Coyote Blog

I like reading about the history of science, and one of its more famous chapters is the debate between the Neptunists and the Vulcanists in early 19th century Great Britain.  At the risk of oversimplifying, the debate was over whether the earth's features (and life on it) were formed slowly over long periods, or relatively quickly through catastrophes.  Secondarily, it was about heat and fire vs. water as forces shaping the Earth (thus the names).  Eventually a consensus  (an actual consensus, not a declared one) developed that they were both right in some ways and both wrong in others. 

What struck me reading about this again over the weekend was that it took decades, and sometimes centuries, for this to sort out.  Take the part of this debate over extinction.  The initial consensus was that extinction was due to catastrophes, ala the Biblical flood.  Then Darwin came along and shifted the consensus away from catastrophes, showing that extinctions occurred in the normal order of species action-reaction to threats and opportunities.  And then in the 20th century, revisiting the K-T geologic layer we have come around to dinosaur extinction being catastrophic as a result of a big meteor.  Except nowadays there are scientists who think this is too simplistic.  Geology, in turn, made it all the way until the 1960's before anyone was even talking about plate tectonics, something that was still being derided in the 1970's but is fundamental to our understanding of numerous aspects of the earth today.

And so it goes in normal scientific inquiry.   Scientists expect it to take decades and generations to really shake out new theories and areas of inquiry.  Sometimes, as with Newton's laws of motion, we still accept the theory, though even here we have tweaked at the edges (e.g. relativity when things are moving fast) and exempted certain regions (e.g. quantum mechanics and the very small).  Other times, we have thrown theories that were cherished for decades completely away (e.g phlogistan).   After decades of work, string theory in physics could easily be thrown out completely and looked upon as the 20th century's phlogistan, or it could really be the theory of everything Einstein searched for in vain.

Which is all fine and expected, except when governments are standing by to make trillion-dollar choices, as they are in global warming, a scientific body of inquiry that is barely 20 years old.  Go back to any new scientific theory in its first 20-years, and think about the governments of the world betting the entire global economy on scientific understanding of that theory at that point in time.  It's pretty scary.  We'd probably have a 5-trillion dollar government controlled medical leach industry.

Please stop tell me that I have no right to question Al Gore when he wants to take over the world economy to his own ends.  And please stop telling me that catastrophic man-made global warming is now beyond question:

One of the many disturbing aspects of global warming hysteria is the
way moonbats who use it to promote their ominous political agenda
insist on a consensus that simply does not exist. A recent survey
of more than 12,000 environmental scientists and practitioners by the
National Registry of Environmental Professionals shows that despite the
hysteria and considerable pressure to conform to the "correct" view,
many scientists are choosing skepticism over the safety of the herd.

The survey found that:

• 34% disagree that global warming is a serious problem;
• 41% disagree that warming trends "can be, in large part, attributed to human activity";
• 71% disagree that human activity has significantly contributed to hurricanes;
• 33% disagree that the US government is not doing enough about global warming;
• 47% disagree that international agreements such as the preposterous
  Kyoto Protocol provide a useful framework for addressing global climate
  change.

There are good reasons to believe in some man-made global warming, but there are very good reasons to doubt it will be as catastrophic as portrayed in the media, and very, very good reasons not to hand over the throttle of the world economy to environmental groups in anticipation of such uncertain events.  My position on the skeptical middle ground on climate change is here.

Top 10 Junk Science Stories of 2006

The word "censorship" is used all-too-often in this country.  I take a much more narrow definition of censorship.  In my mind, only the government can be guilty of true censorship, which I define as using the coercive power of government to prevent certain forms of speech.  By even this narrow definition, the recent threats against Exxon by Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe come awfully close to censorship:

We reprint the full text of the letter here,
so readers can see for themselves. But its essential point is that the
two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate
about the issue must stop and ExxonMobil should "end its dangerous
support of the [global warming] 'deniers.' " Not only that, the company
"should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public
its funding history." And in extra penance for being "one of the
world's largest carbon emitters," Exxon should spend that money on
"global remediation efforts."

The
Senators aren't dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening
specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can't
refuse. But in case the CEO doesn't understand his company's jeopardy,
they add that "ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured
controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too
reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years." (Our emphasis.) The Senators also graciously copied the Exxon board on their missive.

