No Time for Children

As a true Generation X member, I sometimes write about the influence of the generation called the Baby Boom. I don’t really understand Boomers that well and I am alternately fascinated and horrified by the impact they have had on my world. I suspect that the reason I don’t connect well with them begins in my youth. My father is older – born in 1923 – and he had little in common with the parents of the kids I went to school with. My father was just shy of his sixth birthday on Black Thursday and grew up in rural America during the Great Depression. He left school to fight in World War II and, afterward, attended medical school on the G.I. Bill while working nights at the auto plant to keep food on the table for the family, which eventually reached a total of 8 kids.

My mother was my father’s second wife. Born during the Baby Boom in West Virginia, she grew up as one of the many dirt-poor kids in Appalachia. Getting out of poverty through hard work, studiousness, and grit, she had a very different world-view than many of her contemporaries.

Neither one is perfect, but my father worked to make sure my mother could stay home, and my mother ended her career outside the home to raise us all.

I am doing my best to mirror this part of their life. My wife became a stay at home mom when our first son was born and continues to care for our children full-time. I strive for positions where I can set my own hours and spend afternoons with my boys. Although we occasionally speak about getting a sitter, we haven’t really looked for one in over a year; we have too much fun with the little men! We prefer to send the boys to the other end of the house with pizza and a new movie while we have a romantic dinner for two right in the coziness of our own room. No money shelled out for a sitter, no driving for hours to get to a decent restaurant, and we get the fun of the boys running in, laughing and talking about their movie when it’s all done.

Well, my reaction to this article by Adair Lara should be no surprise. The article is obviously meant to describe how hip, urbane, and modern women are breaking the traditional paradigm of matriarchal roles via their own fierce independence. In actuality, the writer and her peers are examples of how society has changed in ways I think are bad for them and our future. I understand that Ms. Lara was writing for a target audience in a magazine with a fairly tight focus, but it ends up as an unflattering look at the seeming disregard many Boomers have for their own children (especially their daughters). I also wish to discuss the possible ramifications of these changes in how the extended family interacts. Ms. Lara writes:

“One recent Saturday morning my daughter, Morgan, and her husband, Trevor, were feverishly trying to pull their new apartment together with Ryan underfoot and the baby wailing. "Can you watch the babies while we work?" Morgan called to ask…. She lives three blocks away from me in San Francisco.

Look, I'd love to nip over and whisper secrets into 1-month-old Maggie's ears, or to dress 2-year-old Ryan in the black leather jacket I bought her recently and take her to look for late blackberries in Golden Gate Park on my bike (with its deluxe new kid seat). But I have a job. I'm a reporter, I have two books to write, a husband who wants to go to France, and I just bought an investment property in Portland, Oregon. I love my grandchildren, but being a grandmother got added to my to-do list.”

In short, she’s too busy to help her daughter and her son-in-law. She mentions no meetings, no pre-scheduled trips, no real plans at all. She is just, well, busy. The reaction of Ms. Lara’s daughter, and Ms. Lara’s acknowledgement of it, are very telling. Ms. Lara writes:

“…my answer. "I can't, sweetie. I'm working," I told her. "Okay, Mom, we'll manage," she said, with that briskness she uses to cover up disappointment. I put the phone down, realizing I'm going to have to live with that guilty feeling.”

First of all, it seems obvious that Ms. Lara’s daughter, Morgan, is used to being disappointed by her mother. Ms. Lara implicitly acknowledges that she has hurt her daughter’s feelings, and that Ms. Lara feels guilty about it. Her response is very telling “I’m going to have to live with that…” In other words, no actions, no making up for it, no change in her attitude or behavior at all, just ‘I’ll live with it’.

To me, guilt is an indicator of error; you feel guilty when you have done something wrong. When you are justified in doing something, guilt should not be there. I feel that somehow, somewhere, Ms. Lara and her peers realize that they are making mistakes. Ms. Lara writes:

“One friend [of Ms. Lara –ed.], also a grandmother, was recently entertaining members of her board when the call came asking her to babysit at short notice. She couldn't do it. Inevitably, her daughter was angry and fed up, saying, "You make time for other people, but not for me."

This bit shows that Ms. Lara admits that the anger and frustration of her friend’s daughter is something to be expected, a natural reaction, ‘inevitable’. But Ms. Lara has more examples! For instance, she wrote:

“…[my friend]… feels bad that, because of a long-planned book signing and a scheduled day on the bench, she couldn't drop everything for a week when her oldest daughter, Susan, had another baby…”

In other words, her friend skipped being there for the birth of her grandchild, let alone helping her own daughter after childbirth, because of a book signing and a day of work. She didn’t reschedule one and take a day off, she didn’t even work around them and see her daughter in-between appointments – she just gave it a miss. Ms. Lara goes on to quote this same friend as saying:

“…it's not important for me to come to their birthdays….” and “I'm not willing to give up my writing or my traveling.”

This is actually the key to what is (in my opinion) going on here. The Boomer generation was and is focused on self-improvement. They were trained that personal achievement, personal fulfillment, personal triumph, is the sine qua non of life. While it may simply seem that none of these women hold the needs or desires of others in any esteem (well, Ms. Lara does discuss how her husband wants to go to France), in actuality they are merely following the dictates of their society. It doesn’t matter that the people who are asking for help, who need help, are their own daughters and their own grandchildren. All they hear are requests for their time, and their time must be, first and foremost, for the perfection of self.

Ms. Lara admits that she and her peers had mothers with a different attitude. Ms. Lara mentions that her own mother was always there for her, as was her mother’s mother. The entire article acknowledges the help and comfort that the selflessness of her mother’s and grandmother’s generations gave to her and her daughter. She then quotes her own daughter as saying:

“…I can't help wishing you could help more. I thought that was what grandmothers did.”

The use of the past tense may be telling.

How do the women of the article justify themselves and this attitude change? Ms. Lara does mention that the average age that a person becomes a grandparent today is roughly the life expectancy of someone at the beginning of the 20^th Century, so attitudes toward life may have changed. She does quote a friend of hers as saying:

“…we're young enough that we still want to enjoy ourselves”

My reaction to reading this was – isn’t spending time with your grandkids ‘enjoying yourself’?! And their daughters, who are young, in need, and want some help to get by, have to wait until later in life to enjoy themselves, I suppose?

Lest you think that Ms. Lara is oblivious to how some people will take her little manifesto, she states;

“You may think I'm being churlish, but at least I'm not alone.”

This does seem to be a relatively common attitude in her generation, so we must forgive her for thinking that being in broad company makes things any better. But you don’t gain any moral currency from the company you keep.

Before I continue, let me pause and interject something. I like Ms Lara’s writing and I envy her smooth, easy style. I have read and enjoyed her column for the Chronicle and I look forward to reading her work in the future. While writing this I called her up and found her to be an approachable, warm person that seems to love to talk as much as I do.

She and I spoke briefly of the article I am commenting on and the puzzlement in her voice at the hullabaloo her article is brewing seemed genuine. I did a little fawning over her skill and she informed me she is writing a book about grandparents. She obviously loves her grandchildren and other works show that she cares for her daughter.

So let me be clear – Adair Lara is a rich, complex person (like we all are) and one article intended for a specific audience in a specific market does not an opus make. I am using her article as an illustration of what the societal changes of feminism and liberalism have wrought.

“So”, you ask, “what is so wrong with self-improvement?” Nothing, as long as we keep two things in mind. First, self-improvement does not trump obligation; and second, not everything focused on the self is improvement. As was noticed by virtually everyone while I was surviving high school, the Boomers quickly became the Me Generation focused on money, status and stuff. The focus on self improvement easily becomes the focus on the self. In the name of improving ourselves, we reject the other. A desire for self-perfection is a very small step from narcissism, and I think far too many of us (from any generation) have taken that step.

Therefore Ms. Lara and her contemporaries are rejecting the roles and actions of their mothers and grandmothers and treating the needs of their own grown children and their grandchildren as on par with trips to France and managing investment property.

This brings me to the other major point that shines through from the subtext of the article; the inevitable, unceasing focus on things. Part of Ms. Lara’s definition of herself as a grandmother was:

“…the person ready to open her fridge, her wallet, her house, and her heart to them”

When she describes her own grandmother, she discusses the things her grandmother did, like knitting and coming by at the drop of a hat. When she illustrates the differences between her generation and her grandmother’s, however, it is primarily a physical description:

“[today’s grandmother] has short red hair, a Mini Cooper, frequent-flier miles, and an iPod in her Kate Spade bag.”

A great deal of the description of her interaction with her grandchildren is also materialistic; the jacket she bought for one, the cool kid seat on her own bike, etc.

Why am I flogging this? Well, where her own family members once knitted sweaters for the children, she buys them (I assume). It is part and parcel of the rejection of the personal for the produced, the difference between connection and commodity. Stuff cannot substitute for time, and “Quality Time” is no replacement for true involvement.

