Reviews: Daybreakers and McClatchy's story on restarting chimp medical experiments

Daybreakers is an above-average vampire flick, partly for the premise: instead of being a hidden minority, in the near-future the vampires have won and run the world, with a small number of remaining humans being all that exists for the carefully controlled, medical blood farms.

There's a certain environmental analogy in the film: some vampires ask their complacent colleagues what will happen when they've drunk the last human blood (there will always be more is the answer). I think we have an even better analogy, though.

McClatchy reports that the US is considering restarting the use of chimpanzees for medical experiments. Just like some vampires in the fictional movie believed it was wrong to use their closely related species of humans, however inferior the humans might be, many people and even a major pharmaceutical company (GlaxoSmithKline) oppose this experimentation on great apes.

McClatchy's reporting is good and detailed and has two flaws: first, it's not clear exactly how the chimps would be used. Many were previously infected with Hepatitis C, so this research could potentially benefit them. More to the point, any research that doesn't hurt, scare, or medically harm the chimps isn't too controversial. I think the researchers' comparison to human volunteers doesn't work, though: you don't have shoot human subjects with anesthetic darts on a daily basis in order to get blood samples from them. Overall, I doubt the proposed research matches the benign standard that I could live with.

The second flaw is the assertion that chimps do not make particularly useful subjects for human medical research. I highly, highly doubt that to be an accurate statement. It treads into the animal rights version of science denialism, and provokes the over-reaction from people like Mark Hoofnagle who can't stand animal rights activists and miss the point that sapient species need to be treated differently.

I suspect a much better version of the utilitarian argument against using chimps for medical experiments is that they're too expensive to use, especially if you accept that we must treat them decently. To me, that would mean teaching them sign language, something you could easily argue is a necessity to avoid unnecessary harm, and should be enough to make it way too expensive to use chimps. There ought to be a law on this, and I think we could get one on a state by state basis.

EPA climate regulation, the budget, and Obama's nuanced-but-wrong view on climate lawsuits

One under-reported aspect of the Obama budget compromise is that EPA's regulation of climate change gets to move forward, although grants and other programs to directly fight climate change were killed. This seems to me to be an important victory - EPA has another year to get more detailed regulations developed, polluters have to spend a year in compliance and begin their adaptation to regulation. Most importantly, the climate rejectionists only have one more shot to kill EPA regulation in the 2012 budget before the November 2012 elections. New regs should be finished by the time the 2013 budget rolls around, and if we're lucky, the Republican majority in the House will be much smaller (although the same is likely true for the Democratic majority in the Senate, where 2 Dems are up for re-election for every Repub in that cycle). Budgets, not direct overturning of EPA authority, are the things we have to worry about.

Of course, the EPA climate regulations aren't exactly earthshaking, but they are progress. I also expect lawsuits by the enviro community sometime after the regulations are in place - not to suspend them, but to keep them in place while enviros litigate for tougher ones. Comprehensive climate legislation would of course be better, but this is the hand we've got until at least 2013, and quite possibly two or four years later given the difficulty overcoming the filibuster in the Senate.

I think this all plays a role in Obama's nuanced-but-wrong attempts to strike down climate change lawsuits in the courts. It went to oral argument last week, and things don't look good. Lawprof Jonathan Zasloff excoriated Obama for taking the polluters' side last fall, while I took a nuanced-but-critical view in the comments to Jonathan's post. Obama is arguing the climate-as-a-public nuisance is displaced by the Clean Air Act, as long as the EPA is acting to enforce the law:

in the 15 months since the court of appeals issued its decision, EPA has taken several substantial actions pursuant to its CAA authority to address greenhouse-gas emissions. EPA finalized the proposed rule that the court of appeals discussed—the “endangerment finding” (i.e., that greenhouse-gas emissions are reasonably anticipated to endanger public health and welfare). It also adopted standards governing emissions of greenhouse gases from certain motor vehicles. As a result of those regulations, which took effect on January 2, 2011, carbon dioxide is now a “pollutant subject to regulation under [the CAA].” 42 U.S.C. 7475(a)(4).

On December 23, 2010, EPA announced a proposed settlement agreement, under which it would commit to complete, by May 26, 2012, a rulemaking relating to NSPS for greenhouse gases emitted by fossil-fuel-fired electric-utility steamgenerating units (i.e., the category of stationary sources at issue in this case).

Thus, EPA’s actions have triggered a regulatory cascade that will result in the application of PSD requirements to new and modified stationary sources that emit greenhouse gases.

(p. 10)

In other words, if the Republicans take away enforcement, the nuisance case has a strong reason to come back. Obama figures this will reduce the level of Republican incentive to gut the EPA on climate change.