This
is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone
agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same
time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop
financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in
the paper. We respect the folks at the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, but we didn't know until reading the Rockefeller-Snowe
letter that they ran U.S. climate policy and led the mainstream media
around by the nose, too.

While I tend to believe that the warming camp is correct that manmade CO2 is creating or will create some global warming, there are a lot of very very good reasons to be skeptical of the magnitude of their warming estimates and their hysterical calls for massive government intervention in the world economy.  I call this the skeptical middle ground on climate.  (Update: more reasons to be skeptical of current "consensus" models here).  A skeptics guide to An Inconvenient Truth is here.

Kevin at Truck and Barter has a great article where he fact checks a statistic he found in a "non-fiction" book.  And what do you know, it was not only wrong, but way off.  And, to make matters worse, changing the statistic to its correct value undermines much of the premise of the book:

What an utter refusal to check sources and validate simple statistics!
THIS IS NOT MY JOB, nor the job of any of Ms. Robbins' readers. It's
the job of the author and editors. I don't know if I should even bother
continuing to read the book at all, as I've spent 1/2 hour tracking
down just one horrendously wrong data point. How many more will be this
wrong???

My hypothesis is that this happens all the time, especially in media reports about various social ills.  We have all suspected that if you add up all the people in articles that suffer from X or Y, it would include everyone in the country, probably three times over.  Part of this is the very poor scientific and statistical background of most writers and editors.  However, I think it also is a problem of skepticism.  Editors and reporters don't necessarily have the time to fact-check everything, so they do a kind of triage using their own personal skepticism as a guide.  And I think most reporters and editors are more than willing to believe that nearly every social ill discussed -- homelessness, teen suicide, drug abuse, hunger, etc. etc. -- are prevalent and getting worse, so they seldom really push back on relevant numbers for these issues.  Most publishers and media outlets have pushed hard for diversity of skin color, but these groups remain pretty uniform in their outlook and basic assumptions about society, and so their failures of skepticism are pretty predictable.

I am often told, in emails that vary from friendly to downright threatening, that global warming science is not scientific consensus and my skepticism puts me on par with tobacco company lobbyists.  An upcoming paper in Theoretical and Applied Climatology looks back at a recent peer-reviewed Nature article that purported to provide more evidence for man-made global warming and found the much quoted article by Isabel Chiune in Nature to be complete crap:

What is important here is not the truth or falsity of
the assertion of Chuine et al. about Burgundy temperatures. Rather,
what is important is that a paper on what is arguably the world's most
important scientific topic (global warming) was published in the
world's most prestigious scientific journal with essentially no
checking of the work prior to publication.

Moreover "” and crucially "” this lack of checking is not the result
of some fluke failures in the publication process. Rather, it is common
for researchers to submit papers without supporting data, and it is
frequent that peer reviewers do not have the requisite mathematical or
statistical skills needed to check the work (medical sciences
excepted). In other words, the publication of the work of Chuine et al.
was due to systemic problems in the scientific publication process.

The systemic nature of the problems indicates that there might be
many other scientific papers that, like the paper of Chuine et al.,
were inappropriately published. Indeed, that is true and I could list
numerous examples. The only thing really unusual about the paper of
Chuine et al. is that the main problem with it is understandable for
people without specialist scientific training. Actually, that is why I
decided to publish about it. In many cases of incorrect research the
authors will try to hide behind an obfuscating smokescreen of
complexity and sophistry. That is not very feasible for Chuine et al.
(though the authors did try).

Finally, it is worth noting that Chuine et al. had the data; so they
must have known that their conclusions were unfounded. In other words,
there is prima facie evidence of scientific fraud. What will happen to
the researchers as a result of this? Probably nothing. That is another
systemic problem with the scientific publication process.

Oops.  By the way, accepting the hypothesis that man made CO2 is causing some warming does not require that one also accept Al-Gore-type estimates of catastrophic 6-8 degrees C warming or more in the next 50 years.  In fact, the evidence still is that man-made warming effects will be small, and predictions of massive warming are way out on a scientific limb with little proof.  I discuss these issues in my article on the skeptical middle ground on climate, as well as my earlier primer on an Inconvenient Truth.

