Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Katharine Hayhoe

Texas Monthly has an interesting profile of Katharine Hayhoe.

co-author of the last two National Climate Assessments and a reviewer on the Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hayhoe—the daughter of missionaries and the wife of a pastor—is herself an evangelical Christian. In her talks, she uses the Bible to explain to Christians why they should care about climate change and how it affects other people, from a poor family on the island nation of Kiribati who will be displaced by rising sea levels to an elderly couple in Beaumont who can’t afford to pay for air-conditioning in Texas’s increasingly sweltering summers. As she puts it, “The poor, the disenfranchised, those already living on the edge, and those who contributed least to this problem are also those at greatest risk to be harmed by it. That’s not a scientific issue; that’s a moral issue…”

If she was going to leave astronomy behind, Hayhoe wanted to do policy-relevant climate science. When she was considering graduate programs, she was thrilled to learn that Don Wuebbles, who had been instrumental in addressing the chlorofluorocarbon problem in the eighties, was the new head of the department of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He would serve as her adviser for both her master’s degree and her doctorate. Under Wuebbles’s guidance, Hayhoe eventually began focusing on statistical downscaling, which was still a relatively new field when she started graduate school, in 1995. “There was very little of this being done at the time,” Wuebbles recalled recently, “and the methods were not capturing the full extent of the science, so she set about to develop a new technique and very successfully did so. She’s brilliant…”

Hayhoe’s first step is always to “genuinely bond over a shared value,” with an emphasis on that shared value’s being genuine. “The key is not to pretend; we can all smell someone who is not genuine a mile away,” she said. “If I’m talking to farmers or ranchers or water managers, I start off by talking about what we all care about, which is making sure we have water. And that, for many Texans, is almost as strong of a value as whatever it says in the Bible.” Her next step is to connect that issue to climate change. So when talking about water, she describes how climate change is changing rainfall patterns. “We’re getting these heavy downpours, and then we’re getting longer dry periods in between, and our droughts are getting stronger because the warmer it is, the more water evaporates out of our lakes and rivers and our soil,” she said. She tries to end her talks with solutions that inspire people, ranging from the personal (measuring your carbon footprint and installing energy-efficient light bulbs) to the large-scale (putting a tax on carbon). Hayhoe herself is most excited by the efforts of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and founder of SpaceX. “If I had to pick one person to save the world—and I don’t think any one person will but if I had to pick one—it would be him.” She is excited about the battery packs that Tesla is developing, declaring energy storage the “single technology that will make the most difference.”

clean water is not enough

This article presents evidence for the expected trend in biodiversity of riparian areas (whether lake, river, stream, etc. I can’t tell from the abstract) in response to urbanization. Large water features might be the one piece of the landscape that urban development has trouble erasing. But by changing the nature of the shoreline and adjacent habitat, you would expect a degradation in ecosystem quality, even if the water quality itself is perfectly fine (which it often is not, of course). The question is, could you design a shoreline and adjacent city that would support a significant fraction of the biodiversity and ecosystem function that was once there? In other words, a smaller nature that is still healthy? Or should we write off the idea of a high-functioning urban ecosystem and focus on protecting more wild areas? Well, I don’t know but I can guarantee that not making a serious attempt at either one will not lead to a good outcome.

Decadal declines in bird abundance and diversity in urban riparian zones, Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 159, March 2017, Pages 48–61

Urbanization is frequently cited as a major driver of species losses worldwide; however, most studies in urban areas use a space-for-time substitution approach to document effects of urbanization through time. Ultimately, understanding the effects of urbanization on biodiversity requires long-term datasets. We examined long-term changes in bird assemblages at 12 riparian sites in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area and nearby Sonoran Desert region, featuring a range of human modifications and levels of water flow. Riparian areas in arid cities represent a key habitat type that is sensitive to human modification and supports high levels of species diversity. We used long-term data to: (1) explore variation in bird communities as a function of water permanence and degree of human-modification; (2) identify which environmental variables best describe differences found across riparian site types; and (3) assess how riparian bird communities, abundance, and species richness have changed through time. Engineered riparian sites supported more broadly distributed generalists; whereas, natural riparian sites supported more specialists. Sites with perennial flows had more vegetation and water compared to ephemeral sites and engineered sites had more impervious surface compared to natural sites. In nearly all comparisons, bird species richness, diversity, and abundance declined across riparian types during the period of study, even for common species. Bird communities in natural settings have changed more than communities at engineered sites. Overall, the riparian bird community is shifting toward urban dwelling, resident species that are characteristic of riparian sites with less water and more impervious surface.

more on Irving Fisher’s hydraulic machine

I’ve talked before about Irving Fisher’s hydraulic model of the economy. Here is a 2005 article that appears to discuss all its pieces and parts in detail.

