In the comments to my post on MRSA, a commenter says:
Providing access to primary care to those who are currently only getting emergency care is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the problem of reducing medical error. (hat tip to the first person to get the reference.) While there may be a reduction in the rate of increase in costs after several years, there will need to be an immense effort made to train an army of primary doctors and get them into the communities where they're needed.Please, stop reading Lomborg. Malaria and global warming are both serious problems. There is simply no reason whatsoever to pit them off against each other. This is even more the case where the solutions to the two problems require different commitments.
This is a very common complaint among liberals about Bjorn Lomborg, who basically argues that global warming is not a high priority relative to other things we could do to alleviate human misery; better to spend a little money on adjusting to global warming and a lot on malaria eradication, than a lot of money preventing global warming and a little money on malaria.
As it happens, I think Lomborg is probably wrong. But I think this criticism of Lomborg is wrong too.
Lomborg's critics essentially say "But we should do both!" But the universe is filled with awesome things we could do; unfortunately, it provides only limited resources with which to achieve them. We have to prioritize. Lomborg is absolutely right that we should order the list of things to do by the cost-effectiveness of reducing human misery, and do the things that reduce the most misery for the least money first. Yes, it might be nice if we did global warming and malaria eradication . . . but perhaps it would be even nicer if we did malaria eradication and sewage treatment. We should always, when considering a policy, consider whether the dollars might be better deployed elsewhere.
THis is particularly important because the governments of the western world are not run by benevolent dictators. They are themselves self-interested, and they are beholden to voters who are not overburdened with unlimited generosity. And for many of their efforts, like polio eradication or, arguably, fighting global warming, improvements will not scale smoothly. That is, it is several orders of magnitude better to have spent enough money to get rid of all the polio in the world, than to have spent half that money and achieved half that eradication. This means that it is probably better to put a lot of money into a few things, than a little money into many things. However nice it would be if those governments could do all good things, in practice, they will do only a few, so it behooves them to choose carefully.
Where Lomborg goes wrong, I think, is not that he urges us to prioritize carefully, but that he is too optimistic in his assessment of global warming. Specifically, he doesn't really address the problem of low-probability, but catastrophic systemic failures. If you change the weighting of those low-probability events--and in fairness to Lomborg, how to weight such things is a matter of hot economic and philosophical debate--then global warming starts to look more important than malaria eradication again.
The same logic may apply to MRSA eradication--or it may not. Perhaps we have the money to do both national health care and MRSA eradication, (assuming for the sake of argument that they are both good ideas.) Or perhaps MRSA eradication is not possible, or is too costly, or is for some other reason a bad idea.
But as a thought experiment, I think it's useful, because it illuminates different priors among different parties to the argument. Some people arguing over national health care on both sides are sort of present-centered utilitarians; they are interested only in the most cost-effective way to make people healthier, given the various political and economic constraints. They might rank MRSA higher on their list than national health care. But other people in the argument have additional priors about distribution; if they could only do one of these two things, they would choose national health care even if MRSA was cheaper or saved more lives, because they're also seeking a form of distributional justice. As I've said elsewhere, I don't think that government provision of health care is a particularly good vehicle for distributional justice. But mostly in this case I'm interested in separating the sheep from the wolves, because my sense is that almost everyone talking about health care tends to argue as if we're all trying to maximize the same thing.
I do not recall that distributional justice is one of the powers enumerated for the federal government in the Constitution. I also don't recall that income redistribution was one of the original justifications for the income tax.
I guess you could also argue that the federal government's decision to pay only a fraction of the bills rendered by medical professionals and hospitals is also a form of distributional justice. Fortunately, it is neither wage nor price control, or it might be contributing to a shortage of care providers.
Specifically, he doesn't really address the problem of low-probability, but catastrophic systemic failures.
An interesting area for studying such low-probability events is physics. There have indeed been experiments where reputable people believed that there was a non-zero but very small chance of destroying the universe. Makes for amusing articles in the popular press, but I'm not really sure how to judge such things.
Single payer health care is cheaper than the US healthcare system.
This is like making a choice between saving $100 on your rent or spending $20 on netflix. Shockingly, you can do both.
Specifically, he doesn't really address the problem of low-probability, but catastrophic systemic failures. If you change the weighting of those low-probability events--and in fairness to Lomborg, how to weight such things is a matter of hot economic and philosophical debate--then global warming starts to look more important than malaria eradication again.