Again, this is from a focus on the self. So many of us want to “have it all” that we aren’t willing to compromise. The result is not having it all, but a sort of equivalency – all that we have is equal. A whitewater rafting trip is just as important as a grandchild’s fourth birthday; a day at the golf course is as crucial to our happiness as a day at the beach with our son’s family. This focus on the internal first leads to an inability to discern differences in quality in the external. The impact our words and actions have on others is meaningless to us; only the impact of words and actions on us is important. This is the ultimate expression of selfishness wrapped in a cloak of “I’m OK, You’re OK”.

This explains the current popularity of the concept of ‘that is true for you, but not for me’. If reality is uncomfortable or inconvenient, we ignore it; if we want it to be true and it isn’t, we act as if it is true anyway. Post-modernism is the academic expression of this disregard for external differences in quality in favor of internal desires – a philosophy of self-absorption, as it were.

“OK”, you say, “what do you care? After all, if they are so self-absorbed….” Well, more and more often, this selfish desire for reality to bend to our own whims is bleeding over into politics. And politics affects me through things like, say, legislation.

But more concerning to me is…. What will become of these distant, oh-so-busy grandmothers, and their spiritual heirs in younger generations? Many of them, if not most, only had one or two children. Their own children are having even fewer kids of their own. (If you want an exhaustive look at population demographics, please see my archives). Psychologists are reporting that the daycare/preschool/public school/quality time culture is resulting in people who are incapable of forging meaningful interactions with other people (I plan to discuss this at length in an upcoming article), resulting in fewer and weaker ties between family members.

Demographics show that, unless things change rapidly, by 2100 a substantial number of people in the Western world will be third generation only children – no siblings, no aunts or uncles, and no cousins. The two-income family with high divorce rates will almost certainly be surpassed by the never-married single mother as the primary family type, meaning that many of these young adults will have a family that consists of a mother and a grandmother. Period. They will have been placed in daycare at an age of 6 weeks, transitioned to pre-school at age 3, and the public school bus will have taken them to after-school daycare or activities until age 18, when they left to live at college. This article is part of the evidence that many of them will have little, if any, interaction with their grandmothers in a manner that differs from their interactions with their largely-absent working mothers. Indeed, their grandmothers will almost certainly be seen much less frequently and regularly than their mothers, as evidenced by the culture we see reflected in Ms. Lara’s article.

So; a future with almost non-existent family ties.

Social isolation is, bluntly, chronic loneliness. Usually associated with the disabled or the elderly, in fact it can exist in anyone who lives alone or is alone for long periods. Social isolation can lead to mental illness and physical degradation. And it seems to have a more pronounced effect on women. There is some evidence that family connections are more important than social connections in avoiding social isolation.

Let me end with a question: are these new, hip grandmothers who need a penciled-in appointment to see their grandchildren dooming themselves to an early, lonely death?

Predictions for 2006 and Beyond

Actually, let’s look from now up to 2010, which will be much sooner than you think.

1. Demographics studies by everyone from the U.S. Census Bureau to the U.N. Population Council will continue to lower their projections for peak human population, and predict that the peak will occur sooner, every year.

2. Following Australia’s lead, more nations will realize that they are about to vanish due to lack of people and try, far too late, to do something about it.

3. The MSM and environmental groups will ignore both and continue to warn of overpopulation.

4. European Governments will grow weaker and less able to function in the face of radicalism. The European public will grow more fearful. By 2010 at least one demagogue will be quite popular in Europe, probably in a nation with a TFR under 1.8 and moderate immigration bordered by a larger nation with massive immigration, a Socialist government, and a TFR under 1.5.

5. Pope Benedict will appoint conservative cardinals, reform the liturgy to be more conservative, crack down on priests and parishes that are not following the rules. Non-Catholics will be shocked that the Pope is so Catholic.

6. The so-called “mainstream Christian churches” (i.e., liberal ones) will grow more liberal.

7. The Kelo decision will be reversed or made irrelevant.

8. Despite years of PR work, gay marriage will not spread very far and will lose ground overall.

9. After the phenomenal success and profits of The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia Hollywood will continue to make and praise stuff like Brokeback Mountain and His Dark Materials. They will also be stunned, stunned, to barely make their money back on such ‘critically acclaimed, important’ movies. They will also label people who are offended by films that attack their viewpoint as ‘close minded’.

10. Rick Santorum will be reelected. So will Ted Kennedy

11. Despite the lack of any evidence that DDT is harmful in any way, it will be banned by more and more countries under pressure from groups attempting to make the planet ‘better’. Malaria deaths will continue to climb above the current 1 million per year.

12. The laws against illegal immigration will not be enforced. Liberal states will continue to grant illegal immigrants access to the full range of social services. Liberals will whine that those same social services are underfunded because of unexpected increases in use and demand higher taxes for the ‘most vulnerable’. Anyone who objects to any part of this will be labeled a ‘racist bigot’ by liberals.

13. Europe will finally do something about the Iranian nuclear program besides dither. The economic sanctions will spark civil unrest in Iran (young people who want more freedoms) and in Europe (young people who, it seems, want to be radioactive). Both sets of protestors will prevail, and a slightly more liberal Iran will stop its nuclear program after Europe caves in the face of acceptance.

14. Immigration to Europe will increase. At the same time, the emigration of native Europeans will also increase.

15. Muslim violence in Southeast Asia will increase, mainly focused on women, children, churches, and foreigners.

16. Air America will shutter its doors. The MSM will continue to ignore the scandal of where a chunk of its startup money actually came from.

17. As China stops strongly manipulating its own currency the Yuen will surge upward, causing the dollar to also surge. These two events will confuse many socialist economists and ruin the plans of many Euro holders. Many goods and services will remain cheap for those with dollars and get too pricey for those with Euros. This will be another hammer blow to the struggling economies of Germany, France, Spain, and Japan as their import imbalance increases, although it could be good if they realize that they can now sell things to China.

18. The Avian Flu Pandemic will not actually happen.

19. Qaddafi and Castro will both die before 2008.

20. At least one major MSM outlet will refer to one or both of these tyrants as having improved things because they promoted ‘equality’.

21. No matter what the weather conditions are, they will be cited as ‘proof’ of man-made global warming.

Excess Profits

OK, I’ll admit it – I hate to pay for gas. I drive a lot to and from work, almost all highways in Atlanta, with an average speed of 76 mph. So I fill up regularly and notice every price change. But I am also a capitalist and generally anti-legislation, so I was awfully suspicious when congress decided to yank oil company executives into hearing on “excess profits”.

See, the term “excess profits” usually means “we want to take your money’ amid claims the profit makers are immoral, even evil. It is done when politicians think that the weight of public opinion is against the industry being targeted, so the businesses won’t dare complain too much. It seems a safe bet right now – people are upset by gas prices that went over $3 a gallon in places and the oil companies *did* make billions of dollars in profits at that time.

But I am a bit nervous about anyone simply deciding that someone made “too much” profit and taking it from them, especially the government. So I did a little research (thanks are owed to Conoco Philips and the American Petroleum Institute) and learned the following.

The average profit per gallon is about 9 cents – meaning that if the oil companies made no profit at all, gas prices would fall about 5%. Not much of a profit, really. Now, since I got this profitability data from an oil company, I looked at other sources (Gibson Consulting, the Houston Chronicle, and the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights); they all agree that oil company profits for gasoline sales range from 8 cents to 10 cents a gallon with an average of, in fact, 9 cents per gallon.

Is that so much? Not really; based upon the oil companies’ investment that is an overall profit of 9 cents per dollar of investment (different than profits per gallon). This means that the oil company (with a profit margin of 9%) is less profitable than long distance and cellular phone service companies (average of 9.5% profit margin), software companies (average 11% profit margin) or banks (average profit margin of a whopping 19%). This means that the total profits (the amount earned per month) are so large because Americans use a lot of gas (more than 775 million gallons per day)!

There is something that the senators investigating “excess profits” don’t mention – taxes. The federal gas tax is 18.5 cents a gallon, or about twice the profit per gallon of the oil companies. And state taxes are generally worse – only Georgia and Alaska have per-gallon gas taxes lower than the profit of the oil companies. State gas taxes average 20 cents a gallon and range as high as 31-32 cents a gallon (New York and Wisconsin). So consumers are paying an average of 38 cents in taxes for every gallon of gas they buy, not counting sales taxes! In New York or Wisconsin your taxes can go as high as 50 cents per gallon; adding in weighted sales taxes, citizens of New York state add an additional (average) 8 cents a gallon for a total tax load of 59 cents per gallon, or almost $12 in taxes to fill a 20 gallon tank.

Compare that with the $1.80 in profits that the oil companies make for that same full tank and determine which is hurting consumers more – oil company profits or taxes?