My post on the lack of correlation between air pollution (in the form of ozone and particulates) and asthma has led several people to ask me -- well, what else could possibly be causing the rise in asthma cases?

One "cause" for increases in measured disease rates that almost always plays a role in modern epidemiology is better diagnosis and reporting.  There have been a number of diseases where changes in definitions and better diagnosis have led to an increase in reported cases, while the actual occurance rate has remained constant.  The rise in asthma cases seems to go beyond this effect.

The best guess I have for the increase in
asthma in this country, and the strong positive correlation between
asthma and economic development, is that it has something to do with
indoor pollution.  The spike in asthma cases seems to parallel the rise
in energy prices.  Beginning in the 1970's, we began sealing up houses
tighter and tighter to conserve energy.  Increasing penetration of air
conditioning simultaneously caused people to close the windows.  The spread of office-type service work had brought more people indoors.  I am
convinced its something inside, not outside, that is causing the asthma spike.

Update:  More on the lack of correlation between air pollution and asthma here, this time in California.

On this blog, I have often felt the need to point out that correlation does not equal causation.  For example, if X increases at the same time Y increases, it is not necessarily true that X causes Y or Y causes X.  The correlation could be a coincidence, or it could be that both X and Y are related to a third variable Z that drives their movement.

Anyway, I see this mistake all the time.  What I did NOT expect to see was that someone would have to explain that non-correlation does not equal causation.  But that seems to be the wacky world that environmental science has descended into, via the Commons Blog:

EPA's new report "America's Children and the Environment" notes that
air pollution declined, but asthma prevalence continues to rise. One
possible conclusion from this is that air pollution is not actually a
cause of asthma. In fact, that's the most plausible conclusion. Every
pollutant we measure has been dropping for decades pretty much
everywhere, while asthma prevalence has been rising pretty much
everywhere. This is true throughout the entire western world, not just
the U.S. In fact, asthma incidence is highest in countries with the
lowest levels of air pollution. Asthma is rare in developing countries
with much more polluted air. Asthma incidence is simply unrelated to
air pollution. Asthma attacks are probably unrelated as well. But even
if air pollution can cause asthma attacks, it is a minor cause,
responsible for less than 1% of all asthma attacks.

Despite these two trends going in the opposite direction, environmental activists still insist that large increases in asthma rates are driven by pollution:

A report by E&E News
(subscription required) makes it clear that what's in EPA health
reports doesn't actually matter. The story opens with "While the number
of children living in areas violating ozone and particulate matter (PM)
standards has declined in recent years, adolescent asthma that results
from exposure to such pollutants continues to rise, according to new
U.S. EPA statistics." The journalistic goal is to raise health alarms,
whether warranted or not. Thus, the news story itself says air
pollution, the presumptive cause of asthma, went down and yet asthma
prevalence went up. However, the reporter claims air pollution is
responsible for rising asthma just the same.

Wow.  These guys could be the poster-children for refusing to adjust their beliefs in the face of actual facts.  They even acknowledge that pollution and asthma are going in opposite directions and still they insist on their causation theory.

Postscript:  I am willing to believe, maybe, that there is some unknown, unmeasured and unregulated pollutant out there that is increasing and is causing increases in asthma.  However, that is not the argument these folks are making - they are using asthma increases to lobby for tougher standards on known pollutants.

Update:  The best guess I have for the increase in asthma in this country, and the strong positive correlation between asthma and economic development, is that it has something to do with indoor pollution.  The spike in asthma cases seems to parallel the rise in energy prices.  Beginning in the 1970's, we began sealing up houses tighter and tighter to conserve energy.  Increasing penetration of air conditioning simultaneously caused people to close the windows.  I am convinced its something inside, not outside.

I'm not really into the culture, so prevalent here in Scottsdale, of purchasing expensive cars and boats for use as ego-prosthetics (I drive a Volvo, for god sakes, a chick-anti-magnet if there ever was one).  But I have to admit this is cool, a new supersonic business jet.  The real breakthrough seems to be their ability to substantially reduce the sonic boom, which got the Concorde banned from over-land flights, to a legal and manageable level.  They claim sound levels 99% lower than the Concorde at ground level, though this is theoretical and has not been tested.

They don't mention fuel economy -- the Concorde drank fuel. 

