countries that signed on to the Kyoto Accord have increased their carbon emissions. There’s more CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in the last 650,000 years, and the rate at which it’s increasing is itself increasing.

“The actual actions of countries worldwide are inconsistent with stopping the CO2 rise,” Hansen said. “Energy departments around the world are assuming we can burn all the remaining fossil fuel. That will double or triple atmospheric CO2.”

What that means, he said, is that unless global carbon emissions are cut drastically, and soon, we’re headed for “. . . a completely different planet than the one that’s existed in the past. Obviously, it would be an ice-free planet, warmer than it’s been in any of the recent interglacials.”

Among other impacts Hansen foresees is the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas, Rockies, and Andes within the next few decades, threatening the water and food supplies of hundreds of millions of people.

Hmm. Where would they go, and what kinds of upheavals would that kind of mass migration cause?

Irreversible tipping points

Hansen also warned about climatic and environmental tipping points, “where the dynamics of the system take over and you don’t need any more forcing and there’s the potential to lose control.”

One example is the disintegration of the ice sheets. “It takes thousands of years to build up an ice sheet from snowfall,” he said. “If we cause the West Antarctic ice sheet to disintegrate, that’s essentially irreversible.”

“I think that the metric for what is dangerous should be headed by these irreversible effects, such as the extermination of species,” he said. “We know that when there have been warmings of several degrees in the past, more than half of the species on Earth at that time went extinct.”

Remarkably, Hansen remains optimistic about our ability to push CO2 levels back below 350 parts per million and turn this looming catastrophe around. The keys are technology and public policy.

One necessary ingredient, he says, is to cut back immediately on the burning of coal as well as other fossil fuels. “We could say that we’ll only use coal at power plants where we will capture and sequester it,” he said.

Hansen also wants to see carbon emissions taxed. “The public has to understand that we have to put a price, a tax, on carbon emissions,” he said. “That has to be given back, so the person who reduces his carbon emissions more than average will make money.”

Hansen is now re-examining nuclear power. In principle, he says, fourth generation reactors can burn nuclear fuel far more efficiently than in the past, while generating much less--and less dangerous--waste.

“I think we should be doing the research on nuclear power and having a trial of fourth generation technology, because that may very well be necessary,” he said.

Crimes against humanity and nature

From Hansen’s point of view, business-as-usual versus re-stabilizing the climate is an intergenerational conflict with enormous moral and legal implications.

“It’s an inequity and an injustice for the young and the unborn,” he said. I think it raises ethical and legal questions about liability. There has been intentional misinformation of the public, which makes the companies that engage in that and fund the contrarians to misinform the public ethically and I think legally liable for what I call crimes against humanity and nature.”

Hansen does not believe that the free market alone can or will solve this problem. “The profit motive seems to be so strong that I don’t think we can rely on their conscience to change things,” he said. “We have to rely on public policy.”

Hansen has consistently and courageously advocated on behalf of a stable climate and a viable future for our children. We need to make sure our leaders know he's not alone, and that this may be our last chance to act.

2008-09-24T18:02:00.000-07:00

McCain sucker-punches Obama

Remember the Clint Eastwood movie Million Dollar Baby?

The rising star, Maggie Fitzgerald, is winning a crucial match against Billie "The Blue Bear," an older boxer with a nasty reputation. The bell rings at the end of a round. Both boxers lower their guard and turn toward their corners. But from out of Maggie's sight, Billie decks her with a vicious sucker punch. Maggie falls, hits her head on the corner stool, breaks her neck, and ends up paralyzed.

Minus the broken neck, that's pretty much what happened to Barack Obama today.

With Sarah Palin's luster fading and the economy in meltdown mode, Obama surged to a nine point lead in a Washington Post-ABC poll. At 8:30 this morning, Obama called McCain to suggest that, since they agree on many of the key issues, they issue a joint statement on the financial crisis. McCain called back six hours later and said sure, good idea, and went on to suggest that they consider suspending their campaigns until Congress passes a bailout bill. Obama said he'd need to think about that, and suggested that their staffs talk it over.

Obama put down the phone, turned away, and got to watch McCain go on national TV to announce that he, for the sake of the economy and the country, was suspending his campaign and proposing to move back the presidential debate set for this Friday.

It was a nasty but brilliant move, worthy of Carl Rove at his best. To say that it caught Obama flat-footed is a major understatement.

And, just to rub it in, McCain innocently announced that he'll still be happy to work on that joint statement.

In the movie, Clint Eastwood made sure that everyone saw the sucker punch in sickening detail, and despised Billie for throwing it.

In real life, McCain comes out looking like a great statesman, the one candidate who really cares about us.

Assuming that Obama gets sponged off and climbs back in the ring, let's hope that the next time around he won't be quite so naive, nor quite so quick to lower his guard and hold out his hand.

It's a lesson he urgently needs to learn if he's going to be President, and not just in dealing with John McCain.

2008-09-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

APA backs out of the torture business

It took several years of grass-roots advocacy and a rare vote by the entire membership, but the American Psychological Association (APA) have finally bowed out of the dark realms where torture is carried out.

Following a long series of revelations about how American psychologists have wittingly or unwittingly abetted the Bush administration’s programme of coercion and abuse of prisoners in the war on terror, activists within the APA forced a ballot on an unequivocal anti-torture resolution.

The mail-in balloting closed on 15 September. Nearly 60 percent of the 15,000 APA members who voted supported the resolution, which will take effect no later than the next APA meeting in August, 2009.

The heart of the resolution forbids APA psychologists from working in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.”

By taking this stance, even belatedly, the APA have not only joined other professional associations worldwide in condemning torture and prohibiting their members from abetting it, but have taken the right side in the long historical struggle to end torture.

In 1563, the Dutch physician Johann Weyer published his great work, On the illusions of demons and on spells and poisons, in which he argued forcefully against the witch-hunting madness sweeping through Europe and condemned the use of the torture to force suspected witches to confess to satanic acts and name others.

It’s no coincidence that Weyer, a physician who believed in the Hippocratic admonition, “First, do no harm,” was one of the few voices of humanity and reason in a fear-wracked time not entirely unlike our own.

The APA could have taken this stance earlier, as did the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, and still need to implement the resolution.

Still, they deserve praise for joining the ranks of true healers throughout history who have refused to be associated with the practice of torture, however strongly advocated by the authorities of the day.

Robert Adler

2008-09-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin--Black Swan rising

A Black Swan, according to philosopher/stock trader Nassim Taleb, is an intrinsically unpredictable, completely unexpected event with major consequences.

Based on a lifetime of studying and trying to deal with Black Swans, Taleb believes that in our highly dynamic, intimately interlinked, and intensely non-linear world, these rare but extremely potent bolts-from-the-blue actually dominate most human affairs, including economics and history.

We may be seeing a Black Swan in the making in John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States.

Given that the current race appears extremely close, and that McCain is 72 years old and has a history of a potentially life-threatening form of skin cancer, Palin is arguably a few key votes--or voting machines--plus a few rogue skin cells away from becoming the 45th President.

Palin, a 44-year-old self-described "hockey mom," attended a string of community colleges before earning a bachelor's degree in communications, with a minor in political science, from the University of Idaho. She was a very competitive basketball player in high school, the runner-up, and winner of the Miss Congeniality Award, in the Miss Alaska pageant of 1984, and worked as a sports reporter and in her husband's business before entering politics.

Her rise in the political world can only be seen as meteoric. She served on the Wasilla, Alaska city council for two terms, as mayor of Wasilla for two terms, and became the governor of Alaska on December 4, 2006.