I'm not saying I agree with this, but just that it's a workable strategy. It's a strategy aimed at promoting EPA regulation. If all you wanted was new climate legislation in Congress then you wouldn't do this, you'd instead keep the nuisance suits viable absent any legislation and then offer to kill them in the new legislation as a concession to the rejectionists.

I think it's bad law, in that it basically denies the role of courts in adjudicating public nuisances like they've done for generations, but there's reasoning behind it.

Nisbet/Romm/Mooney/Prop 23

So, Matt Nisbet, kind of contrarian/kind of gets a lot of people riled up at him as he tells people how to be persuasive, has some paper claiming that the climate hawks failed at passing a climate bill last year despite having a financial edge on rejectionists and a reasonably accurate media portrayal of the science.

Joe Romm, given advance warning by a third party, breaks the news embargo to blister the work. Joe broke the embargo partly because he thought someone else had, but more interestingly because he felt Nisbet was deceptive and wanted his critique available when people read Nisbet's stuff. I'm still mulling that one over, but I think it's okay (he shouldn't have posted Nisbet's full document though).

Joe says Nisbet's deceptive in that Nisbet compares total lobbying across all sectors between business allies of cap and trade and business opponents (and each side's nonprofit allies). Nominally pro-cap-and-trade businesses are unlikely to have spent much of their lobbying budget on this issue. Joe could've strengthened his point by noting that the same issue applies to business opponents of caps, but not as strongly since the fossil fuel corps are highly motivated to throw money at this issue. He also backs this up with a second post showing fossil fuel industry far outspent alternative energy industry in political donations.

Nisbet could've had a decent point that it's not as much as enviros versus monolithic corporate world as it was in the past, given the large portion of the business world that's willing to live with the climate hawk position. But we already knew that.

Joe's other major critique was that Nisbet omits television when he says the media is now accurate about climate change, when Fox News' internal messaging has been to dispute reality. Seems like another legitimate point.

Chris Mooney also jumped in with a pointed defense of his own work showing the Bush Republicans were at war with science and arguing that Nisbet displayed inappropriate false bias about the level of Bushian interference with science. Interesting in that Mooney used to work closely with Nisbet. Nisbet also appears in the comments for a little while, also kind of interesting.

The failed denialist attempt to use Prop 23 to kill California's work on climate also came up, because reality outspent denial on that issue. I think Nisbet might miss three points: 1. good guys won, so are they really as incompetent as he thinks? 2. the big money won, so who has the big money is also important, and 3. most ignored is that the bad guys knew they were going to lose more than a month before the election, and without having seen the campaign expenditures, I'll bet they cut their losses. The bad guys also had a decent backup strategy in the form of the simultaneous Prop 26, keeping polluters from having to pay for the environmental effect of their nonsense. Prop 26 won, and polluters outspent good guys by 3 to 1. We need to watch that strategy harder, and use it ourselves.

Bottom line is that the bad guys are fighting defense in the Senate, and they only need two fifths of the Senate to stop action. Nisbet apparently thinks we can't do a frontal assault at all, and falls back to the research-and-adaptation-only-nonsense. I don't think he's made his point.

My Progressive Caucus/Obama/Ryan budget plan

1. I'd change everything by following Gore's proposal of ending payroll taxes and substituting a carbon tax for them:

But that completely sound approach is even more unlikely to happen than anything listed below, so moving on....

2. I would reinstate Clinton era levels for estate taxes. I'd split the new revenues 50-50 between reducing deficits and reducing income taxes for the top 10% (this would still be a progressive tax shift, because the people who pay estate taxes are far richer than the top 10% of income earners).

3. From the Progressive Caucus Budget Proposal, I'd keep the new tax brackets for millionaires (minus their share of the estate tax revenues), tax capital gains the same as income, add the public option for ObamaRomneyCare, negotiate market prices for Medicare Part D, and reduce defense expenditures by at least as much as they say, 15%-30%, maybe even more. I would keep half of present troop levels in Afghanistan, though, limited to cities, highways, and portions of the country where Karzai didn't steal the election/where the government is perceived as legitimate.

4. From Obama, I'd keep the phaseout of Bush cuts for incomes above $250,000, and of course ObamaRomneyCare.

5. From Ryan's plan, I would adopt the voucher proposal for Medicare, which is basically ObamaRomneyCare applied to seniors, with some changes. I'd include the public option that would basically be existing Medicare, and the vast majority of seniors would probably just stay in that system. I'd index the vouchers to GDP instead of inflation, because medical costs way exceed inflation but cannot exceed GDP increases forever. And I'd include the cost containment mechanisms of ObamaRomneyCare.

Mostly I'm adopting each plan's version of increasing revenues and cutting costs. And since this is my magical pony wish list, I'll keep going.

6. Limit the dependent child tax credit to one per adult, and then create a new and more generous credit for adopted and foster children with no limit on number.

7. Eliminate oil and other corporate subsidies, and farm subsidies.

I'm sure this will all happen, very soon.

