DDT is not dangerous to humans, but it is dangerous to some animals. So if you’re in a rich country where you have malaria under control, clearly you should ban DDT or severely restrict its use.
But our concern about DDT in the early 70s basically meant that most of the developing world restricted their use as well. That was probably an immensely bad judgement because yes, it harms animals like birds, but it also saves human lives. These actions undoubtedly led to many millions of lives lost. So that is one example of where we need to be very careful about what we do.
But I think we are doing a little bit the same thing with climate change discussions right now. We have spent so much time over the last 10 years trying to do something about climate change. We have a treaty that will essentially do nothing whatsoever about climate change and it will still end up costing us quite a bit. And you’ve got to ask yourself, couldn’t we have spent that amount of time and effort and consideration on addressing some of the issues in the world where we could have done an enormous amount of good?
I know you’ll be shocked to learn this, but women talk more than men. I also found this an interesting statistic:
…what the male brain may lack in converstation and emotion, they more than make up with in their ability to think about sex.
Dr Brizendine says the brain’s “sex processor” – the areas responsible for sexual thoughts – is twice as big as in men than in women, perhaps explaining why men are stereotyped as having sex on the mind.
Or, to put it another way, men have an international airport for dealing with thoughts about sex, “where women have an airfield nearby that lands small and private planes”.
Studies have shown that while a man will think about sex every 52 seconds, the subject tends to cross women’s minds just once a day, the University of California psychiatrist says.
More than anything else, even the misrepresentations themselves, the collective willingness to overlook bad policy arguments unsupported (or even contradicted) by the current state of science while at the same time trumpeting the importance of scientific consensus is evidence of the comprehensive and pathological politicization of science in the policy debate over global warming. If climate scientists ever wonder why they are looked upon with suspicion among some people in society, they need look no further in their willingness to compromise their own intellectual standards in policy debate on the issue of disasters and climate change.
Christopher Monckton excoriates the Stern Report and the “science” behind the global warming policy pushes:
First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that’s scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn’t do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.
Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: “With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’ “
And Chris Mooney thinks that there’s a Republican war on science?
Next time they call people fascists, some of these folks need to look in the mirror.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Jonah Goldberg (with whom I had the pleasure of chatting for a few minutes last night) has related thoughts.
So much of the demonization of conservatives from liberals in the last fifty years has worked on a formula which goes something like this: “I want use the state to impose my dreamy good intentions. Conservatives are evil. So, if they get ahold of government they will use government to do evil in the same way that we would do good.”
This isn’t surprising, given human nature, and the evolutionary process that developed it. It’s in our genes to distrust “the other.”
But one of the features of the Anglosphere is its ability to build trust institutions, even in the face of physical diversity. I’d like to see some cultural cross comparisons. Any takers on further thoughts?
Speaking of hurricanes, while the Atlantic remains quiet, the biggest storm of the season so far is pounding the Phillippines, and due to hit Manila directly. It unexpectedly went from a tropical storm to a Category 4 typhoon in twenty-four hours. It just shows that we have a long way to go to be able to predict these things. It also shows that we don’t pay much attention to tropical cyclones unless they affect the US, because I haven’t seen anyone reporting it.
Anyway, the lack of predictability brings up our immediate dilemma. We’re about to go out of town for ten days. Should we shutter up before we leave (which would be a royal pain, amidst the other packing)? It seems unlikely that there will be a storm that hits south Florida during the first week of October, but you never know.
, it’s not a