More on climate change and health impacts

From Scientific American:

Also, nice piece at The Atlantic by Vann R. Newkirk II:

Climate change can seem almost too big to fathom. Reports such as the recent National Climate Assessment and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent release have made waves by portraying the dire threats of a warming world, making the case that the fundamental fabric of humanity will be degraded without immediate action. But the scenarios—the biblical floods and droughts, the mass migrations of dispossessed people, the creeping seas and the retreating glaciers—have a way of short-circuiting the brain. It’s almost easier to despair or to will oneself into ignorance than to begin to grapple with the future. What are human lives when measured against the coming tempest?

Efforts to assess the exact human costs of climate change, however, have provided new tools for understanding the ways in which those lives will be impacted. A major report published November 28 in the public-health journal The Lancet provides predictions of how climate change is degrading human health, and how it will alter health-care systems in the future. The findings are reliably grim. But in focusing on the health-care implications and the potential damage done to people and their descendants, the report provides a firm backing to the call to climate action. The experts behind the report hope to marry the urgency of climate science with the muscle of America’s most successful and most trusted policy experiment—its public-health system…

Read all of it (including the linked resources therein). The Lancet work can be found here [pdf].

From page 21 of the Report:

Training the Next Generation and Educating the Public on the Health Impacts of Climate Change
Correlates with Lancet Working Group 5: Public and Political Engagement 

Healthcare professionals need to be educated about the ways climate change is harming Americans’ health and well-being.These professionals include physicians, nurses, public health workers, and professionals in other health sciences. 

The International Federation of Medical Students Association (IFMSA) has created a 2020 Vision for Climate-Health in Medical Curricula as a call to action to include an element of climate-health in every medical school curriculum by 2020.67 The Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE), hosted at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, has developed Climate and Health Core Competencies for health professional students which can act as an institutional guide.

Recent polls show that nearly half of Americans (49%) are “extremely or very sure” that climate change is happening versus only 7% who are “very sure” climate change is not occuring. Given that the bedrock of public health is education about threats to health, it is critical that health providers inform their patients, communities, and policy makers about the health harms of climate change. 

Evidence shows that primary care providers are among the most trusted voices to deliver this message (Figure 15), while nurses are the most trusted profession in the country across all sectors. It has been shown that educating Americans about the health impacts of climate change can increase public engagement and decrease political polarization.

Interesting.

I keep coming back to the climate change thing because if we don't get a handle on it soon, a lot of other tech topics in the health care space are going to be increasingly moot, as increasing financial resources diverted to exigent disaster relief and recovery crowd out funds for tech R&D and other economic needs.

See some of my prior climate related posts here. And, don't forget Mr. Best Words.

Look closely at the left side vertical descending bars of the Scientific American graphic above. The costs associated with adverse health impacts are projected to significantly outstrip other categories. Our time for continued denial is running out.

“The way I think about it is: Somebody was made sick yesterday from climate change, someone is being made sick today as we speak, and someone is going to be made sick from climate change tomorrow.” - Georges Benjamin, APHA

DEC 7TH UPDATE

New post at Naked Capitalism:

The Inconvenient Truth about Climate Change and the Economy

FROM MY LATEST HARDCOPY EDITION OF SCIENCE MAGAZINE

EDITORIAL
Define the human right to science
Jessica M. Wyndham, Margaret Weigers Vitullo
       
The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly will mark its 70th anniversary on 10 December. One right enshrined in the UDHR is the right of everyone to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” In 1966, this right was incorporated into the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a treaty to which 169 countries have voluntarily agreed to be bound. Unlike most other human rights, however, the right to science has never been legally defined and is often ignored in practice by the governments bound to implement it. An essential first step toward giving life to the right to science is for the UN to legally define it…

The scientific community has contributed three key insights to the ongoing UN process. One is that the right to science is not only a right to benefit from material products of science and technology. It is also a right to benefit from the scientific method and scientific knowledge, whether to empower personal decision-making or to inform evidence-based policy. In addition, access to science needs to be understood as nuanced and multifaceted. People must be able to access scientific information, translated and actionable by a nonspecialist audience. Scientists must have access to the materials necessary to conduct their research, and access to the global scientific community. Essential tools for ensuring access include science education for all, adequate funding, and an information technology infrastructure that serves as a tool of science and a conduit for the diffusion of scientific knowledge. Also, scientific freedom is not absolute but is linked to and must be exercised in a manner consistent with scientific responsibility…

In October 2018, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights released a list of 29 questions related to defining the right to science [pdf]. Three of the most important questions were: What should be the relationship between the right to benefit from science and intellectual property rights? How should government obligations under the right differ based on the available national resources? What is scientific knowledge and how should it be differentiated, if at all, from traditional knowledge?…

The power and potential of the right to science for empowering individuals, strengthening communities, and improving the quality of life can hardly be overstated. It is time for the UN process to reach a responsible and productive end and for the right to science to be put into practice as was intended when it was first recognized by the United Nations in 1948.