Dupont and ozone, Exxon and climate, fluoride and nobody, evolution and fundamentalists

On March 22, I sat with the other members of the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board for a workshop on fluoridating San Jose's water system, the largest city in the country that doesn't fluoridate all its water.

The meeting had many residents virulently opposed to fluoridation, I've talked to quite a few of them, and they're as fervent about their cause as many other people are about the science and medical causes they fight. What's different about this fight they have against the scientific establishment is how easily mainstream science can overcome their strong opposition in the political arena. Most Americans drink fluoridated water.

So why does it work for fluoride and not so easily for climate? One answer is the simple establishment message: fluoride is effective, and fluoride is safe. The first part of that message is accurate. The second part is pushing it some - more accurate would be "fluoride is effective, and fluoride's risk is at most small, mainly to certain small subsets of the population, and outweighed by the benefits of fluoride." The establishment doesn't want to say that, except when I pushed them on it. But their simple message works (except for me).

The other answer for fluoride was apparent from looking out at the audience - there weren't any powerful allies for the fluoridation opponents, while the representatives of the health establishment made their preferences clear. The ability to change from no fluoride to fluoridation becomes clearer in the absence of a powerful opponent.

It's similar to the issue Old Eli discusses, ozone depletion. The scientific establishment could've faced powerful industry opposition to phasing out CFC's, but instead it faced Dupont, the early popularizer of the chemicals. Dupont toyed with science denialism for a few years but then backed reality. This probably had less to do with ethics and more to do with expired patents and new competition to produce CFCs while Dupont had a competitive advantage in the replacement chemicals. Had Dupont decided differently, then I think American and the Reagan/Bush Administrations wouldn't have provided the global leadership that they did.

Dupont's counterpart in the climate context is Exxon (and some others), and the behavior difference helps clarify the different political outcome from ozone depletion. It's not the fault of the scientists, maybe only secondarily of journalists. Politicians will have to face their own consciences and whatever theological construct holds true in the end, if any. But I think the primary message is corporate power, especially when playing defense, can hold on for a long, long time.

Teaching evolution is another test of this idea. Basically, the scientific establishment wins from college and up, while only a vague form of evolution is vaguely taught at lower levels of schooling. No corporate power has fought off the scientific establishment in high schools, so I'd agree that the principle isn't that corporate power explains all US politics. Religious beliefs tied closely to conservative political affiliations are an independent power source to fight science in that case, so every situation can be a little different.

One last thought on fluoride - it used to be a politicized issue, with the hard right wing in opposition. That's gone away, so it is possible to depoliticize a science policy issue.

UPDATE: worth noting that Ted Parsons wouldn't agree that Dupont had an easy out. Still, Dupont reacted very differently than the fossil fuel industry to its crisis, both in the politics and the speed at which it shifted its own business model to using substitutes.

Reviews: The Gold Rush (1925) and True Grit (2010)

One of the reasons I subscribed to Netflix was to see the old classics that are the basis of modern films. I haven't done it as much as I should, but I did finally watch Chaplin's 1925 film, "The Gold Rush". The version I watched is kind of a cross-over between silent film and the talkies - in 1942, the film was re-released with Chaplin doing a narration.

Anyway, the slapstick humor passes the test of time, and I can see a lot of carryover into Jackie Chan and Steven Chow. Worth checking out.

The other random film I saw semi-recently was the Coen brothers' version of True Grit. Reviews last year got it wrong, calling it a genre film and not a true Coen brothers' film. More recent reviews, as Pandagon points out, mistake the female lead as being in line with other hypermasculine action flicks that happen to have a female protagonist acting just like a male would. The Coens aren't really holding out any of their characters as true heroes in recent films, with only partial exceptions, and the ending of True Grit makes it clear that the same dark viewpoint continues in this film. It's definitely a Coen film, if you like that kind of thing.

Names of US Congressmembers who deny climate change, so their grandchildren can find them

Yesterday, 240 Congressmembers rejected a one-sentence statement that humans are causing climate change and that it poses significant risks. 184 accepted reality as it is. I leave analysis to Joe Romm, and just take this opportunity to highlight the names of 240. I hope they can imitate George Wallace and do something to reverse all the harm they're causing, but the clock is ticking.