And not only the weights assigned to such events, but also how much of a shift in weight is possible by spending X to prevent it. I.e., if most of measure of the low probability event is where "we're screwed anyway," then we go right back to ignoring it.
The annoying thing about low probability events is just how seemingly trivial measurement and model changes decisively affect decisions. (And, at the same time, how the universe of low probability catastrophes is larger than our ability to prepare for all of them.) The various hype about the "Long Tail" attempts to claim the certain real-life distributions are actually heavy-tailed. That's something that's easily absorbed by measurement error when observing, but the differences in the limiting cases are tremendous.
With specific regard to Lomborg, death from malaria is a FACT; people die of malaria every day. Malaria is not a possible future risk; it is a real and present killer. The solution to ending malaria is known and could be implemented immediately at relatively low cost.
Global climate change is a historical FACT; AGW, on the other hand, is not a fact, but rather a hypothesis. If the solution to ending AGW is known, it is being kept secret. Kyoto, or son of Kyoto, is demonstrably NOT the solution.
With AGW, we are dealing with projected future possibilities based on short term observations and computer projections. With malaria, we are dealing with actual, current, documented body counts. While this is not an argument for ignoring the study of climate change, it is an argument for eradicating malaria.
Based on currently available commercial technologies, the investment required to eliminate AGW by eliminating CO2 emissions (if, in fact, there is a cause and effect relationship) is on the order of $100-400 trillion globally. That is a large investment to perhaps avert, or perhaps only mitigate, a projected future possibility.
"Perhaps we have the money to do both national health care and MRSA eradication, (assuming for the sake of argument that they are both good ideas.)"
MM, if you know where this hoarde lies, maybe you could brief David Walker of the GAO.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/28/business/main2135398.shtml
Perhaps a greater problem -- hinted in MM's disagreement with Lomborg -- is not that many people beleive we can spend resources on every good idea that comes along, but rather that different people have different ideas of which one is the top priority.
Barring an authoritarian government, the result is that resources get thinned down amongst multiple causes, with the most popular causes seeing the greatest allocations regardless of their probability or mitigability.
Megan,
What is the catastrophic outlying risk you fear from global warming? Are we talking about a Jerry Bruckheimer scenario here?
As for Lomborg, his argument about the cost effectiveness of dealing with problems like malaria is partly a response to global warming alarmists who use problems like malaria as reasons to be alarmed about global warming in the first place. These alarmists argue that if you don't reduce global warming, malaria incidents will increase, more polar bears will die, etc., and that you should reduce carbon emissions to slow global warming; Lomborg argues that it would be cheaper and more effective to ameliorate the effects alarmists are worried about than to impoverish ourselves with quixotic attempts to prevent a one-foot rise in sea levels over the next hundred years.
Malaria control and global warming are in fact linked. Malarial mosquitoes cannot exist in temperate and colder climates, therefore as the Earth warms they will be able to shift further from the tropics.
Worse, this scenario applies to all other vector driven tropical diseases, such as dengue fever. So you may expect both malaria and yellow fever back in the USA reasonably soon.
it provides only limited resources with which to achieve them. We have to prioritize.
But "available ressources" are not some fixed bag hiding somewhere, from which we can only draw a finite amount. The available resources may vary depending on what things we are trying to do. I personally feel that there will be far more ressources available to combat global warming than malaria (because global warming affects rich countries: conside the relative political likleyhood of a carbon tax, and a help-eradicate-malaria tax).
The "we should do both" crowd are also correct if either the funding of the two projects do not come from the same source (i.e. we should both encourage people to invest more of their own money and send rockets to Mars) or if the marginal costs balance at some point. There are diminishing returns as well as economies of scale -- it may be that a certain amount of malaria reduction and a certain amount of global warming prevention is the optimal strategy.
Whether the "we should do both crowd" actually think this through to that extent is another question...
Denialists, like Ed Reid above, play a dreary and predictable game. On the one hand they are skeptical, oh so skeptical, of the scientific process and the overwhelming evidence of human-induced climate change. On the other hand, they assert as fact both that solutions would require returning to a hunter-gatherer state and that they would cost trillions.
