Via Facebook, my old friend Jeff Kluger at Time Magazine drew my attention to a sobering Twitter item by David Stukus, an allergist and pediatrics professor in Columbus, Ohio:
The anecdote is a valuable reminder of the enormity of the gap between fears and facts in many people’s perceptions of health risks — and of how that gap contributes to illness.
For more, read: Read more…
After the Republican success in the mid-term elections, it’s no surprise that a search of Twitter for “Steyer election Koch” — meaning for discussions of the relative impact of the millions spent on campaigns by the liberal billionaire Tom Steyer and the conservative Koch brothers — turns up a lot of heated assertions.
On election night, Peter Dykstra, writing for The Daily Climate, had posted a thorough critique of false equivalence in stories (including in The Times) equating the two efforts to influence races in which coal, climate change or related issues were relevant. He used a baseball analogy, saying Steyer had just entered a game in which the other team has long had “big bats, a huge payroll, and a different rulebook.”
But to me, the debate over whose money mattered more and the warning about false equivalence (which is valid) both miss a factor I’ve been noting for awhile.
The two teams are not playing for the same outcome.
I made this point in a talk a couple of years ago, and Kathy Zhang, then a student, created this simple, but telling, cartoon to illustrate the point:
With last night’s political outcomes in mind, which stick figure would you label as Tom Steyer and which as one of the Koch brothers?
Would the relative amounts of spending be the prime factor determining who moved the boulder?
The Koch brothers and their allies want to maintain the status quo, while Steyer and others seeking a political path to a post-carbon economy have an epic challenge in trying to prod Americans out of a fossil-fueled comfort zone that took a century to form.
I’m sure Steyer is in this for the long haul and it’s clear that he, like any smart investor, is hedging his environmental bets, putting money into far more than political campaigns.
Given that the fight for new energy norms requires an unlikely mix of urgency and patience, along with relentless experimentation, I’d say he’s on a good course.
Addendum | Zhang, who was a student then, is now working in communications for the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Keep up the good work, Kathy.)
The year-long rollout of the latest assessment of climate change science and solutions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ended today in Copenhagen with the release of a final synthesis report offering an overview of the world’s climate trajectories and choices.
This report cuts across the earlier panel reviews of basic climate science and related economic, technical and policy questions to identify overarching themes.
There’s much that’s valuable, if familiar, including a recitation of ways to limit the buildup of greenhouse gases:
But there’s also much that is important but largely missing. Look a little closer at the second of four steps above: “Greater use of low-carbon and no-carbon energy; many of these technologies exist today.”
The new synthesis tends to echo the panel’s earlier reports on global warming mitigation options, implying that a price on carbon and some shifts in policy (subsidies, for instance) are all that’s needed for an swift and affordable transition from conventional use of fossil fuels.
But without a substantial boost in basic research and development and large-scale demonstration projects related to technologies like mass energy storage, capturing and storing carbon dioxide, grid management and a new generation of nuclear plants, it’s hard to see timely progress.
In all of the graphics and take-home points in the panel’s synthesis effort, the only language I can find on these points is turgid and buried. Skip to the bottom of this post to see what I mean.
In the long slide presentation shown at the Copenhagen release, somehow the panel failed to fit in a single graph like this one from the International Energy Agency showing how utterly inconsequential energy research is in advanced democracies (the O.E.C.D.) compared to budgets for science on other things we care about:
I’d be interested to see a full analysis, including in China, of research budgets over time, as with this look at America’s science investments since the Space Race (I’ve published some version of this graph regularly since my 2006 page-one article, “Budgets Falling in Race to Fight Global Warming”:
Read more...
I hope you’ll read and disseminate Jim Gorman’s story on the new Science paper pointing to a potential ecological catastrophe in North America should a potent chytrid fungus that attacks salamanders arrive on these shores. The fungus originated in Asia and its arrival in Europe has already caused substantial salamander and newt losses there. A related fungus has already devastated a host of frog species around the tropics, as I’ve explored in many posts.
In laboratory tests, the researchers found a 100-percent mortality rate in Eastern newts (one of my favorite forest and pond creatures) exposed to the fungus.
As Gorman noted, legislation has been introduced in Congress that could limit chances of the fungus coming to the United States through the absurdly under-regulated international pet trade: Read more…
David Roberts, thankfully back on task after a year away from the environment blog Grist, always provides thoughtful input on energy and climate policy.
He’s tended to write on American policies and politics, but this week has refreshingly focused a two-part post package on developing countries, where energy needs, and growth, are greatest.
In the first post — “How can we get power to the poor without frying the planet?” — he explores the challenges faced in trying to boost energy access without greenhouse-gas overload. He lays out the arguments of a range of analysts including the Breakthrough Institute, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Morgan Bazilian and Dan Kammen and the Sierra Club. He appropriately frames the piece around the mythological challenge of navigating between Scylla and Charybdis — finding ways to boost energy access while limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Read more…
The New England Journal of Medicine has published “Ebola and Quarantine,” an invaluable commentary by seven physicians* who warn how overreactions by American elected officials aiming to calm fears of Ebola here could make it more likely that the virus will spread in Africa and possibly other developing regions of the world. I found the piece through a link in a wise editorial in The Times on “the dangers of quarantines.”