Better late than never, I guess, when it comes to precisely pinning down core conceptual phrases.

Beyond international legal definitions, this goes to issues of "Ethics," no?

apropos of one specific science-technology area and ethics, "Artificial Intelligence," I call your attention here:

From their 2018 Report:

University AI programs should expand beyond computer science and engineering disciplines.
AI began as an interdisciplinary field, but over the decades has narrowed to become a technical discipline. With the increasing application of AI systems to social domains, it needs to expand its disciplinary orientation. That means centering forms of expertise from the social and humanistic disciplines. AI efforts that genuinely wish to address social implications cannot stay solely within computer science and engineering departments, where faculty and students are not trained to research the social world. Expanding the disciplinary orientation of AI research will ensure deeper attention to social contexts, and more focus on potential hazards when these systems are applied to human populations.

That's interesting. I am reminded of my cite of Dr. Rachel Pearson's book (MD, PhD) and her scholarship in the "Medical Humanities." Interdisciplinary synergy.

UPDATE: JACOB WARD

Saw an MSNBC Ali Velshi interview with this Jacob Ward fellow, and was rather impressed. Glad to now be aware of him.

Warrants following.

JacobWard.com

Could not agree more with that statement. Easier said than done. One of my favorite "Futurists," Ian Morrison, joked during a Health 2.0 Conference that "the benefit of being a Futurist is that you never have to change your slides."

Good writer, Jake Ward. Check this out:

In 1999, a trio of economists emerged from a conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, squinting without sunglasses in the unfamiliar sun, and began a slow walk through the hills overlooking the city. The three of them — a Harvard economist-in-training, Daniel Benjamin, and the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and David Laibson — were reeling. They had just learned about a new field, neuroeconomics, which applies economic analysis to brain science in an effort to understand human choices. Now they were strolling through the taxonomy of midday joggers and dog-walkers in Los Angeles, talking all the while about how people become what they are. Benjamin recalls feeling very out of place. “Everyone was so beautiful,” he says.

The economists spent the walk discussing what else they could measure across such a wide variety of human beings. By the time the sun began to set, the conversation landed on the very building blocks of life. “If economists are studying the brain,” Laibson asked, “what about studying genes?”

At that time, the standard method for connecting genes to human outcomes was to look for connections between specific DNA clusters and specific conditions in the lives of people who share those genes. B.R.C.A., perhaps the best-known gene sequence in medical science, is associated with a high risk of breast cancer. The A.P.O.E. sequence seems to have a connection to your chances of developing Alzheimer’s. “We thought we were going to find a few candidate genes that were the critical genes for impulse control or risk taking or cognitive ability,” Benjamin says. But when Benjamin, Glaeser and Laibson began writing to the keepers of DNA databases, asking to partner up, they found the geneticists reluctant to join forces. And matching D.N.A. to social outcomes, like educational attainment or wealth, wasn’t just ethically questionable, it was practically impossible…

…researchers themselves acknowledge that it’s hard to think about oneself clearly when subjected to this new [DNA] tool. Benjamin, Conley and several others in the study went ahead and got their own polygenic scores measured. It was for fun, mostly, and no one was unhappy with their results. “But at the moment I did it, I regretted doing it,” Conley says. “It’s a cognitive trap. I immediately realized that at an individual level, it doesn’t predict anything, but it’s human nature to want to know more about yourself. I don’t know …” He pauses for several seconds. “People parse meaningless distinctions.

Benjamin is less conflicted. “I don’t regret doing it,” he says. “But I’m an economist, so I’m trained to always think more information is better.”

Ahhh... more "Omics" stuff. "Geno-economics?" "Neuroeconomics?" What could possibly go wrong with that kind of stuff? The hell with your GPA and GMAT. The hell with your FICO score (some people would end up in the "subprime DNA" demographic). The hell with your VC Startup Seed Round Pitch Deck. Just give us your whole genome assay result. GINA et al be damned.

I know: I should do a startup called EconoGenomics.com™ 'eh? Get me some of that Silicon Valley money. Hmmm.. relatedly, how about NeuroCriminalistics.com™?

Read Jacob's entire NY Times Magazine article. Very thoughtful, analytical take on the issue. He's on Twitter here.
_____________ AnthropoceneDenial

DEC 10TH  CODA

Imagine my surprise.

@Arctic21

_____________

More to come...