Nonsense. Selfish and short-sighted libertarians and republicans would just have to acknowledge that there is such a thing as the common good. They'd have to acknowledge that aspects of the current economy have hidden costs, and that adjustments are needed. Furthermore, there is an excellent chance that the US could prosper by selling green technology, and over longer time frames we will have to adjust away from an oil-based economy in any case.
Matt is substantively wrong here. Yes, there are choices in the real world. But the spectrum of choices is far broader than malaria vs. AGW.
Artificially restricting the categories of comparison is a dishonest dodge, and that's my foundational complaint about Lomborg. He is a three-card Monte artist.
Marc,
I said nothing about a return to the hunter-gatherer state. That, if not impossible, is at least clearly implausible for a global population of 6 billion, unless we begin aggressively hunting each other.
I would encourage you to formulate a conceptual plan to eliminate anthropogenic carbon emissions on a global basis, perhaps within the timeframe laid out by former US VP A. A. Gore, Jr. in his congressional "testimony" last April; and, to estimate the investment required to do so. (I have done so for the US, assuming implementation of currently commercially available technology.)
You may not like the numbers you develop any more than I liked my numbers.
First, people need to learn the difference between risk and uncertainty.
With AGW we can't even talk about risk, only uncertainty. Not even uncertainty, but a possible change in uncertainty. And a rather insignificant increase in uncertainty at that. There are far more and much more likely threats of catastrophic failure than the ones tied to AGW.
One way to address uncertainty is to increase knowledge. The other is to develop contingencies. In no way does burying your head in the sand decrease uncertainty [except for the uncertainty of actually being productive. I does cut that down.].
What exactly do you think Lomborg gets wrong?
How much does stabalizing GHG levels decrease our uncertainty about catastrophic failure? None. It's doesn't significantly affect the probability of catastrophe. Catastrophe is just as likely to happen with our without our contribution.
You are talking about a near zero change in a near zero number that doesn't mean much in the first place.
Megan said,
"Specifically, he doesn't really address the problem of low-probability,
but catastrophic systemic failures."
The phrase "catastrophic systemic failure" is a bit ambiguous as
to meaning. I think I know what Megan means. I'll give an example
from another context: asteriods or comets hitting the earth.
To the best of my knowledge the risk that I will be killed by
an asteroid hitting the earth is very low. The chance that I will
be killed by Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus on the
other hand, although low, is many, many orders of magnitude greater.
In fact personally I have already run into Staphylococcus aureus and
it nearly killed me.
So from the perspective of one human being concerned only with himself,
it makes little sense to be spending any money trying to mount a defense
against asteroid strikes given the very long list of personal risks
that are significantly higher.
But is that the only legitimate perspective? What about the risk
of human extinction: the possibility that there might be no more
children, nor never a human thought again. MRSA is not a risk to the
human species. There is no way this bacteria can extinguish humanity.
Almost everything on my list of risks that personally threatens me is
not a threat to the human species.
Asteroid strikes are a threat. There have been multiple such events
in the past that if they occurred today would wipe out the human species
along with many others.
I'll be dead and gone sometime in the next fifty years, probably far
sooner. But strangely I want there to be people after me. I want
others to have that chance at life. So from that perspective it
makes sense to fund efforts to detect and deflect asteroids.
I imagine I'm not alone in thinking this way.
So this is what I think Megan means by "catastrophic system failure."
She is asserting that rising levels of atmospheric CO2 may threaten
human extinction. And that even though such an consequence may seem
entirely improbable, that if there really is such a possibility at all,
then that puts global warming in a different category of risk than
Staphylococcus aureus.
Specifically, he doesn't really address the problem of low-probability, but catastrophic systemic failures.
We don't have a good system for assessing those risks. The biggest problem is that once you include a near-infinite result on the cost side, even a small error on the probability side can result in a phenomenal error on the overall expected cost.
As an example, Dick Cheney famously said that if there is even a 1% chance that Saddam was close to an atomic bomb, almost any action to stop him was justified. You can quibble about the chances of Saddam developing nukes and about the expected cost if he does, and then your expected outcome will vary wildly.
Similarly, as a science nerd, I think the expected cost, if it occurs, of a planet killer cosmic collision is much higher than any plausible expected cost of global warming prior to the development of cheap and effective carbon sequestering technology. Therefore, I call on the world to stop major GW efforts until we have completed mapping out all knowable asteroid and comet orbits, placed an effective asteroid/comet detection system in place, and developed a system to shift any fast approaching extra-planetary objects (seriously).
