Jeff Schweitzer's Blog, page 5

Unfit for Publication: How USA Today Got Everything Wrong

USA Today splashed across its June 18, 2014, front page the breathless headline, “Unfit for Flight” to dramatize the deadly enterprise of flying general aviation aircraft (small airplanes). We learn in bold print there have been 45,000 deaths attributed to small aircraft and dozens of multimillion-dollar verdicts that reveal lies and coverups.

There is only one problem: Nearly every inference about aviation in the article is wrong. Let’s put this in perspective statistically. If a private pilot flew 10 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, for 30 years, it would take over five lifetimes to be involved in a fatal accident.

The real story here is media bias and editorial malpractice, not the dangers of aviation or manufacturing defects. The article insinuates that huge numbers of people are dying in small airplanes, and that the cause is largely manufacturing defects. Both conclusions are untrue. Deaths in general aviation are actually few relative to comparable activities, and when there is an accident manufacturing defects rarely play any role. The writing in the USA Today article is so transparently biased that the author draws conclusions obviously inconsistent with his own presentation. An example is a chart showing a significant decline in generation aviation accidents with the headline “general aviation accident crash rate remains steady.” In spite of that absurd claim the chart clearly shows the death rate since 1983 declined from 107 per million flight hours to 65; and the total number of accidents declined from 1,068 to 444 over that same period. And those 45,000 deaths so boldly presented? Sure, over a period of 50 years; that’s right, 50 years, or an average of 900 deaths per year (and declining to 444 in 2011). I guess 450 deaths per year are just not sexy enough for headline space. Compare 450 general aviation deaths to the 35,000 killed each year on our highways. If this author were writing about the dangers of driving, the headline would scream that driving has caused 1,750,000 deaths (and then in small print we’d learn that the number is the total over five decades). The author also failed to mention that the non-commercial helicopter accident rate has dropped 30 percent, another statistic that is not amenable to headline hyperbole.

The innuendo in mentioning the high-dollar verdicts in the headline is also terribly misleading, and the worst kind of journalism. In the absence of facts, smear with insinuation. This is an age of multimillion-dollar settlements from hot coffee. Settling is often all a manufacturer can do without implying any guilt at all in order to cap potential damage no matter how meritless a suit may be.

Let me pause here to present my aviation credentials. I am an active pilot with over 5,000 hours total time. I hold an Airline Transport Pilot rating, own and operate a single engine jet, and have been actively involved with general aviation for nearly 30 years. I have no financial interest or any connection to any aircraft manufacturer. I have often enough been an adversary to aircraft manufacturers and have no love for them. But this article is a smear campaign against an entire and rather noble industry that distorts and twists the truth to reach a preconceived conclusion independent of the facts. Few industries are more highly regulated or more closely scrutinized than aircraft manufacturers. Have some acted badly, covered up defective parts, or made short-sighted decisions that compromised safety? Absolutely. And those cases should be prosecuted fully and the companies punished severely. The USA Today article rightfully points out these horrible cases, with their terrible human cost of pain and suffering; but then makes the critical mistake of drawing broad conclusions that do not follow the facts.

Cases of malfeasance, no matter how horrible, are no reason to broadly condemn an entire enterprise. Airplanes are beautiful, complex machines with hundreds of intricate parts moving in perfect harmony, subject to severe mechanical stress, wild swings in extreme temperatures and harsh rain, wind and turbulence. Airplanes operate in an unforgiving and ever-changing environment that leaves little room for error. With this burden, and under the scrutiny of heavy regulation, manufacturers do a superb job of producing safe, durable, reliable machines that can function dependably over decades in these tough and challenging conditions. My beefs with them have always been in the area of customer service, not the safety of their product. What makes a small airplane accident so newsworthy is rather rare nature of a crash due to the overall reliability of personal aircraft.

Boating Kills

The USA Today author demonstrates a terrible ignorance of aviation. Here is a typical canard: “While the airline crash rate has plummeted to near zero, the general aviation rate is unchanged from 15 years ago, and roughly 40 times higher than for airlines.” But the comparison is absurd; the statistic measures a population of professional pilots who undergo mandatory recurrent training twice per year, who fly highly sophisticated machines with triple redundancies and multiple jet engines, with two pilots in the cockpit, supported by an army of mechanics and a massive ground crew feeding them information on weather, routing, and airport conditions. General aviation should be compared to driving, not commercial flying. GA pilots are by definition amateurs who do not make a living from flying; we often fly alone in simple machines with little or no redundancy, usually with one piston engine, and are responsible for gathering our own information on weather, flight conditions, and the health of the airplane. Yet even with that awesome disadvantage, with wild differences and pilot skill and experience in the GA community, with a fleet mix of old and new equipment, we still see relatively few deaths from flying. Hell, 50 people die each year snow skiing. SCUBA diving kills about 150 per year. Recreation boating claims about 750 people each year, significantly more than general aviation. Nothing about general aviation is out of line with any other sport that entails inherent risk. There is no grand conspiracy or systematic flaws in manufacturing. Instead, what we see is simply the unreliable element of human nature.

Stupid Pilot Tricks

Formal accident investigations claim that pilot error is responsible for 86 percent of all accidents. We in the aviation community know that this number is low; pilot error is a bigger contributor than that. The accidents included in the 86 percent usually involve some obvious mistake like low altitude aerobatics (“hey, Mom, watch this”), flying into severe weather, flying when ill or tired, or taking off with more weight than the airplane is designed to handle. But pilot error is deeper than that. Aircraft are complex machines that require careful, constant and expensive maintenance. If time or money are constraints, and they often are, and anything about maintenance is neglected, that too is pilot error. So too we see pilot error when in the face of a mechanical failure a pilot fails to land safely as a consequence of poor training. Yes, some failures are catastrophic and unrecoverable; but many can be survived if a pilot is properly equipped to handle the emergency. Failure to do so in a recoverable situation is pilot error.

Helmet on the Couch

USA Today makes a common mistake in this article based on a fundamental misunderstanding of risk. Flying 300 mph at 27,000 feet in an aluminum tube is not equivalent to sitting a home on the couch wearing a helmet. Yes, we will continue to strive to reduce the risk of flying through proper pilot training, vigilant aircraft maintenance and good manufacturing practices; but the risk will never be zero. People will die flying, as they will when driving, skiing, mountain climbing, boating, diving, and walking to work. And here we get to the essence of the misunderstanding. Inadequate pilot training, faulty parts, and other such factors contribute to bad outcomes, but that is not the whole story. To put manufacturing defects into perspective, and to see why the USA Today article was so far off the mark about how general aviation is horribly unsafe, we need to grasp some essentials in the art and science of risk management.

Risk Is Not Just Risk

We can start by first breaking down the concept of risk into two main categories, inherent and operational. Then we’ll see how that distinction is necessary to refute absurd articles like the one splashed across the USA Today headlines.

Flying creates an inherent risk; going further, we can say that flying is inherently dangerous. Think of the guy in a helmet watching TV in his living room as a comparison. Defying gravity at high speed will always entail risk inherent to the activity. But we’re sold on the inverse of this reality, told that flying is inherently safe. It is not; we only create that illusion by successfully minimizing the risk with appropriate diligence. This inverse reality impacts how we perceive aircraft accidents. Even when we attribute the cause to pilot error, the assumption is usually that the pilot was doing something inherently safe, and then crashed by taking an unsafe action. But that is not true. Instead, the pilot was doing something inherently risky, and failed to manage the risk properly. Those two explanations of the accident are not equivalent. Which brings us now to operational risk.

Operational risk is that caused by our own decisions and actions in pursuit of a goal or objective. We willingly take on operational risks by measuring the anticipated consequences of our actions against potential gains. We can choose to take an action that is more dangerous than not taking that action. I might risk a slip on ice if I were walking to an important meeting, but avoid that risk if I had simply intended to go snag a cup of Joe. We have a much greater degree of control over operational risks. Unlike with inherent risk, here our decisions and actions are the direct cause of any grief we may experience.

Operational risks represent the greatest threat to safety in aviation; not defective manufacturing. We face these threats on every flight in every condition at every airport. Our decision-making itself is what creates the risk. As an aside, I should note too that general aviation pilots are exposed to a greater degree of operational risks than commercial pilots. For example, we have no duty-cycle limitations. That freedom places on us a greater potential for higher operational risk because we are allowed to make dumb choices not available to airlines. The most obvious operational risk is weather avoidance; but also included in this are our decisions about proper maintenance, currency, quality of training and a host of other factors. USA Today wants us to believe there is a crisis of manufacturing defects in aircraft causing airplanes and people to fall from the sky; it is simply untrue. The author exaggerates the numbers (you know, by a factor of 50), and then incorrectly attributes cause. Other than that…

Managing Does Not Mean Eliminating

Another significant point missed completely in USA Today: risk management does not mean in the real world eliminating risk although the two are commonly confused. Rather the idea is to recognize risk, reduce potential risk to the greatest extent reasonably possible, and mitigate that which cannot be avoided. We have an obligation to make flying as safe as humanly possible. But “as safe as humanly possible” does not mean risk-free.

Flying is inherently dangerous; we cannot eliminate all aspects of operational risk; and no form of risk management is perfect. What that means: people are going to die flying airplanes. An accident does not automatically mean someone did something wrong. An accident can simply be the manifestation of flying’s inherent risk, even if everybody did everything right. You do not believe me? A large bird strikes and severely damages the propeller of a single-engine airplane flying between Greenland and Iceland. No matter the level of training, maintenance, planning, and pilot skill that brought the aircraft to this moment, the fatal outcome of that strike is inevitable. And nobody is to blame; only the inherent risk of flying.

“Stuff” happens. Let us never confuse risk management with risk elimination; the two are entirely different animals. Let us do everything within our power to improve safety. But we must acknowledge that in spite of those efforts, we will never eradicate the dangers inherent to flying. From every accident we must learn all that is possible. But not every accident is an indictment of aviation’s training, safety and maintenance programs, nor necessarily reflective of poor pilot skill or judgment, nor indicative of a conspiracy of manufacturers to sell us faulty parts. The sensationalism of the article in USA Today does nobody any service. They got it wrong completely. Flying is relatively safe because we have made it so by managing inherent risk and minimizing operational risk; piling on manufacturers with exaggerated claims, bloated numbers and inaccurate conclusions does not help us advance toward a better record of safety. USA Today made itself part of the problem rather than contributing to the solution.

The Supreme Court Rules That Christianity Is Not Christian

For the past six years I have followed and written sporadically about an obscure lawsuit in a town nobody could locate on a map, noting to the few who would listen that this was one of the most important legal battles being waged in the country. This labor in obscurity has ended this week with the Supreme Court ruling in favor of a return to pre-revolutionary America. That the Court even agreed to take the case is a sign of the end of times.

The Supreme Court agreed with arguments that undermine our most cherished founding principle, the separation of church and state. As you absorb the folly to come, forget not that early settlers made the arduous journey to our shores in part to escape the stifling oppression of a dominant religion. The urgent need to rid the government from the influence of a single religion was Thomas Jefferson’s unifying and guiding light. But Jeffersonian principles have been set aside for the convenience of promoting Christianity over all other religions. Welcome to the United States of Saudi Arabia.