From the vote information page (in case the link goes away, Waxman H.Amdt 245, to amend HR 910, vote Roll No. 236 taken 4/6/2011), here are the ones that their grandchildren can examine:

Adams Aderholt Akin Alexander Amash Austria Bachmann Bachus Barletta Bartlett Barton (TX) Bass (NH) Benishek Berg Biggert Bilbray Bilirakis Bishop (UT) Black Blackburn Bonner Bono Mack Boren Boustany Brady (TX) Brooks Broun (GA) Buchanan Bucshon Buerkle Burgess Burton (IN) Calvert Camp Campbell Canseco Cantor Capito Carter Cassidy Chabot Chaffetz Coble Coffman (CO) Cole Conaway Cravaack Crawford Crenshaw Culberson Davis (KY) Denham Dent DesJarlais Diaz-Balart Dold Dreier Duffy Duncan (SC) Duncan (TN) Ellmers Emerson Farenthold Fincher Fitzpatrick Flake Fleischmann Fleming Flores Forbes Fortenberry Foxx Franks (AZ) Gallegly Gardner Garrett Gerlach Gibbs Gibson Gingrey (GA)

Gohmert Goodlatte Gosar Gowdy Granger Graves (GA) Graves (MO) Griffin (AR) Griffith (VA) Grimm Guinta Guthrie Hall Hanna Harper Harris Hartzler Hastings (WA) Hayworth Heck Heller Hensarling Herger Herrera Beutler Huelskamp Huizenga (MI) Hultgren Hunter Hurt Issa Jenkins Johnson (IL) Johnson (OH) Johnson, Sam Jones Jordan Kelly King (IA) King (NY) Kingston Kinzinger (IL) Kline Labrador Lamborn Lance Landry Lankford LaTourette Latta Lewis (CA) LoBiondo Long Lucas Luetkemeyer Lummis Lungren, Daniel E. Mack Manzullo Marchant Marino McCarthy (CA) McCaul McClintock McCotter McHenry McKeon McKinley McMorris Rodgers Meehan Mica Miller (FL) Miller (MI) Miller, Gary Mulvaney Murphy (PA) Myrick Neugebauer Noem Nugent Nunes

Nunnelee Olson Palazzo Paul Paulsen Pearce Pence Peterson Petri Pitts Platts Poe (TX) Pompeo Posey Price (GA) Quayle Rahall Reed Rehberg Renacci Ribble Rigell Rivera Roby Roe (TN) Rogers (AL) Rogers (KY) Rogers (MI) Rohrabacher Rokita Rooney Ros-Lehtinen Roskam Ross (FL) Royce Runyan Ryan (WI) Scalise Schilling Schmidt Schock Schweikert Scott (SC) Scott, Austin Sensenbrenner Sessions Shimkus Shuster Simpson Smith (NE) Smith (NJ) Smith (TX) Southerland Stearns Stivers Stutzman Sullivan Terry Thompson (PA) Thornberry Tiberi Tipton Turner Upton Walberg Walden Walsh (IL) Webster West Westmoreland Whitfield Wilson (SC) Wittman Wolf Womack Woodall Yoder Young (AK) Young (FL) Young (IN)

It seems strange to call out as brave someone who just admits the obvious, but Dave Reichert is the lone Republican Congressman who accepts reality. And three Democrats deserve special attention for denying it, the Hons. Boren, Peterson, and Rahall.

Wish I didn't have Shellenberger on my (partly) pro-nuke side

Nuclear proliferation issues are probably the second-biggest problem with nuclear power after economics. Michael Shellenberger spent much of this Forum discussion pretending it wasn't a problem at all. "You don't build nuclear power to get a nuclear weapon." Oh yes, you do. There's a huge amount of overlap in the technology.

France used civilian nuclear energy program to develop and disguise its nuclear weapons program (Shell completely screws this up). Other nuclear powers did the same thing. For Shell to claim the Iran example supports his position when so much of its program was built with the assistance of the UN, is really stupid. I have trouble believing he actually believes it.

Shell also made a somewhat misleading cost comparison of "built" nuclear power, which ignores the massive upfront construction costs. Existing nuclear capacity is cheap, but building new plants is a totally different issue that he glides by.

Also annoying is Shell's "I used to be against it, now I'm for it" conversion trick that climate denialists think give them credibility. It doesn't.

Getting back to proliferation, it's not an easy thing to solve because throwing taxpayer money at it, the Republican solution to nuclear power, won't work. I think a solution that expands nuclear power to other nations would require much more powerful UN control, not just inspections, of nuclear plants. I also don't know how you get this unless existing nuclear powers offer up the same degree of restriction on sovereignty. Tell that to the Tea Party.

Congressional Republicans admit they can't handle the truth

I meant to comment on this a while back:

A group of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives is proposing to shift funds from NASA’s climate change research coffers to the agency’s manned spaceflight program, an effort they say could preserve what they described as the agency’s core mission even as the new GOP-controlled House seeks to make good on vows to roll back federal discretionary spending this year.

It's not just moving money from the most scientifically-useful part of NASA to the least useful, although that does nicely symbolize the Republican hatred of science. Most Republican leaders admit that the planet's warming, but they usually say the case for it being anthropogenic is unproven. Trying to deny information that would provide further proof is a solid indication that they can't handle the truth. I suppose they could claim that they have definitive proof that the warming's not human-cased, and that the proof is so solid that there's no longer any need to study the subject, but that makes them all the more idiots.