How to Compute Equilibrium Prices in 1891

William C. Brainard and Herbert E. Scarf
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology
Vol. 64, No. 1, Special Invited Issue: Celebrating Irving Fisher: The Legacy of a Great Economist (Jan., 2005), pp. 57-83
Published by: American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3488117
Page Count: 27

 

more on the hollowing out of the middle class

This article from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco talks about how the “wage premium” (how much educated workers make compared to less educated ones) seems to have stopped growing recently, although it is still large.

Recent Flattening in the Higher Education Wage Premium: Polarization, Skill Downgrading, or Both?

Wage gaps between workers with a college or graduate degree and those with only a high school degree rose rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. Since then, the rate of growth in these wage gaps has progressively slowed, and though the gaps remain large, they were essentially unchanged between 2010 and 2015. I assess this flattening over time in higher education wage premiums with reference to two related explanations for changing U.S. employment patterns: (i) a shift away from middle-skilled occupations driven largely by technological change (“polarization”); and (ii) a general weakening in the demand for advanced cognitive skills (“skill downgrading”). Analyses of wage and employment data from the U.S. Current Population Survey suggest that both factors have contributed to the flattening of higher education wage premiums.

Bradford Delong on…I’m not sure what

I have a sense that this long blog post by Bradford Delong contains some key insights or kernels of wisdom, but I just don’t quite have the language skills to translate from econospeak to English. I’ll give it a shot:

  • The human economy consists of two layers – the supply-and-demand market system governed by prices as envisioned in economics 101 textbooks, built on top of something more biological, our “propensity to be gift-exchange animals”.
  • Gift-exchange animals want to form relationships. We want wealth, but we want to feel like we have earned that wealth. We want to give, but we don’t want to feel like we are being taken advantage of.
  • What we are paid actually has a lot to do with what country, city and family we were born into, and all the knowledge and groundwork that was laid by the people who came before us in that location, and in the world/economy more generally.
  • Based on the above, he claims to be for some system of fair income or wealth allocation – “we need to do this via clever redistribution rather than via explicit wage supplements or basic incomes or social insurance that robs people of the illusion that what they receive is what they have earned and what they are worth through their work.”
  • He never quite explains what this would look like. He quotes another blogger, who suggests infrastructure, education, entrepreneurship, and something about removal of urban land use regulation that doesn’t quite make sense.

So I don’t quite know what my personal take-away from all this is but I feel like there is something there and if I ruminate on it for awhile it might come to me.

Venn Diagram your work-life balance

This is a very simple idea but I like it.

The second good idea is to use a Venn Diagram to improve your practice and/or your life. Basically, the circle on the left is your ideal practice/life. The circle on the right is your current practice/life…

The amount of overlap determines how happy you are. Drummond says if the overlap is 60% or more, you are likely very happy and unlikely to burn out. If it is 20% or less, watch out! You are very likely to burn out very soon.

The first good idea, by the way, is to create a “transition ritual” between your work and personal lives. I like that idea to, and have actually been doing it for many years without having such a good name for what I was doing.

the real Santa was black

or Olive skinned, at least, because St. Nicholas was a 3rd century Greek. Here’s some other Santa and Christmas-related miscellany:

The Romans were still around at that point and were still persecuting Christians. Poor families had to pay a dowry to marry off their daughters, or else sell them into sex slavery. Women would wash their stockings and hang them over the fireplace to dry. Nicholas supposedly put dowry money in the stockings of a few girls, which is supposedly the initial origin of the Santa story.

“The other story is not so well known now but was enormously well known in the Middle Ages,” Bowler said. Nicholas entered an inn whose keeper had just murdered three boys and pickled their dismembered bodies in basement barrels. The bishop not only sensed the crime, but resurrected the victims as well. “That’s one of the things that made him the patron saint of children.”

Sounds like it was a scary time to be a kid back then. Even after pickling, enslaving and raping children were no longer as common, children were routinely terrorized by a variety of boogeyman stories. The Germans had a variety of monsters that were mutated combinations of St. Nicholas and older creatures from German and Norse mythology.

Some of these scary Germanic figures again were based on Nicholas, no longer as a saint but as a threatening sidekick like Ru-klaus (Rough Nicholas), Aschenklas (Ashy Nicholas), and Pelznickel (Furry Nicholas). These figures expected good behavior or forced children to suffer consequences like whippings or kidnappings. Dissimilar as they seem to the jolly man in red, these colorful characters would later figure in the development of Santa himself.

Then there is Krampus, who is a Santa-like horned devil who beats bad children and carries them off to hell.

So is there a war on Christmas? Maybe not now, but both the Nazis and Soviets tried to suppress it and introduce alternatives.

In Russia, Santa Claus fell afoul of Josef Stalin. Before the Russian Revolution, Grandfather Frost (Ded Moroz) was a favored figure of Christmas who had adopted characteristics of proto-Santas like the Dutch Sinterklaas. “When the Soviet Union was formed, the communists abolished the celebration of Christmas and gift bringers,” Bowler said.