The majority of federal gasoline taxes go into the federal transportation bill as what is known as ‘highway money’. The scandal over the waste of tax money in the transportation bill is justly legendary. In the bill just passed and signed there were more than 6,300 “special projects” ranging from lights for a music center to the infamous ‘bridge to nowhere’. All told, these pork projects add up to more than $24 billion, or almost 9 percent of the total $286 billion road bill (the bridge to nowhere alone is almost a quarter of a billion dollars).

Here’s a suggestion – cut all that pork and reduce the federal gas tax by 1.5 cents to 17 cents a gallon? That would be a wash; the reduction in pork and taxes are equal. Or let’s repeal past pork (road bills often set up payments for 5-10 years, meaning we pay for pork for decades) from the last 6 road bills and reduce the tax. I bet that we could drop the tax to 12 cents a gallon without trying too hard. State taxes are certainly no different – I bet that the elimination of government pork and corruption could reduce the federal and state gas taxes by 8 cents a gallon immediately, probably with money left over.

Instead, we have senators, many nominally conservative senators, chastising oil executives for “excess profits” while fighting for gas tax pork with both hands.

Whoa! Well, I need to repair and update this baby a little bit, huh? Look for the new, improved, REPAIRED, Deep Thought this weekend, warriors.

Too Cool for School

As someone who posts to websites often, has a blog, and freely gives out his (public) email address, I get a LOT of unsolicited email. And a lot of it is stunning. For some reason, my frequent posting to places like Green Housing leads to a lot of stuff like the “Overpopulation Time Bomb!!!!” email I mentioned previously. One that I got recently was “Pressure your congressperson to adopt to Kyoto Accords on global warming”, etc., etc.

Now, I will admit; I’ve never, ever been worried about global warming. Ever. Not once. Waterworld, The Day After, Split Second (never heard of that one, have ya’?), none of them struck me as more plausible than When Worlds Collide. Some of this may be a book I read in high school about the ‘little ice age’ when world wide temperatures plummeted for the 200 or so years before 1450 and things stayed cold until about 1850. Crop cycles were disrupted, health declined, etc., etc. In a rather, well, chilling passage, a French priest wrote of a winter so cold that most of the birds died and hundreds of oaks burst asunder.

Now, since it took about 200 years to cool down, the author figured it would take a bit more than 100 years to warm back up. Especially since the climate in southern England (where we have a lot of archaeological climate data) still isn’t quite where it was in the early 1100’s. The book I read (trying to ID it at Amazon) predicted that the return to pre-little ice age temps would conclude about 2050-2100.

In other words, climatologists have had reason to suspect we are within a normal climatic warming trend for about 25 years. Add in the fact that further research revealed the Medieval Warm Period – before the Little Ice Age, the climate was warmer than the current average for a period of about, oh, 400 years from the 9th to the 13th century. In other words, climactic archaeology shows that the world was warmer than it currently is for about 400 years, rapidly cooled (well, ‘rapidly’ in global weather terms), was cooler than currently for about 400 years, and then began to rapidly warmed up. And we are probably in a ‘warming up’ phase right now.

Huh. Now, I wrote a paper on this in high school in 1984 after reading some trash novel about the coming ice age and how New York would be frozen in. [BTW, thanks, Aunt Marilyn, for all those pulp, trash science fiction, and damn-near-softcore-porn novels you always had lying around when I was a kid. I wouldn’t have the deep appreciation for real literature I have today without your help]. At that time these weather researchers expected global temperatures to rise (rapidly from the viewpoint of history, slowly from the viewpoint of a human life) over the next, oh, 50-100 years, stabilize for a while, then go back down the same way.

Flash forward about 10 years and people are worried about global warming. I shook my head at this and moved on. But this email (remember that?) got me to thinking; was I being complacent? Is human activity combining with natural processes to really muck things up? Was I being prideful?

Well, deciding that I was probably guilty on the ‘prideful’ thing, I did some research. Fascinating stuff, research. Especially when you are researching global warming, a topic so political that I’m amazed at the stay-at-home attitudes of both sides of the abortion debate in comparison. A lot of the research on global warming is pure, unadulterated, rank junk science propping up a political/social agenda. And many of the people that lend their name to the issue obviously know little, if anything, about it (I’m looking at you, Dave Matthews).

Is everyone ready for the inevitable “He’s going to bore me to DEATH” with numbers? You know, I am!

To begin, the fact that global mean temperatures are increasing is, indeed, a fact. What is in question is; A) is it increasing because of human action? B) is it increasing rapidly? And C) are we now in a warmer phase than has ever existed before in human history, so that civilization itself will collapse if we don’t do something drastic, and pronto? For brevity’s sake (rare for me, I know) I will refer to the belief that global warming is man-made and very, very dangerous as “global warming”.

Let’s start with the ‘smoking gun’ or the global warming advocates, a data analysis by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes in 1998 (hereafter ‘Mann’s report’ or somesuch). This analysis of data from 1400 AD to 1995 or so ‘proves’ that global warming is man-made and precipitous and that the Earth is warmer now than it ever was before in human existence. The ‘big deal’ of this paper was a sharp increase in global mean temperature over the last hundred years or so. Called the ‘hockey stick’ because of the sharp curve in temperatures, this increase (roughly equivalent to the Industrial Revolution and cars and stuff) demonstrated directly that human action is cooking the planet.

This report is the cornerstone of the arguments of those who advocate drastic action to curtail global warming. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) issued all sorts of recommendations based upon this report, including a lot of the third Kyoto Accords. This clear demonstration of anthropogenic (i.e., ‘man-made’) global warming was the last nail in the coffin of nay-sayers that ‘deny’ global warming.

Right?

In 2003 McKitrick and McIntyre, two Canadians, published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal where they claimed to demonstrate that Man, et. al. got their data analysis wrong. McIntyre and McKitrick show in their paper that the Mann data was manipulated, that extrapolations were really, really forced, and some of the data points were used ‘inappropriately’. Their own analysis of the exact same data showed that the 15th Century was warmer than the 20th and that there was no ‘hockey stick’ at all, let alone in conjunction with industrialization. Combined with the fact that the Mann paper had conflicted with many previous studies that showed that the 20th Century is not the warmest in the last 1000 years this seemed to blow global warming’s ‘best offense’ out of the water.

That’s when things got interesting. Three other papers after Mann had also shown the 20th Century as warmer than the 15th. Mann and his co-authors then replied that the two Macs had not used the original data, but a different set. And a number of ad hominem attacks were launched against the two Macs; that they ‘aren’t scientists’ (McKitrick is an economist – he certainly knows statistics, and McIntyre is a statistician for a number of mining companies); that ‘they “analyzed” the data on an Excel spreadsheet, not a scientific program’ (not true, they provided the software); and that ‘they don’t understand how to manipulate data’ (they used the exact same procedures that Mann did).

A number of environmentalists used columns and blogs to attack the credibility of everything McKitrick had ever written on global warming and said it was all flawed. Others rebutted these articles, also mainly on blogs and columns. Some tried to discredit the journal the two Macs had published in, neglecting that many other ‘respected scientists’ publish there. A real mess, actually. The two Macs replied to Mann’s rebuttal, stating that they used his new, ‘correct’, data and got the same ‘no-hockey-stick’ results and countered that he had not yet explained some of the more ‘inventive’ uses of data in the Mann paper. The journal Nature limited the two Mac’s rebuttal to 500 words, then rejected it because the information was too technical to be conveyed in 500 words. The rebuttal is available online, but dismissed by global warming advocates as ‘rejected by a peer reviewed journal’.

Mann did, however, respond to the full rebuttal with more reasons why the extrapolated data should be manipulated a certain way. The two Macs responded by generating random numbers, manipulating it as Mann did in the second response – and got the ‘hockey stick’ chart from trendless data (in other words, no matter what numbers you used, Mann would get his hockey stick). Mann replied that only he had the data that made the process ‘unbiased’ and refused to provide it. The two Macs complained to Nature under that journal’s rules that all data pertaining to a aper be freely available. Finally, after Mann never provided it, Nature issued a statement that the Mann paper had important errors that affected the integrity of the work, or the reputation of the authors, or the reputation of the journal. In other words, the Mann paper was ‘unpublished’ by a peer-reviewed journal. Mann wrote a correction where admitted that much of the material he said he used weren’t while some unmentioned data sets were – and concluded by saying that didn’t affect the results. Nature let that be that, and effectively said that this statement by Mann that his results were good even if the data and data manipulation weren’t, ‘republished’ the Mann paper.

Confused yet? This is only the controversy over ONE paper. An extremely important, influential paper – but only one. So now some people write the Mann paper off completely, and some still use it as the core of climate science relating to global warming. Some see Mann as a liar, others see the two Macs as incompetent rubes opposed to ‘real science’.