The epicenter of our shift to a theocracy can be found in Greece, New York, where something seemingly innocent enough in fact threatens to undermine the foundational ideals of our country. In Greece, New York, the town supervisor each month invites a local Christian minister to open the council’s meeting with a Christian prayer. Here is an example from the Reverend Lou Sirianni began with this:

“Be thou present, O God of wisdom, and direct the councils of this honorable assembly.” He ended with, “All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Savior.”

The obvious problem, of course, is that not all citizens believe Christ is our savior. No big deal, you say? What is the problem, you ask? Would any Christian or Jew tolerate a town meeting opened exclusively with an Islamic prayer from the Quran? How would our Christian citizens feel if the meeting were opened with pleas to Allah? Or if the opening prayer was done in Hebrew? The answer is obvious and self-evident: It would be offensive, and clearly counter to the ideal of freedom of religion. That reality simply cannot be denied. Still not convinced? Then imagine an imam, bearded and turbaned, in traditional dress, standing before our United States Congress, invoking the Quran to open every session of the House and Senate. Not comfortable with that? Then imagine how every Jew, Muslim and atheist feels with each opening of a government meeting with a Christian prayer.

For this rather obvious reason the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court ruled that such public government-sponsored prayer violated the separation of church and state. If a town council cannot impose Islam on its residents, then the council cannot impose Christianity. Any effort to do so is unambiguously a violation of the Establishment Clause. Such an imposition is precisely what Jefferson and our other founder’s feared most. The Circuit Court ruled reasonably; and the Supreme Court had no business taking this case.

Perhaps you think that Sirianni’s prayer was an anomaly, and that opening prayer is generally non-denominational. Well, no. Here is another sample, from Pastor Robert Campbell’s town hall opening:

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace.” … Father, we thank You for these blessings that You’ve given us and bestowed on us, and Lord, blessing us with these men and women that have governed us, we pray that You’d continue Your blessing on them. … It’s all because of what You’ve done and Your son Jesus in sending Him to be the Prince of Peace. And we pray for that peace upon our community. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

The last sentence should remove any lingering doubt about this being a Christian prayer. Just substitute “Allah” for “Jesus” and we’re living in Tehran instead of New York.

Lest you think the Rev. Sirianni’s invocation or that from Pastor Sirianni were random samplings from a broad range of what god to summon, until 2008 only Christians were allowed to lead the prayer as official policy. This exclusivity is important because the Supreme Court has previously ruled, under the so-called “O’Connor’s endorsement standard” that the government violates the First Amendment whenever it appears to “endorse” religion. Specifically, a government action is invalid if it creates a perception in the mind of a reasonable observer that the government is either endorsing or disapproving of religion. Well, c’mon: excluding all religions but one is by any standard an endorsement of that one remaining religion.

Yes, prior to this standard, the Court’s record was a bit muddled. In 1971 in Lemon v. Kurtzman, another case involving religion in legislation, the court came up with what later became known as the “Lemon test.” Government action “should have a secular purpose, cannot advance or inhibit religion and must avoid too much government entanglement with religion.”

In 1983, one year before O’Conner’s contribution, the Warren court ruled in Marsh v. Chambers that public funds could be used to pay a minister to offer opening prayers because prayer was “part of the fabric of our society” — thereby excluding all parts of our society where prayer is not part of daily life. Prayer is certainly not a part of my social fabric; am I to be excluded because I am not Christian?

So, let us return to Greece, New York. A Jewish resident, along with a resident atheist, sued the Greece town council arguing that “a reasonable observer” would conclude that Christian prayer “must be viewed as an endorsement of a… Christian viewpoint” and therefore is in violation of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court agreed, ruling against the town, concluding that the town’s actions “virtually ensured a Christian viewpoint” that featured a “steady drumbeat of often specifically sectarian Christian prayers.” Ya think? This ruling is self-evidently correct based on the very words from town representatives, who make their motives clear. Pastor Vince DePaola asked, “Do I want everybody to be a Christian? Of course I do.” Complaining residents should “grow some thicker skin.” Really? Would he grow a thicker skin if an Imam opened the meeting with a prayer to Mohammad?

Rather than refute that rather obvious conclusion and explicit statements that the local government is promoting religion, in clear violation of the Establishment Clause, town supporters argue that the Court should “relax” constitutional limits on religious invocations. The reasoning implicitly accepts that the town is in fact violating our constitution — but that we should excuse Christianity from its limitations. Oh? Should we “relax” our right to bear arms? How about our privacy protections under the constitution? How about the right to assembly? The right to free speech? Should we “relax” those protections? Maybe we should just scrap the entire Bill of Rights because the protections given therein might inconvenience a subset of our society who wish to promote one religion to the detriment of all others.

As a demonstration of where things will go once we become a Christian nation where everyone not a Christian has to grow a thick skin, one woman participant in the lawsuit arose one morning to find that her mailbox, once firmly in the ground near her driveway, was sitting on top of her car; part of a fire hydrant was thrown in her pool. All this was wrapped in the tolerant Christian message that the woman should “be careful…lawsuits can be detrimental.”

The ruling of the Supreme Court is an embarrassing charade made possible by the radicalism of Scalia and his cohorts. The explicitly stated attempt to promote Christianity in a government meeting so obviously violates our Constitution that the case should have never even come close to the halls of our highest court. Our judicial branch of government has been hijacked by zealots who are no different than the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in Iran. The conservative wing of the Supreme Court has shed any pretense of fulfilling their constitutional duties.

Justice Scalia has revealed his true colors well before this case. In Salazar vs. Buono in 2010 Scalia was simply baffled that a Christian cross could be construed to represent Christianity. He seemed puzzled that Jesus Christ was not broadly representative of Islam, Judaism or no religion. In asking what symbol should be raised over a cemetery of fallen soldiers, Scalia asked absurdly, “What would you have them erect? Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?” Notice that Scalia did not offer the obvious and imminently more reasonable alternative of erecting the Crescent of Islam in place of the cross. He only suggested the absurd notion of a chimera. He is so utterly blinded by his faith that he could not imagine that anything other than a cross could serve to honor our soldiers. Would Scalia himself allow a Star of David on his grave? If a Christian would not select a Star of David then why on earth would a Jew choose a cross? Yet that is exactly what Scalia proposes. The notion that the cross represents everybody is extraordinarily bizarre, defying even the most basic elements of decency. So this how we become a Christian nation, by claiming that Christianity is in fact representative of all religions. You know, like Islam represents all religions in Iran.

But we are not now nor have we ever been a Christian nation. Let’s hear from John Adams, one of our most influential founders, who addressed the question straight on in 1797:

“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

We do not need a Church of America: What the founding fathers knew in 1776 holds true in 2014. In spite of right-wing Christian rhetoric to the contrary, that we are a secular nation cannot be denied. The facts supporting that conclusion are unambiguous, overwhelming, and indisputable. The Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1777, the U.S. Constitution (1787), and the Federalist Papers (1787-1788) are purely secular documents (I have reviewed these in detail elsewhere). The time has come for us to fight the arrogant certainty among Christians that they hold a truth more valid than Jews, Muslims and those who eschew all religion. What is happening in Greece, New York, now endorsed by our highest court, infects our nation with the virus of intolerance. How ridiculous, how absurd is this fight; how blatantly obvious that promoting Christian prayers promotes Christianity.

And yet in their religious radicalism the Supremes ruled otherwise, in a 5-4 decision. Their twisted logic is that as long as prayer does not denigrate non-Christians “or proselytize,” then public prayer is acceptable. That presumes absurdly that invoking the name of Christ in a public meeting is not proselytizing. Would invoking “Allah” promote Islam? Justice Kennedy likened Christian prayer to “ceremony” in keeping with national tradition. Justice Kagan called this for what it is: ridiculous. She said that “our public institutions belong no less to the Buddhist or Hindu than to the Methodist or Episcopalian.” Such an obvious point, but one rejected by the conservative majority in order to promote their own narrow religious views. Kennedy went on to argue, weakly, that judges should not insert themselves into evaluating the content of prayers. Really? Does it take a deep evaluation to understand that “All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Savior” promotes Christianity and Christianity only? If we substituted “Allah” for Christ, would the ruling be the same, that we should not evaluate the content of prayer?

But Kennedy’s most egregious and dangerous logic is yet to come. In 1992 Kennedy ruled that a high school graduation was no place for a Christian prayer. But he claims the high school ruling is not relevant to Greece, New York, because “attendees at the council meeting may step out of the room if they do not like the prayer.” This is offensively wrong at many levels, but let’s just look at two. First, stepping out of the room forces non-Christians to reveal themselves and their religious preference while being excluded as second-class citizens. Should we make every Jew wear a Star of David? That was tried once, and had a bad outcome. Second, why should any citizen have to step out of the room in a public meeting organized to discuss local concerns? Does that not make some citizens more privileged than others?

The Supreme Court ruling is another giant leap toward theocracy. We are descending to new lows, where non-Christians are openly scorned, made to stand up in public to be identified as outcasts. Our founding fathers are crying in shame and frustration. Welcome to the United States of Iran. Every American should today weep for our country.

Hidden Wonders: What Nature Teaches Us About Ourselves

Few among us do not find awe and wonder in nature’s magnificence and complexity. But in spite of that commonality among folks from all walks of life, an important divide quickly reveals itself when we seek to interpret the significance of nature’s many miracles. Some see causality, believing that only an invisible controlling agent could explain such wonders. Others see randomness, with no direction, purpose or meaning.

In the face of nature we reveal to ourselves two very different world views, one with god, one without. Perhaps this grand divide is a consequence of humanity’s insignificance as we orbit in the enormity of space on our tiny “pale blue dot.” How so? Humans can see only a small fraction of the natural world both grand and microscopic. The limitless cosmos is almost entirely beyond the reach of our narrow vision. Even if we could somehow see all of the visible universe, we would still miss the 94% hidden from us as dark matter. We cannot see atoms, DNA or viruses. We miss the colorful world seen through the filter of ultraviolet light. Unassisted by technology, the five senses with which human beings are endowed are woefully inadequate to the task of seeing anything but the smallest fraction of reality. But we have evolved a cruel paradox; our brains can imagine an infinite world far beyond the severe limits of our senses. This combination of endless thought constrained by the restricted reach of perception is fertile ground for fantasy and easy explanation for that we cannot see or readily understand.

Philosopher David Hume noted long ago: “We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable. These unknown causes, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear.”

Hume suggests that the first ideas of religion likely derive from mundane concerns for the events of everyday life and how the vast unknown of nature affected daily existence. The human brain is extraordinarily adept at posing questions, but simply abhors the concept of leaving any unanswered. We are unable to accept “I don’t know,” so when the miracles of nature remain mysterious, we fabricate explanations for that which we cannot grasp. In a world largely opaque to our senses, almost entirely veiled by our limited reach, we develop elaborate creation myths, sun gods, rain gods, war gods, and gods of the ocean. To allay fears of disease, death, starvation, cold, injury and pain, we solicit the aid of greater powers. We communicate with our gods and influence their behavior to impose some order on the chaotic mysteries of the hidden world. By making up answers to dull the sting of ignorance and limitation of our senses, we fool ourselves into thinking we explain the world. Hope and fear combine powerfully in a frightening world of unknowns to stimulate comforting fantasies and myths about nature’s plans. Religion was our first attempt at physics and astronomy.

