CapitalistImperialistPig

What's the percentage in being a contrarian? Well, if you are pretty sure that the herd is stampeding off the cliff, it makes Darwinian sense to try to get out of the flow. Skepticism about the perceived wisdom is the intellectual equivalent of a biological mutation - the odds are very heavily against it, but when it pays off, it can win big. Contrarians don't necessarily lack the herd instinct, of course. They like to think that they are part of their own crowd. Thus the high school goths all congregate under the same tree, just as the jocks, nerds, and beautiful people each have their own territory. Thus it is also with climate skeptics. Via Brad DeLong , Ryan Avent wonders about the link with political conservatism. My question is why conservatives think it advances their purpose to continue this demonstrably wrong adherence to climate change denialism. This isn’t like, say, evolution. Scientific evidence of evolution is quite strong and will only continue to get stron...

The Bush regime implemented a highly efficient method for injuring, poisoning, and otherwise endangering Americans - appoint regulators who are incompetent, corrupt, and in the pockets of special interests. The Supreme Court blessed this arrangement by ruling that once government regulators had ruled on safety, individuals would have no further recourse against those who poisoned them. BPA, a practically ubiquitous plastic found in everything from plastic bottles to dental fillings, has long been suspected of being potentially hazardous. A new study reinforces those fears. The National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, released a draft report today that says exposure to the chemical may be linked to breast cancer, prostate cancer, early puberty in girls and such behavioral changes as hyperactivity. It urged further study. The report marks a significant departure from earlier positions taken by the government, which had maintained there was a negligible hu...

Harold Bloom, whatever his critical successes in youth, seems lately to have doddered into the role of unlucky crank. Unlucky, I mention, since no sooner had he loosed a volley at this year's literature Nobelist, calling her award "political correctness," than the New York Times unearthed a 1992 Op-ed by Doris Lessing on PC and related linguistic abuses. Lessing is more interesting than Bloom, though, so I want to consider a bit more of what she said. A primary theme was that Communism had loosed a catastrophic pollution into language, and that that pollution had spread far beyond the left. Eli Rabbett has pointed out that the language of the rightwing nutjobs protesting Al Gore's Nobel borrows from Stalinist racial rhetoric. More tragic than the impoverishment of language is the associated impoverishment of mind. The totalitarian mind can't bear contradiction and so must villify criticism and suck all the life out of thought. There is obviously something v...

A blasted post-apocalytic world of environmental catastrophe is the theme of many an SF story. Right now, China is taking the lead in exploring this particular scenario in real life. JOSEPH KAHN and JIM YARDLEY, writing in The New York Times take a close look today in a long story. No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo. Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water. Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for t...

So say our denier friends. Unless maybe you were hoping to be able to kayak to the North Pole this year. You might be able to come pretty close. With a good month still left in the melt season, Arctic sea ice reached a record low this week. Compare the white space with the median August ice line (pink). For a look at your kayaking prospects, check out the cool North Pole webcams. (via Jeff Master's Wunderblog )

There was great joy along the river when indefatigable statistician (and denier) Steve McKintire discovered an anomaly in the GISS data. He reported it to NASA and recalculations were made. The result, hailed by denialist bloggers, talk show hosts, and the benighted everywhere, was that 1934, in the United States, which had previously been a statistically insignificant 0.01 C cooler than 1998, was now a still statistically insignificant 0.02 C warmer than 1998. This, according to the usual suspects, was proof that global warming was a myth, that James Hansen should be fired or worse, and that the Earth was indeed flat, as they had known all along. Now it is true that 1934, like 1998, was indeed very hot - it was the height of the dust bowl, and much of the Southcentral US was blowing away. It's also true that, as usual, our river dwelling friends don't seem to grasp the meaning of the word "global" in the phrase "global warming." The global trends were...

James Annan weighs in : This debate has been discussed at length on RC already, but the audio is up on the web so I had a listen to it - all 90 minutes. The only real surprise was that any scientists would try to oppose the motion - that "global warming is not a crisis" - and it's only to be expected that they would struggle. Of course it's not a "crisis", but rather a long-term problem. There is nothing special about this year, or even this decade, compared to the previous or next, other than that it happens to be the one we are currently in. In fact the entire problem centres on the fact that climate change is a long-term issue, rather than something that can come to a turning point and be resolved. I agree. What we do now or tommorow is much less important than what we do over the next twenty or thirty years. As a planetary disease, it's more like high blood pressure than a heart attack. Habitat destruction, on the other hand, *is* a crisis. We pr...

How do you know that Easter Island wasn't wiped out by a tsunami? asks Rae Ann in this comment . There are many similar questions. How do we know that the Universe is expanding? How do we know that the Earth is more than four billion years old? How do we know that Finland was covered with ice 25,000 years ago? How do we know that human activity is increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? How do we know that Africa and South America were joined two hundred million years or so ago? How do we know what the sea level was 500 years ago or how much CO2 was in the atmosphere 200,000 years ago. How do we know, for that matter, that the Earth is round and that the Moon isn't made of green cheese? In each case, even the last, there is a chain of evidence that leads to the deduction. In the case of Easter Island, and Rae Ann's question, the answer is easy. The great part of Easter Island is more than 50 meters above sea level. Portions are more than 400 meters above ...

If you put certain simple organisms on a plate of nutrient material, they will multiply until they poison themselves with their own waste. Humans, too, have often demonstrated a rather similar behavior - Easter Island and Chaco Canyon for two examples. Why so? In each case, the easy answer is to say that they were too dumb to know any better. It's not quite that simple, though. Other organisms demonstrate complex adaptive and cooperative behavior with a better long term prognosis. Our cousins the slime molds are a favourite of mine. People too have often proven capable of adapting. A slightly more sophisticated answer is that the environment that humans (and the simple organisms of our first example) evolved for was an environment in which resources and predation limited the self-poisoning factor. The biologists agar plate, and our technological society, are just different versions of temporary release from that constraint. Our technology has allowed us to multiply like th...

Our distant ancestors were gatherers, opportunistic scavengers and hunters, and it seems likely that conservation of resources for the long term was not a priority for them. Once agriculture was invented, the situation became quite different. Fields needed to be planted and tended and domestic animals needed protection from beast and foe. Civilization arose, we can imagine, when it became apparent that cooperative effort could alter the local environment for mutual benefit through irrigation and related activities. I have no idea when it first was understood that environment changing activities of the East African Plains Ape could produce major collateral damage, but the Ancient Greeks knew and discussed the matter. Recognizing the need for conservation is not quite the same as accomplishing it, though. Small scale societies far less sophisticated than the Ancient Greeks faced the problem, solved it and thrived, or failed, collapsed and disintegrated. Thus it is strange to me that ther...

That most excellent blogger and polymath, Brad DeLong, commends for our reading what he calls Partha Dasgupta's excellent review of Jared Diamond's collapse. I'm afraid that I can't agree. I disliked the review a lot. Firstly, his main quarrel with Diamond is that Diamond wrote a different book than Dasgupta would like. More about that later. More fundamentally, the review seems quite dishonest in the way it interprets what Diamond did say. Consider his only quote from Diamond: At one point he claims that ‘all of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology,’ to which I felt like shouting in exasperation that perhaps at some times, in some places, a few of the unintended consequences of our existing technology have been beneficial. Reading Diamond you would think our ancestors should all have remained hunter-gatherers in Africa, co-evolving with the native flora and fauna, and roaming the wilds in search of wild berries and ...