California is on fire once again

[11/19 update] The first, hellacious photo above is from the Paradise CA "Camp Fire" east of Chico, a good 150 miles from San Francisco proper. This post has accrued across a week as the fires developed and worsened. We expect rain beginning perhaps by the 21st and lasting several days, which will clean the air and douse the fires, but will likely also precipitate mudslides and complicate the ID and recovery of more human remains.

It's just like last year, but horrifically worse.

From The Atlantic:

Smoke From California’s Fires Is Harming the State’s Most Vulnerable
As wildfires burn out of control, they are impacting the state’s other crisis—the growing number of people living on the streets.
ALANA SEMUELS & ROBINSON MEYER

The deadliest fire in California’s history continues to burn, and San Francisco is filled with smoke and ash. On Tuesday, for the fifth day in a row, air throughout Northern California contained high amounts of fine-particulate-matter pollution, and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District warned that the air was unhealthy for everyone. “The public should limit outdoor activity as much as possible,” the agency said Monday, urging residents to stay inside with their windows and doors closed.

But for San Francisco’s thousands of homeless people, this warning is impossible to follow. San Francisco, like many California cities, has seen homelessness rise in recent years, as the cost of housing has gone up and zoning laws have limited the construction of new housing units. Despite an initiative passed on November 6 to tax large businesses to fund homeless services and news that the CEO of Twilio had donated $1 million to fund homeless services until the tax kicks in, thousands of people still have nowhere to go in San Francisco on any given night. As the number and deadliness of fires grows in California, the population of people negatively impacted by the air quality is growing, too…

In addition to our long-time chronic homeless population issue, we now have thousands of people newly made homeless by our fires. Same thing last year with the wine country fires. I can't imagine. 

My eyes have been burning since last Friday, and I've had a heavy feeling in my chest, notwithstanding being 140 miles to the southwest of the closest fire near Chico. Our area in Antioch smells like BBQ, the sky a chalky grey-yellow, with the sun a dull orange-reddish orb. We were all advised to close windows, bring the dogs in, and stay inside. On Sunday the manager of my Muir cardiac rehab PT clinic called to say that PT was cancelled for Monday and perhaps today as well. As I post this the death toll has risen to at least 44, with hundreds of people yet missing.

Numerous vehicles have literally melted along the roads. Thousands of structures have been reduced to ashes (some with human remains cremated inside).

UPDATE

Before-and-after pics from one street corner.

Wow.

BTW: look under your sinks, and out on your garage shelves. Ponder all of those toxic household cleaning products, paints, solvents, landscaping, herbicides, pesticides, and automotive chemicals, etc. The smoke cloud now enveloping us is full of them in addition to burned wood and grass particulates (along with what used to be plastics).

I first came to the Bay Area in 1967 (subsequently lived in Seattle, Birmingham and Tuscaloosa AL, Knoxville TN, and Las Vegas, prior to returning here in 2013). The California population has since more than doubled, from ~19 million to more  than 39 million people. Along with population pressure, persistent drought, exacerbated by climate change has contributed significantly to the frequency and severity of western wildfires.

 

Tangentially, time for deployment of "exposomics" monitoring tech in fire-affected areas?

No rain in sight for us yet.

UPDATES

Cardiac rehab was open today, btw. Good workout.

The Atlantic has another good one up on widfires:

The Simple Reason That Humans Can’t Control Wildfires

___

RELATEDLY, COURTESY OF KAISER HEALTH NEWS

High Stakes, Entrenched Interests And The Trump Rollback Of Environmental Regs

Julie Appleby, Kaiser Health News
 
Since his days on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump has promised to roll back environmental regulations, boost the use of coal and pull out of the Paris climate agreement — and he’s moving toward doing all those things.

He has pushed ahead with such action even as a report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in October concluded that without much stronger measures to reduce the use of fossil fuels, a warming planet will witness the spread of tropical diseases, water shortages and crop die-offs affecting millions of people.

Supporters of the administration’s changes — some of whom are skeptical of accepted science — say the administration’s moves will save money, produce jobs and give more power to states.

But critics say new strictures on scientific research and efforts to overturn standards for protecting air, water and worker safety could have long-term, widespread effects that would upend hard-won gains in environmental and public health.

The Trump administration’s many environmental proposals vary widely in target and reach.

For example, the administration has delayed the implementation and enforcement of many Obama-era rules, saying they need time to draw up new rules or study some that are already on the books. Industry generally agrees, arguing these rules are an overreach with negative financial consequences. 

Critics fear that the delays will undermine hard-fought public health protections.

Among such efforts:

The Environmental Protection Agency recently argued it needs until 2020 to decide on a controversial Obama-era directive expanding to smaller streams and waterways the types of wetlands protected by the federal Clean Water Act. That directive might mean fewer pollutants released into tributaries of larger waterways, from which millions of people get their drinking water. But the controversial rule has been fought by farming, mining and other industry groups that say it is too restrictive.