I also think that disarming the Soviet and Russian nuclear arsenal and developing a self-sustaining human society in an environment other than Earth (and ideally, outside of the solar system altogether) are more important to avoiding catastrophic outcomes than energy conservation. (Seriously).
Finally, how do we balance the cost of future catastrophes that we might avoid through new techology, future catastophes that we might cause through new technology, with the cost of technology that we will lose if we institute a program of energy use reduction serious enough to make a noticable dent in the likelihood of a possible GW catastophe that you believe is possible?
he doesn't really address the problem of low-probability, but catastrophic systemic failures.
So, how much should we devote to asteroid defense, which would be even more catastrophic then climate change?? The problem with devoting resources to anything is there are always other things to devote resources to.
Alarmism isn't helping promote solutions, it causing the issue to be deeply divisive. Either you believe the world is going to end from AGW, or you're sticking your head in the sand.
The science of climate change isn't quite there yet, especially the computer models. There is a bunch of uncertainty in the models. But the trick is figuring out if the uncertainty is enough to bet the whole farm on. And there are still quite a number of respected meteorologists who are less then convinced about the whole thing. For me, it isn't, not yet, primarily because of the computer models. In another decade, things may be refined enough to know where we are going.
Beyond that, there are still good economic reasons for reducing energy use, increasing efficiency, and reducing overall emissions and pollution. I think if we really want to change, we need to come up with cost efficient solutions.
Most people will only care about a problem when they see that it is directly effecting them. Everyone is dealing with high energy prices, so show people how cost effective conserving energy is, and you'll get more people conserving energy.
this is a sincere question (that is, not trolling, actually looking for info):
i understand the threat of planet killer asteroid. but megan seemed to be saying that GW might create some "catastrophic system failure" akin to planet killer asteroids. i've seen no evidence that's a possibility just about any time soonish (e.g., within a couple 100 years).
how could even a significant increase in global temp lead to "catastrophic system failure" that breaks down civilization, rather than "just" increasing costs from xtra hurricanes, rising sea levels, etc. such effects might be very costly, but seemingly not catastrophic. is this just some guess that GW might increase the probability of some global plague?
"how could even a significant increase in global temp lead to "catastrophic system failure" that breaks down civilization..."
This is what I was asking Megan, and what came to mind was the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" where somehow global warming leads to a new instant Ice Age in temperate areas, forcing American survivors to flee to Mexico. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of alarmists took this movie seriously.
To me, the idea of treating CO2 as a pollutant when much of the world is plagued by real pollutants (take a deep breath in Sao Paulo or Cairo sometime) seems crazy.
What is the catastrophic outlying risk you fear from global warming?
The outlying risk that I have seen talked about the most is the cessation of the Gulf Stream, which could cause Europe to lose the ability to grow many (most?) food crops. As I understand it, there is evidence that it has happened in the past, and possibly very quickly. There are processes in the physical world that can change state almost instantly when an equilibrium is disrupted. The same might be possible in the case of the Earth's climate.
I am skeptical about the more extreme claims of the AGW lobby, and having spent some time helping a professor grub for money, I know that there is a lot of hype being generated to grow the scientific grant pool. But, with a degree in physics and astronomy and having taken some economics, I know that: 1) improbable events occur all the time, 2) people (and political systems) have trouble dealing with them.
As I've commented here before, I don't see any economically or politically possible short term fix except massive deployment of nuclear power plants to replace oil, coal, and natural gas plants.
The outlying risk that I have seen talked about the most is the cessation of the Gulf Stream, which could cause Europe to lose the ability to grow many (most?) food crops. As I understand it, there is evidence that it has happened in the past, and possibly very quickly.
And if this is true, wouldn't it be the case that humans being the cause of it was unlikely???
There is a certain cyclical nature to a lot of weather related phenomenon. It's important to understand the cycles, as well as our place and effect in them.
I don't see any economically or politically possible short term fix except massive deployment of nuclear power plants to replace oil, coal, and natural gas plants.
And with an excess of nuclear generated electricity, plug in commuter cars become a more practical option.
ech and Keith Indy,
There was a paper about the Gulf Stream switching on and off
by a norwegian scientist that I used to reference that is
now off the web. Or if it is I don't know where it is.