Now many scientists and ideologues that believe in global warming argue that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age only happened in Europe, while others support the contention that it was global. See, if it was limited, then on the Mann paper and those like it are correct. If it was global, Mann and supporting papers must be false because Mann shows a global warming trend during the Little Ice Age as well as showing global temperatures as too cool if the Medieval Warming Period was global.

In other words, if Mann is correct all previous climate research is wrong, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age only affected western Europe and North America, and global warming is a fact. If Mann is wrong, the MWP and LIA were global and global warming is a natural trend that will peak soon and has nothing to do with human activity. One or the other.

But who is right?

Well, the two Macs weren’t the first to criticize Mann. The biggest problem most scientists have is that they heavily manipulated a lot of data from before 1850 that has been demonstrated as accurate. And while they used archaeological data for all periods they also “added in” actual thermometer readings for the 1902-1980 period and extrapolated backwards from it. In other words, they used two completely different sorts of data for the periods of 1400-1901 and 1902-1980. Guess where the ‘hockey stick’ is? Yup, 1902+. The data summary provided by the two Macs from the same data without the ‘culling’ and without the added-in data from a different set is a dramatic match to previous research and clearly shows the MWP and the LIA exactly as previous work predicted them, both in duration and degree. And when the two Macs went to the original data that Mann didn’t use but had been verified as accurate, it still matched previous works and didn’t match Mann’s conclusions.

As an observer, the thing I find most disturbing about Mann and the other papers supporting it is that many of them have never made their source data available. Now, in scientific journals there is a rule that this data must be available so that other scientists can see if they have the same results. Mann has never released his core data and admits that the data he gave to the two Macs and others who wanted to check his results was incomplete and full of errors. So his paper failed the test of peer-review (as Nature originally admitted). While previous climate papers and current ones that support the global MWP and LIA have available data, Mann and the supporting papers do not. Why is that? Why is it that the papers that support global warming can’t be confirmed? And, if the data isn’t available, why were these papers published?

As you can see, I’m tending not to buy the whole global warming story. Paleoclimatology was firmly sure that the MWP and LIA were global. Indeed, some argue that if they were just isolated to Europe then we don’t know nearly as much about climate as we think we do. But within the last decade the MWP has been rejected as never happening (indeed, now the 15th Century was cooler than the 20th) and the LIA was recovered from in about 50 years. At the same time, there are still plenty of papers being generated that support the MWP and LIA being global. I am suspicious.

The reason I am suspicious is that science isn’t what it used to be. The fact of the matter is that Einstein, Sagan, and Hawking mucked it all up and got famous. Mann’s paper is now setting the energy and foreign policy of a dozen nations; he’s a darling of hundreds of groups, and his opinion is highly sought after - all because he proved global warming. Its probably a safe assumption that, given the world’s political *cough* climate, he could have easily anticipated this development. At the same time, the two Macs could have just as easily predicted just what a splash their own rebuttal would make and the notoriety it would generate.

But additional facts are always out there, somewhere. Mann himself recently told a Senate committee that his work is mainstream, mainly because it is part of the U.N.’s IPCC report (which he chaired, BTW). Two scientists disputed this claim, stating that the vast majority of climate literature supports the global MWP and LIA and refutes Mann’s work and the handful of supporting papers. These scientists, Soon and Baliunas, were labeled as ‘fringe scientists’ with no expertise, no knowledge, etc. Their paper that disputes Mann’s work was savaged, even though it was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Indeed, many called for the editor of that paper to be fired simply for publishing something critical of Mann’s work. Soon and Baliunas, by the way, are Harvard astrophysicists whose paper was on solar cycles and global climate – well within their expertise.

In other words, global warming advocates are opposing those who disagree with them not because of their science but because of their conclusions. Whenever you begin excluding people from ‘the truth’ because their conclusions are different from yours, you are practicing heresiology; you are expelling heretics. Now, this is perfectly legitimate in religion, but completely unacceptable in science. In effect, it shows that a large number of people in the global warming group are no longer thinking rationally about climate. You agree with them or you are ‘fringe’, ‘corrupt’, ‘partisan’, etc. Never a good sign.

In short, I think we can completely ignore the Mann report and the other recent papers that support it. While embraced as received truth by many environmentalists, it is in contradiction of a great deal of other science work being done.

This still leaves the question – is global warming real? Yes, I noticed that the above only stops a handful of scientific papers. Let’s move on to the real question.

Everyone should know the drill by now – the Earth’s temperature is what it is because of the greenhouse effect; sunlight falling on the Earth warms the surface and reflected infrared radiation is absorbed by ‘greenhouse gasses’. This keeps the Earth at its current just-right temperature. One of the greenhouse gasses is carbon dioxide; human industry is dumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; therefore, the greenhouse effect is increasing. If we don’t do something, the Earth will warm up until civilization collapses under melting icecaps, super-hurricanes, and no crops. There is clear, irrefutable evidence that man-made carbon dioxide is heating up the Earth this way – that is global warming.

While this is the ‘elevator pitch’ of global warming and is probably well-known by virtually everyone in Europe and the Western Hemisphere, it is amazingly over-simplified. So over-simplified that it can be misleading. For example, while the greenhouse effect depends upon the so-called ‘greenhouse gasses’, there is one such gas that dominates on Earth – water vapor. As a matter of fact, water vapor (i.e., clouds and stuff) is responsible for 98% of the greenhouse effect.

On top of that, the absorption of radiated infra-red accounts for only about 25% of the total greenhouse effect. That’s right, the actions of greenhouse gasses, the only issue mentioned 99 times out of 100 in global warming discussions, is only 25% of the total greenhouse effect (the rest is convection and conduction at about 37% each). So the non-water vapor greenhouse gasses account for about .5% of the total greenhouse effect. That is ½ of 1%, by the way, not five percent. By itself, a doubling of carbon dioxide could not under any model increase average global temperatures by more than 1.7 degrees centigrade.

But global warming advocates state that CO2 doesn’t act alone; the .4 to 1.2 degree centigrade increase that most models predict from doubling CO2 in the air will, they say, increase the amount of water vapor in the air. This would amplify the effect and result in a total increase of about 5 degrees centigrade – pretty darn serious! But, unfortunately, the assumptions made about the increase in water vapor and the actions of the increased water vapor are just that – assumptions. For example, most models predict that water vapor will increase, but cloud cover won’t. The reason? Well, the energy increase absorbed energy by doubling carbon dioxide would equate to about 2 watts of energy per square meter of the Earth’s surface (why that weird number? You’ll see). But clouds reflect about 75 watts of energy per square meter. So a 2% increase in cloud cover would negate the doubling of CO2.

Now, the mechanisms involved are far more complicated than that (for example, very high altitude clouds can increase greenhouse effects instead of reducing them, like low level clouds do). For example, many computer models predict an increase in temperature associated with diminished snow cover (it gets warmer=less snow; less snow=less reflection of sunlight=warmer Earth). Problem is, recent research indicates that a reduction in snow cover results in increased cloud cover to an extent that to total greenhouse effect may be negative, i.e., it makes the Earth cooler.

The main problem is that weather/climate actions are stunningly complex, complex enough that the term ‘butterfly effect’ is used. In short, the butterfly effect is the concept that weather actions are so complex that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Japan can cause a storm in France weeks later. All existing models of global warming are completely insufficient in the face of this. The biggest issue for current global warming, for example, is the very obscure physics of water vapor. Right now all models show increases in temperature resulting in an increase of water vapor at all levels of the atmosphere equally. If the actual increase is off by as little as 4% weighted toward low-level humidity, however, the net effect would probably be equilibrium or a decline in global temperatures, not global warming.

The best way to test a model is to compare it to the known past. In other words, use your model to ‘predict’ what happened over, say, the last 100 years and see if it matches reality. We can only really go back to about 1900 for weather data because before that weather information is indirect; we have temperature and humidity levels after about 1900 that are fairly accurate, but before that we have to figure out weather from things like tree-ring thickness. When you take current models used to support global warming they predict that the last century should have seen a total increase in temperature of about 2 degrees centigrade with most of that occurring in the last 30 years of the century. In actuality the climate record show an increase of temperature of about .45 degrees centigrade with the majority of it occurring in the first 40 years of the century and a small spike in the last ten with a minor cooling phase in the 1970’s.

Here’s another kicker; according to isotope samples about 440 million years ago total CO2 levels on Earth were roughly 10 times what they are today. In computer models that support global warming the mean temperature must have been no less than 8 degree warmer than today. However, the Earth was in the grips of an ice age at the time. Even indirect evidence refutes these models.

The models also call for an increase in equatorial ocean surface temperature of about 2 degrees. There is a change of about .3 degrees, no more. In other words, the models fail miserably. Every single application of current climate models that support global warming to the past century grossly overshoot actual warming during that period.