Here’s an excerpt from the journal essay, which starts with a mention of the strict quarantine policies set initially by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and others:
The governors of a number of states, including New York and New Jersey, recently imposed 21-day quarantines on health care workers returning to the United States from regions of the world where they may have cared for patients with Ebola virus disease. We understand their motivation for this policy — to protect the citizens of their states from contracting this often-fatal illness. This approach, however, is not scientifically based, is unfair and unwise, and will impede essential efforts to stop these awful outbreaks of Ebola disease at their source, which is the only satisfactory goal. The governors’ action is like driving a carpet tack with a sledgehammer: it gets the job done but overall is more destructive than beneficial. Read more…
Just ahead of the two-year anniversary of the calamitous flooding of New York City by the surge from Hurricane Sandy, Alan Feuer has written a fine piece summarizing how this maritime metropolis, facing decades, if not centuries, of inevitable sea-level rise, is slowly evolving a softer relationship with the sea.
Here’s the nut: Read more…
As New York City grapples with tracing the contacts of Craig Spencer, a young physician infected with the Ebola virus, It’s worth drawing attention to two worthy efforts to tamp down unreasoned fears — President Obama’s White House embrace of Nina Pham, the Dallas nurse who contracted Ebola while treating a dying patient, and David Ropeik’s fine piece on the perils posed by Ebola fears, published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece by Ropeik, who’s the author of “How Risky is it, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts”:
There is no question that America’s physical, economic, and social health is far more at risk from the fear of Ebola than from the virus itself. Yet health care leaders from the US president down are pouring resources and attention into managing Ebola far beyond what is required to keep the disease from spreading beyond sporadic cases. Controlling Ebola in the United States requires thorough isolation of symptomatic victims and rigorous attention to personal protective equipment and protocols for health care workers. But it does not require the appointment of an “Ebola Czar,” a promise to call up the National Guard if necessary, or the cancellation of a presidential fund-raising trip in order to convene a two-hour emergency meeting with every top federal official involved in public health and safety.
U.S. health leaders are communicating reasonably well. Constant, honest, humble risk communication is a vital part of establishing trust, which is especially crucial for managing public concern during crises. When mistakes are made, they admit them. When new developments happen—like a Texas Presbyterian health care worker who had to be isolated but was already on a cruise ship—they report them. While perhaps sounding too confident as they claim they can keep Ebola from becoming a public epidemic, they are avoiding un-keepable promises of absolute safety, acknowledging that there may well be more sporadic cases.
But officials are up against the inherently emotional and instinctive nature of risk-perception psychology. Pioneering research on this subject by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and others, vast research on human cognition by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, and research on the brain’s fear response by neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, Elizabeth Phelps, and others, all make abundantly clear that the perception of risk is not simply a matter of the facts, but more a matter of how those facts feel. [Please read the rest.]
The most legitimately scary thing about this virus is its tendency to target caregivers like Spencer and other medical personnel and so many family members — particularly women — in affected regions in West Africa. For more on this chilling aspect of the outbreak, please read Ben Hale’s recent piece in Slate: “The Most Terrifying Thing About Ebola: The disease threatens humanity by preying on humanity.”
Why Rebound Matters
By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
In response to our New York Times Op-Ed about the limits of energy efficiency and the furious reaction to it from some quarters, Andy Revkin asks whether we can find room for agreement on the rebound effect.
To some degree we already have.
Just over three years ago, when Breakthrough Institute published an extensive review of the economic literature on rebound effects, there was little discussion about how serious rebound effects are, or what the implication might be for climate and energy policy. The conventional wisdom at the time, as Andy can attest, having been party to some of the private exchanges among efficiency experts and advocates, was that rebound effects were so small as to be inconsequential.
While some in energy policy circles still cling to this view, today there is broad recognition that rebound effects are likely substantially greater than has previously been acknowledged. This consensus extends from large academic reviews of the literature such as Steve Sorrell’s groundbreaking 2007 review for the UK government to more recent reviews conducted by the European Commission, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the International Energy Agency (IEA). All cite studies finding rebounds in various contexts approaching and in some cases exceeding 50%. This stands in contrast, for instance, with the IEA’s estimate from as recently as 2012, which, despite recognizing the existence of rebound, estimated rebound effects globally at a rather precise 9%.
Even Azevedo and her colleagues, who offer a series of criticisms of our argument [link], acknowledge the likelihood of significant rebounds. So it would appear that we can all agree that estimations of the energy savings from energy efficient technologies based upon engineering-level estimates likely overstate significantly the energy savings that will actually be realized. This recognition constitutes progress, given that most climate mitigation scenarios still fail to account for significant levels of — or in many cases, any — rebound.
One precondition for finding agreement, however, is accurate representation of the positions taken by those with whom you are trying to find agreement. Over the last two weeks, a number of commentators and efficiency advocates have taken issue with positions we have never taken. Azevedo and her colleagues, for instance, altered a quote from our Op-Ed to suggest that we had argued that energy efficiency measures would universally and in the aggregate result in higher global energy demand. We have not made this claim.
What we wrote was this: Read more…
Bill Gates spends a lot of his time probing the minds and work of researchers and analysts trying to solve the world’s biggest problems. The results often end up on his GatesNotes blog. His new post focuses on the plant genetics research of Edward S. Buckler, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher at Cornell.
Buckler was elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year for work that Cornell summarized this way:
Buckler uses genomics and statistical genetics to understand and dissect complex traits in maize, biofuel grasses, cassava and grapes. In the lab, he and colleagues exploit the natural diversity of plant genomes to identify sets of genes and single genes responsible for genetic variation. He is working to develop seeds for breeders and researchers to use to dissect complex traits, characterize genetic diversity and to understand such traits as drought tolerance, nitrogen use, basic development, carbon metabolism and vitamin A and E content.
Gates’s post focuses on efforts by Buckler and others to do for cassava, a keystone crop in tropical Africa, what’s been done for corn. (Cassava, originally from Brazil, is also known as manioc and tapioca.)
Here’s a video produced by Gates’s team, along with an excerpt from his post describing his visit to Buckler’s lab: Read more…