Wasilla is a town of 7,025 inhabitants. As mayor, Palin oversaw a budget of $6 million and a staff of 53. Alaska is the largest state in the U.S. in terms of area, but the 47th in population, with fewer than 700,000 inhabitants.

Not surprisingly, not a lot is known about Palin's character or politics. She appears to be a deeply committed Christian conservative who appeals strongly to the Religious Right, a crucial voting block that McCain has had difficulty inspiring. She clearly is a powerful speaker who effortlessly conveys the common touch that so strikingly eluded Al Gore and has bedeviled Democratic presidential candidates from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama. At least some Alaskans see her as determined, even ruthless, in getting her way.

It's also clear that despite Palin's lack of national or international experience and, until now, visibility, she has dramatically energized the Republican base and sapped any momentum that the Democrats gained from their convention. Since Palin's nomination, McCain has surged ahead of Obama in national polls.

This commentary is not meant to criticize Palin or bemoan her candidacy. Rather, it is to alert readers to a Black Swan taking wing as we watch.

According to Taleb, totally unpredictable high-impact events--Black Swans--increasingly dominate economics, politics, and other aspects of human affairs. He argues that pretty much all of us, including key decision makers, blind ourselves to the existence and impact of these rare, but world-changing surprises. We blissfully go on making plans and predictions as if Black Swans didn't exist, leaving ourselves vulnerable to enormous unforeseen risks.

Even when a catastrophe like 9/11 shocks the world, Taleb notes, leaders may learn enough lessons to ward off an exact repetition, for example by increasing airport security, while learning nothing at all about the inevitability of future, equally unforeseen Black Swans, such as the mortgage meltdown that started here and is now rippling through the global economy.

So here we are, in September of 2008, with a planet full of problems from shaky economies to edgy international relatiions, with climate change and shortanges of energy, food, and water looming ahead. On January 20th, 2009, we may see John McCain take the oath of office, and, quite possibly within the next few years, Sarah Palin.

For Palin to take the reins of the most powerful nation on Earth would indeed be a striking Black Swan.

She might, of course, be a great president. The relatively inexperienced Harry Truman took office following the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April, 1945, with World War II still raging. Truman had the grace to admit that he felt "like the moon, the stars, and all the planets" had fallen on him. Yet many historians now consider him one of America's best presidents.

Or, the McCain-Palin ticket may lose, and the U.S. will have a different, yet also relatively young and inexperienced President.

The point is not to try to predict who will be President, nor how good or bad he or she may be. It's to join Taleb in recognizing, really facing the fact that despite the best efforts of pundits, politicos and professors, the unfolding of history is truly unpredictable.

If Palin does become President, I'll certainly feel some satisfaction that I recognized a Black Swan before it was fully fledged, and may have helped alert others to it and to Taleb's fascinating--and frightening--view of the unpredictability of human affairs.

Still, as Taleb writes about how he felt when the stock market crash of October 19, 1987 shocked even the savviest of his fellow traders--"I felt vindicated intellectually, but I was afraid of being too right and seeing the system crumble under my feet. I didn't want to be that right."

Me neither!

2008-08-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

Bush and Cheney--lame ducks or dangerous dinosaurs?

Here’s a real-life scene worthy of a Hollywood thriller:

Three U.S. senators huddle over a document, closely watched by a team of White House lawyers. The senators have been granted a quick view of a zealously guarded report. They’re allowed to scribble a few notes before the papers are whisked away.

What could this eyes-only document be? A warning of an impending terror attack? The discovery of a killer asteroid plummeting towards Earth? The truth about UFOs?

None of the above. This scene, which took place in the U.S. Senate on 25 July, was just a skirmish in one of many battles that the Bush administration continues to wage as their final five months in power tick away--in this case furthering their program to derail any meaningful action on climate change.

For the lame ducks that they supposedly are, Bush et al. continue to show a lot of teeth and claws.

The much-fought-over document is a report on the impacts of greenhouse-gas-driven climate change on the U.S. It was grudgingly prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the agency to determine if greenhouse gas emissions threaten public health or the environment.

The study reportedly corroborates what most of the world has long accepted—that the world’s climate is changing in response to greenhouse gas emissions, that future emissions will exacerbate climate change, and that those changes will impact the U.S.—not to mention the rest of the world—to such a degree that unchecked emissions are likely to endanger public welfare.

Those conclusions are far from radical today, but remain anathema to President Bush and especially Vice President Cheney—who has strenuously pushed the agenda of the most reactionary of the petrochemical and coal behemoths on energy and climate issues.

If the EPA findings were to become official policy, the agency could be mandated to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. To an administration that has done everything in its power to block public awareness of climate change in the U.S., and, a fortiori, official studies, recognition of the problem, or—heaven forebid—national or international action, the report had to be derailed.

So, when the EPA emailed the report to the White House in December of 2007, Bush et al. finessed the potential threat by the remarkable ploy of simply refusing to open the email. Remember those hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys?

That report is not the only casualty in the administration’s climate-and-energy war. Last October, for example, John Marburger, the President’s chief science advisor, reportedly gutted a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on the health effects of climate change. In December, Stephen Johnson, who heads the EPA, overrode his own staff recommendation, and scuttled California’s attempt to regulate its own greenhouse gas emissions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA have also run into the administration’s climate-change firewall.

On the international front, this administration has consistently sabotaged attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions and other meaningful steps to head off potentially catastrophic climate change at meetings of the G8 and at the UN climate summit at Bali, Indonesia, in December, 2007. As the world tries to craft a successor to the Kyoto accord, the U.S. continues to push any numerical caps to carbon dioxide production into the distant future.

The conventional wisdom in the U.S. and much of Europe right now has it that Bush and Cheney are lame ducks waddling towards the door, and that the world should look past them to a hopefully more enlightened administration.

That would be fine if action on climate change were not so urgent. A series of recent studies in leading science journals has made it clear that the pace of climate change is accelerating to a degree that is surprising and alarming to many climatologists. Runaway ice melt, carbon-dioxide-bubbling permafrost, methane-belching seafloors, and changing ocean currents are just a few of the dangerous tipping points that Earth's climate could soon cross.

Testifying before Congress on 23 June, 2008, NASA climatologist Jim Hansen redlined six “tipping elements” that Earth’s climate is likely to crash through unless we cut atmospheric carbon dioxide from the current 385 parts per million to 350 or less. This is crucial, Hansen writes, “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”

Even economists have started to sense the same urgency. Rajendra Pachauri, an IPCC economist says—"If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

The community of nations is now preparing to negotiate the agreement that will replace Kyoto. That new accord, which needs to be in place by December of 2009, looks to be our last best chance to head off catastrophic climate change.

If this is in fact “the defining moment” for Earth’s climate, then the Bush administration’s continued determination to block or delay any meaningful domestic or international action until they are ushered from the White House makes them look a lot more like velociraptors than lame ducks.

The U.S. Congress needs to be encouraged to redouble its efforts to reign in this still dangerous administration and act forcefully on climate change, and the international community needs to do everything it can to ensure that the next president is committed to getting the U.S. up and running on this vital issue from his first day in the oval office.

If instead we let the dinosaurs continue to run the world, we should not complain when we find ourselves back in the Cretaceous.

Robert Adler

2008-05-29T17:03:00.000-07:00

Pinko Polar Bears

On May 22, columnist George Will recast the U.S. government's reluctant decision to protect polar bears as part of a supposed war against all things good, true and American by the "green left," which he then equates with the "red left." He makes a big deal over some worries about global cooling that appeared three decades ago. You can read his rather slimy diatribe here. The institute's response follows:

Dear George,

I think you confuse the assiduous work of the scientific community
with a leftist agenda to establish complete government control.