I recall this happening before, and I'm sure it'll happen again. The second-level question though is why do they bother? The evidence that we're changing climate is mountainous and they ignore it, so why do they bother trying to stop still more evidence from coming in?

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to fear hypocrisy

Came up with the quote above myself. I really hate the argument that you're not allowed to do something good unless you always do that good thing. Mostly lately used to say the US shouldn't be allowed to stop Qaddafi because we've not bombed Yemen's dictator. Not that we should rush in everywhere, and I even think there are reasonable arguments not to get involved in Libya, but everywhere or nowhere isn't a good argument.

We're no angels, and hypocrisy is a good argument to make if we claim to be angels, but it's not an argument for inaction.

I often see its counterpart argument, btw: someone says they should be allowed to do something wrong because other people have done something wrong previously. Land developers make this argument constantly, "people ten years ago built their homes right into the streamside habitat, therefore I should be able to as well." No.

So why is a partitioned Libya worse than a Qaddafi-ruled one?

I'm not getting the argument behind the fear of a partitioned Libya. The alternative is more Qaddafi, more oil purchases from Qaddafi, and more weapons sales to him.

In a partition, the rebels will continue to assemble a government and maintain oil sales, while Qaddafi can't. Eventually they'll take care of him. Given that we've created a no-fly/no-armor/no-artillery zone, if the rebels can't fight off infantry at this point, then they don't have the support and drive to maintain a revolution.

As for Josh Marshall saying no genocide=no humanitarian reason to intervene, I think the rebuttal argument makes itself.

It's definitely a roll of the dice, but doing nothing isn't such a great play either. And while eastern Libya has been a hotbed of Al Qaeda recruitment in the past, a chance at a more democratic society could help there, and meanwhile we're destroying every weapon in Libya that can shoot down aircraft.

Nuke power: still too safe, still too expensive, and no one's changed their mind

Stoat refers to the latest go-around on nukes following the catastrophe in Japan (also here). I don't think people are changing their minds on the overall issue, and who am I to buck that trend?

While I find it pretty murky to figure out exactly what's happening in Japan, it seems that the radiation released is still much less than Chernobyl. Maybe the radiation could get as bad as Chernobyl, maybe not, but it definitely won't result in as many lives lost. Compare that to the million people annually who die from from fine particle emissions, in large part from fossil fuels, and it's no contest. Meanwhile, Germany and China partially suspend their nuclear programs while their coal plants chug away, actions that don't help safety unless they later plan to make up for lost time.

So I'll stand by what I wrote in 2005, that nuclear power is too safe relative to fossil fuel competitors. I suppose you could argue it's worthwhile to make the worst 10% safer while making new plants less safe than otherwise planned, but that wouldn't change the analysis. I also suppose it's less safe than the industrial accidents from renewable power (don't really know the answer to that), but that's not the binary choice we have in our current system.

I tried to figure out what could change my mind on safety, and it would have to be getting a lot of Chernobyls. However, nuclear power could be ruled out with only a few Chernobyls because they have the effect of making significant land areas uninhabitable, an adverse economic effect. Nuclear power is just too expensive to be more than a minor contributor to climate solutions, unless we go along with the conservative push for giant subsidies for nukes. Maybe we need to, but that doesn't make it optimal.

One other point: Matt notices that nuclear power is only safe due to governmental regulation, and still conservatives love it.

And another: this BBC article points to a proposal to put a nuclear waste depository in the already-uninhabitable Chernobyl area. It doesn't make much sense in the thousands of years that we'd theoretically need to store it, but it does make sense for the actual century or two that's needed, and afterwards a much more advanced technological society can figure out a better solution.

Checking for next steps in House Republicans science denial

Talking Points Memo reports that none of the 31 Republicans on the House Energy Committee will admit that climate change is real and caused by people, directly repudiating both the real world and their own 2008 presidential campaign.

The more constructive side of my personality thinks they should be asked if temperatures will continue to go up in the next ten years at the rate predicted by the IPCC, then will they change their minds. I can't imagine how much trouble we'll be in if there's still serious resistance to action ten years from now, but there probably will be, so we might want to start blunting it.

The more political side suggests seeing how far we can test these geniuses. I bet many would reject an amendment declaring that CO2, methane, and other gases have globally increased in concentration and humans are responsible. A commenter also suggests testing them as to whether the earth is over 6,000 years old, which could be done by an amendment declaring that the earth is many millions of years old and therefore a study of the paleoclimate over the millions of years helps us understand modern climate.

Let's see how far they'll stick their heads in the sand. Showing how the Republicans can't acknowledge reality is a good way to start wedging them apart from any educated supporters.