And interesting look into ‘climate hysteria’ can be gleaned from that book I read so long ago. In the 1950’s and ‘60’s the Earth had a minor global cooling trend. The result was a slew of papers, books, and pop-culture obsession with ‘the coming ice age’. One prominent science writer issued a book that mocked skeptics of the global freeze theory and stated bluntly that the possible dangers were so great that the absence of confirmation should not prevent us from acting. Sound familiar? Two of the scientist/authors who issued books warning of the coming ice age (Schneider and Tickwell) are now prominent proponents of global warming. In other words, many of the people who spent the 1970’s warning of global freezing are now warning of global warming.

We are now in a situation where the predictive models for global warming fail repeatedly and there is some evidence that the major supporting works for global warming were faked. The result has not been self-reflection and review, however, it has been to expel ‘heretics’. In 1988 Lester Lave was dismissed from a Senate advisory committee where he served as a scientific resource because he said that the evidence for global warming was ambiguous. In 1989 Dr. Newell of MIT lost National Science Foundation funding when his results refuted global warning; his reviewers said his results were ‘dangerous for humanity’.

Many environmental advocates are calling for an end to research and a start to drastic action to end this obvious, imminent threat. In other words, they don’t care for facts, they want action! Environmental advocacy is a big, powerful business. Environmental NGO’s in America control hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and grants. Environmental groups in Europe are full-fledged political parties. Global warming has been a easy tool for fund raising and access to power. And many are using this influence to silence any dissent. Then-senator Al Gore led this charge with an editorial in the New York Times that equated the fight against global warming with the fight against Nazism.

Dr. Aaron Wildavsky, a professor of Political Science, once said this,

“Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist's dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population's eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”

In other words, the primary motivation of a great many global warming advocates is political, not environmental. One call from the IPCC was to reduce all CO2 emissions 60%. This would involved shutting down a significant number of factories, eliminating virtually all gasoline-powered cars, and throwing literally millions of people out of work. In 1999 it was estimated that reducing CO2 emissions 10% in America alone would cost about $250 billion a year for 10 years! The costs involved in the proposed 60% global reduction would dwarf the expense of WWII by all sides and the human impact would be potentially as great. The major sufferers would be Third-World nations who could not afford to implement new and cleaner technology. And the major shifts in transportation would radically alter Western society, especially America. Indeed, based upon a rather controversial report on methane emission by cattle (methane is a greenhouse gas), some are calling for legal controls on the number of cattle to ‘protect the Earth’ – many of these proponents are also members of groups like PETA.

In short, I do not worry about global warming. Not then, not now.

Culture War

Boy, do I get tired sometimes. Tired of the weird, yet deeply offensive, claims of those who do not share my views. I’ve mentioned recently the huge number of liberal columnists, bloggers, and leaders calling everyone from areas that didn’t have a majority vote for Kerry ignorant, stupid, evil, etc. On Hannity and Colmes a few days after the election Geraldine Ferraro, the one-time Democratic vice-presidential candidate, stated “…if all the blue states … seced[ed] from the union, think what would be left for those red states; nothing….no educational system. Nothing. …where is all the talent in this country? Both sides, the Northeast corridor.”. Ms. Ferraro has seemingly never heard that there are, indeed, universities and businesses in places other than New England and the edges of the coasts.

Similar arguments abound that ‘the most food production in America comes from the Central Valley of California – if the Red States don’t get with the program, we’ll starve them out’. Of course, the Central Valley voted overwhelmingly Republican in 2004. While the voting patterns in the last election look shockingly like the map of America from space at night, showing where the most lights are, to assume that intellectual capital means superiority, or even supremacy, is pretty silly. The concentration of intellectual capital in urban areas has more to do with access than innate superiority. And all the stockbrokers on Wall Street won’t help you if the farmers on Main Street won’t sell you milk.

Writer Lawrence Henry, in his article Secession, eh? In the online version of the American Spectator draws a very interesting parallel. The last time that a group of people that felt that they were being isolated and disenfranchised by the American voting system and began making noises about secession was in the early 1800’s. The Southern American states felt threatened by the changes that threatened to permanently alter their way of life. The change from a distributed agrarian economy to a concentrated manufacturing economy terrified the South, enough that they waged war to keep things from changing. In the end, of course, they were doomed. The same forces that were changing economics had changed everything else.

The secessionists of the antebellum South made a lot of valid-seeming points; they were richer than the North, especially the plantation owners. They were the center of culture for America, especially the arts and fashion, and were much more cosmopolitan with regular trade with Europe, an elite that traveled abroad extensively, and a more cohesive culture. And, of course, during the War Between the States the Confederacy enjoyed the support of the French

Despite loudly spoken concerns from conservatives that America is going down the wrong path; despite 40 years of Democratic control of Congress; despite the legalization of abortion, a key moral issue with many conservatives; despite the attacks of the Left; you don’t hear conservatives speaking about leaving the country. But the Left speaks about it more and more. Perhaps this is indicative of something.

I think that, deep down, many liberals realize that change is inevitable and unstoppable. The generation of change that began in the late ‘60’s may be like the Lost Generation; a single generation with concerns that seemed to dominate for a time, and then faded away into history. The decision that must be made by liberals now is – is purity more important than influence?

The vast majority of liberals are calling for either no change to the Democratic platform, or a shift further to the left. They again and again refuse to “compromise” on their “core issues” or abortion and gay marriage. This may be the key to their self-destruction. Many Democratic voters are primarily interested in social justice (living wage, poverty, death penalty issues) or peace (opposition to war and American foreign policy) or economics (a bit of both social justice and peace with a focus on reining in corporations and the power of the wealthy). And ecological concerns (vanishing wilderness, pollution, animals, etc.) are also a large part of the Democratic base.

Just like the misconception among liberals that all ‘moral values’ voters are a monolithic bloc focused on abortion and gay marriage, they seem to think that all Democrats value all elements of their platform equally. If it continues to be apparent that a hard-line leftist stance on abortion and gay marriage loses elections, they may begin to see defections from their party by people willing to compromise in order to make gains in social justice, the environment, etc. In other words, the pledge that the Democratic Party will always support abortion on demand may be a suicide pact.

We can see the effects of this myopic view of all voters as ‘single issue voters’ today. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out in an article in the New York Daily News, the ‘moral values’ exit poll has led an overwhelming number of liberal commentators and strategists to conclude that they were defeated by angry, ignorant, homophobic, White, redneck men. This leads to an easy demonization of their ‘enemy’ and allows them to claim the moral high ground. After all, they are ‘tolerant, open-minded, and on the side of rights’ while their foes are ‘inbred hicks’.

A look at polls, though, proves them wrong. The ‘anti-gay backlash’ is a myth – the increase in votes for Bush in 2004 compared to 2000 in the 11 states with an amendment to ban gay marriage was less than his percentile increase in states without such an initiative. In Ohio the increase was less than 1/3rd the increase in states without gay marriage on the ballot. In other words, there was no surge of anti-gay sentiment driving people to the polls – in reality, a large number of people who voted Democrat also voted to ban gay marriage. This fact is probably too disturbing for many liberal pundits to contemplate.

Bush increased his numbers among Hispanics, Jews, Catholics, Blacks, senior citizens, and women. Especially married women. Where is this surge of ‘rednecks’? Why would married women vote based on homophobia? Think about it; based on polling a person who voted for someone else in 2000 but voted for Bush in 2004 is likely to be a married Hispanic Catholic woman – hardly your typical homophobe with two teeth driving a truck with KC lights. Yet the liberal pundits and bloggers insist that the election was because of the mythical redneck, not the actual middle-class woman with kids.

So where do they go? Insisting that they are both innately superior and posses the moral high ground, what will the Democratic Party do? My prediction is – they’re gonna’ crank it up to 11. By refusing to consider that they may be wrong, but convincing themselves that they only lose because people don’t ‘get it’/are ignorant/deluded, and by refusing to consider that some of their platform items are incompatible with the morals or desires of a majority of Americans, they will try what they tried in 2000 and 2004, but with more force. Michael Moore has already announced he is making a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 to “inform people of the truth” and a lot of columnists are increasing the tempo of their attacks on conservatives. Add in the repeated statements that any judge who agrees with the majority of America will be filibustered, and we are looking at some serious brinkmanship by liberals already.

It Gets Worse

[Note: having some trouble with links, so it’s a little clunky right now]

Well, after just a few days the vitriol from the Left has gotten worse and worse. I have my favorites, of course. Like Left is Right at http://www.mstabile.blogspot.com/ . This genius posts the definition of bigot and then goes on repeated rants that everyone from a ‘Red state’ is an evil moron who wants to kill her. The Hell? So saying that everyone who disagrees with her is stupid, ignorant, and psychotic makes them bigots and her open-minded? The Daily Kos at http://www.dailykos.com/ is no better. Indeed, worse. He seems to betray his own high ideals by basically planning to starve the ‘ignorant, incapable’ masses by keeping them from the food and money only really produced in the ‘Blue states’. “They need us more than we need them – if they won’t let us lead them, let the world burn!” - how very Atlas Shrugged of you, pal.