If you would read the data and reports of the scientists instead of
relying upon your ideological perspective you might find that the
international community has come up with a broad consensus and a few
articles from 33 years ago do not prove them wrong.

When large insurance (and reinsurance) companies, most of the Fortune 500, every
other industrial nation, financial institutions, and stockholders such as
the Rockefeller family agree that climate change/global warming is a
threat that needs to be attacked immediately, one has to wonder why
all of these entities with their own scientific teams have decided
one way, and you with a seemingly impermeable ideological bent have
decided the other.

Perhaps, George, the experts--including the 1700 leading scientists who just published yet another urgent warning on climate change--are right and you are wrong.

Lou Miller, PhD

2008-05-21T22:24:00.000-07:00

To catch a failing star

For the first time in history, astronomers have caught a supernova—a star blowing itself to bits at the end of its life—at the instant of detonation.

The unprecedented new observations flowing from this discovery are giving astronomers a deeper understanding of just what happens when a star explodes.

Credit: NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler.

On January 9, Alicia Soderberg, an astronomer at Princeton University, was using NASA’s SWIFT satellite to study x-rays from an earlier supernova in the galaxy NGC 2770, 90 million light years from Earth, in the constellation Lynx.

What she had the amazing luck to witness instead was a brilliant burst of x-rays so intense that they overwhelmed the satellite’s detector.

“I truly won the astronomy lottery,” Soderberg says. “A star exploded right before my eyes,”

She instantly realized that the blast was the long-sought signature of the birth of a supernova. Within minutes she alerted astronomers around the world, allowing them to observe the first hours and days of a supernova for the first time.

Until now, scientists could only study supernovas when visible light from dust and gas around the star reached Earth. But since that light arrives days or weeks after the actual explosion, the scientists were left in the dark concerning supernovas’ first days.

Astrophysicists have a working theoretical understanding of how a star dies and creates a supernova. When a massive star runs out of its nuclear fuel, its core collapses under the pull of gravity. The infalling material can reach a speed of a quarter of the speed of light, and a temperature of 100 billion degrees. When the core has collapsed as much as it can, into what’s known as a neutron star, it rebounds, creating an incredibly powerful shock wave. When that shock wave hits the dying star’s surface, it generates an intense blast of ultraviolet light or x-rays.

It was those long-predicted x-rays that Soderberg detected, for the first time.

Now scientists can start to check their theories against real data.

Supernova 2008 D, as Soderberg's discovery is now known, is already the most studied supernova in history. Her incredibly good luck has become astronomy’s great gain. It will let astronomers and astrophysicists fill in the gaps in their understanding of the sudden death of massive stars and the fiery birth of neutron stars and black holes.

Robert Adler

2008-05-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

Obama or Clinton, prepare for the worst

We'd like to be hopeful about the 2008 elections, but the right-wing spin machine remains extremely powerful. Between the spin-masters in the White House and the Pentagon and their sycophantic echo chambers in the media, the current exponents of the big lie have had their way with the American people for at least the last eight years.

If they can take a total slacker and make him president--twice--
and if they can take a genuine war hero and swiftboat him,
then they can turn any truth into a lie
and any lie into the truth.

No matter who wins the nomination, it's going to be brutal campaign.

the institute
May 16, 2008

2008-05-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

America, 14,000 BP

The Monte Verde archaeological site, in Chile near the tip of South America, continues to provoke new questions about when and how people first came to the Americas.

In a paper in this week’s Science, Tom Dillehay, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his colleagues report that previously un-analysed soil samples from Monte Verde yielded nine kinds of algae that the prehistoric people who lived there used for food and medicine. The team radiocarbon dated these organic remains to 14,000 to 14,200 calendar years ago.

Excavating the Monte Verde site

These dates add weight to Monte Verde’s standing as the site of the oldest proven human presence in the New World. The now clearly established fact that people were living deep in South America more than 1000 years before the oldest Clovis site should, as Dillehay points out, place a tombstone on the grave of the hoary Clovis-First theory. The Clovis big-game hunters were clearly not the first people to occupy the Americas, although they did scatter their characteristic fluted spearpoints across much of North America as early as 13,000 years ago.

What’s new and more interesting is how sophisticated the residents of Monte Verde appear to have been. In their Science paper and an accompanying teleconference, Dillehay and his Chilean colleague, Mario Pino, noted that much of the algae they found came from beaches that were then some 60 miles from the inland settlement. In their press conference, they added that the Monte Verde site has also yielded medicinal plants that came from the Patagonian plains far across the Andes from Monte Verde.

Just in the area of food and medicine, says Dillehay, they found " . . . more than 72 plant species that have economic uses, not only from the coast and estuary, but also a wide range of food and medicinal plants that come from the [upstream] forests, the foothills of the Andes . . . and two plants that are medicinal that come from the other side of the Andes, from present-day Argentina.”

The implication is that the 20 or 30 people who sheltered, cooked, treated their sick, and left their footprints at Monte Verde more than 14,000 years ago, were not just an isolated band. According to Dillehay, they had an intimate knowledge of the vital resources in their own area, and may well have been exchanging goods with other established groups from as far away as the Patagonian plains across the Andes.

“That would imply,” says Dillehay, “that there were certain resource zones throughout the Americas where people settled in and perhaps built up a substantial population” 14,000 years ago or more.

If he's right, that’s an eye-opener for the Americas, which until very recently were assumed to have been devoid of humans, much less substantial populations trading with each other, until much more recently.

Robert Adler
May 8, 2008

2008-01-29T09:02:00.000-08:00

Fifty thousand Earth scientists call for climate action, but is anyone listening?

The American Geophysical Union, representing some 50,000 scientists and students in 137 countries, has staked out significant new ground on the issue of climate change. The question is, have they gone far enough?

At a press conference in Washington, DC on 24 January, they released a terse statement saying that “Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming,” that many facets of the climate system “are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural,” and that these changes are best explained by increased levels of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity.

They were equally clear about probable impacts—reduced agricultural productivity worldwide, widespread loss of biodiversity, and, if warming greater than two degrees Celsius continues over centuries, melting ice sheets leading to a sea level rise of several meters.

“The scale of change we’re seeing is something modern society has never seen,” said Michael Prather, who chaired the AGU committee and was also lead author of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Nor did the group rule out the possibility of “surprises that may cause more dramatic disruptions than anticipated.”

Unlike the Bush administration, which has steadfastly resisted international efforts to set specific targets for greenhouse gas emissions, the AGU was not afraid to lay out numbers. “If this two degrees Celsius warming is to be avoided,” they write, “then our net annual emissions of carbon dioxide must be reduced by more than 50 percent within this century.”

When I asked the AGU panel to explain the statement that Earth’s climate is out of balance, Prather said it meant that the climate is no longer cycling slowly within a fixed range. “It’s not a balanced system,” he said. “We’re starting to slide.”

Does that mean that we’re sliding toward an irreversible tipping point? Prather would only say, “We’re moving.” He would not say if that meant “crossing a single critical threshold” or “death by 1000 knives.”

In either case, the panel agreed, concerted, coordinated, and targeted international action is needed.

“If you don’t start on a trajectory downward [for greenhouse gas emissions], you won’t be able to stabilize climate change,” said Prather. “We have to turn it over and bring it down. What we’re really looking for are much larger reductions, greater than 50 percent, by the end of the century.”