Fluoridating water, or a funny thing happened on my way to backseat driving

I originally labelled this blog Backseat Driving back in 2004 because I anticipated it to be a blog where I would second-guess decisions made by politicians and other people. That worked out fine more or less until November 2010, when for some reason I was elected to the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board. Turns out that San Jose is the largest city in the US without fluoridated water supplies (in much of the city, anyway), and the seven of us directors have to decide whether we'll help or hinder the fluoridation process. So I'm pushed into the front seat for this one.

We've got some legal and economic issues to handle (it's not quite as cheap as everyone says, I want to know where the money's going to come from), but the relevant issue here is science. I read the guest post at climate blogger Coby Beck's place, The Case Against Fluoride, fairly closely a while back, especially the raucous debate in the comments. As a spectator with some, limited reading of the available information, I'd say the fluoridators seemed more persuasive than skeptics, but it wasn't the absolute demolishing that I expected.

The fluoride skeptics really hurt their cause when say fluoride doesn't prevent cavities - it's so obviously effective that people making this claim are damaging their own credibility. I'd consider it comparable to denying that the planet has warmed in the last 50 years.

The closer issue is adverse effects, and whether a substantial number of people are very slightly harmed by fluoridation, or if a small number of people are substantially harmed. The 2006 National of Sciences report doesn't condemn fluoridation, but it doesn't absolve it, either:

Bone Fractures

....Overall, there was consensus among the committee that there is scientific evidence that under certain conditions fluoride can weaken bone and increase the risk of fractures. The majority of the committee concluded that lifetime exposure to fluoride at drinking-water concentrations of 4 mg/L or higher is likely to increase fracture rates in the population, compared with exposure to 1 mg/L, particularly in some demographic subgroups that are prone to accumulate fluoride into their bones (e.g., people with renal disease)....There were few studies to assess fracture risk in populations exposed to fluoride at 2 mg/L in drinking water. The best available study, from Finland, suggested an increased rate of hip fracture in populations exposed to fluoride at concentrations above 1.5 mg/L. However, this study alone is not sufficient to judge fracture risk for people exposed to fluoride at 2 mg/L. Thus, no conclusions could be drawn about fracture risk or safety at 2 mg/L....

(In California, 2 mg/L was the limit, and 0.7 is the new proposed goal. -Ed)

Neurotoxicity and Neurobehavioral Effects

Animal and human studies of fluoride have been published reporting adverse cognitive and behavioral effects. A few epidemiologic studies of Chinese populations have reported IQ deficits in children exposed to fluoride at 2.5 to 4 mg/L in drinking water. Although the studies lacked sufficient detail for the committee to fully assess their quality and relevance to U.S. populations, the consistency of the results appears significant enough to warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence....

Endocrine Effects

The chief endocrine effects of fluoride exposures in experimental animals and in humans include decreased thyroid function, increased calcitonin activity, increased parathyroid hormone activity, secondary hyperparathyroidism, impaired glucose tolerance, and possible effects on timing of sexual maturity. Some of these effects are associated with fluoride intake that is achievable at fluoride concentrations in drinking water of 4 mg/L or less, especially for young children or for individuals with high water intake. Many of the effects could be considered subclinical effects, meaning that they are not adverse health effects. However, recent work on borderline hormonal imbalances and endocrine-disrupting chemicals indicated that adverse health effects, or increased risks for developing adverse effects, might be associated with seemingly mild imbalances or perturbations in hormone concentrations. Further research is needed to explore these possibilities....

Genotoxicity and Carcinogenicity

....Whether fluoride might be associated with bone cancer has been a subject of debate. Bone is the most plausible site for cancer associated with fluoride because of its deposition into bone and its mitogenic effects on bone cells in culture....Several epidemiologic investigations of the relation between fluoride and cancer have been performed since the 1993 evaluation, including both individual-based and ecologic studies. Several studies had significant methodological limitations that made it difficult to draw conclusions. Overall, the results are mixed, with some studies reporting a positive association and others no association.

On the basis of the committee’s collective consideration of data from humans, genotoxicity assays, and studies of mechanisms of action in cell systems (e.g., bone cells in vitro), the evidence on the potential of fluoride to initiate or promote cancers, particularly of the bone, is tentative and mixed. Assessing whether fluoride constitutes a risk factor for osteosarcoma is complicated by the rarity of the disease and the difficulty of characterizing biologic dose because of the ubiquity of population exposure to fluoride and the difficulty of acquiring bone samples in nonaffected individuals.

These were the most troubling findings, mostly about what hasn't been proven, and mostly dealing with levels that are five times what's planned for drinking water. The report expressly ignored the benefits of fluoridation. It's important to balance out potential concerns over rare, severe complications related to fluoride with the certainty that rare, severe complications can result from cavities.

The bottom line as a policy maker in my little arena is that I shouldn't try and figure out the science myself, but I should try to figure out what the scientific consensus is, figure out where the consensus doesn't yet exist, and then plug that information into everything else we have to balance.