Which brings us to a second paradox. With advances in science and technology, we peer ever deeper into the secret world of nature; yet the more we know the better we understand how limited is our ability to lift the curtain on nature’s hidden miracles. Greater knowledge leads to a grander sense of the vastness of the unknown. But instead of despair we embrace a mounting optimism that what we do not know now we might in the future, with no appeal to any divine oversight. But, but… religion robustly endures. Why?

Probably because we have a short evolutionary history, which has endowed us with a large brain that for most of our existence struggled with the mysteries of a hidden world we are only now beginning to glimpse with the application of reason rather than faith. We are early in our journey to accommodate the uncomfortable reality that we know that we don’t know much, but know enough that we should not create myths to fill in the gaps. As those gaps diminish with growing insights into the hidden world we simultaneously become more comfortable with what we still cannot yet see. Becoming comfortable with the unknown is a process, and we are not done. Religion hangs on as a transitional state between a primitive mind seeking to explain the mysterious and a more enlightened insight that nature’s grandeur is even more awesome in the absence of any guiding hand. Carl Sagan said in 1994, “A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.” Sagan contemplated the idea of religion replaced eventually by a deep awe of the natural world revealed through processes guided by nothing but beautiful undirected randomness. Certainly, such a future is by no means ensured because religion holds a mighty and tenacious grip on the human psyche. How this battle between faith and reason eventually plays out depends much on our endless quest to witness nature’s many hidden miracles.

Institutionalized Fraud: How Wall Street Survives on Predicting the Past

“Bull Market – A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.“  Anon.

Entertainers and charlatans who claim to read minds use a common trick of stating the obvious.  “I feel there is someone in the audience thinking about a man named Peter.”  Given that Peter is a common name, most likely a few vulnerable souls in the crowd will yell “yes, yes” in rapt amazement.  If the seer is unlucky that night with an unusual absence of Peters and nobody answers, he would quickly move on to find the right name in a skilled way that obscures the fishing expedition.  “I sense that you’re concerned about money” and there is a yelp of recognition among those who know a Peter (or Paul or whoever was selected).  Because money is a common concern, he has a good chance of scoring a hit.  If not he can glide to another high-probability stab with talk about a sick loved one.   And so on goes the evening until the man with magic powers of mindreading saw that Betty just lost Peter to cancer and is now concerned with saving her house.  Amazing!

Predicting the Past

But this is pure amateur hour compared to Wall Street.  The gurus of the street go one better by making predictions of past events, cutting out the middleman fishing for clues.  Well, to be fair, not predictions exactly, but ex post facto explanations that are presented as having been known prior to the actual event; a pseudo-prediction. The genius in this is that any explanation of cause can be modified to fit actual circumstances.  There is no way to lose; no way to be wrong.  Let’s say unemployment figures came out better than expected, and the market responds with an upswing.  The headline:  “Market expands in the face of positive job growth.”  But if those exact same figures came out and the market declined instead, the headline would be:  “Market shrugs off employment numbers already anticipating positive growth.” Do you see the game?  Take any result from yesterday, and manufacture a cause that would lead to that result. You sound like you know what you’re talking about when in reality all you’ve done is predict the past, a game of low skill.  Yet this fraud of explaining market behavior is the very heart of Wall Street, as we will see later.

I have been collecting Dow Jones headlines daily for the past 10 years, all from the same popular source (Associated Press as quoted on MSN Money), and the reading is entertaining.  The funniest are those read in sequence one day to the next.  This is true no matter the source, including major newspapers like the WSJ or NYT.  Here is a taste:

Friday, February 1, 2013:  Dow Jones crosses 14,000 as job report sparks rally.   The index reaches a milestone not seen since October 2007 as investors cheer a decent January employment report and improvements in manufacturing and consumer moods.

Monday, February 4, 2013:  Look out below:  long slide in market is just beginning.  Last week’s optimism fades as structural problems and trouble in Europe re-emerge, threatening a months-long downtrend.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013:  Wall Street bounces back, Dow briefly passes 14,000.   U.S. stocks rose on Tuesday, with the Dow rising above 14,000, as earnings came in stronger than expected and investors sought bargains a day after the market’s biggest drop since November.

We can just make stuff up with aplomb.  One day we say the market rises as “investors cheer” good employment numbers; the very next day we attribute the decline to “structural problems” and look forward to a long decline!  Were those structural problems not present yesterday when investors were cheering?  Then the following day all that is forgotten (what structural problems?) and we see a bounce back because of strong earnings and bargain hunters.  So the decline on Monday was not the beginning of a long slide, as predicted on Monday, but a dip from which the market recovered the following day.  No mention on Tuesday of Monday’s failed prediction of a long decline.  Of course if the market had continued to decline on Tuesday, it would be offered as evidence of a long decline.  That is, until the next bump up, when all that would be forgotten.  Also, note that when the headline was touting a rally there was no mention of the “month-long downtrend” that was trotted out the next day when the headline was about a decline.  Comical.

Weaseling the Future

When the talking heads are forced to venture beyond the comfort zone of predicting past events and are compelled to discuss the real future, they have refined the art of inanity, making nonsensical statements that can be true no matter what happens next.  In the USA Today of Monday, April 22, 2014, the editors posed the following question to several experts: “Is the pullback over?” Here is what Rod Smyth, chief investment strategist at Riverfront Investment Group, said: “Given the decent shape of the economy, the broad market doesn’t look as if it’ll get dragged down by the loss of momentum in growth stocks.” Could that statement be any less informative?   He goes on to say that he “would be more inclined to look at this as a correction to an on-going bull market.”  There is enough wiggle room in that to accommodate any future:   if the bull market continues, he can claim he predicted that; if the market declines, he can say the correction is just continuing.  If the market crashes, and there is no hint of a bull market, he can find refuge in the statement’s deliberate ambiguity using terms like “more inclined” and “doesn’t look as if.”  But Rod is in good company, with other experts looking at the same market predicting the opposite outcome.  Ann Miletti, senior portfolio manager at Wells Fargo Advantage Fund, says the following mouthful:  “Those momentum stocks that took a beating still aren’t cheap, which means they’ll likely be subject to further bouts of selling as Wall Street looks to bring those pricey names down to more normal valuation levels.”  A powerful statement except for the “likely to be subject to” that just means that anything could happen.  Let us not leave out Bill Hornbarger, chief investment strategist at Moneta Group, who says with amazing clarity of the obvious, “The market has lost its momentum and investors should expect more ups and downs ahead.”  Really, the market will fluctuate?  Incredible insight. This is why we will see below that “chief investment strategist” is no more meaningful than “blind monkey throwing darts.”  At least the monkeys recognize the inherent reality of randomness and the unpredictability of the future – which brings us to the next phase of this discussion.

The Future is Predictable Only in Greek Myth

There is no Oracle of Delphi in the real world; yet Wall Street exists solely on the idea that such a creature exists.  Testifying before the Senate in 1967, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson declared: “A typical mutual fund is providing nothing for the mutual fund owner that they could not get by throwing a dart at a dartboard.”  He was rekindling an idea initiated 40 years earlier by Edgar Lawrence Smith, who presented in 1926 the first credible attempt to estimate the long-term return on stocks through empirical analysis.  In his book Common Stocks as Long Term Investments, Smith looked at stock investments assuming no market timing or stock selection ability whatsoever; instead he used a hypothetical investor who simply held onto stocks, and found that such an investor outperformed professional bond investors.

Building further on Smith’s idea, and Samuelson’s elaboration, Burton Malkiel published in 1973 his now-famous attack on the financial establishment in a book entitled, A Random Walk Down Wall Street (W.W. Norton & Co Inc.).  Malkiel’s work is perhaps the most important and most unread book of the century.  His was no ordinary academic think piece.  With this book, Malkiel launched a direct and aggressive challenge to the authority of Wall Street, drawing conclusions from his logic and data that cannot be refuted.  His work was and is still today reviled by brokers and others with a vested interest in the status quo.  In his publication, Malkiel postulated that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s stock tables could outperform any stock picker over time.  This fundamental concept is true for a simple reason:  the future cannot be predicted.  And its truth reveals the fraud of every single person on Wall Street who claims to have a system to beat the market.  Why?  Because monkey’s throwing darts do better than professional money managers over decades.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the statistics and returns from impartial studies of money manager performance.  Here though is the bottom-line conclusion:  Barras, Scaillet, and Wermers tracked 2,076 actively managed US domestic equity mutual funds between 1976 and 2006. They found that after fees, three-quarters of the funds exhibited zero alpha, a fund’s excess return over a benchmark index, with virtually all the remaining having a negative alpha.  Only 0.6% showed positive alpha, which is statistically insignificant, a consequence of inherent randomness.  Better yet, do the research yourself; it is easy enough.  Get the prospectus from any mutual fund and compare its performance to the market over any given 10 or 20 year period.  You’ll arrive at the same conclusion:  monkeys do better than professional money managers.

We tend to resist the message about blindfolded monkeys so elegantly put forth by Malkiel because all of us so desperately want to believe that something about the future can be predicted.  We crave that illusion of control over our destiny.  After all, you can “predict” that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning.  But in fact that is not a prediction of the outcome of a statistical probability at all; it is the known result of orbital mechanics.  Predicting movement in the stock market is entirely different: once you enter the market, at that precise moment you have exactly a 50.000% chance that the stock if it moves will move up or down in price.  Nothing you do beforehand, no amount of research, no amount of technical analysis, no amount of wishing upon a star will change that simple fact.  But there remains one more important element:  when you exit the stock market, you have exactly and precisely a 50.000% chance that the stock if it moves will move up or down from that moment forward.  Any effort to change that rule of nature, to nudge that 50% mark off center, is completely and hopelessly futile.  Try and you will fail, as everybody has before you. Ask those 2000 professional fund managers.  Once you enter the market, you can only know one thing:  with time the stock will go up or go down over time.  Any statement or claim beyond that is witchcraft, and you can never predict which of the two will prevail for any one stock.  It is impossible.   You may think you’re a genius with a no-lose strategy that works great during an expansion.  You are not a genius.  Things look less promising during a contraction.  See how you do over the next 10 to 20 years, and compare your performance to a blind dart-throwing monkey who chose stock randomly with no knowledge of past performance or predictions of future gains.  Monkey wins or draws every time.

The only legitimate idea supporting Wall Street is that the global economy will expand over time.  This is a reasonable assumption, and one supporting the idea of buying stocks randomly and holding them over long periods.  But even that basic assumption could prove illusory.  An “outlier” like nuclear war, asteroid hit, deadly pandemic, or some other global catastrophe could render the assumption meaningless.  Such possibilities do not preclude investing in the future – we have no choice but to hope that such calamities are far down the road.  But they do emphasize how little we know about the future, and how inherently the future is unpredictable.  Until Wall Street stops pretending otherwise with “investment strategists” and mumbo-jumbo about “structural problems” that disappear overnight, the entire enterprise is based on the fraudulent idea that the future is predictable at a fine scale.  It is not – and never will be – as a fundamental reality of nature.  Investors, both institutional and individual, need to wake up, ignore the experts and pundits, and start throwing darts.  Ignore the inanity of “experts” and “investment strategists” and “market analysts.”  They are a terrible sick joke.  The data are unambiguous and the conclusions robust – the experts know no more about the future than you do.  We want to believe otherwise, we strongly resist this reality, we think that experts are smart enough to create an edge, beat the system, overcome the odds.  They are not – and that is the only truth about Wall Street that has any meaning.  The rest is a form of institutionalized fraud, a huge fraudulent scheme in which all the players agree to accept a Big Lie that allows them to pretend they know what they are doing. But they don’t.