Oh, and the price - expected to be $80 million for a twelve seat aircraft.  For those of you who don't routinely shop for private aircraft, this price is steep even in that rarefied market.  You can get a Boeing 737 outfitted very nicely as a private plane for half that.  But this new plane will get you to your house in Gstaad twice as fast.

My independent work in college was on interfacing micro computers with mechanical devices.  Most of the work was in assembler language on an S-100 bus CP/M computer tied to some simple devices.  In one project, for example, I used an ultrasonic range-finder stripped off a Polaroid camera (brand new auto-focus technology, for the time) and put it on a stepper motor.  I wrote a program to turn it into a radar that painted a picture of the room on the screen.  In the next iteration, I experimented with having it control a "gun"  (a pencil on a stepper motor) and keep it locked onto a moving target in the room.  Seems pretty basic but it was not that easy in 1982  (also, coincidently, the last year I ever ran a mainframe computer program from a card deck).  In the spring of 1983, we programmed electronic devices that managed various functions on an N-Scale model railroad, a dream class for me given that model railroading has always been my preferred hobby.

Anyway, in this context I thought this was really cool:  A Lego robotics machine that solves the Rubiks cube.

This makes perfect sense to me.  The fact that I am 6'-4" tall has nothing to do with it:

Economists have long been irritated by the weird fact that tall people
have better jobs and earn more money. Many explanations have been
offered, various forms of social and individual discrimination first
among them. But two Princeton economists disagree: "In this paper, we offer a simpler explanation: On average, taller people earn more because they are smarter."

Update: I am amazed that I even have to say this, but of course I am having fun with this and don't take it seriously (I can't believe all the emails this has generated).  Besides, just think about the math for a minute.  There is a broad normal distribution of intelligence for both short and tall people.  The study says the averages of these two distributions diverge a bit.  But even if they do, the distributions themselves are much, much wider than this divergence.  This means in practice, even if true, this study has no predictive power for individuals you meet.  Short and tall people will be both smart and dumb.  It only means that if you somehow met all 300 million people in the US, you might notice you met a few more smart-tall people than smart-short people, but that is all it would mean.  Now, I do believe tall people might make more money.  There is good evidence that tall people get disproportionately favored in hiring and promotions than equally qualified folks who are altitude challenged.

Now, if you said short people were touchier and more over-sensitive than tall people, I would have a hard time disproving it from my email.

From Michael Siegel, with a hat tip to Reason's Hit and Run (use of colored text in the original):

An article in the current issue of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association),
reporting on the recent Surgeon General's review of the health effects
of secondhand smoke, brings to the forefront the controversy over
whether the Surgeon General misrepresented
the science in his public communications surrounding the report's
release ...

The
controversy stems from the press release and other ancillary materials
released by the Surgeon General to accompany the report itself.

Here is what those ancillary materials stated:

According to the Surgeon General's press release:

"Even
brief exposure to secondhand smoke has immediate adverse effects on the
cardiovascular system and increases risk for heart disease and lung
cancer, the report says."

According to the Surgeon General's remarks to the media:

"Breathing
secondhand smoke for even a short time can damage cells and set the
cancer process in motion. Brief exposure can have immediate harmful
effects on blood and blood vessels, potentially increasing the risk of
a heart attack."

According to the Surgeon General's accompanying fact sheet:

"Breathing
secondhand smoke for even a short time can have immediate adverse
effects on the cardiovascular system, interfering with the normal
functioning of the heart, blood, and vascular systems in ways that
increase the risk of heart attack."

And according to the Surgeon General's accompanying brochure:

"Even
a short time in a smoky room causes your blood platelets to stick
together. Secondhand smoke also damages the lining of your blood
vessels. In your heart, these bad changes can cause a deadly heart
attack."

These claims are markedly different from those
made in the Surgeon General's report itself, which concludes that
chronic exposure to secondhand smoke increases the risk for heart
disease, but does not conclude (or even present evidence that) a brief
exposure to secondhand smoke can cause lung cancer, heart attacks, or
heart disease.

This is a classic technique used today in scientific reports on global warming, where the report itself is often full of cautionary language about potential problems in the models and the uncertainties in predicting climate, but the summary and press releases make doom and gloom statements with absolute certainty that aren't actually supported by the research they purport to summarize. 