Given the clarity and urgency with which the AGU presented the case for urgent action, I was disappointed by their lack of a specific action plan, even for their own organization. “It’s our responsibility to go out and talk,” said Prather, and of course to provide society with the best science possible. But individual members need to decide just what they want to do.

AGU president Tim Killeen also emphasized education, outreach and greater interaction with policy makers, but cautioned that the AGU is determined to stay within its scientific role and not be drawn into “debilitating political controversies”.

Clearly, the AGU deserves kudos for stating the science clearly and for issuing yet another strong wake-up call to citizens and policy makers worldwide.

Still, given the powerful economic and political interests who are fighting any caps or cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, much less 50 percent reductions, I suspect that the AGU is overestimating the impact of good science, education, and outreach alone. After all, energy producers, smokestack industries, automakers and other great producers of greenhouse gasses are not shy about exerting all the political influence they can muster or buy.

To the extent that the AGU and its members take their own work and warnings seriously, and want those warnings to lead to real change, they are going to have to venture out of their comfort zone and into that unfamiliar and risky political arena both farther and faster than they might like.

Robert Adler

for the institute

2007-12-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

Stand up to Bush

According to NASA researchers, the arctic is melting faster than even the most outspoken scientists predicted just a year ago. Climate researchers warn that the Earth is on the cusp of a tipping point, beyond which a vast release of greenhouse gasses from melting permafrost and warming seabeds could irreversibly multiply the impact of human greenhouse gas emissions. Likely impacts include rapidly rising sea levels, coastal flooding, more frequent and powerful hurricanes striking heavily populated regions, more frequent and intense droughts and floods, devastation of the Amazonian rainforest, the extinction of corals and many other species, the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people, and increased threats to the stability and security of many nations, including the U.S.

With this catastrophe fast approaching, the continued intransigence of the United States with respect to negotiating meaningful international emissions goals has become not just an embarrassment but a clear and present danger.

The Bush administration has shown a remarkable indifference to any restraints, whether from scientific research, the U.S. Constitution, the American public, or world opinion. Their behavior in a variety of areas from climate change to war can best be characterized as, “We’ll do exactly what we want, and push our agenda as far as we can, as long as we can get away with it.”

Someone, somewhere, needs to set limits, call Bush’s bluff, point out that this would-be emperor has no clothes.

How remarkable, then, to find that courageous stance coming not from the cowed and cowardly U.S. Congress, nor even from other great nations, but from Papua, New Guinea, a nation of just six million people, most of whom make their living by subsistence farming.

At the just-ended climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, it was Kevin Conrad, the representative of New Guinea, who stood up to the recalcitrant U.S. delegation in a tumultuous public session and demanded, “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.”

Bravo for New Guinea. Perhaps, as small and poor as they are, they have little to lose by standing up to the U.S. Certainly, as an island nation in the tropics, they have a great deal to fear from global warming. Whatever their reasons, they did the right thing.

It’s time for the rest of the world to stand with them.

And it’s long past time for the U.S. to take their advice and get the hell out of the way.

Robert Adler

for the institute

2007-12-06T09:11:00.000-08:00

Even weirder quantum weirdness

It’s not often that one gets the chance to learn, or say, something new about reality itself. So when I came across an article entitled “An experimental test of non-local realism” (Nature, 19 April 2007, p 871), I couldn’t resist looking into it.

I don’t like giving away the conclusion before telling the whole story, but when talking about such basic matters, it’s best to be clear. What the authors, seven quantum physicists in Austria and Poland led by Anton Zeilinger, conclude from theory and experiment is that “any non-local extension of quantum theory has to be highly counterintuitive.”

By that understatement they mean that some of the most fundamental assumptions scientists and lay people make about reality are almost certainly wrong. At risk are such fundamentals as Aristotelian logic, including for example the idea that a proposition cannot be simultaneously true and false; or that the universe is deterministic; or that the present cannot change the past.

“We believe,” the authors write, “that our results lend strong support to the view that any future extension of quantum theory that is agreement with experiments must abandon certain features of realistic descriptions.”

It might be helpful to define some terms. By “realism” the authors mean a point of view that assumes that something exists, that events occur even if not observed, and that the outcomes of observations depend on pre-existing properties of objects, properties that themselves are independent of the observation.

“Local realism” is where Einstein famously dug in his heels. It assumes that events in “space-like separated regions” cannot influence each other—what he disparaged as “spooky” action at a distance. The current authors point out that a long series of increasingly refined experiments dating back to 1972 have definitively proven Einstein wrong on this. Local realism now rests alongside other quaint and outdated scientific ideas such as phlogiston and the aether. Physicists do believe in spooks, at least of this sort.

Still, some aspects of realism might be salvaged through a set of theories based on “non-local hidden variables.” Those theories (which, to give the game away again, the current authors have now tested and found to be wrong) make three assumptions:

--Realism: measurement outcomes are determined by pre-existing properties of particles.

--Hidden variables: the physical states of particles are statistical mixtures of sub-ensembles which themselves have definite properties (for example, polarization).

--Averaging: taken together, the sub-ensembles obey physical laws (in the case of polarization, Malus’ law, which states that the intensity of a polarized beam that has passed through a polarized filter depends on the cosine of the angle between the polarization of the beam and the filter).

The core idea here is that particles such as a pair of entangled photons speeding away from each other are composed of hidden parts which, taken together, carry properties, such as polarization, that show up if and when they are measured at a particular point in space and time.

The authors point out that theories based on these assumptions have been proposed to explain those “spooky” correlations between spatially separated but entangled, particles. These theories have been successful in that predictions based on them have matched the results of all relevant entanglement experiments prior to those the authors undertook.

So what did these authors do? They tested the class of non-local hidden variable theories by measuring the polarization of entangled photons. However, unlike previous experiments, their detectors did not lie in the same plane with respect to the photon source. This novel geometry was needed to test an inequality first derived by Anthony Leggett in 2003. The inequality is based on a very simple property of integers, that, when applied to the quantized properties of entangled particles, allows a thumbs-up, thumbs-down test of non-local realism.

It took some careful tweaking to minimize the noise in their measurements, but the researchers were able to generate entangled photon pairs and compare their polarizations within the correct geometry.

The result wasn't even a close call. They found that Leggett’s inequality was violated by nine standard deviations. If extraordinary conclusions demand extraordinary proof, there it is.

This result does not say as much about what reality is as what it is not. At the very least, particles can not be said to carry hidden information that could do away with that pesky action-at-a-distance spook. The properties of particles really are random until they are observed, and measuring one member of an entangled pair really does determine the corresponding properties of the other, no matter where or when they are measured.

More strongly, the authors suggest that the universe in which we live may not oblige our prejudices by, for example, following Aristotelian logic. The statement, “Their properties really are random until they are observed,” may be both true and false. Present events may be able to influence the past. And—yet another blow to Einstein—the universe may simply not be deterministic.

Although Zeilinger suggests that any or all of these implications of quantum weirdness may be the case, he advocates caution. Writing about Einstein and Schrödinger, both of whom had deep reservations about what quantum theory said about reality, Zeilinger writes, “Yet it is very much to their credit that they both clearly understood which radical changes in our view of the world (Weltanschauung) quantum mechanics in the end necessitates. Changes which might be so radical that it is certainly reasonable and understandable to thoroughly investigate all other possibilities before taking the leap.”

As to what those other possibilities might be, Zeilinger remains agnostic. He quotes the Nobel prizewinning physicist, Isidor Rabi, who said, “"The problem is that the [quantum] theory is too strong, too compelling. I feel we are missing a basic point. The next generation, as soon as they will have found that point, will knock on their heads and say: How could they have missed that?".