The science seems to favor fluoridation, but it's not a slam dunk. And we still have potential policy barriers, and the overall cost issues. Figuring this all out will be interesting.

UPDATE: I'll give the anti-fluoridators credit for quickly finding their way here. Personally, I'm not going to attempt to judge the quality of their sources. I don't care what any single paper or PhD says, I want to know what the consensus says.

Beware pundits selling a new look at some bad people

Brad DeLong on political scientists not behaving well, quoting Mother Jones:

....Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr.... sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months later, he penned an elegant description of the chat for The New Republic, reporting that Qaddafi had been interested in discussing "direct democracy." Nye noted that "there is no doubt that" the Libyan autocrat:

acts differently on the world stage today than he did in decades past. And the fact that he took so much time to discuss ideas—including soft power—with a visiting professor suggests that he is actively seeking a new strategy.

The article .... noted that Nye had gone to Libya "at the invitation of the Monitor Group, a consulting company that is helping Libya open itself to the global economy"... [but not that] he [was]... as a paid consultant of the Monitor Group.... And Franklin Foer, then the editor of the magazine, says, "If we had known that he was consulting for a firm paid by the government, we wouldn't have run the piece."...

And Nye wasn't the only one who did this stuff. I'm familiar with my friends at Burson Marsteller and at Hill & Knowlton from when I used to do something useful campaigning for Burma. Looks like this Monitor Group is another firm to watch.

I guess the lesson is to be careful when a pundit says something contrarian, about a powerful bad guy turning over a new leaf....

The Carbon Inception

Everything's better with music.

Yup, nothing to worry about here, it's just a bad dream....

Evolutionary psychology wars aren't helpful to climate denialists

Climate denialist/skeptics face a problem in trying to argue that 97% of the practitioners in the field are fundamentally wrong in accepting climate change: how likely is it that a field of science could get that screwed up? Generally, denialists don't care about whether the unlikelihood of their claim and whether it suggests they themselves are in the wrong. Instead they just say that climatologists don't understand climatology.

My question is whether this has happened before in modern science. If it hasn't, then denialists have to get us to assume pretty heroically that the scientific process has failed in a way that it's not failed before, and I think it might make us consider whether in fact, the denialists are wrong and the 97% of climatologists are right.

I should note that this isn't about science getting something wrong - that happens all the time. This is about the claim that the field of climatology is fundamentally unsound, which is the basic claim of denialists. And even if it did happen elsewhere, that doesn't mean it's happening now in climatology, but the precedent would make the claim a tiny bit less implausible.

I looked once before at whether modern science engages in conspiracy, in the far smaller group of scientists examining Jupiter's moon Europa and its ice cover, and I didn't think it was helpful to denialists.

So how about another potential example, in the field of evolutionary psychology. This area attracts a lot of controversy, possibly because amateurs try to use it to as a pop-scientific justification of whatever moral belief they advocate, possibly because its supporters sometimes overstate some of their conclusions, and possibly because biologists don't like psychologists encroaching on their turf. But is the field discredited?

The short answer is no, at least not the way that climate denialists think that 97% of climatologists are wrong. Even critics of many papers published on evolutionary psychology think the field can reach and has reached appropriate conclusions, like Jerry Coyne:

Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould. Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction. I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould. And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.

It's also worth noting that compared to climatology, evolutionary psychology is a "soft" scientific field with ethical barriers to experimentation that climatology doesn't experience. Even so, aside from the view of possibly a tiny number of critics, it's not gone as far off the rails as denialists claim has happened for climatology. The denialists are going to have to look somewhere else for a precedent.

Personally, I think evolutionary psychology is fascinating and likely to have significant insights. I think it's facetious to believe that in our psychology, which is crucial to our survival, we'd have escaped the evolutionary influences that affect every other species on the planet. Great apes are clearly smart enough to have differing individual psychologies that must have affected their survival rates over time. Getting deep and subtle insights about human evolutionary psychology will be difficult, but denying that field's validity is as about as smart as climate denialism.

Gaddafi out by the end of next week

(UPDATE: guess I'm back to my pre-2008 predictive ability. I still think Gaddafi's toast, though.)

We'll see if this prediction is as bad as my political predictions usually are, although I've improved a bit in recent years. My prediction is based on Gaddafi's attempt to retake eastern Libya with military force, an attempt that's apparently failed. If the opposition could stand up to him miltarily with one week of organizing, then they're only going to get stronger.

I don't know what the long term holds for Libya - the strong tribal structure seems worrying for national unity. I was very mistaken in the case of Iraq to think in early 2003 that chaos would be preferable to the rule of an incompetent tyrant. I won't assume chaos is preferable in Libya either, but I'm hoping the wave of people power in the Arab world might also lead to a different result.