In both cases, the principles justify the exaggeration of the public message as all in a "good cause", which of course is the justification every lying politician uses.  Even Ted Stevens.

From the Boston Globe today:

"We do not understand the natural internal variability of climate
change" is one of Lindzen's many heresies, along with such zingers as
`"the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940," "the evidence so far
suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average,"
and "Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th
century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since
about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are
now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why."

When
Lindzen published similar views in The Wall Street Journal this spring,
environmentalist Laurie David, the wife of comedian Larry David,
immediately branded him a "shill." She resurrected a shopworn slur
first directed against Lindzen by former Globe writer Ross Gelbspan,
who called Lindzen a "hood ornament" for the fossil fuels industry in
a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine....

For no apparent reason, the state of California, Environmental
Defense, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have dragged Lindzen
and about 15 other global- warming skeptics into a lawsuit over auto-
emissions standards. California et al . have asked the auto companies
to cough up any and all communications they have had with Lindzen and
his colleagues, whose research has been cited in court documents.

"We know that General Motors has been paying for this fake science exactly as the tobacco companies
did," says ED attorney Jim Marston. If Marston has a scintilla of
evidence that Lindzen has been trafficking in fake science, he should
present it to the MIT provost's office. Otherwise, he should shut up.

"This
is the criminalization of opposition to global warming," says Lindzen,
who adds he has never communicated with the auto companies involved in
the lawsuit. Of course Lindzen isn't a fake scientist, he's an
inconvenient scientist. No wonder you're not supposed to listen to him.

My position on global warming and the state of global warming science is here.

Apparently there is a new study being trumpeted by social conservatives to help them begin a new attack on raunchy song lyrics.  The Rand study to be published in the journal Pediatrics did phone interviews with a bunch of teenagers, asking them about their sexual habits and what songs they listen to.  They found a correlation that teenagers tend to listen to more sexually-degrading music also are more likely to subsequently begin having sex (or having more sex).  The articles reporting on this study have headlines like this:

Study: Raunchy Music = Earlier Sex

The implication is that listening to sexually-charged* music causes more early sex.  But in fact, they don't know that.   Before it starts to rain here in Phoenix, the sky goes dark and the winds pick up.  Does this mean that darkening skies and increasing winds cause rain?  Or are darkening skies and winds merely a leading edge symptom of a broader phenomena that also includes rain, which we might call "a thunderstorm moving through town."

Does interest in sexually degrading lyrics actually cause teenagers to have sex when they might not have otherwise?  Or is this interest in such music merely a leading indicator, a symptom on the leading edge of a larger phenomena that one might label "adolescence" or "hormone overload."  As an alternative hypothesis to explain the data, one could argue that listening to this music is merely an early low-risk form of sexual experimentation, like sneaking a peek at the Playboy magazines at the local 7-11, which then gets followed up by (but doesn't cause) physical sex. 

I don't know the answer.   Though few would describe me as a puritan, I certainly won't let some of that crappy music in the house (I do check what the kids are downloading on iTunes).  On the other hand, "Don't Fear the Reaper" was one of my favorite songs for years and I never felt the slightest urge to kill myself. 

What I do know is that you absolutely have to beware of the media when they report studies and statistics, and correlation=causation is their absolute favorite mistake to make.

* the article makes a second mistake, in that the study authors found a difference between the correlation of teen sex with sexually degrading music vs. just music with sexual content.  The media also misses this distinction.

Postscript:  This article about professional wrestling leading to teenage violence seems to make the same mistakes

I just finished reading the Deep Hot Biosphere by Thomas Gold.  I thought it was a really interesting read, though be forewarned that this book is treated like the moral equivalent of 9/11 conspiracies by much of the petroleum engineering profession.  Mr. Gold's hypothesis is that our oil and natural gas is not a result of dinosaurs and ferns getting mashed under the earth into oil  He posits that methane is naturally occurring in the earth in huge quantities, and the oil and gas we are exploiting are actually this naturally occurring methane either coming up as-is or converted through chemical and biologic processes underground into heavier oils.  We now know that many of the planets in our solar system have large amounts of naturally occurring methane - why not the Earth?

I found his hypotheses very well reasoned and compelling.  I had a few questions I would have like to ask of him, but he died in 2004.