As an aside, I exclude from this discussion the extremely, extraordinarily rare opportunity for true arbitrage, where the trader knows – usually as a technical flaw in a trading mechanism or a glitch from tiny time differences that can arise in global trading — at the moment of trading that his purchase price is lower than his subsequent sales price.  If you have in hand simultaneously your purchase and sale price at the moment of your trade, you are not predicting the future.

You might feel better if you do “research” before buying a particular stock by looking for trends, trend line patterns, or breaks in trends, but you are just whistling in the dark.  Finding sideways channels and trading the breakout sounds impressive, but is completely bogus.  Identifying 1-2-3 formations, or rounded bottoms or triangle formations or using simple and weighted moving averages buys you nothing but wasted time.  Bar charts are fancy and impressive but are not predictive any more than is a painting by Jackson Pollock.  And don’t be smug if you eschew technical trading for fundamentals; sifting through fundamentals and macroeconomic data to identify discrepancies between the inherent value of a company (or commodity) and the current market price of that asset is equally a fool’s game as a trading strategy.  The results of any of these research techniques or trading methods yield nothing more accurate than predictions made by flipping a coin.  Quite literally.  You are no better off than if you selected a stock completely at random.  That this perfect truth is so difficult to accept is testimony to how effective the Big Lie has become.  But you need not succumb.  Choose your own path based on reality rather than false hope and deny the Big Lie.  Those blindfolded dart-throwing monkeys tell the entire story; those monkeys give us the picture more accurately than any so-called expert or investment strategist or fund manager ever could.

The “Fat But Fit” Fallacy

We all like to eat. Most of us want to eat well; at least we try to be good some of the time. We all know that how and what we eat directly impact our health and well-being. Yet few subjects are more prone to confusion and distortion than diet and nutrition.

We are promised amazing results with an endless stream of diet plans: Atkins, Dean Ornish, the Zone, South Beach, Glycemic Index, the list is nearly endless. Grocery stores sell magazines shouting out blatantly false claims that promise to help readers “lose weight like a teenager,” “lose belly fat,” “lose 11 lbs a week,” and “fill up on fat-burning super foods.” We are sold hormone supplements, told the benefits of “anti-inflammatory foods” and promised results if we only would take acetyl coenzyme A. These promises cannot be kept because they defy the simplest laws of biology and physics. This is what the FDA and nutritionists say about fat-burning foods: “No substance has ever been shown to actually do this.” “Consumers should know that there is no such thing as a fat-burning pill.” So much misinformation and myth has enveloped popular ideas about diet and nutrition that even the most basic facts have become distorted. Commonly used terms like fat, calorie or body mass index (BMI) are widely misunderstood and abused by the unscrupulous. Some of this is harmless hype that will simply part some fools from their money; but some common myths are downright dangerous. Perhaps none is more so than the idea of “fat but fit.”

Fat is Not Fit

A recent article in the New York Times rightly explained the limits and deficiencies in using BMI as an indicator of health and longevity. BMI misses more than half of people with excess body fat. Inversely, because BMI is deeply flawed, we find that some people considered overweight according to BMI measurements are at least as healthy as someone considered of normal weight (in terms of BMI). Fine, so far; we can use this knowledge to moderate and guide the use of BMI as a tool in our arsenal. But something more nefarious has happened: this inherent flaw in BMI has led to the dangerous and patently ridiculous idea that one can be simultaneously fat but healthy. Nothing could be further from the truth, as we will see next. Data provided here are taken from the original citations in Calorie Wars: Fat, Fact and Fiction.

Biology is a science of averages in which we can see significant individual variability. While smoking hugely increases one’s risk for lung cancer, not all smokers get the disease. Such outliers prove rather than refute the rule by emphasizing the rarity of the unusual. Indeed a small percentage of obese people do not exhibit some of the problems associated with being overweight. This is to be expected because few things are absolute in biology. Yet while we can point to a few obese individuals who do not appear to be at increased risk for heart disease, that should offer no consolation to anybody, nor can we draw any meaningful conclusions from the outliers. Just because Betty Sue won the lottery does not mean her neighbor will too. On average, obesity leads to an increased risk for a variety of deadly ailments, and obese individuals have a greater chance of suffering from such diseases. Most Americans die sooner than necessary by stroke, heart attack or cancer, and obesity increases the risk for all of these.

We know absolutely that obesity creates an increased risk of diabetes. In 1990 about 11 million Americans had type 2 adult onset diabetes, a disease of insulin resistance that commonly coexists with obesity; just nine years later the number was 16 million, or about 6% of all Americans. Then from 1999 to 2003 we saw a 41% increase in diagnosed diabetes. Since then obesity has ballooned to an astounding 64% of all Americans and the number of diabetics continues to explode. The insulin resistance syndrome associated with obesity has other dire consequences, including hypertension and the increased risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

Another problem with “fat but fit” is simple mechanics. The human body evolved from a period of deprivation where food was scarce and difficult to obtain. Our ancestors were almost certainly lean. In any case, we are not engineered to bear excess weight on our joints. Obesity leads to arthritis – and often to joint replacement not only because of the mechanical stress it can cause but because fat produces chemicals that attack cartilage. Think of it this way: If you stuff 20 people into a VW Bug, the suspension will wear out faster and the engine will have to work harder, ultimately reducing its useful life.

Also, consider the following realities:

• About 300,000 deaths per year are attributed to obesity; in spite of the deep flaws in BMI, we know that individuals with a body mass index (BMI) over 30 have a 50% to 100% increased risk of premature death from all causes compared to lean people with lower BMIs.

• High blood pressure is twice as common in obese adults compared to those with a healthy weight; obesity is associated with elevated blood fat (triglycerides) and decreased good cholesterol (HDL).

• A weight gain of only 11 to 18 pounds increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes; over 80% of people with type 2 diabetes are overweight or obese.

• Obesity is associated with an increased risk of cancer of the uterus, colon, gall bladder, prostate, kidney, and postmenopausal breast cancer.

• Sleep apnea is more common in obese people. And some recent studies have indicated that a lack of sleep might impact hormone levels to a degree that could, indeed, cause weight gain.

• Obesity during pregnancy is associated with a greater risk of birth defects, including spina bifida.

• Every increase in weight of two pounds increases the risk of arthritis by 9% to 13%.

One final consideration on the idea of being fat but fit: obesity affects quality of life through limited mobility, decreased physical endurance, and social, academic and job discrimination. While we know we should not judge a book by its cover, we all do. Yes, we should be comfortable with and love ourselves for who we are; and we need not look like a fashion model. But that truth is no excuse for carrying around excess weight, or deluding oneself into thinking that fat can be healthy.

Fat is Not Inevitable

The idea of “fat but fit” is simply an attempt to justify rather than address a problem. Countless people struggle daily with excess weight, and wishing it away won’t help. Too much is at stake for us to succumb to lies, misleading advertisements, disinformation and bad biology perpetrated on us by a $40 billion diet industry and unscrupulous doctors. We are all easy targets because we want to be attractive, trim and sexy. We want to feel good about ourselves. We want so badly to find a magic bullet, discover a pill that will help put right our image in the mirror. That wish for a quick fix is pure fantasy, but do not despair, because the truth too is that the solutions to diet problems are simple – and realistic.

We need not be victims of pseudo-medicine, bad science and bogus claims. In spite of all the phony prophets and charlatan MDs selling false hope, we each have the power to take control over our own lives; we can control our health, our diet and nutrition, our weight. You don’t need a ridiculous doctor in surgical scrubs on TV telling you what to do; you don’t need a mega-corporation telling you what to eat.

With just a few simple ideas, we can master our struggle with weight gain. Want to be slimmer and healthier? The rules are straightforward. Yes, following the simple rules is not always so easy; maintaining a good weight and a trim figure requires commitment and work. Like all things in life, anything worth achieving requires some effort. But if we can incorporate these three simple rules into our daily lives, we can be successful.

Eat less: Snack less often, eat slowly, reduce portions or pick full portions of lower calorie foods. This does not mean deprivation; just less than what you eat now.



Eat well: Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and less processed food, eat fiber and whole grains; drink water. Run like mad if someone tries to sell you a diet that excludes a major food group like carbs, fats or proteins.



Exercise: Even five minutes per day is better than nothing at all; incorporate something, anything, that involves physical activity into your daily routine that you can live with and stick to.

That is it; everything else is fluff, an unnecessary distraction from what is real. There is no fat-but-fit, no magic bullets, no fantasy fat-burning foods. Diet supplements, pills, elaborate meal plans, hormones, energy powders, protein drinks are all devious ways to separate us from our money. We need to embrace just three simple rules to lose weight, trim down and be healthier. That is the truth. The whole truth.

Why Facts Matter: Science is Not an Opinion

In a recent Tweet, Donald Trump threw out this witticism: In New York, March was the coldest month in recorded history – we could use some GLOBAL WARMING! The capital letters and exclamation point are his; so sure is he of his deep insight that he must shout it out to the world.

Opinion, Fact, Climate and Weather

Oh Donald. As soon as the temperature hits freezing we hear with the regularity of an atomic clock from Trump and his ilk cries of indignation that global warming must be a farce. After all, how could the world be warming if freezing temperatures are gripping most of the nation? Likewise, every winter we see newspaper editors across the country trot out the old and tired cartoon of the global warming group meeting cancelled due to snow and ice. A laugh riot; and it would be funny if not so sad a barometer of the gross ignorance that endangers our planet.

We have come to a sad state of affairs in which expertise is simply self-declared in the absence of any credentials or experience. Everybody is now a meteorologist; except they are not. And therein we find the problem: opinion and fact are not equivalent, but this distinction has been lost. Everybody is an expert. That is why Trump and his friends can confuse climate and weather without losing credibility with their listeners. The opinion that a cold snap belies any global warming can only be taken seriously if we ignore the fact that climate and weather are not the same. Opinion trumps fact even when the facts are clear:

Climate describes atmospheric behavior averaged over long time periods of decades and centuries across large geographic areas. Weather describes actual local atmospheric conditions over short periods of time, from hours to days. Weather is all about the actual state of the atmosphere with respect to wind, temperature, moisture, pressure, cloud cover and other instantaneous measurements. Climate is a composite of weather conditions averaged over many years. Think of weather as a single datum point and climate as a large collection of those data. Better yet, think of weather as a one-night stand. Then climate would be raising the kid resulting from that night for the next two decades. One immediately leads to the other, but the two are completely different phenomenon. And that is why we have two distinct fields of study: meteorology and climatology.