Let’s try this again. Self-described evangelical Christians are about 40% of the voting populace. Only 75% of them voted for Bush. So the “Right-wing Republican Bigots are all alike” rant is a denial of reality. Even people who call themselves the right-wing don’t vote alike! Kerry lost a lot of the Catholic vote. According to exit polls (thanks, Zogby), mainly Catholic who regularly go to church. Those same Catholics overwhelmingly disapprove of almost everything Bush is doing except oppose abortion. Catholics were once a more dependable bloc of Democratic voters than Blacks – yet the Democrats won’t bend an inch on their pro-choice stance. It can be argued that if the Democratic Party would just talk about the abortion issue as if people who disagree with ‘abortion on demand at taxpayer expense’ aren’t evil, then millions of voters who support healthcare, living wage, the end of poverty, the end of war, and the environment would flood back to their side.

And that is the central error of all of these oh-so-angry liberals. Millions of us who voted for Bush desperately want to vote for a Democrat. Hell, any Democrat. But we have items that are centrally, vitally important to us that we want taken seriously. The Democratic Party has not been willing to discuss them. And these bloggers certainly don’t want to hear it. Most of the liberal columnists don’t want to hear it. So, deeply conflicted, we do what we feel we must; vote against some social justice issues to support others we think more vital.

This is a terrible position to be in. And those that we want to reach out to us seem to hate us for making the choice.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I hope you didn’t think that an election would go by without some Deep Thought! As some of you may have guessed, I vote conservative. I don’t call myself a conservative, because (as I have said elsewhere) that comes with a huge list of “conservative=” assumptions that don’t fit me. I have a list of issues, some more important than others, that guide my voting. Conservative parties tend to meet me on the ‘most important’ list, liberal on the ‘less important’ list, so I vote conservative.

I am also a bit of an amateur statistician (loved the college coursework, use it at work, think its kinda’ fun. No, really). Looking at the exit polls and then reading what the ‘pundits’ write, I notice something interesting. This is something most conservatives would say ‘well, duh’ to, but to which most liberals would react with a ‘that’s not true!’.

The liberal leadership, including its pundits and apologists, don’t understand the average American.

Now, I am certain they care for the average American (hereafter just ‘Americans’), mainly because they want to care for everyone. And they think they understand Americans. And they try to speak to Americans. But they obviously failed.

Exit polls here are very interesting. Thos e who regularly attend church overwhelmingly supported Bush. Those who rarely or never go supported Kerry in roughly equal numbers. And while the “Catholic vote” was split, I have a guess – of those who call themselves Catholic, about half attend regularly, about have attend rarely or never. In other words, it was church attendance, not denomination, that mattered.

In America more people live in suburbs or rural areas than in urban areas. People in suburban and rural areas are more likely to be regular church-goers. So the ‘average American’ is a suburban/rural person who attends church on a regular basis – the people who just elected George Bush. Regular church-goers tend to oppose gay marriage, be pro-life, and to place moral issues over economic ones – even when economic conditions aren’t that good for them personally.

Its not just cut-and-dried, though. Many of these non-urban Americans are also deeply concerned about the economy, the war in Iraq, etc. – the issues focused on by Democrats. The Democrats obviously and specifically hoped that they could convince enough people that they were right on these issues to draw them into voting for Kerry. Although there was some success, it was far from enough. I think the main reason is that the Democratic Party is more ideologically rigid than the Republican Party.

While many on the Left assail the Republicans as close-minded authoritarians the fact is that there is a great deal of dissent within the ranks of the Republicans. From the large numbers of legislators who do not actively support pro-life issues or directly oppose things like stem-cell research to the Log-Cabin Republicans, a group of openly homosexual politicians and ideologues, the Republican party has members and leaders who openly disagree with the Party’s ‘core issues’.

The ‘open-minded’ Democratic Party, on the other hand, tends to dismiss or quash dissent very effectively. There is no room for pro-life Democrats within the party; Bob Casey, then the newly-reelected governor of Pennsylvania, was not allowed to speak at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because of his pro-life stance. At that same convention, however, there was time for 6 pro-choice Republican women to speak, including one who had worked in the campaign against Governor Casey. Democratic politicians are ever-vigilant to oppose any judicial nominee who has not stated specifically that they support pro-choice laws (Estrada’s only ‘failing’). And the group Democrats for Life is routinely excluded from any gathering of Democrats.

A current bit of political wisdom is that the once-formidable “Catholics vote” is gone; now Catholics vote like everyone else. But this is wrong. In the key battleground states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, etc. the Catholics there were much more likely to vote for Bush than for Kerry. In Minnesota voters as a whole were 56% likely to vote for Kerry. But Catholic voters were 60% for Bush – in short, the only reason Minnesota was a battleground state at all was because of the Catholic opposition to Kerry.

Catholics in Minnesota are, according to other polls, pretty darn Liberal (like the state as a whole). The key issue that aimed them at Bush was abortion with gay marriage a catch-up second place. While Democratic strategists claim that ‘people who vote Republican because of abortion would vote that way for a whole list of other reasons’ are lying to themselves. Poll after poll indicates that many would vote for Democrats if the Democratic Party would just discuss pro-life concerns. Not support them, not endorse them, just talk about them. This poll from the University of Michigan was released before the 2000 election – and ignored to this day.

And this election provides more evidence. Ohio is suffering from a serious economic downturn and massive job-loss. But a lot of people there voted for Bush and a lot of them based their vote on “moral issues”. In other words, abortion and gay marriage. One Missouri voter, a life-long Democrat, stated specifically that he thought Bush’s economic policies would hurt him and his family but he felt compelled to vote for Bush because of his concerns for the unborn.

In short, a number of Americans; non-urban, churchgoing Americans; are willing to see their families suffer economically to oppose abortion and gay marriage. That is pretty damn serious. And that is a voting bloc that is committed in ways that transcend issues like whether or not explosives went missing, or who was a ‘real’ war hero. So a lot of the efforts of the Democratic Party to paint Kerry as a compassionate, intelligent man who would help them get and keep jobs meant almost nothing to a large number of average Americans.

How committed is the Democratic Party to pro-choice? It maintained a link from its web page to the very small group Catholics for a Free Choice despite a well-run boycott and letter-writing campaign by the Catholic Defense League to remove it. Why? Catholics for a Free Choice is pro-choice. At the same time, the repeatedly refused to post a link to the webpage of Democrats for Life because they were pro-life. Willing to endure a ton of negative publicity in an election year to show any form of support for a tiny pro-choice group, they were unwilling to show any support for a Democratic group that was pro-life.

That seems pretty clear. This is a refusal to admit that there are people that agree with a majority of ‘liberal’ issues yet vote conservative over one or two “key points”; so-called ‘single-issue voters’ or ‘litmus test voters’. Liberals both decry single-issue voters as ignoring larger issues (read any liberal commentator over the last 2 years) and support single-issue items (Kerry’s promise not to nominate a judge that wasn’t pro-choice, for example). Liberals (a broad, sweeping generalization, I admit) see their opponents whole cleave to a single issue as having overriding importance as close-minded, yet see themselves as dedicated to truth, justice, etc. when they do the same.

This myopic view extends up and down the chain. Writer Byron Williams writes “Fear and [a concern for moral] values trumped the majority [of voters] who felt the country is headed in the wrong direction, the possibility that the Supreme Court could take a major shift to the right, [and] the global communities overwhelming disapproval…”. Byron is symptomatic – if a majority of voters selected Bush based on moral values or fear of terrorist attacks, how can he claim that “the majority” feel that the country is headed in the wrong direction? Bush has been in office for four years promoting pro-life views and aggressive military actions; the majority of voters re-elected him; who the heck is Byron talking about?

He is, of course, talking about the people he associates with. In the same article he mentions that America is a red nation with blue on the edges (not his exact words). The heavily liberal areas are also heavily urbanized. There are Democrats in rural areas – lots of them (look at Minnesota, a largely rural state). But the often have different values that urban Democrats. Again, Pennsylvania is an example – many Dems in Pennsylvania are rural, and many of them are pro-life. Who within the Democratic Party considers them important, let alone speaks for them?

Many other liberal pundits wail that the economy and the war in Iraq are moral values (My favorite is Ellen Goodman). No doubt about it, the economy and war are morals-based things. Period. But they are all missing something – people who are worried about keeping their job voted for Bush even though they feared he could (or would) make job-loss more likely. People who oppose the war in Iraq voted for Bush even if they thought Kerry would end it faster and less violently. What they miss is that to a great many Americans issues of abortion trump money and war; that judicial changes to the definition of marriage (in defiance of laws passed by legislators elected by the people) are seen as more critical than the amount of taxes paid by the top 1% or incomes in America.