In any case according to this scientist, from the perspective
of Norway, the Gulf Stream has switched off or on twenty
or so times (I don't recall the actual number) in the last
100,000 years. It's been on for about half the time and
off for the other.
The consequences for Norway are pretty extreme. More or less
the difference between looking like a glacier to what it is
now.
And then there is some data I've seen that suggests the
Gulf Stream volume is diminishing quickly right now.
Although serious for europe this is far from a human extinction
event and in any case seems pretty normal.
still confused -- the dread consequence of GW is that things get warmer, so the gulf stream switches off, so parts of europe get colder? yes, i've read about this before, but don't see how you can view this as catastrophic. does europe end up colder or warmer at the end of the day? how much colder or warmer? and should we care? is warmer europe really bad? if colder europe is really bad, shouldn't we want warming (at least in europe)?
anyone else have something truly scary that GW might cause? cause, so far, there seems to be no catastrophic possibility undermining lomborg's stance.
Warming causes evaporation which causes warming which causes thawing of tundra which releases methane which causes evaporation which causes warming that thaws tundra and releases methane which causes evaporation which causes warming until the oceans are gone and the deserts are flooded and all the swamps are deserts, just like last time it warmed a degree.
(but only if we add CO2, warming from water vapor only causes more evaporation if it's from CO2 and not from warming from water vapor... trust me.)
One thing I never quite understand about the AGW alarmists (my views on AGW are that it is more likely than not to occur, but it is highly likely to be manageable) is that they rarely seem to consider the extreme importance of reducing economic growth rates. Especially as growth compounds, increasing resources mean much more ability to deal with increased disasters, disease, provide more food and health care, etc.
Perhaps equally important, reductions in economic growth effectively kill people . Reductions in economic growth correlate strongly with increased mortality. GW may result in increased deaths, but does it result in more deaths than the decrease in economic growth and resources, especially when the growth compounds? That is not a comparison I have seen. I would not want to accept any limits on economic growth for AGW reduction until a realistic assessment (e.g. not using a zero discount rate like the Stern Report) was done.
What shut down the Gulf Stream at the end of the last ice age was large quantities of fresh water pouring into the western North Atlantic Ocean from the St. Lawrence basin. Which is to say, the melting of glaciers that covered Ontario and Quebec. There are no glaciers in Ontario and Quebec today.
"Malarial mosquitoes cannot exist in temperate and colder climates". This is nonsense. Malaria was endemic to all parts of the USA except the Rocky Mountains until modern control methods were established. Malaria was a major cause of illness in the Continental Army and during the Civil War. The Constitutional Convention was forced to leave Philadelphia for a time because of a yellow fever epidemic.
Long one but who cares?
2.4 billion people worldwide—two out of every five—live without basic sanitation. Providing adequate food, clean water, and basic education for the world's poorest could all be achieved for less than people spend annually on makeup, ice cream, and pet food.
Another example: We in the west spend a multiple amount of money on medical research that could treat only a fraction of the victims of malaria than what would be required to prevent malaria. We practice in effect a sick-care system and not a health care system. We spend most money on unknown treatment (research) and not on prevention of known problems and solutions (being able to boil water). We also do not make it transparent market wise what is healthy and sustainable and what is not (saturated fats should not be subsidized in terms of healthy care and ecological costs but they are!)
This was the case long before climate change was an issue. What if we sacrificed makeup, ice cream and pet food and saved us from both, malaria and global warming? Well - it does not work that way me thinks. Under 100% government health care the average life-span of a Russian was 54 – while for the American without health care it was 70? No free economy (ecology) – no science and technology (soil, plants, water). But this comparison still does not do the ecological threat justice!
First of all – malaria is mostly a political and economical problem of local thinking. Climate change is currently a global problem because no single nation can claim to practice sustainable living. Climate change is a symptom of environmental destruction and not a cause. If those poor Africans who die of malaria were rich – they would practice the same unsustainable consumption as we do in the West today. Right now they live sustainable semi-lives because they are poor. We would require 2 more earths and that is as much a fact as that people are dying of malaria today. In other words – we could continue with only one planet earth, even if people still die of malaria, but we could not, under no circumstances, survive or live pleasant lives if those who are dieing today were as rich as ourselves!