The distinction between weather and climate becomes critical in understanding global warming. Let’s look at what is happening now. This winter a persistent high pressure over the Arctic acted like a big boulder in a fast moving river, causing the Jet Stream to flow south deep into the United States. With that big dip in the Jet Stream came cold Arctic air. So we are all froze our fannies off. But that has absolutely nothing to do with global warming. We can see catastrophic effects of climate change with an increase in average global temperature of just 2 to 3 degrees. If the arctic air warmed from minus 70 to minus 67 degrees, you would still freeze when that air blew south, but the impact on the global climate would nevertheless be profound over time. Weather is right now, the need to put on a thick winter coat to stop that cold arctic air from nipping off a limb from frost bite. Climate is the fact that the arctic air is warmer than expected, even if still cold enough to kill. Arctic air will always be brutally cold even in the most extreme cases of global warming. Snow and ice will always be a winter reality. So stop already with the embarrassing nonsense that climate change can’t be real because it is cold outside. Nobody ever said climate change meant the end of winter. But that absurd notion takes hold in a world in which fact and option are treated as equally valid.

Another favorite from deniers is the old canard that global warming is nothing but a sign of natural variation in climate. That claim is fascinating on two levels. First, the idea implies that scientists themselves never thought of the idea that the earth’s climate varied over the past 4 billion years. Second, and this one is steeped in irony, the deniers only know of such natural variation from the field of climatology and from climatologists. So deniers believe climatologists when they say there has been natural variation, while suggesting that those scientists actually never thought of such variation! One of the oddest twists of logic I’ve ever encountered.

Let’s say for the sake of discussion that in Austin, Texas, in 1990 the average winter low was 40 degrees and the average winter high was 60 degrees. Then in 1991 the averages were 40.1 degrees and 60.1 degrees, respectively. Would you feel any difference? Of course not. In fact, even if the average temperature was .1 degrees higher, you could still have record lows that year if you had a greater number of days above average. But sure enough as soon as that record low was recorded a denier would be on TV claiming global warming a hoax. Local record low temperatures are a weather phenomenon, not a climate issue. But in 10 years if that trend continued the new averages would be 41 and 61 degrees. In another 10 years the numbers would be 42 and 62. In just 30 years the average temperatures would have risen 3 degrees, an increase that climatologists agree would have catastrophic impacts. The weather would not be changing noticeably even as the trend was rising dangerously. So of course we will experience cold winters, with deep freezes, snow and ice and maybe even record lows. That weather has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of global warming.

Finally, climate change does not mean that all places will warm at all times; quite the contrary. We can indeed expect many places to see colder and harsher winters, just as we will see more frequent and violent tropical storms. As the climate shifts, we get more extremes at both ends; that cold snap does not indicate warming is a liberal plot; only that weather and climate are not equivalent – and that averages and trends are not determined by a single point.

This confusion between fact and opinion is not benign. Twenty two years ago I was part of the United States delegation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) when I was the Assistant Director for International Science and Technology in the White House. We know now, more than two decades later, that the predictions scientists made in that first final report have proven extraordinarily accurate. What strikes me all this time later is the tragedy of lost time. Due to intense conservative opposition to science on the basis of nothing but faith, and confusing fact with opinion, we have likely lost the opportunity to stop the world from warming catastrophically even if we now take drastic action. The train has left the station and no amount of denial will change that sad fact. The costs of responding now will be exponentially greater than what they would have been if we acted in 1990. But we won’t act even today because the House Science Committee is filled with members who believe climate change is a liberal hoax, along with the idea that the world is 4000 years old and evolution is a conspiracy to denigrate religion. We are fighting battles that were decided hundreds of years ago. And we knew 20 years ago that climate change was real and caused by human activity; we knew that. But so-called skeptics refused to accept the conclusions of thousands of scientists from 166 countries – because they suddenly became professional climatologists who knew more than all the global experts, and believed that fact and opinion are interchangeable.

Harsh Reality

Climate change is here and here to stay. A report from the American Meteorological Society (a nasty den of liberal conspirators deviously disguised as neutral scientists) demonstrates the point in its summary of 2012: Arctic sea ice reached record lows; sea level hit an all-time high; and greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels (rather than from trees) broke all records. That year was one of the globe’s top ten warmest years ever recorded; and the United States experienced its hottest year ever. These are not isolated statistics taken out of context; these are data points along a robust trend driving toward an ever-more rapidly changing climate. The science is clear, the conclusions robust: the earth is warming much faster than natural background rates, and that warming is caused by human activity. To deny that reality, that fact, is no different than dismissing atoms as nature’s building blocks, refuting that DNA contains genetic code, or claiming that energy does not equal mass times the square of the speed of light.

Faith is no substitute for objective reality when making public policy. A preacher might believe his skin is immune from the effects of heat; but put his hand over a hot flame and his flesh will burn, indifferent to his contrary belief. Climate change is as real as that flame; denying its existence will not diminish the very real impact.

Big Consequences

Due to conservative intransigence we will be witness to an extraordinary transformation. The threat of massive migrations unprecedented in human history, wars over dwindling or shifting resources, catastrophic storms and flooding and dramatic changes in agricultural production are not sufficient to concern climate deniers. So let’s look at something closer to home and more immediate: the health effects of a changing climate.

• We will see (are seeing) an expanding range of tropical diseases and new strains of old diseases as they move north, more and more severe allergies as ragweed season grows longer, more mold and fungus in hotter more humid weather, change in rainfall patterns affecting food production, more extreme heat waves, and more frequent and severe droughts and longer and more intense fire season.

• As warmer weather moves north, disease vectors go along for the ride. Many of those vectors are insects, like mosquitoes, which are expanding their range to a backyard near you.

• Water-borne diseases will increase in frequency because warmer water expands the season and range of diseases-causing organisms.

• Rodents also proliferate in the growing temperate regions with milder wet winters; they themselves are disease carriers, and also are reservoirs for disease-carrying ticks.

• We can look forward to a host of ugly diseases, including: dengue fever, malaria, yellow fever, Hantavirus, leptospirosis, Japanese B Encephalitis, Elephantiasis, Lyme’s disease, West Nile, Leishmaniasis, Chagas disease and Typhus.

• A long drought in the southwest has reduced predator populations, leading to an explosion of white-footed mice, which carry Hantavirus.

• New Yorkers first suffered an outbreak of West Nile virus in 1999, a new scourge for the city, which is now an annual threat.

• We will also get new strains of old diseases. A new strain of West Nile first detected in 2002, is moving quickly. The virus infected about 175,000 people in 2007, killing 117.

• An increase in carbon dioxide supercharges the growth of the most aggressive pollen producers, including hay-fever causing ragweed and the trees that give us the worst springtime allergies.

• With a warmer climate we will see an increase in the proliferation of mold and fungus, the spores of which love warmer temperatures and higher levels of carbon dioxide.

• Severe droughts in Africa lead to massive dust storms from that continent’s expanding deserts. Those clouds travel across the Atlantic and into the lungs of unsuspecting citizens in Florida, who have seen a 20-fold rise in asthma in the past several decades.

• Changing weather patterns will bring floods to some areas and more severe droughts to others, a longer and more extreme fire season, and changes to agricultural production, all of which are direct threats to human health.

So when grandma gets malaria, or comes down with a bad case of West Nile, write a letter of thanks to your local Republican representative.

Faith and Reason

We have come to this tragic conclusion about our future because fact and opinion today are considered of equal validity. But how did we arrive here? Why did this happen? How did two plus two equals four become liberal conjecture? Why do we dispute the obvious? Because our society has been infected with the deadly disease of faith-based reasoning.

Faith and science are not compatible worldviews. Here is the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the two: science searches for mechanisms and the answer to “how” the universe functions, with no appeal to higher purpose, without assuming the existence of such purpose. Faith seeks meaning and the answer to “why” the world is as we know it, based on the unquestioned assumption that such meaning and purpose exist. The two worldviews could not be further apart. Let’s be clear: many people can simultaneously turn to science to understand “how” and to religion to understand “why”, and derive satisfaction from both. That though does not mean that science and faith are compatible, any more than are oil and water. You can make a good salad dressing emulsion with oil and water, and enjoy the flavor of both together, but you can’t make them mix.

Science can tell us that the earth rotates counterclockwise (if we’re looking down on the North Pole from space). No purpose exists in that fact. The “why” here answers a mechanical question based on history; that particular direction of rotation is a consequence of how the original gases and debris were orbiting the sun prior to coalescing into our planet. Faith might ask “why” God had a yen for counterclockwise, but that question is outside the realm of and irrelevant to the science in question, if such a question is valid at all.

For centuries people have attempted in vain to reconcile faith and reason. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences was founded in 1936 by the Vatican to promote scientific progress compatible with the Church’s teachings. Here on the pages of the Huffington Post, Jeffrey Small argued that science and faith have common ground. Others writing for the Post, like Max Tegmark, make similar appeals. Jonathan Dudley claims the Christian faith requires accepting evolution. Dudley says that “Christians must accept sound science, not because they don’t believe God created the world, but precisely because they do.” The sentiment is similar to what famous geneticist Francis Collins said: “When something new is revealed about the human genome, I experience a feeling of awe at the realization that humanity now knows something only God knew before. I am unaware of any irreconcilable conflict between scientific knowledge about evolution and the idea of a creator God; why couldn’t God have used the mechanism of evolution to create?”

Here is the easy answer: because the mechanism of evolution explain life’s history and complexity without any need to invoke god; he becomes superfluous, a desperate add-on. I feel a realization of awe that nature with no direction or purpose can result in such a spectacular array of life using nothing but simple mechanisms of action with no guiding hand. Appeals to reconcile science and faith are utterly hopeless, just wishful thinking and faith that the absurdities of faith can be shoehorned into the realities of science. It is not possible. A reasonable response to the overwhelming evidence for evolution is to accept that the ideas of faith have failed to explain the extraordinary presence of life, rather than to try desperately to bridge an ever-widening chasm between what we know and what the faithful want to believe. Forcing the round peg of faith into the square hole of reason only serves to reduce god to what Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins don’t know.

Unlike scientific claims, beliefs cannot be arbitrated. If opinion is truth, there is no means to determine which belief is valid because there is no objective basis on which to compare one set of beliefs to another. Faith and science are incompatible at every level. The two seek different answers to separate questions using fundamentally and inherently incompatible methods. Nothing can truly bring the two together without sacrificing intellectual honesty.

Science is Fallible

Those who attempt to reconcile faith and faith often appeal to the idea that science is not immune to error. We are told that since science and faith are both fallible, both are equally valid approaches to understanding the world and ourselves. Here is what Jeffrey Small says about this:

“Bias, preconceived ideas, academic politics, ego and resistance to change are ever-present in scientific and academic communities and often result in institutional opposition to new theories, especially ground-breaking ones. Many scientists initially resisted Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo because they presented a new paradigm of the universe.”

Well, exactly! What this proves is that over time, science is indeed self-correcting while faith is not.We all know now, due to science, that the earth orbits the sun. But getting there was a journey of fits and starts. Yes, science is indeed fallible, and scientists suffer from all the usual human foibles. But reproducibility, scrutiny from other scientists, the drive for new knowledge, the glory of overturning orthodoxy, all drive science to a better understanding of an objective truth or our best approximation of it; this method of understanding the world is inherently incompatible with faith. Faith cannot be contested: I believe, therefore it is true. All scientific claims are by nature contestable. Those differences can fundamentally never be reconciled.

