Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Dumb Story of the Day

On CNN.com today:

Tyra fat?

Are we going overboard with the controversy surrounding Tyra Banks' weight?

Answer: Yes

Saturday, January 27, 2007

A Look Down the Barrel of the Global Warming Gun

Cross-posts: Daily Kos; Brudaimonia

As many who follow global warming know, Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to the potential meteorological consequences of global warming. There are several good reasons why, which I detail below.

This diary serves to give a detailed profile of Bangladesh and what might happen if some of the events projected by climatologists due to global warming come true. Having spent a month in Bangladesh a few years ago, having experienced the genuine kindness and hospitality of many Bangladeshis, and having several friends there now, global warming's threat to the country is somewhat personal for me.

Three major rivers -- the Ganges (known locally as the Padma), the Jamuna, and the Meghna -- course through Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Composed of, for the most part, the collective delta of these three rivers, the country's terrain (with small highland exceptions in the north and in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in the southeast panhandle) is mostly flat alluvial plain (i.e. low and wet). It has one of the lowest average elevations of any country. (Elevation map)

These geographical conditions place Bangladesh on the edge of the cliff. If the climate model results reported in the New Scientist in 2003 come even close to being true, the land will be pushed over the edge:
Flooding in the country is set to increase by up to 40 per cent this century as global temperatures rise, the latest climate models suggest.

[snip]

...heavier rainfall triggered by global warming will swamp Bangladesh's riverbanks, a previously unforeseen effect, flooding between 20 and 40 per cent more land than today, says Monirul Qader Mirza, a Bangladeshi water resources expert now at the Adaptation and Impacts Research Group at the University of Toronto.

...People can grow crops on land regularly fertilised by nutrient-laden silt from the rivers [see photo below]. But extreme floods cause considerable hardship and loss of life: in 1988 and 1998 over two-thirds of the country was under water at some point.
Granted, the 40 percent figure is the worst case scenario, but even
[i]f temperatures rose by just 2 °C, two of the models showed that the mean flow of the Meghna and Brahmaputra rivers would increase by 20 per cent. (New Scientist Article)
What will it take to give ourselves a good chance of (but not ensure) avoiding a 2 °C raise and increase the likelihood of sparing Bangladeshis great hardship? According to this seminal article by George Monbiot (related to his new book), it will take a 60% global reduction of greenhouse gases, a 90% average cut by rich countries, and a 94% cut by the U.S by 2030. If this reasoning is even close to the mark, things look really bad for Bangladesh.

The threat to Bangladeshis of a sea-level rise and increased river flooding is exacerbated by its population density, the highest in the world of any sizable country. Imagine half the US population living in Iowa; that's Bangladesh's population density.

When I visited, it was not the monsoon season, when one-third of the country is under water (CIA World Factbook). But even in the dry season, the amount of land available for farming can be scarce in some areas.

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting
(Bru)

This is a view from the Bangabandhu Jamuna Bridge, a massive and modern bridge named after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh's founding father. (His nickname was "Bangabandhu," or "Friend of Bengal" in Bengali.) The small dots near the sand chars in the middle of the river are farmers in boats. This is a telling example of the shortage of land in Bangladesh: farmers take advantage of any piece of arable land they can get, even if it bears a high risk of flooding and destroying their crops.

A significant rise in sea level may tighten the land crunch beyond repair. According to my Lonely Planet book, "A 1m rise in the Bay of Bengal would result in a loss of 12% to 18% of the country's land" (p. 35).

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting
(Rice nurseries near water's edge - Bru)

Another threat of rising sea levels is infiltration of salt water in fresh water bodies and aquifers. This is especially troubling in a region where half of the tubewells are already contaminated with arsenic.

Already Bangladesh is experiencing an increase in urbanization as the rural poor and environmental refugees flock to Dhaka and other large cities.
Masuma's home is a bamboo and polythene shack in one of the hundreds of slums colonising every square metre of unbuilt land in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

Masuma is an environmental refugee, fleeing from the floods which have always beset her homeland but which are predicted to strike more severely with climate change.
A third of Dhaka's population lives in slums (Source). While there, I learned that future increases in the city's slum population will help make it the world's second-most populous city by 2020.

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting
(Bru)

The grey roofs you see in the foreground all make up one large slum. You can see how it stretches to the edges of the lake, even if the ground doesn't provide a solid foundation. If the migration into Dhaka increases according to projections, where will all these new people live? What will they eat and what water will they drink? These are huge problems that Bangladesh would have to deal with no matter what happens to the earth's climate, but global warming threatens to make them much worse.

Bangladeshis are used to flooding and natural disasters. Besides the normal monsoon flooding every year, they have been hit on occasion by excpetionally bad floods. This happened in 1999, 2002, and 2003 , to name just three recent years. In 1991, a cyclone killed over 130,000 people. In 1970, the Bhola cyclone killed at least 500,000 people, the deadliest tropical cyclone of all time.

In the wake of all these disasters, Bangladesh has improved its response system and disaster planning. But no amount of planning may prepare them for the potential consequences, and ripple effects, of a significant average global temperature rise.

I have been reading parts of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac lately, and have been marveling at how ahead of its time it is, given that it was published in 1949. In "The Land Ethic," Leopold argues that our ethical systems must evolve to take into account the entire community of life, not just other individuals or human society in general.
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
For global warming, we have to fight our subconscious tendency to only pay attention to localized problems, and consider the effect on the global community. We have to treat a threat to people halfway around the world as a threat to our neighbor or ourselves, because that's what we would want people halfway around the world to do if the threat was to us or our neighbor, especially if we knew that our actions influenced this threat.