We have to tackle both issues somehow, obviously. but they are intervened and some variables are easier to control than others. But if we do not take care of climate change and sustainability – malaria won’t matter anyway. And as argued before – the best way is for the rich to break the pattern that more technology and wealth means more environmental destruction. Unless we break that paradigm – we cannot truly speak of any kind or real progress but at best, virtual and imagines progress. Vital lies..
I am not sure how many here have understood that “wake up” shout out.
I keep posting about nature because I truly believe that the average citizen does not know what it is. We should all take a walk with Henry David Thoreau:
We understand “malaria” but not ecological disease.
We think of gardens and cultivated fields or maybe idyllic pictures and paintings. Maybe of riding or playing golf or lying at the beach? We have become so ignorant that many believe that it is we who approach nature to use her or to enjoy her. We are not aware that we are one of her pimples and that we are always in nature and fully dependent on her like a newborn. One reason why we should start growing locally is not because it saves transportation resources only – but because then we have a change to learn more about how we survive?
Climate change has more implications than raising sea levels (again – climate change is only a symptom and not the cause or the problem itself). Lomborg would fail any SOX audit as he has assessed less than 1/3 of his infrastructure (never mentions soil erosion, water shortage, barely mentions species loss – the worst since 60 million years). Marx has a better understanding of free market economics than Lomborg has about ecology? The last time we faced such drastic species extinction was 60 million years ago after a potential asteroid hit. Back then there was no adapting to the situation possible within decades. Today we face the same insane rate of species loss but no asteroid has hit us. Maybe, after we have provided every human with unlimited health care and can guarantee a life span of at least 100 to 10 billion people - we can look into this minor curiosity? I didn't know that the ideological ghost of Descartes (animals are mere machines, nature too) was alive inside so many of us, screaming and kicking? Nature is not a machine – it’s a market. Animals are not machines – they are free agents. Or at least some.
But lets forget about all that weirdness. What would happen is we tackled only malaria? What would be the best possible outcome? What if we tackled climate change and freed the ecology?
* Better distributed income in developing countries
* Oil independence
* Clean water
* Non chemical, non toxic soil and no erosion
* No bird flue and mad cow diseases from factory farms
* The theoretical chance to feed the next generation
* Transparent markets (no artificial subsidies of unsustainable practices)
* Healthier and cleaner environments and foods
* More efficient and hence cheaper and more productive technologies?
I am truly surprised that Lomborg cannot at least show the substantial overlap between the causes of climate change and the causes of malaria (only one commenter here has)? What if they overlap 80% of the time or more? If only the sociologist Lomborg could think vertically and horizontally like so many biologists manage these days?
To quote, again, from the best article written in the 18th century.. Henry Thoreau:
Under 100% government health care the average life-span of a Russian was 54 – while for the American without health care it was 70?
This is false. Under the Soviet system (the last time Russians had free health care, and even then they actually had to pay bribes to get treated), Russians' life expectancy was 69. The transition to capitalism led life expectancy to fall under 60.
Michael Brazier, there have been many shut downs of the Gulf Stream
in the last 100,000 years and most of these do not correlate
with glacial meltwater. You've heard of one event and that event
makes a dramatic story and did in fact correlate with a shutdown of
the Gulf Stream.
But this is only one of many and for most of them we have no idea
what triggered them.
Wait a minute, the catastrophic event that Megan refers to is that Norway may become uninhabitable?
I agree that Norway freezing over several decades would be very bad, but compared to a planet-killer asteroid, I would say that it's not on the same scale. More importantly, what are the relative human costs of (1) Northern Europe becoming significantly colder versus (2) a sustained reduction in the world economic growth rate? Which will kill more people?
Norway uninhabitable? Doubt, it'd just be less hospitable.
sorry for the spelling mistakes as well as for the omitted words in my sentences. I will start reading what I type more carefully...
brooksfoe
My point was that nations who have enjoyed free market economics for more than a few decades will beat most closed economies in terms of life expectancy? Do you agree?
Russia has yet to reach what can be considered a stable democracy and a transparent free market? Right now the economy depends too much on resources such as oil and gas, etc and does not produce enough intellectual capital. The transition periods after tyranny to capitalism are also usually anarchic and worse than what people experienced under tyranny.. In Russia one should add that smoking and drinking has been on the rise after WWII and now those males are paying the price. btw - I was referring to males in Russia who have hovered below the 60 years mark under communism and the beginnings of capitalism.