One other note: conservative blowhards condemn Obama for not taking stronger action in Libya, while failing to notice that hundreds of Americans and other foreigners were still in Tripoli. Now that they're gone, Obama is taking stronger action. Adults are moving things forward.

UPDATE: See here for the American version of why it's important to remove the bad guys from power - that clears the way to punish them for their crimes. We didn't do that with the financial leaders of Wall Street, and now they're getting away.

Offsets and cap-and-trade: coming soon to the Clean Water Act

I'm attending a water law conference in San Diego this week. Today's presentation included a discussion of attempts to limit pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. The presenter said that nitrogen and phosphorus pollution is likely to be set at certain maximum levels pretty soon, and following that, anyone who wants to do something that adds pollutants will have to find offsetting reductions. He speculated that a cap-and-trade market might even emerge.

I think this is still more evidence that there's nothing innately wrong with offsets and trades in greenhouse gases, and that the only real question is whether the programs are done well or done poorly.

One other piece of info that was climate related: another presenter discussed cost-benefit analyses in federal environmental regulations. I asked whether international effects were considered. He said not as a usual matter, but climate change is forcing them to think about it. They now give two different prices for the cost effect of increased greenhouse gases: one price is if they assume the US is all that counts, and another if they assume that we live on planet Earth. We'll see which one ultimately wins out.

Climate betting update for 2010

I had my annual friendly email exchange with betting partner/opponent, David Evans, several weeks back. Our bet:

We have three bet periods -10, 15, and 20 years - and two bets for each period - an even-odds bet and a 2:1 bet in David's favor. The even-odds bet centers around a temperature increase rate of 0.15C/decade with a 0.02 void margin on either side (bet voids if temps increase between .13 and .17C/decade). The 2:1 bet centers on 0.1C/decade with a .01 void margin. Even-odds bets are for $1,000 each, and the 2:1 bets increase over time, with me betting $1,000, $2,000 and $3,000, and David betting half that. My exposure is $9,000; his is $6,000.

We use the NASA GISS dataset, and the baseline is the five-year average for 2007 (.55C above the long-term average), compared to five year averages of each of the three bet periods. Years 2010 through 2014 won't "count" in the sense of not being measured in the five year averages, but they will give a sense of who's winning.

So who's winning? Interestingly, David and I both focused on the news that was bad for our own side. In 2010, the global average temp was a record .63C above the long-term, an increase of .08C in just three years from 2007's multi-year average, and a pace that far exceeds what I need to win all of the bets. That's the perspective David took.

By contrast, I compared five-year averages: we're now able to calculate the five-year average centered on 2008, and it's only .01C above 2007's multi-year average. The reason for the small change is that the only difference between the averages is that 2007's average included the record year 2005, while 2008's average dropped the record year 2005 and replaced it with the record year 2010. At a .01C annual increase rate, I will lose half of my bets and void the other half.

Looking forward to this time next year, our perspectives might shift again, assuming 2011 plays out as another warm year but La Nina-cooled from 2010. The five year average for 2009 will eliminate 2006, which was only typical and cooler than 2005, and replace it with 2011. Any 2011 temperature above .58C should put me in good shape for the five-year average, even if it's not as blistering as 2010. So we'll see.

Meanwhile, James Annan continues his too-easy path to climate betting riches with Russian skeptics. I've been meaning to reach his betting opponents to see if they agree that their goose is cooked, and if not, whether they'd like to double down.

UPDATE: The skewed prediction-market bet that exaggerated the short-term warming anticipated by the IPCC turned out to be insufficiently skewed, and the "Al Gore side" won the bet. The website promoting the bet on behalf of denialist Scott Armstrong has been mysteriously silent about this development, talking only about a longer, proposed bet that's still artificially skewed by lying about the predicted short-term warming. And just in case that bet disappears down the memory hole, here's how Theclimatebet.com describes it:

“Now, assume that Armstrong and Gore made a gentleman‟s bet (no money) and that the ten years of the bet started on January 1, 2008. Armstrong‟s forecast was that there would be no change in global mean temperature over the next ten years. Gore did not specify a method or a forecast. Nor did searches of his book or the Internet reveal any quantitative forecasts or any methodology that he relied on. He did, however, imply that the global mean temperature would increase at a rapid rate – presumably at least as great as the IPCC‟s 1992 projection of 0.03°C-per-year (NOTE: untrue statement, no short term IPCC prediction was made in 1992, and later reviews made lower decadal predictions - ed). Thus, the IPCC‟s 1992 projection is used as Gore‟s forecast.”

Finally, the small bet I've got with Joe Romm on whether 90% of Arctic sea ice will disappear by 2020 (with me taking the cold side) chugs along. Joe does have a chart here showing that recent decline rates, projected linearly, would have him winning. I'm not so sure, although I'm also less sure of my side than I was when I took the bet.