So why the heck to the liberals miss this? Why do these pundits and strategists, so eager – even desperate – to reach as many people as possible with what they feel is the truth, not realize that many people who vote conservative could easily vote liberal if the Democrats relaxed their white-knuckled grip on an all-out support of abortion on demand paid with tax dollars? I don’t like the conclusion I’ve reached (although I reached it some time ago). I believe it is because of a combination of arrogance and contempt of those who disagree with them.

In the same article Ellen Goodman lumps pro-lifers, those who oppose gay marriage, and Creationists into a single category, a category she contrasts with people who “…see poverty as a moral issue”. She doesn’t consider for a moment (in the article at least) that pro-lifers, those who oppose gay marriage, and Creationists might be different groups with different goals. Also: newsflash for Ellen – the majority of outreach to the poor and activism against poverty comes from religious institutions, often very conservative religious institutions.

Columnist Paul Krugman states that those who are pro-life and pro-family are implicitly anti-minority rights. That’s right, he assumes that if you are pro-life and oppose gay marriage you oppose equal rights for Blacks, Hispanics, etc. Never you mind that 75% of Black Georgian voters opposed gay marriage. Or that a stunning majority of Hispanics are pro-life. See, opposition to any equals opposition to all in Mr. Krugman’s mind. Many of the liberals I know (and I know a whole lot of ‘em) automatically assume that those who disagree with them need to learn more – that all opposition to their own worldview is borne of ignorance or hate. People who hold such views can never reach a rapproachment with their opponents; they are, by definition, inferior.

This arrogance and condescension is seen and understood by many ‘average Americans’ and the Republicans exploit it. The ‘liberal elite’ is not a myth; the web page Democratic Underground has some insightful commentary on this, pointing out that a large number of Democratic leaders and strategists are wealthy professionals from affluent families from the Northeast of Left Coast that have almost no experience interacting with average folks. When they focus on economic issues (which the Democratic Party has done for a long time) there is a sense of noblesse oblige, a feeling that “those people” should be grateful for the help.

I found one author that admits this, Jeanette Batz Cooperman. She admits to feelings of intellectual superiority and tries to overcome them. The article, of course, implies that those who disagree with her aren’t actually stupid, they are just genetically unable to grasp complexity. At least she’s moving in the right direction.

I find myself in an interesting position. Although I far prefer to not talk too much about my personal beliefs, I find that no one speaks for me and few want to speak to me. I am the opposite of Jessie Ventura and Arnold the Governator, I am the quintessential devout Catholic: socially conservative and fiscally liberal. Yet Republicans don’t care for me for my support of welfare programs, broad reform in healthcare (and contemplation of how a national health care system would work, and well), and belief that aggressive progressive tax rates (including stiff estate and capital gains taxes) would benefit the country.

Evangelical Christians don’t want me. In addition to being Catholic, I think evolutionary theory is pretty solid science. And Democrats also don’t want me. So why do I end up voting conservative? Because while conservatives don’t like some of my positions, there are plenty of Republican politicians who support tax breaks aimed at low-income families, the minimum wage, healthcare reform, etc. In short, I can be a conservative and dissent. But Democrats tell me I am anti-woman (I oppose abortion), a homophobe (I am against gay marriage), and irrational (I am religious). In short, I face more hate speech from the left. Because they are more ideologically rigid.

Spam, Birth Rates, and The End Of The World As We Know It

I received some spam today. No, really! I have had my main internet-based email account for about, oh, 9 years or more so I get a lot of spam – this one just slipped by the filters. It warned of overpopulation and encouraged me to learn more about how to keep the world from being destroyed by people.

Now, I’ve seen Soylent Green and I thought it was cool. And I’ve visited overpopulation.com and thought it was lame. All in all, the ‘overpopulation issue’ leaves me either chuckling (at best) or angry at the gullibility of people (at worst) because there is no overpopulation issue on Earth. Never has been, never will be. As a matter of fact, I’m seriously worried about underpopulation. Here’s some quick numbers, many from the CIA factbook (you should go there) and overpopulation.com’s won website (check it out, too).

Let’s start by mentioning a minister named Malthus. He made a basic observation about animal populations in the wild. In a nutshell, he predicted that, in the absence of predation, creatures would grow to the limit of their food supply and then the relative scarcity of food would limit population. That’s it, really. Darwin was stimulated by this concepts and it helped him formulate his theories of the origin of species. And a lot of people think it means humans will reproduce until we all starve to death. Huh? No, really, since the writings of Malthus, such ‘malthusian’ predictions that there would be too many people to support have been going strong. They really hit their stride in the 1960’s and made a big splash in a number of science fiction stories, including the afore-mentioned Soylent Green. This has led to the creation of a number of studies, think-tnaks, and groups, all focused on limiting human reproduction before we all kill ourselves with our own children. Some of the big donors to the distribution of birth control to the Third World, legal and financial backers of the push to legalize abortion and make it easily accessible, and many environmental groups are mainly focused on overpopulation.

These people focus in the horrible sufferings of the victims of famine. They point to images of starving children and demand that we limit population so there will be enough food. The trouble is, of course, that in the modern world famine isn’t about lack of food, it is about a lack of power. There is more than enough food to feed everyone on Earth a rich, varied, and sufficient diet. But some people can’t get it because they lack money and/or guns. The famine in Ethiopia was about war; Somalia about the lack of law, etc. In each case men with guns prevented people without guns from getting the plentiful food that was available. As this becomes more common knowledge, some in the anti-childbirth campaign speak of standards of living. They argue that we will use up all of the resources and we will have a meager existence of lower-lower class subsistence as the world fills up with too many people.

Problem is, the core conceit of too many people has never been an issue. At current rates, it never will be. As a matter of fact, in the same year Soylent Green was released in theaters a report by a small United Nations commission on world health predicted that the world population would peak around 2040-2050 at a sustainable level and thereafter decline. Their numbers were pretty darn good, actually. Let’s talk numbers. I know, I know – boring, right? But unless you understand the numbers, you might miss the real danger that threatens the entire world. Yep, that’s right – a world-threatening danger. Well, a world-civilization-threatening danger, at least.

The first concept I want to talk about is Total Fertility Rate (TFR); the number of children the ‘typical’ woman of child-bearing age would have in a society. Its also the average number of children per woman – same thing. In a nutshell, this indicates how much and how fast the population of a place (we’ll focus on countries) will change. Since it takes 2 to tango, the TFR should be 2 in order to maintain a steady population, right? Well, mostly. Some children will, unfortunately, die before they have their own kids, in childhood, etc. So the minimum TFR to maintain a steady population generation to generation (called a ‘replacement rate’) is roughly 2.1. I say roughly because this number is for people with access to Western medicine, hospitals, etc. In some Third World places the replacement rate can be as high as 2.4. Maybe more. But we will use the conservative 2.1 as world-wide replacement rate TFR.

So what is the global TFR right now? Last time I checked, it was 2.7. ‘Hmmm’, you say, ‘above replacement rate - so we are going to starve!’. Time for a little context. You see, the global TFR in 1990 was 3.4. In 2000 it was 2.8. And it is estimated that in 2025 it will be 2.3. This is expected to continue to decline with some blue-sky predictions showing a global TFR of 1.2 in 2100. But before you relax and think about all that land your grand-kids can buy cheap, we need to talk about 2 more number-thingys. The first is age-distribution.

Age distribution is the relative number of children, the young, the middle-aged, etc. Because we have had large TFRs in the past and they are currently dropping like rocks, the total world population won’t just start going down – it takes time to stop a train, after all. It is predicted that the world population will peak around 2050 at no more than about 9 billion people. At the same time, age-distribution means that the average age of the population will shoot upwards. In 1975 the mean global age was 22 years old. In 2050 it is estimated it will be 38 – the elderly will outnumber the young for the first time in human existence. And this is an average; the median age for Japan is expected to be 53, Italy to be 58.

The next thing to discuss is the mortality rate, or how fast people die off. While global mortality rates were dropping for decades, the global mortality rate is increasing again. This is due to a combination of factors, mainly the resurgence of malaria, the AIDS epidemic, and the transmission of diseases to new areas. So people are dying a little faster than they did 20 years ago. Mortality rates are, for related reasons, highest in regions with the highest TFRs. Because of these changes in mortality rates, which were expected to drop faster than they are, the most-supported world population total is about 7.6 billion people in 2050, followed by a sharp decline.