Whatever that head-banging enlightenment may be, it's still very much missing.

Robert Adler

For the institute

2007-12-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

Baby bookies

Robert Adler

“Every child is born a genius,” my mother liked to say, usually with the rueful implication that it’s life’s hard knocks that dim that initial promise. A recent study reminded me of her firm belief in the innate brilliance of babies.

Here’s the core of the study:

A one-year-old baby sits on its caretaker’s lap in front of a computer screen. A movie runs for a few seconds showing four objects—three identical and one different--bouncing around inside a circle with an opening at the bottom. Most adults would recognize this as depicting a very simple lottery, but an infant, one assumes, knows nothing about such things.

The scene blanks out for a second. When the circle re-appears, one object tumbles out, leaving three behind.

The question is, can a one-year-old differentiate between outcomes that are more or less probable, that is between trials in which one of the three identical objects exits the circle versus less likely sequences when it’s the unique object that falls out?

If you predicted that one-year-olds can perform this remarkable probabilistic assessment, congratulations. Your high expectations for the cognitive abilities of infants have just been confirmed by an elegant series of experiments carried out by Ernõ Téglás and Luca Bonatti, cognitive scientists at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, and their colleagues, detailed in a recent paper (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 27, 2007).

The researchers found that one-year-olds looked at improbable outcomes significantly longer than at probable ones—for 12.5 versus 9.3 seconds on average. The length of time infants pay attention to an event or scene is a well-established way of determining what gets and keeps their attention, for example things that are unexpected or surprising.

In other words, if one-year-olds could wager, they would be able to bet on the more likely outcome of this lottery based on an apparently innate sense of probability.

The team used carefully designed control sequences to see if the infants might be responding to non-probabilistic aspects of the scenes such as the objects’ shapes or colors. These tests confirmed that the babies looked longer at the unlikely outcomes simply because they violated their intuitive expectations.

“We found that infants can form these expectations, without any need to experience the outcomes of the lottery before,” says Bonatti. “Thus, they can reason about the future independently of their knowledge of the past.”

The researchers went on to show that similar intuitions about probability shape the responses of children at least through the age of five. At three, in fact, the children’s intuitive expectations—in this case anticipating whether a ball will escape from a box through the side with one hole or three holes--trumped what they actually experienced. Three-year-olds continued to favor the intuitively more probable outcomes even when the experimenters made them happen infrequently.

It was not until age five that children’s intuitive sense of probability could be modified over time by the actual frequency of the events they experienced.

So, not only are intuitions about probability in place by the age of one, independently of experience, but they turn out to be both strong and long-lasting.

These new findings add a surprisingly high-level skill to a long list of what Bonatti characterizes as the “stunning cognitive abilities” of babies and young children, revealed by research over the past few decades [New Scientist, 17 May 2003, p 42].

Bonatti notes that by four months of age, babies can differentiate between small numbers of objects, and even respond to addition or subtraction. Infants respond differently to “possible” and “impossible” events. They can categorize objects based on multiple characteristics simultaneously. They know that animate objects can do things that inanimate ones can’t, and that what they do is driven by goals. Most recently, researchers found that six-month old babies can infer character from behavior (New Scientist, 22 November, 2007).

Bonatti is convinced that we humans come into the world with vastly greater and more structured cognitive capabilities than suggested by John Locke’s blank slate or William James’ “buzzing, booming confusion.”

Still, many current developmental theories come down strongly on the “blank slate” side of the necessary interaction between innate capabilities and experience. For example, a widely accepted theory argues that the ability to assess probability necessarily requires previous experience with similar events. “This theory basically says that our ability to predict the future is entirely shaped by our knowledge of the past,” says Bonatti.”

Bonatti does not deny the importance of experience, but his findings emphasize what even very young babies bring to their encounter with the world. “Over and above our abilities to learn from experience, we also have logical and conceptual abilities that do not seem to derive from the world,” Bonatti says. “But, after all, why should this be surprising? We have ears, noses, eyes; why not also cognitive structures for reasoning about the future?”

Why not indeed?

If, as it seems, Bonatti’s findings show that there’s a lot more going on in the mind of a baby than meets the eye, or that modern-day “blank slate” theorists think possible, then it behooves us to look for even more high-level skills, and at even earlier ages. Like astronomers hunting for extra-solar planets, once our instruments allow us to find one, far more are sure to follow.

Ever since Copernicus dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe and Darwin showed that we are more closely related to apes than angels, science has dealt one blow after another to the human ego. In the face of this, I, for one, am thrilled to learn that human infants, at least, have much to crow about.

Not to mention that sometimes mothers get it right.

Robert Adler is a psychologist and science writer currently in Oaxaca, Mexico

Babies can spot the good, the bad, and the ugly
New Scientist, 22 November 2007
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn12948-babies-can-spot-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.html

Bonatti and Téglás’ contact information
http://www.sissa.it/cns/lcd/members.htm

International School for Advanced Studies
http://www.sissa.it/cns/

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, November 27 2007:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0700271104v1?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Bonatti&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

The movies seen by the one, three and five year old children:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0700271104/DC1#F5

What every baby knows
New Scientist, 17 May 2003, p v2
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17823955.400-what-every-baby-knows.html

2007-06-04T10:36:00.000-07:00

Has Bush seen the light on climate change?

Robert Adler

If we take President Bush at his word, the United States is ready, even determined to move to the front of the international community when it comes to climate change. “The United States is taking the lead,” the President announced on May 31, “and that’s the message I’m taking to the G8.”

Given the Bush administration’s long history of obstructing international action on climate change, starting with his rejection of the Kyoto accord months after taking office, I felt the need to ask one of his spokespersons on climate policy, Kristin Hellmer at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, if President Bush was serious about this.

“The President doesn’t’ announce things and not follow through with them,” she said.

Encouraged, I checked the details. It turns out that there is at least some substance behind the President’s bold statement. Jim Connaughton, Bush’s chief environmental policy advisor, followed Bush’s speech with a press conference at which he presented a well-articulated plan. The U.S. wants to work with other nations to create a new framework for international climate negotiations that would have agreements in place and working when the Kyoto accord ends in 2012. “It’s our going-forward strategy on the issue of energy security and climate change,” Connaughton said.

Rather than trying to negotiate a global consensus on greenhouse gas emissions right now, the U.S. believes it would be more productive to bring together smaller groups of countries in negotiations that would lead to “the statement of a long-term goal for reducing greenhouse gases” by the end of 2008. “What the President is trying to do here is find that consensus that will allow for forward progress,” says Connaughton.

It’s worth noting that this is the first time that the Bush administration has indicated any willingness to set specific goals for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. It’s perhaps a mark of how desperate other world leaders are for the U.S. to play a positive role with respect to the climate that both Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the Bush initiative, at least in public. It’s an “important step on the road,” according to Merkel, and “for the first time . . . the opportunity for a proper global deal,” said Blair.

The meetings are to start this fall with the 15 biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, which would include the U.S., several European nations, plus rapidly developing economies such as India and China. The aim will be to forge agreements on “mid-term goals”, to be realized through nation-by-nation targets and strategies to reach them within a decade or two. They would also involve industry leaders from sectors such as transportation, power generation and agriculture in order to encourage technological innovation and rapid dissemination of best practices and new technologies, the latter aided by reducing tariffs and other trade barriers.

Connaughton points out that a focus on speeding technology transfer and encouraging individualized national targets and strategies may be a more effective way to encourage developing nations such as China, India, and Brazil to accept that they too need to rein in their greenhouse gas emissions, than the current cap-and-trade paradigm, which they, along with the United States and Australia, continue to reject.