In reality we need to turn this argument about fallibility on its head. Science never claims to be infallible. There would be no need for more research if scientists believed they had all the answers, and all of them right. But god by definition is infallible. And yet. The Bible’s clear statement about age of the earth, off by more than 4 billion years, is one example of an important factual error. Sure, maybe this is a mistake of human interpretation of divine will. But with each new discovery proving a Biblical assertion wrong, the Church retreats to the safety of errors in interpretation or dismissing the discrepancy as unimportant. Nevertheless the ever-accumulating factual mistakes must call into question the certainty with which the Church claims that god, or the Bible, is infallible, since their previous insistence has proven unsubstantiated with glaring factual mistakes. The issue of fallibility is a problem for the faithful, not for science and reason. Never confuse the two.

Heavy Inter-generational Burden

Conservatives have on their shoulders a world that will change dramatically because they prevented us from acting when we had the chance. Faith trumped reason; opinion trumped fact. We knew. We knew 20 years ago; you can imagine the frustration in watching this unfold knowing that opposition to the scientific conclusion was not due to questions about the data but due to ideology, religious fanaticism and right wing lunacy. Irrationality, disdain for the truth, contempt for science, and the warm embrace of willful ignorance are all symptoms of the same malady, a conservative movement sick with extremism borne from faith-based reasoning. And the world burns as a result.

God and Morality: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Ah for every one step forward two steps backward.  The Pew Research Center just published a survey conducted in 40 countries demonstrating that many people in the world still hold onto the idea that one must believe in god to be moral.  That view is more common in the poorer countries; and the idea is nearly universal in Africa and the Middle East (with the exception of Israel).  The survey is deeply depressing because the idea that faith in god is essential to morality is one of humanity’s most dangerous and destructive myths.

Five Pillars

As I argued in Beyond Cosmic Dice, religion pathologically persists in service of five different masters of human weakness: fear of death and the promise of seeing lost loved ones; the need to explain away the unknown; hope for controlling one’s destiny; a desire for social cohesion; and the corrupting allure of political power.   So we create, each of us, and collectively, a god who is all-powerful and all-knowing to address some combination of these five masters, or all of them.

There is no link between morality and the five pillars; nothing about being moral would lead to a belief in god.  The two concepts do not intersect.  The history of religion proves the point.

That morality does not derive from, or lead to, religion has been the conclusion of some of our greatest minds, including David Hume, the father of religious studies.  Due to certain inconveniences, like the possibility of being burned alive at the stake, Hume restricted his writings to polytheism.  But it takes no great leap to read between the lines and apply his words to monotheism and Christianity in particular.  Hume did not believe morality is a gift from god because he thought religion a false construct and therefore no foundation for human behavior or thought.  Instead, humanity’s first beliefs in a higher power were borne of ignorance and fear of the natural world:  every disaster that befalls us demands an explanation.  Naturally, multiple unknown causes leads to the idea of multiple powers; polytheism is the natural state of a primitive mind.

We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable.  These unknown causes, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear.

From Many, One

But so too does this apply to belief in one god; one is just a derivative of many.  The idea of powerful gods, or a god, controlling each important aspect of our lives would not by itself be satisfying.  We want to put a face to the power; we want to be familiar with the deities that control our fate; we want to know them so that we can communicate with them and solicit their interventions.  We are all Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, seeking to reveal the nature of the man behind the curtain, hoping to strike up a conversation with whoever is in charge.

By no coincidence then do our gods take on idealized human form.  Our egoistic species has a universal tendency to transfer human-like qualities to surrounding objects, giving them characteristics that are familiar to us.  This tendency to anthropomorphize everything around us has the consequence that we attribute human malice or benevolence to inanimate objects, and of course to the gods above.   With their human form, gods also take on human personalities, with passions and weaknesses that make them jealous, vengeful, spiteful, fickle, wicked and foolish.  How comforting to know that one’s fate and fortune, tossed about by unknown causes, can be controlled by dialogue with an invisible power that possesses familiar sentiments and intelligence!

But attributing human qualities to a higher power has a paradoxical consequence, one leading inevitably to the idea of multiple gods, at least initially.  We raise our own estimation of ourselves as god-like, but diminish the power of the very gods we create by humanizing them.  Once again, Hume is right on the money:

They suppose their deities, however potent and invisible, to be nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites, together with corporeal limbs and organs.  Such limited beings, though masters of human fate, being, each of them, incapable of extending his influence everywhere, must be vastly multiplied, in order to answer the variety of events, which happen over the whole face of nature.  Thus every place is stored with a crowd of local deities; and thus polytheism has prevailed.

The idea that deities are “nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind” of course applies to more than the old discarded gods of the past.  The words exactly describe Jesus.   The link between the one god of today and the many of the past is forged in steel.  The characteristics that originated in polytheism continued to apply even as the number of gods diminished.  One could argue, in fact, that today’s religions are not truly monotheistic.  Christianity has created hundreds of objects of worship in the guise of saints, who have become minor gods to many followers.  So this conclusion from Hume is particularly poignant:

…it will appear, that the gods of all polytheists are not better than the elves or fairies of our ancestors, and merit as little any pious worship or veneration.  These pretended religionists are really a kind of superstitious atheists, and acknowledge no being, that corresponds to our idea of deity.

So we conclude that most of the multiple divinities of the ancient world were supposed to have been human or human-like, thereby diminishing their power.  Yet Christianity is no different:  we have Jesus, in the flesh, bleeding like a regular guy, no different from what Hume disparages in his idea of a cruder polytheistic god.  Like many gods, one god is nothing better than the elves or fairies of our ancestors.  Nowhere in this narrative is there any suggestion that morality is linked to religion, or that morality elsewhere derived would lead to a belief in god.

While I emphasize David Hume as the father of religious studies, we cannot neglect to mention its grandfather, Baruch de Spinoza, who preceded Hume by almost 100 years.  When Spinoza took on the question of ethics he created a path to secular enlightenment that Hume did not fully assimilate.  I raise this here because at no point in Spinoza’s masterpiece, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus did he ever link the development of human morality with a future belief in god.  As did Hume later, Spinoza concluded that the history of religion precludes any connection at all between morality and religion, in any order.

Poseidon and Morality

Religion’s history begs an important question: why of all the gods does the god of Abraham own the right to morality?  The history of religion can be understood as the winnowing of gods from many to one.  What this means is that all of us are atheists, even the most devout, undoubting, dedicated priest, rabbi or mullah.  Atheist means “without god,” and all of us are without at least some gods.  All monotheistic believers reject all gods, except one.  They reject all the Greek elder gods Cronus, Gaea, Uranus, Rhea, Oceanus, Tethys, Hyperion, Mnemosyne, Themis, Iapetus, Coeus, Crius, Phoebe, Thea, Prometheus, Epimetheus, Atlas, Metis, and Dione.  Muslims, Jews and Christians all deny the existence of the Greek Olympic gods Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Hera, Ares, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite, Hermes, Artemis, and Hephaestus.  All major religions today dismiss as nothing but myth the Roman gods Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Apollo, Diana, Mars, Venus, Cupid, Mercury, Minerva, Ceres, Proserpine, Vulcan, Bacchus, Saturn, Vesta, Janus, Uranus and Maia. Yet this roster of gods was real to multiple thousands of people for thousands of years, every bit as real as the one god worshipped by Christians, Muslims and Jews today.   Was the morality derived from a belief in those gods any different from what we see today with one? If asked, Christians, Jews and Muslims today would use numerous and diverse reasons to deny the existence of Greek and Roman gods, who were so important to so many people for so long. I simply extend that reasoning to include the one remaining god.  Everybody rejects as silly the idea of gods; I merely exclude the existence of one more god than those who consider themselves religious.

Something that we all reject is hardly a sound basis for morality.  A more compelling basis would be the Tooth Fairy.  Hear me out.  No adult takes the myth seriously, of course.  Yet the evidence for the existence of the Tooth Fairy is in fact more compelling than that for any other belief system.  As a child, you put your recently yanked tooth under your pillow.  The next morning, lo and behold, you have a dollar where the tooth used to be.  That is concrete, real, undeniable evidence that the Tooth Fairy came to visit during the night.   What other explanation could be possible with such incontrovertible evidence? What could be more compelling:  you can hold that dollar in your hand, and you know for a fact that the previous night only a tooth lay beneath your head.  The Tooth Fairy exists, end of story.  Now, science might try to convince you, as a five-year-old, that there indeed is a more rational explanation for the nocturnal switch, such as a caring parent acting the part, for example, but you will have none of it.  You believe the Tooth Fairy exists, have evidence to support your belief, and dismiss the scientific explanation as heretical.  Just a bunch of pointy-head liberals who don’t understand that of course the Tooth Fairy is real.

Fortunately, we all grow out of believing in the Tooth Fairy.  Well, no, we don’t.  We just transfer that belief to something we call “god.”  God is the Tooth Fairy, and the Tooth Fairy is god.  Instead of looking for a dollar under our pillow, we look to miracles as evidence to support our belief, ignoring the fact that belief cannot be supported by evidence. Yet, we insist.  We see statues of the Virgin Mary crying blood, or the face of Jesus on an eggplant, or witness a healer laying hands giving ambulation to the disabled.   Instead of the story involving a tooth and quarter, our narrative becomes more complex (we are adults after all), with the plot thickening to include creation and an afterlife.  But both stories are made up, figments of our imagination, equally supported by “evidence.”  Both are valid only because we believe. The first impulse would be to dismiss as completely absurd any equality between god and the Tooth Fairy.   But resist the temptation, and ask yourself a simple question: how do the two really differ?  Whatever argument you come up with to support a belief in god, can you not also apply to the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus, or trolls under a bridge in Ireland?  Yes, of course, the concept that the Tooth Fairy is real is lunacy.  But so, too, the belief in god.  The notion that god exists is as childish and as silly as the belief that a mythical creature enters your bedroom at night to give alms for your milk teeth.  This is a poor foundation for human morality.

Morality and Biology

Fortunately, we can understand the basis for morality without invoking god either as a cause or a consequence.  Morals are not derived from religion, nor god’s grant of free will, but instead arise from inherent characteristics embedded in human nature as a consequence of our sociality.  What we view as moral behaviors – kindness, reciprocity, honesty, respect for others – are social norms that evolved in the context of a highly social animal living in large groups.  The evolution of these social norms enabled a feeble creature to overcome physical limitations through effective cooperation.  Morality is a biological necessity and a consequence of human development.  Morality is our biological destiny, deeply embedded in the human psyche.  Our moral characteristics are primeval adaptations that helped our ancestors survive.  In a world of dangerous predators, early man could thrive only through mutual cooperation: good (moral) behavior strengthened the tribal bonds that were essential to survival.  What we now call morality is really a suite of behaviors favored by natural selection in an animal weak alone but strong in numbers.  Religion has nothing to do with morality:  our understanding of human history, and the development of religion over the ages provides compelling evidence that morality is not derived from religion, nor leads to a belief in god.  Morality is an embedded human trait that has been corrupted and lost in the cathedrals of false promise and empty threats of eternal damnation.  Human are moral without being bribed and cowed; we are moral because we are human.   We do not need religion to offer us a morality nurtured on fear and hope or based on the ideas derived from primitive nomadic tribes from 2000 years ago; our morality is stronger than that.