From the NY Times:

People of Valentin Keller's era [mid 19th century], like those before and after them,
expected to develop chronic diseases by their 40's or 50's. Keller's
descendants had lung problems, they had heart problems, they had liver
problems. They died in their 50's or 60's.

Now, though, life has changed. The family's baby boomers are reaching middle age and beyond and are doing fine.

"I feel good," says Keller's great-great-great-grandson Craig Keller.
At 45, Mr. Keller says he has no health problems, nor does his
45-year-old wife, Sandy.

The Keller family illustrates what may
prove to be one of the most striking shifts in human existence "” a
change from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are
so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable.

Scientists are looking for the explanation of a generation of humans so much stronger and healthier than those who preceded them.  Hypotheses seem to center on pre-natal maternal health and early life nutrition.  But I can give the bigger picture answer:  wealth.  Not Bill Gates wealth, but the generally enormous increase in wealth, even among the poorest Americans.  I discussed this issue along with other related ones in this article on wealth creation.  And this cartoon seems relevant.  Also makes you wonder about whether the obsession with obesity nowadays makes much sense.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease,
lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years
later than they used to. There is also less disability among older
people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it.
And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery
keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the
way they did before.

Even the human mind seems improved. The
average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study
found that a person's chances of having dementia in old age appeared to
have fallen in recent years....

People
even look different today. American men, for example, are nearly three
inches taller than they were 100 years ago and about 50 pounds heavier.

A nice perspective to maintain during modern media-fed health panics.

Update:  Brian Doherty makes a similar observation.

I can't speak to the "future technology" that Bush alluded to in his SOTU address, but the history of ethanol gives me no confidence that there is anything here.  Ethanol is all about rent-seeking, not energy Independence.  Quality studies have consistently shown that the whole life-cycle energy use of ethanol is far higher than what it provides.  In other words, at least with current technologies, every gallon of ethanol used actually INCREASES total petroleum use.  Its hard to find any scientist outside of the ADM boardroom or the state of Iowa that takes ethanol seriously.  If we took the small step of moving the Iowa caucuses out of the first primary position in the presidential race, ethanol might go away.

Right now, I am running out the Phoenix Mardi Gras, where a golf tournament often breaks out mid-party, so I don't have a lot of time.  However, trust me that this USA Today article has bent over backwards to cherry pick scientific studies in favor of ethanol.  The figures mentioned for ethanol providing 26% more energy than it consumes are the absolute most optimistic study, not the consensus average, of scientific studies.  Also, the Berkley study is on "potential" technologies, and even it admits that using current technologies actually deployed ethanol consumes more energy than it provides. But even at 26%, note that this means that more than 4 gallons of ethanol substitute net out only 1 gallon of gasoline, which is pretty pathetic.  Anyway, more later.  I am sure others in the blogosphere will be hacking away at this mess today, and I will try to link some of them tonight.

Update: I am in sports heaven today, at the golf tournament all day and watching the Superbowl tonight, so I still have not gotten back to this topic in depth, but our commenters have taken over for me on this one anyway, so I may just kick back with another beer let y'all do the work for a while.  No one would be happier than me to find that we could grow things cheaply to net increase our supply of clean fuels.  Unfortunately, I am not optimistic about the interaction of the government with any market for things that grow.

For some time, I have secretly harbored the theory, without any scientific knowledge to back it up, that somehow bioengineering might long term lead to the most efficient solar conversion technology.  And in a sense, this is what we are talking about here -- finding a
biological solution to converting sunlight into energy in a usable form.  I suspect we are on the cusp of an exponential growth curve in biology like we experienced with thermodynamics, electromagnetics, and semiconductors over the last two centuries.  But if we are at such an inflection point, it just highlights how hopeless it is for government in general and George Bush in particular to pick winners at this point.  What combustion technology might the government have locked us into in 1800?  What computing technology might we have been locked into in 1950?

More at the Knowlege Problem.

I am constantly frustrated with the media's inability to reality check the numbers they publish.  In many cases, just a few seconds thought would tell them that the numbers make no sense.

