Man-Made Disasters and Natural Oil Seepage

The Republican Party seems to attract all sorts of fools, particularly from Alaska. Here is Congressman Don Young's statement about the oil spill in the Gulf:

This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a national [sic] phenomena. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it...

Because similar claims were brought up by others, it is time to put natural oil seepage into perspective. Recent research indicates that natural seepage accounts for 600,000 metric tons of crude oil released into the world's oceans annually. This corresponds to a daily rate of 1,650 tons. One of the most spectacular natural seeps, Coal Oil Point offshore Goleta, California, is releasing 20-25 tons of oil daily.

The leaking Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico is estimated to discharge approximately 95,000 barrels of oil per day. Assuming a specific gravity of 0.9, this rate corresponds to nearly 14,000 metric tons per day. This is almost 10 times the global natural oil seepage. And whereas natural oil seepage is absorbed by the oceans worldwide, this spill will primarily impact the Gulf of Mexico which holds less than 0.2% of the oceans' water. The environmental impact of this oil spill is thus substantially more severe than natural seepage.

Congressman Young is either poorly informed or willfully misleading. But this should be no surprise given the fact that his campaign is primarily financed by the oil and gas industry.

Palin's Crossing the Line

Former vice-presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin has provided numerous examples that she is below par in mental acumen. With that, I am not bothered so much by her recent admission that her family occasionally sought free health care across the border in Canada.

However, instead of expressing her gratitude, she criticized Canada's health care system, saying it should be dismantled in favor of free enterprise. I am marveling at the intellectual incompetence that would compel a person to make such an imbecilic statement. Why would anyone trade an imperfect, but working system for the "free enterprise" mess that we call health care in the U.S.? Reviewing relevant statistics shows why this would be a bad idea:

• Total health care expenditures (% GDP)
  10.0 Canada - 15.6 U.S. (2006)
• Public health care expenditures (% GDP)
  7.0 Canada - 7.0 U.S. (2006)
• Medical doctors per 1,000 population
  2.1 Canada - 2.4 U.S. (2006)
• Acute care beds per 1,000 population
  2.8 Canada - 2.7 U.S. (2006)
• Expectation of life at birth (years)
  81.3 Canada - 78.2 U.S. (2010)
• Infant mortality rate (per 1,000 life births)
  5.0 Canada - 6.1 U.S. (2010)
  
• Healthy life expectancy at birth (years)
  75 Canada - 73 U.S. (2007)
  

A comparison with other countries that offer public health care options would look even worse for the U.S. The obscenely higher cost of U.S. health care despite no better or worse outcomes and despite the fact that the U.S. health insurance industry avoids covering high-risk patients is truly astounding.

When considering the billion-dollar profits that the health insurance industries have raked in, it becomes apparent where a portion of your premiums goes. What seems to have been forgotten is that "health insurance is a form of collectivism by means of which people collectively pool their risk, in this case the risk of incurring medical expenses." With the U.S. "free enterprise" approach, what was envisioned to be cooperative risk management among altruistic people has become a feeding frenzy for the greedy. This is what Sarah Palin advocates for Canada.

Virginia Governor McDonnell Coming Out

During the campaign for the 2009 election for governor, Democrats sought to highlight McDonnell's conservative record, including his stance on homosexuals. According to an August 2009 article in the Washington Post, McDonnell defended himself, saying that government should not discriminate based on sexual orientation. With his rolling back non-discrimination protections for gay state workers, he is showing his true face.

Cuccinelli's Baseless Editorial

In the March 2, 2010 print edition of the Virginian Pilot, the Commonwealth's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, responded to an editorial which had pointed out his anti-science stance with regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Cuccinelli, who claims that the overwhelming evidence for AGW is based on doctored data by a few fraudulent scientists, is asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revisit greenhouse gas (GHG) emission regulations "that will further impoverish those in Virginia who are already struggling." In his opinion piece, he attempts to refute the predictions for rising sea levels by pointing out that a paper that confirmed past IPCC projections, was recently retracted.

Two days after you published your baseless editorial, Professor Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, who had published papers upon which the IPCC relied, has gone so far as to retract his most recent ocean rise paper.

Cuccinelli goes on to say that therefore, EPA's rationale for regulating GHGs is "based on scientific conclusions that have now been formally withdrawn." Anyone with a cursory exposure to this topic should spot the fallacy in this argument. Does Cuccinelli seriously believe that the EPA regulates contaminants on the basis of a single research paper? How could the EPA propose to regulate GHGs in 2008 based on a paper published in July 2009? Or does Cuccinelli think that the retraction of a single paper invalidates all prior research?

Ken Cuccinelli's intellectual dishonesty (or shortcomings?) becomes even more obvious when you actually read the retraction published by Mark Siddall and co-workers. The last sentence states

We thank S. Rahmstorf and M. Vermeer for bringing these issues to our attention.

Rahmstorf and Vermeer dissected Siddall's approach on Realclimate and came to the conclusion that the researchers' projections were based on a flawed methodology. In December 2009, Vermeer and Rahmstorf published a study with new sea level rise predictions that are more than twice as high as those in the retracted paper.

I wonder how Cuccinelli, who praised the retraction saying "This is how peer review is supposed to work," will spin these new findings to fit his political agenda. I hope he is more proficient as Virginia's "Top Lawman" than as a spin-doctor or climate scientist... but I am not holding my breath. For starters, he may want to visit NOAA's Tides & Currents for a first-hand look at sea level trends.

Religion and Societal Dysfunction

I recently stumbled on a paper in the Journal "Evolutionary Psychology," entitled "The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions" in which the authors found that:

... high levels of income disparity, popular religiosity as measured by differing levels of belief and activity, and rejection of evolutionary science correlate strongly negatively with improving conditions.

and concluded:

This study’s uniquely broad based comparison of socioeconomic conditions in the most prosperous democracies confirms that they vary widely among these nations, and that the U.S. is the most dysfunctional prosperous democracy overall.

National religiosity data and levels of poverty by state exhibit the same correlation. The more religious the state, the poorer the people:

Aren't statistics wonderful? Correlation does of course not prove a causal relationship, but I feel uneasy if we elect people who promote religious causes while in office.