I wonder - do you really not believe that free economies and democracies have a better life expectancy? Take Europe, the US as well as the Asian tiger states and compare them to the rest of the world?
And - why should Africans not help Americans with cancer and heart disease but we should help them with malaria? Why?
What do you think about Lomborg'd ideas?
J Mann,
At one level this whole Norway/Gulf Stream thing is kind of a sidetrack,
because I don't think that is what Megan was referring to, when she spoke
of catastrophic systemic failure. But I don't know, I'm not her.
It certainly isn't what I meant by a human extinction event.
On the other when it comes to trying to think of what might be the
worst consequence of continuing to dump CO2 into the atmosphere, this
is much of it.
I don't mean it is actually the worst consequence, it's just one of the
few where we actually know enough to paint this as something that might
happy.
Could be there are worse possibilities that we don't know about.
And the reason we know about this one is because this is what has
happened over and over again. This is just simply the earth's past.
If it happens again it will be what? who knows, the 1001th time it's
happened.
And it's actually a pretty serious thing. If the past is a guide such a
state would persist for thousands of years. It can happen very quickly,
within of decades. It would shut down not just Norway, but most
of europe, and with all manner bad ecological impacts clear around the world.
William H. Calvin has explored this theme extensively. I suggest
this online book at http://williamcalvin.com/1990s/1998AtlanticClimate.htm
But it seems to me that Megan is talking about are things that we haven't
even imagined. I can't imagine such a scenario. I mean a realistic scenario.
What was the name of that movie? I mean it was just plain silly.
I not sure it makes sense to run in fear from something we can't even
imagine.
But here's the deal. It really is within our power to make cheap energy without
carbon emissions. I don't mean it's easy, but if we approach it the right
way we can do it. A heck of a lot of people are convinced we have a major,
major problem. Even if these fears are unreal it's going to be very hard
to convince them otherwise.
The easist course at this point is just to solve the problem.
Mark Amerman, J Mann, dj superfat, etc...
People here seem to love/fear asteroids? Armageddon fans?
As mentioned before - we currently face such a high rate of species extinction. Species extinction is yet another symptom of unsustainable living like climate change - only less popularized because who cares about other species?
The last time when Earth experienced such high extinction has been 66 million ago. Back then, apparently, an asteroid had hit the globe. What does it tell us that we experience the same ecological impoverishment today but WITHOUT an asteroid?
E O Wilson in Is Humanity Suicidal?:
Why are you all talking about detecting asteroids when the worst asteroid we know off, homo sapiens, has already hit the planet?
PS: I liked the last comment by Mark. Me too thinks that we can find emission free energy sources (please no more nuclear), that it won't even be that difficult and that it will yield many positive economical benefits (more than the costs). However - how do we stop species loss? What causes it?
Hugo Pottisch,
To start with I think we have to be realistic in what we try to do.
We can do a lot if we accept human nature and try to work within
those limits.
Relative to other options, a species bank seems cheap. We need to
identify all the species and sequence their DNA and store whatever
else is needed that would allow our descendents to bring those species
back again.
Some of these technologies aren't quite here yet, but they aren't
that far away and we have enough already to make a good start.
Right now when we lose a species its basically irreversible. A
species bank stops that loss.
This should be our first priority. As long as we don't have
that it's kind of a waste to be spending money on national
parks or rain forest set-asides in Brazil. There are other reasons
for national parks, like tourism, that possibly justify their expense,
but if the goal is species preservation then that is an expensive
and fragile "solution".
Just because 10 million acres has been set aside in Brazil doesn't
mean it's going to be there a century from now. All it takes is a change
in government to wipe it out.
Looking at E. O. Wilson's list, with the exception of the ocean, these
are other countries, and we don't control what happens there. In the
U.S. we're doing pretty good really, we have pretty much identified our species
and the rate of loss has been cut back a whole lot. Of course if we
become poor again, then all that is at risk.
E. O. Wilson's numbers are a major guess. The actual number of species
that we know have gone extinct, it's not many. His numbers are rooted
in the assumption that there all these species that we have never identified
that are going extinct. I'm sure that this is going on; I doubt it's
as extreme as he imagines. If this were true I think this would be in our
face. Not something we have to guess at. If this were the Cretaceous-Tertiary
extinction event, we couldn't have missed all those whole orders, not
just species, of animals and plants disappearing.