Each nation’s unique recipe for reducing its climactic impact would be legislated and, in that sense, binding. “It’s the mechanisms that become binding,” says Connaughton. As an example of the kind of mid-term goals he envisions, Connaughton offered President Bush’s call during his January 2007 State of the Union address for the U.S. to reduce gasoline usage by 20% within ten years.

Has the Bush administration seen the light? Can Blair, Merkel, and other world leaders expect to hear “It’s a deal,” rather than “Dead on arrival,” (then U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s infamous reaction to the Kyoto protocol) in response to the next rounds of climate negotiations? Is the U.S. truly ready to take the lead on this vital issue?

One clue lies in the U.S. proposal itself. Its real focus is on getting other countries to lower trade barriers to U.S. technology and services. “We want to drive to agreement on a schedule of eliminating these tariffs in the Doha round by the end of next year,” Connaughton said. (The Doha round is a series of negotiations sponsored by the World Trade Organization that started in Doha, Qatar in 2001, aimed at a worldwide reduction of tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers.)

Unfortunatly, the President’s plan is not nearly as strong on lowering greenhouse gas emissions. According to Connaughton, any greenhouse gas or temperature targets would be “aspirational” rather than binding.

A second clue lies in the timing of Bush’s climate-change initiative, just a week before the start of the G8 meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany. Chancellor Merkel has staked her credibility on getting the G8 to set concrete goals on greenhouse gases and global warming now, not at some indefinite date in the future. This in turn has turned up the heat on the U.S. to do something positive about climate change. Bush’s response—to create a whole new framework for climate change negotiations—undermines Merkel’s initiative.

But the clearest indication of what the U.S. really intends to can be found in a heavily blue-penciled draft of the proposed G8 climate agreement leaked from a U.S. government source to the environmental group Greenpeace and published on 26 May. At the top of the draft, the U.S. declares that the G8 plan and language “runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple ‘red lines’ in terms of what we simply cannot agree to.”

A few of the hundreds of statements the U.S. found unacceptable and blue-lined out:

“ . . . tackling climate change is an imperative not a choice.”

“ . . . resolute and concerted international action is urgently needed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and sustain our common basis of living.”

“We will strive to reach a necessary global agreement by 2009.”

So no, Bush did not hear the voice of Gaia on the road to Heligendamm, and we are not going to witness an epiphany at this time. At the G8 and beyond, the new Bush climate program is far more likely to muddy the waters than clear the air.

2007-04-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

From our point of view, the sooner Bush and his cronies leave office, the better for America and the rest of the world. To help move him along, we're including this helpful countdown to when the U.S. will be out of the bushes and into the fresh air and sunshine once again.

2006-11-27T14:46:00.000-08:00

Who speaks for Oaxaca?

by Robert Adler, Jo Ann Wexler and Monica Trueba

Oaxaca, Mexico, November 27, 2006

You hear it said many times a day here in Oaxaca: Tenemos que aguantar—we have to endure.

You won’t hear this from the principal actors in the political drama which is being played out on Oaxaca’s stage. The leading roles are played by Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, Oaxaca’s, much-despised governor; the PRI, the deeply entrenched political party to which Ruiz belongs; the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO), the increasingly radical activist group demanding Ruiz’s resignation; and the PRD, the opposition party of defeated presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, which has acknowledged bankrolling APPO. They are all determined to win their high-stakes struggle for state and national power, and for international support.

It’s only the long-suffering and essentially voiceless people of Oaxaca who tell each other over and over, “We need to endure.”

Oaxaca’s troubles began in May, when the union representing most of the State of Oaxaca’s 70,000 teachers went on strike for higher wages and better working conditions, as they do every year. This year the governor didn’t award them the raises they expected, since (according to his detractors) he had already spent the money on pet projects which, coincidentally, put money in the pockets of his relatives, political supporters, and the PRI.

APPO occupied Oaxaca following Governor Ruiz’s ill-fated attempt to dislodge the striking teachers on June 14. Voicing idealistic goals, activists barricaded streets, blocked highways, burned dozens of buses, occupied most city and state government offices, and splattered just about every building in Oaxaca with anti-Ruiz graffiti. They turned Oaxaca’s normally enchanting central square and surrounding streets into a tense and sullen encampment. As the situation became known in the international press, tourism, Oaxaca’s major source of income, plummeted to less than 10% of normal.

As the months passed without resolution of the teachers’ issues, Oaxaca’s 1,300,000 school-age children, already among the most poorly-educated in Mexico, slid deeper into the trap of endemic, multi-generational poverty from which APPO claimed to be fighting to free them.

Ruiz’s presumed minions did their share to destroy Oaxaca’s economy as well. Bands of heavily armed, black-hooded marauders have assassinated more than a dozen teachers and other activists in late-night, drive-by shootings. At least 60 people have disappeared. The blatant daytime killing of American journalist Brad Will on October 27, allegedly by local PRI functionaries (although possibly by an APPO provocateur) created headlines worldwide, but was just one particularly visible episode in an ongoing campaign of terror.

Following Will’s death, the international media spotlight turned on Oaxaca and on Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox. He responded by sending in 4,000 members of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), who now control Oaxaca’s zocalo and the route to Mexico City, but still have not been able to re-open all of Oaxaca’s highways. The dramatic November 2 battle for the strategic crossroads of Cinco Señores, near Oaxaca’s APPO-occupied Benito Juarez Autonomous University, inaugurated a new level of violence between APPO and the federal police. Violence erupted again on November 25, when young activists armed with homemade bazookas and shopping carts full of rocks and nail-laced Molotov cocktails turned a nominally peaceful march into a day and night of street battles. The level of violence from federal and local police also escalated. Reports vary, but from three to six demonstrators may have been killed.

With tourism down to a trickle and transportation to and within Oaxaca unreliable, the entire economy is failing. Businesses and services that cater to tourists have closed, including hotels, restaurants, stores and galleries, depleting the savings of the owners and putting thousands of employees out of work. Many of the businesses unfortunate enough to be located in the immediate vicinity of APPO’s encampments likewise have closed. Many Oaxacans were unable to bring their products to market or get to their jobs because of the presence of barricades and the absence of buses. Produce sellers, car repair shops, and dozens of other small businesses closed and laid off their employees. Self-employed workers such as taxi drivers, beauty parlor operators, shoe shiners, vendors, and the artisans for which Oaxaca is famous are barely able to maintain themselves in the local economy since their customers no longer have cash available to purchase their goods and services. Caught in the crossfire between APPO and Ruiz, Oaxaca’s already fragile economy is crumbling.

“We’re like a slice of ham in a sandwich,” says a Oaxacan friend. “We have APPO on one side and Ruiz on the other. Nobody notices that we’re being eaten up.”

The invisibility of the majority of the people of Oaxaca is no accident. Although it’s unlikely that more than a third of the state’s residents support Ruiz, he and his party vociferously claim to represent el pueblo, the people of Oaxaca. APPO’s survival also depends on maintaining its image as the true voice of the people. Although APPO supporters may number in the tens of thousands, a much larger “silent majority” of ordinary Oaxacans simply want their jobs back, their children in school, the ability to get to or across town, and above all an end to this conflict. Yet, when ordinary Oaxacans try to speak out, their voices go unheard.

When reporters descended on Oaxaca in the wake of the arrival of the federal police, it was not unusual to see a crowd of APPO supporters around every journalist, clamoring to be heard. However, we saw people who tried to say that they were neither for Ruiz nor for APPO, but for peace, shouted down and shoved aside.