Today's example actually comes from a "meth-is-death" web site which is run by the Tennessee state attorneys-general association and is linked prominently from the Federal Government's anti-drug web site  (Hat tip to Reason).  Here are their numbers, copied right from the site:

• 1 in 7 high school students will try meth.
• 99 percent of first-time meth users are hooked after just the first try.
• Only 5 percent of meth addicts are able to kick it and stay away.
• From the first hit to the last breath, the life expectancy of a habitual
  meth user is only 5 years.

So 14.3% (1 in 7) try meth, 99% of those who try are hooked, and 95% of those hooked stay hooked, and all of those hooked die in five years.  So .143 x .99 x .95  or 13.45% of all kids are dying on average by the age of 23.  Wow.  There must be a really huge conspiracy out there to cover up all these deaths. Given that there are about 17,000,000 high school age kids, that means that in the next 5 years or so nearly 2.3 million of them are going to die.   And adults who run anti-drug programs wonder why kids don't take their warnings seriously. 

OK, I warned you, editorials are already blaming the damage in New Orleans on Global Warming in general and George Bush in specific.  Here is what you need to know about this meme:

• New Orleans is built in a big below-sea-level hole in the ground and is surrounded on all sides by water.  Their dikes have been breached and the city flooded with great regularity in the 20th century. Pumps run full time to keep the city dry even during fair weather.  Even without this hurricane, some have been worried that the city was about to sink into the ground.

• Katrina is the 5th category four or five hurricane to hit within 100 miles of New Orleans since 1899.  This includes the hurricanes in 1948, 1965, and Camille in 1969.  Camille was the real whopper up to this point, one of only 3 class 5 hurricanes to ever hit the US before Katrina.  Note however, after three major (class 4 or 5) hurricanes in 21 years in the area from 1948-1969, there has not been another one to hit this area for 36 years.   It is difficult to figure out how you get an increasing frequency argument from this data.

A more detailed study of hurricane frequency is here and nice graphs here.  It turns out that increasing $ damages from hurricanes have more to do with expensive houses near the coast than increasing hurricane severity.  More on cycles of hurricane activity here. 

If there is a government failing here, it has more to do with local infrastructure than CO2.  This blog blames the lack of infrastructure on Bush (of course).  I have no particular problem bash Bush for anything, but my question is,if the locals knew this, as the blog implies, why didn't the locals spend their own damn money on their own infrastructure to protect their own selves.  If New Orleans chooses to build their city below sea level, why should the rest of us bear the cost of their higher-than-average infrastructure costs?

Katrina News at Technorati

This is pretty cool, from Charles C. Mann's new book, and quoted by Marginal Revolution:

...the modern species [of maize] had to have been consciously developed by a
small group of breeders who hunted through teosinte strands for plants with
desired traits.  Geneticists from Rutgers University...estimated in 1998 that
determined, aggressive, plan breeders -- which Indians certainly were -- might
have been able to breed maize in as little as a decade...modern maize was the
outcome of a bold act of conscious biological manipulation -- "arguably man's
first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering," [Nina
Federoff]..."To get corn out of teosinte is so -- you couldn't get a grant to do
that now, because it would sound so crazy...Somebody who did that today would
get a Nobel Prize!  If their lab didn't get shut down by Greenpeace, I mean."

Now that Hurricane Katrina has moved inland, it's time for the next stage of preparation - preparing for the onslaught of global warming activists ready to use New Orleans' devastation to justify government intervention in the economy.  Heck, some global warming activists tried to blame the earthquake induced SE Asian Tsunami on global warming.

For the last couple of years, the meme has circulated that hurricanes are getting worse, and that this is a predictable result of global warming.  More destructive hurricanes may or may not be a result of global warming -- I don't know, and I challenge any climatologist who thinks they can make a definitive prediction on hurricane forces based on a half degree change in global temperatures. 

What is fairly clear is that hurricanes are not actually getting worse.  Damage from them is getting worse, but that is more of a function of building a lot of expensive structures close to the water over the last 30 years.  And it is particularly true in New Orleans, which relies on massive pumps operating 24 hours a day to keep the city above water on a good day.  Patrick Michaels has more on the hurricane meme here, including a disturbing tale of the religion of global warming trumping good science.  Where I am on global warming here.  More on global warming activism overcoming the scientific method here.  I will never forget this quote from Steve Schneider of the NOAA:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic
statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us
has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and
being honest.