As for the oceans, this is where I think the biggest problem lies, right
now. It's a classic dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, a resource shared
in common that no one owns. We know what that means.
A species bank, again, while far from a cure, turns irreversible loss
into something that can be restored. It's the first step.
If this were true I think this would be in our
face. Not something we have to guess at.
What if people cannot see anymore - even if they opened their eyes? I believe that this is true! For more on that please read our old friend Henry?
Do you understand what is meant by climate change being just a symptom? Do you understand what is meant by species loss being a symptom? Do you understand what Wilson intended with the question:
...Even when a nonrenewable resource has been only half used, it is still only one interval away from the end. Ecologists like to make this point with the French riddle of the lily pond. At first there is only one lily pad in the pond, but the next day it doubles, and thereafter each of its descendants doubles. The pond completely fills with lily pads in 3o days. When is the pond exactly half full? Answer: on the 29th day.
A species bank, again, while far from a cure, turns irreversible loss
into something that can be restored. It's the first step.
A species bank was one of Wilson's own ideas for academic accounting? How is this related to species extinction? Or do you just mention it because you want better museums? I hope that you do not approach nature as an engineer - ala - we can put it all back together later?
Do you know how much time E O Wilson hat wasted explaining to math, physics and engineering types why did could never work? Do you know what is meant by being part of the whole and not the other way around?
If it were not also tragic we would all laugh now?
Hugo Pottisch,
Complex life, life more complicated than single cells, starts about
600 million years ago.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoproterozoic
Before that beginning, and during the Neoproterozoic, the surface
of the oceans was frozen. Why complex life gets going immediately
after the oceans thawed is not clear, but it did. Before that time
there had been single celled organisms for billions of years, but
no evidence of anything much more complicated.
Complex life, life more complicated than single cells, ends about
100 million years from now. Obviously this is an estimate, it might
be a good deal sooner but we can put an outer limit on it because
the sun is a main sequence star and we know it's approximate future
history because we can look out and see lots of similar stars. The
sun is getting warmer, as it has been all along, and at some point
the oceans will boil and actually considerably before then, complex
life will be gone.
No doubt single-celled life, deep in the rocks, will continue to
persist for some time. But that's not really the same thing as far
as I'm concerned.
That's what's actually at stake -- a window of 700 million years
of life, perhaps less, and 6/7ths of it is already gone.
I am far from indifferent to species extinction and I've
advanced a realistic scheme for stopping it. You make think
it's improbable that a species will ever be restored from a
species bank. Well, I agree, but that's because the whole thing
hinges on human survival and if I were a god betting, well, I'm
not sure I'd bet on it.
But if the human species does survive, yes, I think, every one
of those species in the species bank will be restored.
I doubt that there will be a human species 10,000 years from now.
But maybe we might make it if we're lucky and we try. I don't
really see the point in not trying.
I'm not sure I see the point of Wilson's words. Is he saying
that, yes, the human species is likely to soon be extinct?
Well, yeah, probably.
Is he saying that in the process we're going to carry many other
species with us?
Well, yeah, probably.
I get it. I already knew it. I don't see the point.
Yes, we will probably fail. And if we don't try, we shall surely fail.
Even if we aren't sure how much effort to put into CO2 reductions, we ought to be getting systems in place and running to decrease CO2 emissions worldwide. That's going to take at least a decade to get working properly, and during that decade, we probably want fairly light controls over CO2 emissions (carbon taxes or whatever), till we get the system working in some kind of sensible way.
If it turns out that there are cheaper ways to deal with the problem, we will have wasted the money to establish CO2 emissions limits, and we'll have an unwanted, and probably unkillable bureaucracy. But we can afford that. If it turns out that we need to reduce CO2 emissions sharply, we flat won't be able to *do* it without getting that system in place and beginning to tinker with it now.
joeo - Re: "Single payer health care is cheaper than the US healthcare system."
Several other countries have single payer or something closer to single payer than what we have, and they spend less on health care. That doesn't really imply that if we switched to single payer we would pay less than we do now, or if they switched away from it they would pay more. "Single payer" or lack of a single payer system, is not the only difference between the countries.