Representatives of human-rights organizations are in Oaxaca, documenting and publicizing abuses by right-wing groups or the PFP. According to friends, Oaxacans who approach them to report threats or damage by APPO have been turned away. “Apparently we don’t count,” they conclude.

What started as a teachers’ strike has mutated almost beyond recognition. First APPO absorbed the teachers. It now appears that the PRD, led by defeated presidential candidate Lopez Obrador, is bankrolling APPO and so has it dancing to its tune. Not to mention the bombers who struck in Mexico City on November 6, who also claim to be acting on behalf of the people of Oaxaca. Or the increasingly violent activists who now make up a significant part of APPO, to the point that the have become APPO’s new face.

The next time you read a news story about Oaxaca, take a minute before choosing sides. If your political instincts lead you side with Governor Ruiz, remember that he earned his unpopularity by gratuitously attacking 70,000 teachers, and that his PRI functionaries have the blood of many people on their hands. If your reflexes push you to rally with APPO in supposed solidarity with the people of Oaxaca, remember that five months under APPO’s control left Oaxaca trashed and impoverished, and that what may have started as an idealistic, non-violent movement can no longer pretend to be either.

Even more importantly, remember that this struggle doesn’t have just two sides. It also has an inside—el pueblo--the majority of the people of Oaxaca, who still have no voice, and no choice except to endure.

2006-10-05T15:41:00.000-07:00

We’ve seen how much we spend each day on the war in Iraq, at almost three hundred million dollars, that is a lot of money. You can watch the dollars fly at this website. We spend that much for the country as a whole—you can look at what your state is spending. Or you could determine what we could be spending the money on if we weren’t spending it on the Iraq War. We are talking about costs at the present levels of expenditure, but the costs for the war just keep going up and up. The cost of the Iraq War is surpassing that of Korea or Vietnam to become the second most costly in our country’s history. Leading economists predict that the total costs to the United States economy could be between one and two trillion dollars, and pre-war estimates of $100-$200 billion dollars were laughed off by the Bush administration as being exorbitantly high. The estimated two trillion dollar cost is often mentioned in the foreign press, but doesn’t get much notice in the United States. The US has built the greatest economy (and military to guard it) the world has known. However, all empires get to the point where they spend so much money making war that they lose their power, influence and wealth and are no longer the leading country they once were. The Iraq War could do just that to the United States.

2006-09-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

You can read these five earlier posts by REA on etalkinghead.com (http://www.etalkinghead.com/author/44/):

Bush's Big Lie (05/06/05)
Conservatives target America’s colleges and universities (04/14/05)
Hearts, Minds, and Bodies in Iraq (11/08/04)
Fearmongering: Bush and your vote (10/31/04)
An Iraq War cost breakdown (10/13/04)

2006-09-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

Please Vote Republican

If you wept at Ken Lay’s funeral, please vote Republican.

If you still believe “Mission Accomplished" three and a half years later, please vote Republican.

If every time you pull up to the pump you wonder “can’t we give away a few billion more of my tax dollars in subsidies to the oil companies” and “how can I help the oil industry increase its record profits” and “those oil execs need a pay raise” and “shouldn’t George and Dick receive more credit for helping those energy companies out,” please vote Republican.

If you think Valerie Plame deserved to have been ‘outed’ because her husband Joe Wilson spoke out about the manipulation and fabrication of intelligence that lead us into the Iraq war, please vote Republican.

If you look forward to sharing a cell with Republicans Jack Abramhoff, Illinois ex-Governor Ryan, ex-Congressman Duke Cunningham, Jeff Skilling and his Enron buddies, the guys behind the jamming of the Democratic “Get Out The Vote” phone lines in New Hampshire, Thomas Ney, and many, many more, please vote Republican.

If you hate big government so much that you think that incompetence at the highest levels is the solution, please vote Republican.

If you think the numerous groups in the scientific community who have complained for years that the Bush White House has suppressed scientific findings and replaced them with their partisan political agendas are just crybabies or sore losers, please vote Republican.

If you consider ex-Republican House Whip Tom, “The Hammer” Delay to be a ‘friend’ of yours, please vote Republican.

If you define “Compassionate Conservatism” as giving the wealthiest 1% of the population even more tax cuts and look forward to the day when you or your children can pay for that loss in federal revenues through higher taxes or increased deficits, please vote Republican.

If you insist on ignoring the warnings of scientists at the
Jet Propulsion Lab at California Institute of Techology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
US Army Cold Region Research and Engineering Laboratory,
The Scripps Institute of Oceanography,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
and virtually every other leading climatological science group, organization or institute
that human produced greenhouse gases are affecting our climate adversely and we don’t have much time to change the ways in which we produce and use energy —and you would rather be lulled into buying another SUV by the science “skeptics” on the payrolls of the big oil companies, please vote Republican.

If you forgot, or were never told, that the highest ranking British intelligence official, after talking with US administration officials before the war, reported back to his Prime Minister that the US was twisting the intelligence and facts to fit the Bush policy of invading Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you think our founding fathers would be proud of a political party that has admittedly dispatched operatives from WDC to uncover any and all information about Democratic opponents, spin it into “dirt,” and spend 90% of its advertising budget on negative ads, all because it is afraid to run on the issues, its record, and the President’s performance, please vote Republican.

If you love a President whose motto is “support our troops” but who didn’t provide them with sufficient body armor or protection for their vehicles from IEDs and who still won’t cough up the $17,000,000,000 the Army says it needs to repair all the equipment that has suffered the ravages of the sands of Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you don’t remember the time eight years ago when we had such swelling federal budget surpluses that we were pulling out our hair trying to figure out what to do when we paid off the federal debt, and you are glad--with our $300,000,000,000 annual deficits--that we won’t have those sore scalp problems any longer, please vote Republican.

If you believe a war with Iran will be more successful than our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, please vote Republican.

If you think that turning over the safety net of Social Security that has been well managed for seventy years to a bunch of high-paid, smooth-talking Wall Street financers will make your retirement more secure, please vote Republican.

If you want the increase in hurricanes, floods, droughts, diseases, species extinctions, and human wars over scarce resources that global climate change will bring, please vote Republican.

If you look forward to going quail hunting with Vice President Cheney, please vote Republican.

If you consider whistleblowers who stand up against this administration’s incompetence, cronyism, disregard for science, international law and our own Constitution to be mere nuisances who need to be smeared or fired to discourage others from following in their footsteps, please vote Republican.

If you favor Nixonian “dirty tricks” like jamming the Democrat’s ‘Get Out the Vote’ telephones in New Hampshire on election day and your only regret is that you can’t give Get Out of Jail Free cards to those who went to prison for doing this, please vote Republican.

If you condone the torture and other inhumane interrogation of prisoners in Iraq, well over 90% of which were neither terrorists nor criminals, and believe this helps us win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Muslim world, gains us stature around the globe, conforms with the Geneva Conventions, and will not set a precedent for similar treatment of our servicemen and women when they are captured, please vote Republican.

If you think we are ‘winning’ the war in Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you think it’s fair that someone earning the federal minimum wage would have to work for about 20,000 years to earn what Exxon’s CEO was given as a golden parachute, please vote Republican.

If you can make sense of your Medicare Drug Benefits package, please vote Republican.

If you think that ‘Brownie’ and FEMA did a ‘heck of a job’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina, please vote Republican.

If you contributed to the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, please vote Republican.

If you love your children but still think we should be spending over $200,000,000 a day on the war in Iraq, while not providing the promised federal funding for the No Child Left Behind Act, please vote Republican.

If you believe capturing Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’ is no longer important, so it's fine to disband the working group charged with that task, please vote Republican.