Once in a while you read something so new and unexpected about the universe that you don't even know how to react.  That is where I am with this article on strange quark nuggets, smaller than the width of a human hair but weighing tons, burrowing through the earth at 900,000 miles an hour.  Via Instapundit.  Coming soon:  Bad Hollywood movie using the concept.

Actually, there is no pilots union in the military, perhaps fortunately, because they likely would have opposed the creation of un-manned drone aircraft such as the Predator, which has been wildly successful in Middle East operations.  Current aircraft have both reconnaissance and air-to-ground attack capabilities.  These aircraft are piloted from the ground by ex-fighter pilots, but the next generation will be able to take off and land themselves, obviating the need for even a ground pilot.  Wired has a longer article on these cool drones.  Beyond the obvious reduction in risk to humans, the drones also have the advantage of being substantially less expensive than human piloted fighter craft -- as little as $15 million apiece, even for the next generation tricked up models.

I thought this quote, via Reason, from anti-smoking advocate Michael Siegel is representative of how many pseudo-scientific advocacy groups work today:

In the 20 years that I was a member of the tobacco control movement,
I was led to believe that there were only two sides to any anti-smoking issue:
our side and the tobacco industry side. Therefore, anyone who disagreed with our
position had to be, in some way, affiliated with the tobacco industry. I was
also taught to respond to their arguments not on any scientific grounds or on
the merit of their arguments, but by simply discrediting the person by attacking
their affiliation with the tobacco companies.

As I have found out over the past two decades, there are a lot of
individuals who disagree with a number of positions that the anti-smoking
movement has taken (interestingly, now I find myself to be one of them). And not
all of these individuals are affiliated with, or working for the tobacco
industry. As individuals who are not part of a tobacco industry campaign, these
people are entitled to express their opinions and their arguments really deserve
to be addressed on their merits. At very least, anti-smoking organizations and
advocates should not attack these individuals. Attacking their arguments is
legitimate, but attacking the individuals, in these cases, is not.

Take this statement, substitute global warming for anti-smoking and oil industry for tobacco industry and the statement still works just as well.

Update:  For another example, see the debate over child seat efficacy at the Freakonomics Blog.  A couple of researchers studied data on injury rates of kids in car seats vs. kids in seat belts, and found little incremental benefits of seat belts.  Note their desire to find the truth under the numbers:

What is more puzzling to me is why my results and Heaton's both suggest very
little injury benefit of car seats, but the medical literature often finds 70%
(!!) reductions of injuries with car seats relative to seat belts. We find
reductions that are an order of magnitude smaller. They use very different
methods -- surveying people in the weeks after crashes for instance -- but still
it is really a puzzle. Which is why, when you read my paper, I am extremely
cautious in interpreting the injury findings.

I hope that the medical researchers, Heaton, and I can all work together to
try to make some sense of the conflicting results being generated by these
different methodologies to resolve this important question.

Seems like a reasonable scientific attitude.  Now (via Marginal Revolution) here is the response of a child seat "activist" to their findings:

Their [Levitt and Dubner] conclusions stand in stark contrast to the existing
body of scientific data that support current child restraint recommendations,
and are, in our opinion, irresponsible and dangerous....We hope that this
misleading article does not cost a child his life.

In other words:  Open scientific debat = killing children.  Levitt and Dubner must work for Haliburton.  Levitt has an update to the whole debate here.

Previously, I asked "why won't ethanol just go away", lamenting what a stupid program ethanol is and how much subsidy money is poured down that drain, not to mention the effect it seems to have on the Iowa primary every 4 years.  Yet another study has shown that ethanol consumes more energy to make than it actually produces. 

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more
energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new
Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.

"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,"
says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These
strategies are not sustainable."

Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering
at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of
producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and wood biomass as well as for
producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. Their report is published
in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production,
the study found that:

• corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
• switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  and
• wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel
production, the study found that:

• soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel
  produced, and
• sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel
  produced.

In assessing inputs, the researchers considered such factors as the energy
used in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer,
running farm machinery and irrigating, grinding and transporting the crop) and
in fermenting/distilling the ethanol from the water mix. Although additional
costs are incurred, such as federal and state subsidies that are passed on to
consumers and the costs associated with environmental pollution or degradation,
these figures were not included in the analysis.