Light Bulb Angst: Grow Up

We are told that the world as we know it will end when an overreaching government phases out incandescent lights and forces consumers to purchase more efficient bulbs.  Those to the right of center claim that the government should get out of the way and let consumers make their own choices.  The government cannot pick winners and losers; only the magic of the market can do that.  We hear claims that this is the worst case of governmental intrusion and excessive regulation.

That argument of overreach is disingenuous, tired, simplistic and wrong.  Yes, in the vast majority of cases, market forces are the most efficient means of determining what should be sold at what price.  Capitalism is extraordinarily successful.  But we’ve learned from the days of the robber barons that unchecked capitalism has problems; so too have we learned since the days of Rachel Carson that the market does not always lead us to desirable environmental outcomes.  The argument against phasing out incandescent bulbs is old and tired because we have been here before, hearing the same refrains of lament and grief about excessive regulation in the face of necessary and reasonable government action; and we are going through the same worn out steps to prevent the obvious; let’s see how this always plays out.

First we as a society learn of a potential harm caused by common practice; take smoking as an example, or the use of leaded gasoline.  Industry denies any problems, and usually counters with an argument that the practice is actually beneficial.  Then scientists discover and confirm that the practice is indeed harmful (smoking causes cancer; lead causes problems with neural development).  Industry counters with a barrage of ads and sponsored studies with biased results to confuse the public.   Nevertheless, the evidence mounts, and industry claims become more absurd and desperate.  Remember the spectacle of all those tobacco executives sitting before the senate saying with straight faces that smoking does not cause cancer?  Then finally, the change that should have occurred decades earlier finally does, with billions of dollars lost and millions of lives impacted or ruined.  Tobacco gets regulated as a medical device; and lead is removed from gasoline.  Miraculously we see none of the catastrophic consequences predicted by opponents:  the world does not collapse, the economy does not stop functioning, and mom and pop stores continue to thrive in the newly regulated world.

We all know the tobacco story so let’s see how this scenario played out with lead in gasoline, which seems now to be taken for granted; then we’ll see how this relates to the issue of incandescent bulbs beyond the obvious that both involve government regulations that ban the manufacturing and distribution of a product widely used by the general public.

Dates and sources for quotes below are found here.   Also, the full history of the phasedown of lead in gasoline is captured in a report authored by Richard Newell and Kristian Rogers.  The economics of the phasedown is expertly described by Joel Schwartz, Hugh Pitcher et al. in a paper published in 1985.

So, let’s begin.  In 1965, Clair Patterson published the first study to demonstrate that high levels of lead in the environment (water, air, soil) were man-made and constituted a potential health threat.  Just as they would do later with climate change denials, the American Petroleum Institute countered with the claim that “the mass of evidence proves unquestionably that lead isn’t a significant factor in air pollution and represents no public health problem in any way.” (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 9, 1965).  Sound familiar?

A few months later, in December of that same year, Harriet Hardy of MIT argued that small doses of lead could be a contributing factor to disease, and cites studies that suggest links between lead and mental retardation (New York Times, Dec. 16, p. 22).  Advocates for lead claimed in testimony from Robert Kehoe (an industry-sponsored scientist) that, “There is not enough lead in our environment to be a health hazard to anybody. Those who say there is are ignoring the substance of the scientific work that has been done” (Washington Post, Dec. 19, p. A14). This went back and forth, until the pendulum began to swing decidedly against the industry.  In 1971, Ethyl Corp. officials claimed to be victims of a “witch hunt,” (sound familiar again?) complaining that environmentalists were using “scare tactics” (chorus line) by blaming lead for the fall of the Roman Empire.  By 1977, the evidence for lead’s ill-effects on health was beyond doubt.  Testing by public health scientists showed causation between high levels of lead in children’s blood and brain damage, hypertension and learning disorders.   Later, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that leaded gasoline is the greatest source of atmospheric lead pollution.  In June 1980, the courts affirmed in Lead Industries Association v. EPA that EPA regulations for the phase-out of leaded gasoline could be implemented.

So industry leaders first disputed that lead in gasoline was the source of lead in the water and atmosphere (somewhat like those who later would claim that climate change is a hoax); when that proved unviable, they said, sure, but lead in the environment was not a health hazard (sure, climate change is real but not caused by human activity, a natural variation of no concern).  When that proved untrue, they argued that opponents were organizing a witch hunt using scare tactics to mask the horrific economic consequences of regulating lead (environmentalists were scaring the public about climate change to advance an extreme left-wing agenda of eco-terrorism).  Today you don’t hear anyone arguing we should still have lead in our gasoline.  Why?  “Thousands of tons of lead have been removed from the air, and blood levels of lead in our children are down 70 percent. This means that millions of children will be spared the painful consequences of lead poisoning, such as permanent nerve damage, anemia or mental retardation.”  By 1983 we also learn that the benefits of the lead phase-out exceeded its costs by $700 million in just a few years.

Let us not forget in the face of this economic and public health success that the predictions of economic ruin and regulatory overreach were quite stark as industry tried to rally opposition to regulating lead.  I have seen no apologies or admissions of error.  Just silence; which is striking given the stridency of the opposition, and how incredibly wrong they were.  Here are just a few examples:

• Oil industry representatives testified to EPA that the lead phase-down would cause them to lose profits, prevent them from funding future oil exploration, and make gasoline unaffordable.

• In 1970, the petroleum industry was putting out stories that removing lead from gasoline would cause everyone’s car engines to erode or explode.  That, in turn, would destroy the economy, all because “a bunch of pointy-headed scientists, doctors and public health officials” were spreading “chicken-little panic” about a “purely hypothetical and overblown danger.”

• One lead additive manufacturer ran an ad in major newspapers in December 1973, later picked up in a Washington Post article, claiming the lead phase-down would waste one million barrels of oil a day.

• Phillips Petroleum estimated that producing unleaded gasoline would consume between 300,000 and 600,000 barrels of additional crude oil a day and require from $8 to $15 billion in refinery capital investment.

Of course none of that nonsense proved to be true; the only truth is that removing lead from gasoline caused no economic disruption, but did result in important health, environmental and economic benefits.

And so now we come to another government phaseout of a product considered by the public to be a normal part of daily life, the incandescent bulb.  The first order of business is to explain the significant benefits of banning incandescent bulbs.  The argument for government intervention to institute and enforce the ban is every bit as compelling as that for removing lead from gasoline.

Energy efficiency is the greatest and most obvious return on the investment away from incandescent bulbs.  Two options exist, compact fluorescents (CFL) and light emitting diodes (LED); we can consider CFLs as an intermediate technology, with its own set of problems, including mercury disposal.  LEDs are the wave of the future.  Compared to traditional bulbs, LEDs use at least 75% less energy and last 25 times longer, usually rated at least at 100,000 hours.  An LED circuit gets close to 80% efficiency, meaning 20% is lost as waste heat.  Regular bulbs are the inverse; 20% efficiency, while 80% is lost as heat.

At the national level, DOE puts annual energy savings by 2030 from LED use at about 300 Tera-watt-hours (TWh), even with only moderate market infiltration.  That is enough electricity to power 24 million homes every year, at an annual savings of $30 billion at today’s electricity prices.  That translates to nearly 180 million barrels of oil, each year, oil that we would not import from the Middle East — one more step toward energy independence.   So we can power 24 million homes simply and forgo 180 million barrels of oil every year simply by changing some light bulbs, which in the end cost less over the bulb’s lifetime than incandescent bulbs.  The move is a no-brainer, yet the market would not allow for this outcome because the initial purchase price (for now) is higher.  Only by government regulation can we get to the obviously desirable endpoint within any reasonable time frame; and of course as LEDs get manufactured in every-greater numbers, the unit cost will go down, further underlying the validity of the phaseout policy.

Concerning personal benefits, if you use a 100 Watt incandescent bulb for one year, with an electrical cost of 10 cents/kilowatt hour, you will spend $88 on electricity to light the bulb. Of that, $70 will have been used to heat the room, all wasted energy.  Instead, with an 80% efficient LED bulb, the electricity cost would be $23 per year.  In fact, the cost savings would be higher because most incandescent light bulbs blow out within a year; LED bulbs can used go a decade without burning out.

Sadly, predictably, the right wing brings out all the same objections they brought to the table with the phaseout of lead.  The repetitive song goes like this:  there is no problem; well, if there is a problem, it is being exaggerated by the left; okay, there is a serious problem, but government has no role to play in finding a solution — only the magic of the market can do that. They were wrong then, they are wrong now on all counts.

One prominent blog has the headline, “If energy needs to be saved, there are good ways to do it.  Government product regulation is not one of them.”  Note the question of whether we even need to save energy.  That is rather odd in itself since the idea that we need to save energy and become energy self-sufficient has been a bipartisan position since the Nixon administration.  The parties split is on how to achieve the goal.

So where does the bulb phaseout fit into this debate?  The phaseout has actually been in progress since 2007, when Congress passed and George Bush signed into law an energy bill that placed new efficiency standards on light bulbs.  In 2012, the manufacturing of the familiar tungsten-filament 100 watt bulb was discontinued.  In 2013 that ban included 75 watt bulbs.  In January, the manufacturing ban was extended to 40 watt and 60 watt bulbs.  All older-style bulbs can be sold until supplies run out.

Just as with the rather ridiculous and exaggerated claims about the calamities that would befall all of us if we removed lead from gasoline, we hear similar refrains about the catastrophic consequences of eliminating incandescent bulbs.  And yet, just as with lead removal, the economy did not collapse as the bulb phaseout was implemented.  Consumers did not starve in order to afford new bulbs.  The government did not come marching in black boots into our living rooms to remove old bulbs.  And just as with lead, right wing opponents ignore or deny the obvious benefits derived from the regulations, benefits that would not be forthcoming if market forces alone were brought to bear on the problem.

In spite of the significant benefits of moving away from an early-industrial- age product, even in the face of clear benefits to energy self-sufficiency and national security, even in light of the enormous environmental benefits, the right wing remains stuck in sclerotic opposition, learning nothing from their earlier failures.   The Heritage Foundation loudly proclaimed that “the government’s taking away your light bulbs on Jan. 1.”  Think how absurd this headline would be if it read, “the government’s taking away the lead in your gasoline on Jan 1.”  The original quote will seem equally absurd in a few years’ time.

Government regulations can and very often do indeed go too far; laws can overreach.  Implementation and enforcement can be expensive, inefficient and intrusive.  All of that is true, which means we must always be diligent and fight against government excess.  But knee-jerk reactions to all government regulation, even those essential and reasonable, destroy any credibility in fighting regulations that legitimately should be resisted.  Fighting against actions that clearly benefit individuals and society alike does nothing but delay what should and needs to be done. Los Angeles does not look like Beijing only because of government regulation, forcing the auto industry into adopting catalytic converters and regulating tailpipe emissions (along with regulations of the energy industry as well).  I lived in southern California throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the air was thick and tasted like metal.  The air is breathable now exclusively and solely due to “excessive” government regulation.  No market forces would lead to that outcome.  If you are among those who believe government has no business regulating industry, then live in China for six months and see if you retain your beliefs.  Traffic deaths are down significantly because the government makes you wear seat-belts in a car and helmets on a bike.  You can eat food in restaurants and produce from grocery stores with confidence because those industries are regulated by government.  Hot dogs contain meat instead of rat hair and feces because of government regulation.  Air travel is safe because of government regulation of airline maintenance and duty cycle rules for pilots.  Water is safe to drink because of government oversight and regulation.  Buildings and freeways withstand earthquakes because of government regulation.  The drugs you take are the safest in the world because of government regulation.

