Canada and Climate Change Regulation – Politics as Usual

Seeing red over ‘green scare’ – Los Angeles Times:

For example, Gore blames the disappearing snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro on global warming, but a 2003 study in Nature identified the clear-cutting of surrounding moisture-rich forests as the culprit. In the famously fact-checked New Yorker, Editor David Remnick pens a love letter to Gore in which he laments that Earth will “likely be an uninhabitable planet” if we don’t heed Gore’s jeremiads. Oh … come … on!

Well, it’s hard to figure out where to begin refuting nonsense like this, which has been refuted a million times. You don’t take down scientific consensus by pointing out minor inaccuracies in work done by Al Gore, of all people. Yes, it can be argued (Kaser et al., INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLIMATOLOGY 24 (3): 329-339 MAR 15 2004) that Kilimanjaro’s ice cap regression may have to do more with loss of moisture than with temperature. That does not make a case of the “Green Meanie” ( typical demonising phrase – should we call Goldberg an ignorant ostrich, well, does not have the same evocativeness!). Repeat after me, one inaccuracy does not disprove millions of observations. I suggest he read Field Notes from a Catastrophe, written in language even he could understand to find  a few more experimental observations to “debunk”.

Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there’s still time to study global warming (IRAQ’s WMD – substitute) rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad (IRAQ WAR – substitute) that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.

Sweet words coming out of one of the war’s most fervent supporters. I like people who can have it both ways on a single day and pretend to not see the contradictions.

Maybe he should read this editorial published right below his.

Update 4/21/06 3:30 PM

The Think Progress Blog has more refutation, if this drivel needed any more refuting.

ES&T Online News: Can drugs found in water harm humans?

Researchers agree that aquatic species face the greatest risk from exposure to low levels of pharmaceuticals, such as synthetic hormones, which can act as endocrine disrupters at environmental levels. However, little is known about the potential human health effects arising from complex drug mixtures.

Well, it is often more difficult to analyze complex mixtures because Experimental Design 101 makes you want to isolate the effects. And when you do compounds one by one in series, the tendency is to always add them up from the individual experiments. Unfortunately, body chemistry is not like that. I’ve always wanted to design a study that started complex and then tried to isolate later.

To his surprise, Pomati observed that this mixture of drugs at environmental levels inhibited the growth of human embryonic kidney cells. After 48 hours of exposure, cell proliferation was reduced by 10–30% compared with controls. However, no inhibition was observed when cells were exposed to only the toxic cancer drug at environmental levels.

Well, that seems conclusive enough, but here comes the “Experimental Design 101” Scold:

The results show that the growth inhibition is not due to the single most cytotoxic compound alone. But that does not conclusively prove that synergistic or additive effects exist between drugs in the mixture, cautions Thomas Heberer of the Institute of Food Chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin. To show that the individual drugs behave additively, Heberer suggests that researchers should analyze the effects of compounds with a common mode of action, such as antibiotics, alone and in various mixtures.

No, No, and No. Doing this presupposes that you know that mechanism of action, meaning you’ve half answered your question. The question Heberer is trying to answer is “do individual drugs with the same mode of action behave additively”. The question Pomati is trying to answer is “Can we demonstrate cytotoxic effects of a cocktail of drugs at ambient levels in a laboratory setting”? These are two completely different questions and Pomati’s question is more valuable at this point in time. Heberer’s strategy, on the other hand, will keep a lab well funded for years to come! But, it is very much the final step.

It is more important at this point in time to demonstrate other effects such as endocrine disruption, mutagenicity, etc in the lab at environmentally relevant levels of mixtures. Then we can get a better handle on which  effects are relevant and which ones to ignore.

Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times

When air pollution in a city declines, the city benefits with a directly proportional drop in death rates, a new study has found.

In other news, Dog bites man (I have never typed “dog bites man” into google news before – shocking…)

Well, the Dockery and company published a seminal set of articles on the 6 city study back in the 90s that are the gold standard of air pollution epidemiology. It takes large long-term studies like these to establish even tenuous correlations, and their graphs connecting particle concentrations and mortality were beautiful straight lines.

This follow up is pretty cool because the cities had made most of the reductions in the 70s and 80s after the passage of the Clean Air Act and this study clearly demonstrates that the bar for lowering mortality/cancer rates by lowering fine particle levels has not been reached yet. The abstract of the paper is below the fold.

Read More “Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times”

The Sethusamudram (bridge sea – for the transliterators) project has the classic development plot lines that I’ve seen play out many times in India. Here’s a rationale from the official site…

Currently the ships coming from the west coast of India and other western countries with destination in the east coast of India and also in Bangladesh, China etc have to navigate around Srilankan coast. The existing water way is shallow and not sufficient for the movement of ships. This is due to the presence of a shallow region known as Adam’s bridge, located southeast of Rameswaram near Pamban, which connects the Talimannar Coast of Srilanka

What? They are going to destroy the bridge that rama and the vanaras built? Look at that picture, (thanks Manitham), can’t you see all the “Vanaras” (this has always struck me as racist – folks showing up from the North and calling the darker skinned Southerners Monkeys! But that is a different rant) running across the very clearly delineated land bridge – It’s fascinating, almost makes me believe that the Ramayana happened as narrated!

Manitham has a good rundown of the project from an activist standpoint.

A few points

• The secrecy and lack of transparency are classic government techniques to control the flow of information and discourse. Every government does it, and the Indian government is no exception.
• Environmental Impact Assessments are bought and paid for by the funding agency, and are hence essentially unreliable and untrustworthy. I had first hand experience of this when I was a student at IIT Bombay 10 years back.
• There is a lot of politics involved, the port of Tuthukudi (Tuticorin as the damn Brits say) in Tamil Nadu is a clear winner and Colombo in SriLanka stands to lose revenue. There is also a great deal of Tamil Pride involved
• Read this excellent article from the climate.lk clearinghouse of articles : There is a security dimension here for India that may have been the actual motivation.
• The area, due to its sheltering and shallow waters, has a lot of marine life. From a 2004 Deccan Herald Article

The series of meetings called by the Tuticorin Port Trust chairman in the coastal districts have turned out to be stormy with representatives of political parties shouting down objections from fishermen, who fear the loss of livelihood, and environmentalists who say the project threatens to destroy the Gulf of Mannar Marine Reserve. This reserve is one of India’s most biologically diverse coastal regions.
Over 3,600 species of plants and animals are found here. It is the first marine biosphere reserve in the South and South-East Asia and is believed to have the highest concentration of seagrass species along India’s coast. It is also among the largest remaining feeding grounds for the globally endangered species dugong. Five different species of endangered marine turtles, innumerable fish, molluscs and crustaceans are also found here. The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), the largest NGO working in the field of bio-diversity and environmental conservation, has said the rapid Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report prepared by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) is insufficient and a detailed study should be conducted in all seasons for at least a year.

• The EIA actually says that since the seaway is 20 km away from the reserve, there will be no effect on the reserve, um, that seems highly unlikely to me…
• The other major dimension is the usual utter lack of care for the people displaced. previous instances like the Sardar Sarovar project indicate that there will be no fair compensation for the displaced people, or for lost livelihood, which I guess is perfectly fine because it serves the greater good of the country?

Most of these big projects have resulted in overstated gains, understated losses, and huge wastes of taxpayer money. I don’t trust this to be any different. The facts look fudged, the project seems unnecessary (where’s my tamil pride?) and the effect on the wildlife and the crazy complex current system around Sri Lanka may change significantly leading to unforseen micro climate effects.

Two thumbs down…