So where is the threat to global civilization? You just read it. Underpopulation is a serious threat to global civilization as we understand it. One of the big reasons is the fact that local TFRs vary a great deal. The lowest are in Europe (Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, many others) and Asia (Singapore and Japan). These nations have a TFR of 1.5 or less, with Bulgaria at the lowest of 1.1. This means that the next generation will be no more than 75% the size of the current generation, maybe only 50%. This means that the population will continue to become (on average) much older very rapidly. As a result the care of the elderly will consume more and more of the time, energy, and resources of the entire working population. By some estimates Japan will suffer first. With one of the longest average lifespans in the world, excellent medical care, and a rapidly dropping population, some predictions so that in the year 2040 35% of all Japanese workers will be engaged in care for the elderly. This will be a staggering drain on the workforce, effectively forcing Japan to import millions of workers or face the problem of not having enough workers to staff factories, law firms, etc. Globally, in 2050 there will be more people between the ages of 65 and 80 than between the ages of 0 and 10. The political impact of the majority of voters being over the age of 65 means that younger generations will probably be completely unable to exercise control of democracies in the West.

And this will be repeated globally. Nations will either face massive immigration in order to meet staffing needs or simply not have enough people to work. It will be like the staffing crunch of the late 1990’s but in every sector with no relief in sight. Even with increases in automation, there will also be a decline in consumers (especially as the elderly begin to die). By 2050 a globally shrinking economy will be the norm. Concepts like ‘pension’, ‘retirement’, and ‘limited work week’ could vanish in the face of a shortfall of tens of millions of workers per country.

Certain social, cultural, and political factors are making this problem even worse. Some Asian cultures place a premium on male children at the expense of females. Access to in utero gender identification and abortion means that there is a resulting slant towards more males being born. South Korea, for example, has a TFR of about 1.8, but the most recent group of school children is not 50% male, but 60%. This is more acute in China where there are legal limits to childbirth. Some estimates place the youngest Chinese at a male to female division of 70%/30%, making China’s TFR effectively 1.4, not 1.8. The implications of a future with millions of young men with no potential spouses at home include mass emigration, the ‘importation’ of brides, and a radical change in the racial and cultural makeup of these countries.

The change in ratios of populations in regions is pretty significant. In the early 1900’s Europe had 3 times the population of Africa. In 1990, the populations were even. In 2040 Africa will have three times the population of Europe. Of the 12 most-populous countries of 1950 only 6 will remain on that list in 2040. New additions will include Nigeria, Zaire, Ethiopia, and Iran. No European nation or former Soviet republic will have as many people as the Phillipines.

Other implications are pretty sobering, as well. The earliest impact will be in Europe (including Russia and its former republics), where TFRs are lowest currently. Italy, for example, has a TFR of 1.2 and dropping; the UN estimates that its total population will decline by 25% by the year 2050. Russia and Ukraine are in worse shape with an estimated 40% decline in the same period. The result will be an elderly population dependent upon immigrant labor for care and a nation requiring the same immigrants to main more and more critical areas. There is a serious concern that some cultures and nations will simply vanish as they die out and are replaced by waves of immigrants. And if they ban or severly limit immigration they face simple extinction through lowered birth rates – Italy, for example, theoretically reaches a population of zero in the year 2150. Some theorists also point out that immigrants tend to quickly mirror the TFRs of their new homes, global TFRs may drop more rapidly than expected.

Perhaps the most sobering projection is a simple projection of global TFRs stabilizing in about 2040 at roughly 1.7 or so. This projection by the UN shows a population peak in around 2040, a worldwide decline in population of about 85 million people by 2050 – and then a decrease in population of 25% every generation. If this is stable, meaning if TFRs stay at that level, by 2100 the world population will be roughly 4.5 billion people. By 2200 population projections show a global population of about 1.45 billion, and by 2300 a global population of 450 million people, or less than the projected population for the U.S. alone in 2040.

Now, we cannot make too many assumptions – population projection is tricky. There are a huge number of variables, many of which are not well understood. The current projections have been very accurate for over 30 years and (for a variety of reasons) I expect them to remain valid probably until about 2100 in broad terms. Some population experts expect global pop to stabilize around 1.8-2.2 billion around the year 2250. I am not trying to replace an ‘everyone starves to death’ scenario with an ‘everyone dies’ story.

What I am talking about is a big change in human life on a global scale. Shifting from a growing, young population to a shrinking, elderly population will cause massive societal changes that we can only guess at. A shrinking consumer base combined with a shortage of workers could very well force a number of companies completely out of business. It will certainly have a big impact on distribution of wealth and political power. A global deflationary economy is possible, changing marketing and savings patterns. And the massive drain on manpower and money needed over the next 50 years as the majority of the population ages rapidly will certainly hurt.

Let’s add in that many ‘developed’ nations could end up with a wealthy, well-educated native elite with an average age in the 60’s being served by a youthful, poor, relatively-uneducated workforce of immigrants. The potential for strife is huge. At the same time, many developed nations will have too few young people to field an army of respectable size, while many poor nations will still have plenty of young men – all during the time that may represent the period of greatest economic and political unrest in human history. Disturbing concepts.

Another thing to consider is the pattern of births. Devout members of ‘fundamentalist’ Judeo-Christian religions have a higher TFR than their non-devout, non-fundamentalist, and secular peers. This is particularly true of Catholics and Mormons. Thus, while Italy and Spain, both nominally ‘Catholic nations’, have some of the very lowest TFRs in the world this seems to be because they are heavily secularized. Devout populations of Catholics in both countries seem to be the reason that their cumulative TFRs are not even lower. Among Jewish, Catholic, and Mormon women, TFR increases correspond almost directly with religious participation. Put simply, Jewish, Catholic, and Mormon women that attend church/temple more regularly have more children. Participation in volunteer activities within these religious groups also increases TFR. Interestingly, while Islmaic TFRs are above the global average, they are dropping rapidly and have no similar correspondence with religious activity.

Another interesting aspect of fertility among the (for wont of a more convenient term) devout is that it does not necessarily follow what everyone believes trends in fertility should be. Advocates of family planning from Planned Parenthood to Negative Population Growth urge education and development as a panacea for reducing fertility. The basic argument is that as populations become more prosperous, more women enter the workforce, more women get higher education, marriage is delayed – as is childbirth, and women ‘naturally’ have fewer children. Trouble is, this isn’t always the case.

American studies show that American Catholics in the 1950’s and ‘60’s had more children when they had more education. Similarly, Mormon women with higher education have more children on average than their less-educated co-religionists. Israeli research mirrors this in Jewish women. The Israeli study, by far the most detailed, showed another factor – from barely-observant to devout Jewish women TFR was just as tightly linked to cultural origins as it was to religious participation. For example, secularized Jewish women descended from North Africans have a higher TFR than secularized Jewish women descended from Russian immigrants. And the correlation extends through to devout Jewish women.

One possible conclusion is that the decline in birthrates among ‘more educated’ women has more to do with the absorption of cultural and societal values than with education in and of itself. Because not only do highly-educated religious women have a higher TFR than their secular peers, in Europe and North America the differences in TFR between high-school graduates and those with a bachelor’s degree are far less than similar positive trending amongst the devout. In other words, it seems that it is not higher education in and of itself but rather a “secularized Western” worldview that leads to declined TFRs. The decrease in TFRs seems to have more to do with exporting cultures and values than with improving education.

Another issue is the increase in commitment among young Catholics. By far the largest single religious group on Earth, the Catholic Church seemed to suffer a decrease in members who could be called ‘devout’ during the last 40 years. At the same time, however, total numbers grew until approximately 1/6 of the world is at least nominally Catholic, or about 1.1 billion people. An interesting trend seen recently is a rather sharp increase in the number of young Catholics attending religious services regularly, volunteering at church activities, etc., especially in the developed countries. In other words, as measured here young Catholics are becoming more devout. At the same time, outside of Jewish youths, Catholics have the highest average level of education in developed nations. This seems to open the possibility of developed nations becoming more and more devout as non-devout women have fewer and fewer children while their devout neighbors have more and more. And the ‘undeveloped’ regions that currently have high TFRs also have expanding and devout Catholic populations, especially Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

More interesting extrapolations are possible, aren’t they? What happens if by 2100, when world population has dropped to about 4.5 billion with a large percentage of them being devout Jews, Catholics, and Mormons? Devout members of these faiths tend to be much more homogeneous in their voting habits than their more-secular co-religionists and are overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, conservative. What will be the results of an increasingly religious population worldwide? Other point is the fact that a large number of the elderly population of the next 30 years, especially in the West, is largely anti-religion in its viewpoints?

One outcome that I see as possible combines all of these elements; in the theory or vision the Earth of 2040 has a population of about 7.5 billion people, a majority of Westerners are over 50, anti-religious, or both. The workforce that cares for and supports them is young, devout, and from somewhere else. The societal pressures of a relatively small, poor, devout workforce being under the economic and political thrall of an elderly, wealthy, secular elite will be stunning. If even half of this comes to pass I will be shocked if there are not major changes in not just geo-politics but the very structure of political power and the global economy.