If you think Presidential ‘signing statements’ should replace the Constitutional power the President has to veto legislation, please vote Republican.

If you’d be glad that your wife, son, husband, daughter or other relative was called back for a third, forth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you believe that President served every month of his six years of Air National Guard duty according to the terms he signed upon entering the military, please vote Republican.

If you don’t care that the White House Council on Environmental Quality overruled the EPA and declared the air at Ground Zero ‘safe’ after 9/11, condemning thousands of the heroic first responders and clean up crew members to respiratory problems and lives of medical hell, please vote Republican.

If you agree with the threat Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made while planning for the Iraq war that the next high ranking military officer who suggests that we need to have a plan for stabilizing a post-war Iraq would be fired, please vote Republican.

If you favored the US withdrawal from the International Court of Criminal Justice, please vote Republican.

If you just love throwing away your hard earned tax dollars on those no bid military contracts being given to Halliburton and the other corporate cronies of the Bush Administration, please vote Republican.

If you supported the administration’s adamant stance against forming a 9/11 Commission and then when forced by public opinion to create such a commission, fought the commission’s attempts to get information from the administration every step of the way, please vote Republican.

If you think it’s fair that the incomes of the very, very rich should increase dramatically while those of middle class America stagnate, please vote Republican.

If you want the war in Iraq to continue on endlessly, please vote Republican.

If you realize that the touch-screen electronic voting machine you use on election day
1) hasn’t been regulated even to the extent slot machines in Las Vegas are,
2) has software that can easily be hacked to “flip” votes,
3) probably has no reliable paper trail to assure you that the machine correctly recorded your vote,
4) is owned and operated by a company owned and operated by Republicans,
well, then you’re free to vote any way you damn well please, because it won’t make a difference anyway.

ACE for the institute

2006-09-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

Greetings. You’ve just been drafted into the War on Terror.

I don’t know what you heard in President Bush’s “non-political” speech from the oval office on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. What I heard is that The Decider has drafted us all into his apocalyptic, make-it-or-break it view of the world. From now until that great and distant day when Victory over Terror is declared, we are all soldiers in his war. It’s us versus them, good versus evil, the threatened versus the threateners, the advocates of freedom versus the haters of freedom, resolve and sacrifice versus unspeakable violence, Civilization versus Islamofascism.

It’s “our generation’s calling,” the President told us, nothing less than “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21^st Century.” And, he warns us, we’re just “in the early hours of this struggle.” We or our children or perhaps their children can expect battles "like Iwo Jima and D-Day," with “thousands lost in one day.”

Needless to say, the outcome will depend on great “sacrifice and determination,” marked by “passion for service,” nobly watched over by mothers who are “worried but proud” as they send their children off to the crusade. “We will need them,” the President says, and for once I believe him.

But those great sacrifices, those dark and dreadful days, those bereaved mothers will be worth it, because “we will lead the 21^st Century into a shining age of human liberty, the finest the world has ever known.”

It’s ironic that the path to that shining age of liberty leads through abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but no matter.

On 9/11, after we watched in shock as the towers collapsed and thousands died, a friend turned to me and asked, “Do you think this could destroy America?”

“Absolutely not,” I answered, envisioning how vast and rich and great America is, how strong and balanced and resilient we three hundred million Americans truly are. "Absolutely not."

I was horrified by the tragedy of that day, but not afraid. I was sure that the darkest imaginings and most horrible acts of terrorists could hurt us, as they had, but could never destroy us.

But now a little man who would be great has drafted us all into an endless war against Evil itself. That’s another matter entirely.

Now I am afraid.

REA for the institute

2006-09-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

I’m angry.

Carl Rove and the right-wing radicals he’s put in office are not afraid of strong feelings. Anyone who has watched them spin their dark, distorted version of reality for the past six years knows that fear is the meat on which they feed. It’s terror for breakfast, lunch and dinner, terror trotted out whenever another news story reveals them as the liars, misguided ideologues, and arrogant incompetents that they are, terror to drive flocks of the fearful to the voting booths.

The liberals who speak out at all, try as usual to be the voice of reason and realism, even though they know that their fact-based, nuanced views will be derided as cowardly flip-flopping or, now that a key election is closing in, labeled as flat-out treason.

I’m sick of it.

I’m angry that the Bush administration turned the tragedy of 9/11 into the travesty of Iraq.

I’m angry that our country was hoodwinked into a needless, divisive, and costly war.

I’m angry for the years of lies about Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs and links to al-Qaeda.

I’m angry that Bush and his bullies bamboozled us with a classic bait and switch—promising to protect us against terrorism, but giving us instead a war that’s creating more hatred towards the US around the world, and breeding a new generation of terrorists.

I’m angry that our “visionary” leaders could envision a Middle East remade in our image, but in their arrogance refused to plan for postwar Iraq or provide enough troops for a successful occupation and transition.

I’m angry that Rove’s cynical contempt for the American people, his unlimited permission to hammer on our most primitive emotional buttons, and his attack-dog eagerness to Swift Boat anyone who dares oppose his gang, has debased our political discourse to the level of a fight in the sewers.

I’m angry that many of the rights shining forth from the Constitution, rights that generations of patriots fought and died for, have been gutted while a supine Congress cowers in the corner.

I’m angry that our intelligence community shrugged off its obligation to “tell truth to power,” and instead provided the powerful with the propaganda they needed to bully us into war.

I’m angry that the press followed blindly, avidly swallowing the war-party line.

I’m angry that new laws have let the bloated rich grow even richer, while millions of American children have no health insurance and attend crumbling schools.

And I’m angry that America’s gleaming cloak, our vital ability to lead the world through example, has been tossed aside like old rag and replaced by secret prisons, torture called by other names, and naked power.

Damn right I’m angry. Aren’t you?

This November we have the opportunity to plough our anger into electing a new Congress. These elections are crucial, as Carl Rove and his cronies know all too well. If at least the House of Representatives regains a Democratic majority, the checks and balances that have been derailed since 9/11 can start to work again. There will be at least the beginning of a power base that can oppose the rampant, rabid right.

If, however, Bush’s minions eke out yet another win through their unlimited media budget, by waving the bloody terror card again and again, by hammering away at symbolic wedge issues, shamelessly sliming their opponents, and managing to discourage enough voters and discount enough votes, the rest of us—the huge majority of Americans who would never have gone to war to realize Wolfowitz’s dream of an American empire—will be in deep, long-term trouble.

We need to win big if we’re going to win at all. We need so many ordinary people who register to vote despite all the red tape, who vote despite the roadblocks, long lines and broken machines, and whose votes get counted despite Diebold and friends, that no amount of manipulation, machination, chicanery or fraud can keep us from being heard.

Let’s turn our anger into votes, votes that count.

REA for the institute

2006-09-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

As we battle with short-term problems, such as the crucial November elections, it's easy to lose sight of longer-term issues. Human-caused climate change has to head the list. Read this call to action by John Ashton, the UK's special representative for climate change. Hmmm, I wonder why the US doesn't have a high-level climate-change office?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/5323512.stm

REA for the institute

2006-09-06T17:47:00.000-07:00

THE MEANING OF TIME:

"Consider the 6 days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been 4 billion years; on this scale, a day equals something like 660 million years. All day Monday, creation was busy getting the earth going. Life began Tuesday noon and the beautiful, organic wholeness of it developed over the next 4 days. At 4 p.m. Saturday, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At 1/3 of a second before midnight on the last day, Christ arrived. At 1/40th of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded by people who think that what we've been doing for that 1/40th of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad." David Brower.

LA for the institute