George Will’s irresponsible article denying climate change and the Washington Post’s irresponsible fact-checking

George Will has written an irresponsible article denying climate change (AKA global warming). Here’s the basic problem with George Will’s writing, as stated succinctly by The Wonk Room:

In “Dark Green Doomsayers,” Will attacked Secretary of Energy Steven Chu for discussing a worst-case scenario of California drought caused by the decimation of Sierra snowpack, falsely claiming Chu predicted this will come to pass “no later than 10 years away.” Will also incorrectly claimed that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979″ — based on a 45-day-old blog post by Daily Tech’s Michael Asher, one of Marc Morano’s climate denial jokers.

Will’s article is riddled with falsehoods. The radically untrue nature of Will’s article is beyond dispute. Confronted with Will’s cauldron of conservative climate denial propaganda, the Washington Post was faced with a stark choice. It could either A) confess that it failed to do any competent fact-checking or B) compound Will’s lies with its own by claiming that it did real fact-checking. It chose “B.”

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Why do women in wealthy societies have fewer children?

I’ve often wondered why women in wealthy societies have fewer children. Melanie Moses (who teaches Computer Science at the University of New Mexico) offers a solution in an article entitled, “Being Human: Engineering: Worldwide Ebb,” appearing in the 2/5/09 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers). This phenomenon is counter-intuitive because evolution by natural selection would seemingly predict that human animals with more resources would have more babies. Moses employs the Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE), an approach for understanding the dynamics of flow through networks. It was developed

to explain why so many characteristics of plants and animals systematically depend on their mass in a very peculiar way. . . According to the theory, the larger the animal, the longer its cardiovascular system (its network of arteries and capillaries) takes to deliver resources to its cells. That delivery time, which in turn dictates the animal's metabolic rate, is proportional to the animal's mass raised to the power of ¼. Thus, because its circulatory system works less efficiently, an elephant grows systematically more slowly than a mouse, with a slower heart rate, a lower reproductive rate and a longer lifespan.

Moses argues that this idea that networks become predictably less efficient as they grow has “profound” consequences. With regard to fertility, she starts with facts regarding our energy consumption.

The average human uses up only about 100 watts from eating food, consistent with predictions based on body size. But in North America, each person uses an additional 10,000 watts from oil, gas, coal and a smattering of renewable sources, all of which are delivered through expansive, expensive infrastructure networks.

How do energy networks interact with the reproductive choices of humans?

The decline in human birth rates with increased energy consumption is quantitatively identical to the decline in fertility rate with increased metabolism in other mammals. Put another way, North Americans consume energy at a rate sufficient to sustain a 30,000-kilogram primate, and have offspring at the very slow rate predicted for a beast of this size . . . As infrastructure grows we get more out of it, but must invest more into it, reducing the energy and capital left to invest in the next generation.

Moses disagrees with alternative explanations, such as availability of birth control or decisions to marry later, because these don’t explain decisions to have fewer children in the first place. She also dismisses the idea that “as societies become wealthier, greater educational investments are made in each child to make them competitive in labour markets” because investments in eduction correlate inversely with fertility rates.

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Straight talk about Canada’s oil sands

Would you like to learn the unvarnished story about oil sands, an often highly-touted source of fuel? The March issue of National Geographic has a detailed article on oil sands, focusing on a production facility in Alberta Canada: "Scraping Bottom." It's an already profitable environment-unfriendly carbon-irresponsible way to feed America's often-wasteful craving for fuel. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

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Republicans Reveal Attitude Toward The Future

The rhetoric that accompanied Obama's election included much from the downsized Republicans about looking forward to working with the new president and coming to grips with national problems in the spirit of a fresh start. However, the stimulus package---which may well be too big---has forced the Republicans to declare themselves. We're hearing a lot about wanting more tax cuts---almost exclusively tax cuts---in lieu of spending in the form of direct aid. This is a Republican mantra now. Tax cuts. The question, of course, is really this: what good are tax cuts when you're already buried in debt? Granted, it frees up (theoretically) money for critical and immediate payments, but if the idea is to put people back to work tax cuts are not the solution. Because corporate America is mired in over-leveraged debt burdens that must be paid down before something mundane like hiring can happen. Tax cuts, therefore, won't have any kind of immediate impact on the jobless rate. In time it might, depending on several other factors, the most significant of which would be a newfound corporate sense of ethics which would prevent them from continuing the pillage of their own capital for all the things that have gotten us into this mess in the first place. Labor is at the bottom of the ladder of what they see as important---hence the tongue lashing Obama gave them for paying out bonuses while asking for federal aid. As for working people? What good does a tax cut do someone who isn't paying taxes because he or she has no income? But this was to be expected. It is an attitude born out of the mixed priorities of what has become the Right, one of which is fiscal responsibility (I used to support Republicans on this count) the other of which is the more Libertarian view (borne of the Grover Norquist faction) that government is always the problem and must be pruned back radically. Hence tax cuts, in order to curtail revenues in order to force the government to reduce its size and, one must realize, its influence.

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