The government rightfully banned incandescent bulbs.  Get over it; stop the whining, learn from the past about ridiculous opposition to reasonable regulation, and focus instead on problems of real government overreach — you know, like starting a war based on fabricated intelligence.  The move to LEDs should not be fodder for partisan politics and is only because the right opposes all regulations without thought.  Time to start thinking.

Stone Age Rituals in Modern Society: Let’s Move On

The death penalty is difficult justify in any modern civilized society.  Forget the obvious left-wing and right wing divide; the issue is greater than partisan politics.  A sober evaluation of the costs and benefits of state-sanctioned death clearly demonstrates that the death penalty is not viable.

Let’s look at the basics.  The rationale for imprisoning a convicted criminal is threefold: to protect society from future harm, to deter other would-be criminals and to punish the offender.  All three can be accomplished without putting prisoners to death.  Nothing derived from these three purposes of incarceration can justify killing an inmate when compared to a life sentence with no possibility of parole.  Revenge is not a motivation sufficiently sound for society to justify the accidental killing those wrongly convicted.

The penalty of death is too permanent to account for inevitable errors or willful misconduct on the part of police, judges, or prosecutors. As with all human institutions, the criminal justice system suffers in various degrees from corruption, incompetence, or malfeasance.  Proof lies in the fact that 312 people previously convicted have been exonerated by DNA evidence; that the system makes mistakes is beyond dispute.  Even the most ardent supporter of the death penalty would agree that, in some cases, innocent people are convicted, and the guilty walk free.  Given that stark reality, the real danger of executing an innocent person is greater than the societal benefit derived from putting a guilty prisoner to death, particularly when reasonable alternatives exist.

Advances in DNA testing have proved that in the last 10 years at least 140 prisoners in the United States, innocent of the crime for which they have been convicted, have been sentenced to death. Dennis Williams and Verneal Jimerson spent 18 years on death row in Illinois for a crime they did not commit. Kirk Bloodsworth wasted nine years on death row as a child killer while the murderer roamed free. There are 140 other known examples, and these are the “lucky” ones who were eventually freed before execution.

Others were not so lucky.  Carlos DeLuna was executed in Texas in 1989, but evidence later called into question his guilt.  This story is exposed in depressing detail in the excellent book by Professor James Liebman at Columbia University, “Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution.”  Ruben Cantu was executed, also in Texas, in 1993, later exonerated (to the extent possible in such circumstances) by an investigative series from the Houston Chronicle. There are at least 10 cases of innocent men being executed by the state; and given that few of the total executions have been revisited the number is likely much higher.  With wrongful executions, not only do the wrong men get killed, but the real killer remains at large. A double hit to society.  Let’s be clear here:  do not make the mistake of confusing opposition to capital punishment with being “weak on crime” or the consequence of liberal bias. What could possibly be weaker on crime than letting a killer roam free?

The distance between the state killing an innocent man and a criminal committing murder is difficult to resolve even with a powerful microscope.  When the state executes the innocent, we all become the murderers we seek to punish.   That is justification enough to end the practice, but there are other compelling reasons.  The most obvious is the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.  Up until now, the Court has taken the side that the Eight Amendment does not per se prohibit capital punishment.  But societies advance and evolve; we no longer have spittoons, or throw trash out of our cars, or smoke in public buildings, or collectively believe it acceptable to discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed or sexual orientation.  We need to evolve our thinking on capital punishment as we have with many other practices once considered perfectly acceptable.

Like most words in our founding document, the ideas about the death penalty are open to interpretation; and indeed, the Supreme Court justices have over time modified and refined their interpretation of what constitutes such prohibited punishment.  We need to continue that evolution of thought.  A compelling need to reevaluate is the recent execution of Dennis McGuire in Ohio; he appeared to visibly suffer during the 25 minutes that elapsed between the initial injection and his death.  Few would argue that this was not cruel; and cruel is expressly prohibited.

The Court’s history demonstrates significant discomfort with capital punishment, with the justices placing ever greater restrictions on the practice.  The big criterion is that the punishment has to be commensurate with the crime, with a relatively elaborate but porous means of making that determination.  But the Court continued to further exclude from capital punishment more crimes previously covered:  the crime of raping an adult woman (Coker vs. Georgia 1977); in the case of the mentally retarded (Atkins v. Virginia 2002); and for persons under 18 at the time the crime was committed (Roper v. Simmons 2005).

Plenty of justices have gone from supporting the death penalty to opposing it, including John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Harry Blackmun; but none have gone the other way, once opposing and then supporting the death penalty.  Evolution of thought always leads away from capital punishment.

The rest of the world is ahead of the United States in this evolution.  The U.S. is the only G7 country still to execute people; we are in the company of China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen as among those countries that still do.  That alone should give us pause; these are not generally the company we seek.

Let us admit that the time for capital punishment is over.  Proponents can offer no compelling reason to continue the practice.  Every conceivable purpose of executing a prisoner can be achieved by other means, all of which can be reversed in the case of wrongful conviction.  Opponents of capital punishment have history on their side in the long march toward human decency and dignity, expanding with each epoch since the dawn of the Renaissance.  We are not the brutal societies of past, storming castles and gutting our enemies.  We no longer throw chamber pots out back alleys at night.  We do not celebrate beheadings in central squares, or stone prisoners to death.  All of those practices were considered normal and acceptable — until society moved on.   The time has come to relegate capital punishment to that pantheon of past practices now considered barbaric.  Capital punishment accomplishes nothing.  We do not need the death penalty; we do not benefit from it; we are diminished by it; we are better than that.

Brain Freeze: Why Climate Deniers Flail in a Cold Snap

With the precise predictability of an atomic clock, climate change deniers break out like a bad rash with irrational exuberance each time we see a snow flake. With the onset of winter’s cold each year we can look forward to the reliable appearance of Skepticana deniacus, an increasingly popular bird of prey that feeds on ignorance and fear. With the regularity of a finely tuned pendulum, as soon as the temperature hits freezing this annoying species of fowl cries out with indignation that global warming must be a farce. After all, how could the world be warming if freezing temperatures are gripping most of the nation? Likewise, every winter we see newspaper editors across the country trot out the old and tired cartoon of the global warming group meeting cancelled due to snow and ice. Give me a minute here — I’m doubled over in pain from the laughter.

Whew. Now that we’ve recovered from that laugh riot, we can be sobered by the reality that newspaper editors and much of the general public all suffer from the common misunderstanding that weather and climate are equivalent. They are not. While the latest record cold snap brutalizing the country is nearly orgasmic for the flat earthers, their joy is sadly misplaced, a result of deep ignorance and faith-based science.

Climate describes atmospheric behavior averaged over long time periods of decades and centuries across large geographic areas. Weather describes actual local atmospheric conditions over short periods of time, from hours to days. Weather is all about the actual state of the atmosphere with respect to wind, temperature, moisture, pressure, cloud cover and other instantaneous measurements. Climate is a composite of weather conditions averaged over many years. Think of weather as a single datum point and climate as a large collection of those data.

Better yet, think of weather as a one-night stand. Then climate would be raising the kid resulting from that night for the next two decades. One immediately leads to the other, but the two are completely different phenomenon. And that is why we have two distinct fields of study: meteorology and climatology.

The distinction between weather and climate becomes critical in understanding global warming. Let’s look at what is happening right now. A persistent high pressure over the Arctic is acting like a big boulder in a fast moving river, causing the Jet Stream to flow south deep into the United States. With that big dip in the Jet Stream comes cold Arctic air. So we are all freezing our fannies off this week. But that has absolutely nothing to do with global warming. We can see catastrophic effects of climate change with an increase in average global temperature of just 2 to 3 degrees. If the arctic air warmed from -70 to -67 degrees, you would still freeze your buttocks off when that air blew south, but the impact on the global climate would nevertheless be profound over time. Weather is right now, the need to put on a thick winter coat to stop that cold arctic air from nipping off a limb from frost bite. Climate is the fact that the arctic air is warmer than expected, even if still cold enough to kill. Arctic air will always be brutally cold even in the most extreme cases of global warming. Snow and ice will always be a winter reality. So stop already with the embarrassing nonsense that climate change can’t be real because it is cold outside. Nobody ever said climate change meant the end of winter. Grow up.

Another favorite foul fowl from deniers is the old canard that global warming is nothing but a sign of natural variation in climate. That claim is fascinating on two levels. First, the idea implies that scientists themselves never thought of the idea that the earth’s climate varied over the past 4 billion years. Hmmm. If they had only known, this one misunderstanding would have been cleared up. Second, and this one is steeped in irony, the deniers only know of such natural variation from the field of climatology and from climatologists. So deniers believe climatologists when they say there has been natural variation, while suggesting that those scientists actually never thought of such variation! One of the oddest twists of logic I’ve ever encountered.

But I believe the real confusion between weather and climate derives from the fact that most of us have difficulties with the concepts of averages and trends. These are seemingly simple and self-evident ideas, but that simplicity is deceptive. How many of us remember from school the difference between average, mean and median? How many of us remember how to do a polynomial regression to uncover a trend? Averages and trends are not so simple after all — but are critical if we are ever going to move beyond the silly idea that a cold winter means climate change is not real.

But forget the math; let’s take a hypothetical example instead. Let’s say for the sake of discussion that in Austin, Texas, in 1990 the average winter low was 40 degrees and the average winter high was 60 degrees. Then in 1991 the averages were 40.1 degrees and 60.1 degrees, respectively. Would you feel any difference? Of course not. In fact, even if the average temperature was .1 degrees higher, you could still have record lows that year if you had a greater number of days above average. But sure enough as soon as that record low was recorded a denier would be on TV claiming global warming a hoax. Local record low temperatures are a weather phenomenon, not a climate issue. But in 10 years if that trend continued the new averages would be 41 and 61 degrees. In another 10 years the numbers would be 42 and 62. In just 30 years the average temperatures would have risen 3 degrees, an increase that climatologists agree would have catastrophic impacts. The weather would not be changing noticeably even as the trend was rising dangerously. So of course we will experience cold winters, with deep freezes, snow and ice and maybe even record lows. That weather has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of global warming.

Finally, climate change does not mean that all places will warm at all times; quite the contrary. We can indeed expect many places to see colder and harsher winters, just as we will see more frequent and violent tropical storms. As the climate shifts, we get more extremes at both ends; that cold snap does not indicate warming is a liberal plot; only that weather and climate are not equivalent – and that averages and trends are not determined by single datum points.

Now let us all go out and do some polynomial regressions. And please spare us the pain of another bad cartoon with global warming scientists huddled outside a room boarded up with a sign that says “closed due to snow and ice.” A 5-year-old might find that funny the first time… but this is too serious for juvenile humor to guide our policy decisions. Unfounded skepticism needs to go the way of the dodo bird so we can get on with the business of planning for the future.