“Then in the 1930s, when Stalin needed to build support, he allowed the reemergence of Grandfather Frost not as a Christmas gift bringer but as a New Year’s gift bringer,” Bowler added. Attempts to displace Christmas in Russia were ultimately unsuccessful, as were Soviet attempts to spread a secular version of Grandfather Frost, complete with blue coat to avoid Santa confusion, across Europe.

“Everywhere they went after World War II, the Soviets tried to replace the native gift bringers in places like Poland or Bulgaria,” Bowler explained. “But local people just sort of held their noses until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 and returned to their own traditions.”

 

100 is about it

This Nature article makes an argument that pushing human life span much beyond 100 years is not likely to happen. However, there has been criticism of the statistical methods used in this study.

Evidence for a limit to human lifespan

Driven by technological progress, human life expectancy has increased greatly since the nineteenth century. Demographic evidence has revealed an ongoing reduction in old-age mortality and a rise of the maximum age at death, which may gradually extend human longevity1, 2. Together with observations that lifespan in various animal species is flexible and can be increased by genetic or pharmaceutical intervention, these results have led to suggestions that longevity may not be subject to strict, species-specific genetic constraints. Here, by analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints.

do the rich deserve more health care?

This New York Times opinion article is an economist making the somewhat offensive argument that maybe poor people should not be offered the same access to newer more expensive health care technology as rich people. I say offensive because that is the gut reaction. But part of the article’s point is that newer, higher-tech and more expensive don’t automatically mean a big benefit in terms of outcome and effectiveness. If they do improve outcomes, it is often just by a little bit compared to the lower-tech alternative, and at a much higher price. So it is an argument that a small increase in health is not worth a high price, or at least people should be helped to understand that tradeoff and then decide for themselves. It’s the economist’s basic argument that we live in a universe with finite resources available and we have to decide how to allocate them, and a large number of people making small decisions in a relatively free market will do that efficiently, if not necessarily fairly. Fairness is not really an economic argument, after all.

Consider, for example, treating prostate cancer with proton-beam therapy. It’s more expensive than alternatives like intensity-modulated radiation therapy, but isn’t proven to be any better. If given the choice, many people — especially those with lower incomes — might rather buy health insurance plans that exclude high-cost, low-value treatments.

The trouble is that insurers rarely sell those sorts of plans. Even insurers that try to exclude a particularly expensive and unproven technology from coverage are often rebuffed by legislatures and the courts.

This one-size-fits-all approach to insurance coverage disproportionately hurts low-income people, many of whom might reasonably prefer to devote their scarce dollars to housing or their children’s education. To some extent, subsidies and other monetary adjustments can mitigate this problem. Medicare and Medicaid, for example, are financed in large part out of federal income taxes. And within the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, lower-income people receive subsidies that cover some of their costs.

One way to handle this, which is not suggested in this article, is for the government to provide a minimum level of cost-effective treatment to all citizens, plus catastrophic coverage for the really big stuff like heart attacks and car accidents. The private health insurance market could still exist to cover everything in between, which you could argue is the stuff people want but don’t necessarily need. Which is the proper domain of economics. Distinguishing between high value treatments that prolong and improve the quality of life, and shiny new technologies that we might want but don’t necessarily all need, may become more and more important as technology continues to accelerate.

drought in the U.S. SOUTHeast

We are hearing a lot about drought in the U.S. Southwest. It is severe and a big deal. The climate situation may not be as severe in the Southeast, and yet the consequences may be severe because the population is unprepared and the development and forest management practices are putting people in harm’s way.

Although wildfires may draw more attention in the western U.S., the Southeast is no stranger to them. The U.S. Geological Survey and the Federal Emergency Management Agency mapped wildfire frequency from 1994 to 2013 and showed that while most hot spots are across large swaths of the West, there are a few key hazardous areas in the Southern Appalachians and parts of Alabama and Georgia. To researchers such as Costanza, another devastating wildfire in the Southeast was a long time coming. “But seeing pictures of Gatlinburg — that is scary, and anything like that is surprising,” she said…

Wildfires present such danger in the region partly because a significant amount of the population — more than in any other region — lives in wildland-urban interfaces, where development meets natural areas. Asheville, North Carolina, and Atlanta are among the cities near forests, national and state parks and other public lands and have been under high alert during this season’s fires. Officials are monitoring how close the fires come to city limits. About 80 million people live in the Southeast, according to 2015 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. And urban sprawl is expected to increase dramatically in the region, potentially putting people even closer to forested areas…

If more droughts and a population that continues to come into contact with wild areas are in the region’s future, funding for prevention steps such as creating healthier ecosystems, promoting community preparedness and fire education, and managing prescribed burns is crucial, experts said. Although scientists and climatologists don’t yet know whether this season of fires represents the start of a long-term pattern, conditions suggest that the Southeast might start seeing more intense fires like the one in Gatlinburg — and if so, the region will have to adapt.