We don't have to wait for the government to do anything. We don't have to wait for CAFE standards to be raised or for Wal-Mart to sell a bunch of CFLs. We don't have to wait for utilities to add more renewable energy. We can adopt (or cultivate) our own Land Ethic, within ourselves. And if enough of us do this, we might find that we have saved Bangladesh -- not to mention Ethiopia or New Orleans -- from the worst global warming consequences.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Medicare Plan D reform

This past Friday, the US House of Representative approved a bill requiring the government to negotiate with drug companies over the cost of price of medicines for Medicare users. However, according to Tony Snow, “If this bill is presented to the President, he will veto it” and, “We have a Medicare prescription drug reform that has been saving people significant amounts of money; it is effective.” Presumably then, this bill does not save Americans more money than the previous Medicare drug plan. If precedent is any indicator of the future, we should actually expect decreases in the cost of medicine. A survey released on December 21, 2005 by Families USA found the opposite true of Tony Snow’s statement.

A survey released today found that drug prices under the new Medicare drug
program will be considerably higher than the prices negotiated by the Department
of Veterans Affairs (VA). According to the survey, the median price difference
for the 20 drugs most frequently used by seniors is 48.2 percent. (Families
USA
)
The survey systematically compared the price the VA pays, which negotiates with the pharmaceutical industry, for its drugs and price Medicare participants pay. Not surprisingly, “The survey found that the lowest VA price is much lower than the lowest Medicare prescription drug plan (PDP) price for 19 of the top 20 drugs” and “For half of the top 20 drugs, the lowest Medicare prescription drug plan price is at least one and one-half times higher than the lowest VA price.” Specifically, the cholesterol lowering agent, Zocor costs the VA $167.80 per year of usage; whereas Medicare pays $1,323.72. A difference of $1,155.92! A more detailed look at the drug prices can be found here.

However, opponents of the bill contend, as David Hogberg of the National Policy Analysis and a blogger at USA Today has, that this bill amounts to nothing more than price control. However, the bill simply dictates that the government must negotiate lower prices, not necessarily obtain or force unnaturally low prices. Hogberg also believes this bill will in fact raise drug prices. Following the trend of the VA, it seems logical that if the government, the largest single buyer of medicine with the greatest purchasing power in the world, negotiates en masse, the government will obtain at the very least the same prices, if not lower prices, for medications.

Opponents also argue that by decreasing the cost of the drugs, innovation will decrease markedly because of a lack of funds for research and development. Currently, R&D constitutes between 10-15% of the budget on average (CPT). Furthermore, according to author Marcia Angell, “In 2002, the top 10 American [pharmaceutical] companies in the Fortune 500 made 17 percent of their sales in profits, whereas they spent only 14 percent on R&D” and “they spend two to two-and-a-half times as much on what they call “marketing and administration” (Mother Jones). Only one pharmaceutical company, when filing with the SEC differentiated between marketing and administration costs: Novartis spent a staggering 36 percent of its revenues on marketing alone (Science Week). It seems the only thing that would suffer is the onslaught of Cialis and Viagra ads, not research. Even the amount spent on R&D is misleading. Angell stated:

Well, no one knows for sure what goes into the R&D budget, because the
companies aren’t telling. It’s been estimated that about a quarter of it is
spent on Phase IV clinical trials, many of which are just excuses to pay doctors
to prescribe the drug. They don’t yield any real scientific information. But no
one knows for sure.
This does not even factor publicly funded research conducted at universities and the National Institute of Health, where the drug companies obtain many of their promising leads.

Currently, in the World Health Organization’s rankings of health care systems, the United States, despite spending the most on health care, ranks for 37th, just behind Costa Rica and ahead of Slovenia. France, with a more progressive and socialized health system, ranks first. While this bill will not vault us to the top, it is certainly a step in the right direction. Medicare wants the best drugs at an affordable price. It is not in Medicare’s interest to negotiate a price the only reduces quality of care – eventually Medicare would have to pay for that increase. Rather, this bill aspires to obtain an honest price for premier medical care.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Re-writing history

While listening to the radio today (that's all I do with my job), I heard several radio show hosts comment on the speech given last night by President Bush. Of the coming year in Iraq he stated: "Let me be clear: The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience, and they will make the year ahead bloody and violent. Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue -- and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html). Several hosts commented on this portion of the speech and said the media would over-emphasize this point - just more of the liberal media distorting facts again. According to Madison talk show host Vicki McKenna, the Bush administration stated from the beginning that we should expect a bloody, difficult and protracted struggle. Let's look back at some of their comments:

In the lead up to the war, March 16 2003
MR. RUSSERT: do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties? [emphasis my own]

VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators...The read we get on the people of Iraq is there’s no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080244/)
----He does not seem to think the upcoming war will be difficult or bloody

20 June 2005
VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency. (http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/30/cheney.iraq/)
----The oposition seems to be ending, again, very rosey on the prospects of a short conflict

19 June 2006
VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: I guess if I look back on it now, I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060619-10.html)
----If they stated all along that this would be a proctracted struggle, then he would have anticipated the level of violence

14 November 2002
SSEC'Y DONALD RUMSFELD: I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that. And, it won't be a World War III. (http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t11152002_t1114rum.html)
----Again, not a long war

07 February 2003
SSEC'Y DONALD RUMSFELD: And it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months. [emphasis my own] (http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=1900)
----I do not think I need to editorialize this comments any further

20 February 2003
JIM LEHRER: Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?
SSEC'Y DONALD RUMSFELD: There's no question but that they would be welcomed. (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/rumsfeld_2-20.html)

This does not include the incredible lies regarding the cost of the war ('The oil revenues would pay for the war itself' HA!). Looking at the comments above, Iraq should have resolved itself by now. Alas, it has not.