The EPA also sought to delay by nearly two years standards to protect workers and emergency responders at chemical plants, part of an Obama-era rule in response to a 2013 fire at a Texas fertilizer plant that killed 15 people. Industry says that the rule is costly and that providing information about chemical storage at plants could raise security concerns.

In March 2017, then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt rejected a petition filed in 2007 by environmental groups seeking to ban a commonly used pesticide, chlorpyrifos, which the groups say harms health, particularly citing developmental damage to children and fetuses. The agency said it needed more time to study the chemical. 

All three of those delays were blocked by federal court judges, although the administration may decide to appeal, so final outcomes are unclear.

But one thing is clear: Everyone is likely to spend a lot of time in court.

“Folks are already lining up to challenge the Affordable Clean Energy rule, and that’s probably true for just about anything this administration does when it comes to environmental reform,” said Nicolas Loris, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

The clean energy rule, introduced in August, would replace a more stringent Obama-era rule for coal-burning power plants.

An EPA analysis said the proposed rule would reduce industry costs and create jobs.

The same analysis concluded, though, that the looser standards, which would supersede the never-implemented Obama-era regulation, would cause as many as 1,400 premature deaths and 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems annually by 2030.

On another front, scientists are protesting new Trump administration policies they say would effectively curtail their ability to study the health effects of environmental exposures.

This spring, the EPA proposed a rule dubbed Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, which would restrict the use of studies as the basis for advancing environmental regulations if researchers have not released all their raw data, potentially including medical records.

The Trump administration said this step would ensure that data and methods can be checked for accuracy, echoing a long-running argument from industry and some in Congress.

From scientists, though, reaction was immediate, widespread and negative. Hundreds of researchers and dozens of public health organizations said the proposal would quash important research into the effects of pollution and chemicals on health.

No longer would they be able to promise confidentiality of medical records to people who take part in research studies, which would have a chilling effect on their willingness to participate.

Many of the submitted comments noted that such a rule would undermine key studies that led to pollution laws and prevailing attitudes about the interaction of environmental and human health.

Case in point: the seminal 1993 “Six Cities” research by Harvard scientists linking air pollution to premature death.

That study did not disclose the identities of its 22,000 participants or their medical information.

Its findings led in 1997 to new restrictions under the Clean Air Act for fine particles, tiny pieces of soot, dust, carbon and other pollutants that get inhaled deep into the lungs, potentially causing asthma, lung cancer and other health conditions. By 2020, those rules are expected to have prevented more than 230,000 early deaths.

Scientists say the administration is handicapping their ability to do important research. The plan comes amid other efforts critics see as attacking science, such as removing information from government websites about climate change, restrictions on who can sit on EPA advisory boards and a proposal to more narrowly target safety reviews of chemicals.

“By attacking the science that talks about adverse effects on health,” the administration hopes to allow deregulation yet claim “they are not harming people,” said Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The range and scope of the proposed changes has brought praise from some in industry and agriculture for loosening restrictions and giving states more flexibility. But the changes frustrate public health and environmental health advocates.

“We would like to be moving forward rather than fighting these kind of rollbacks,” said Janice Nolen, assistant vice president for national policy at the American Lung Association.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Is it too early to start drinking?

THURSDAY UPDATE

The air here remains "unhealthy." It was chokingly smoky today, with a sharp burnt odor. The wildfires body count continues to rise (63 as I write, hundreds still missing). More than 10,000 structures destroyed or damaged (mostly destroyed). Thousand are now homeless, many near Paradise sleeping in cars or tents in a Walmart parking lot.

I had cardiac rehab PT today. Pushed it hard. Felt good, but now I can feel it in my chest. Staying in the house.

FRIDAY NOV 16TH UPDATE

More than 630 people reported as missing in the #CampFire area. More than 15,000 structures destroyed. The Bay Area air is so bad that UC Berkeley has closed for the day (as well as Contra Costa County schools). And, coming soon:

https://t.co/H7zcyAFg5H update. My state has been turned into a large, ghastly crematorium, & @realDonaldTrump is coming to inflict himself & his phony concern on us tomorrow. Rain would be great, on multiple counts ... #CampFire #CaliforniaWildfires #WoolseyFire #ClimateChange pic.twitter.com/zJw8Gpenyp

— Bobby Gladd (@BobbyGvegas) November 16, 2018

No, again, I don't like him.

From Vox:

IN MY SATURDAY EMAIL INBOX

In The New Yorker

SUNDAY MORNING

Spot-on CNN OpEd by Tess Taylor. "In California, the apocalypse keeps getting worse."

ON DECK

Finished two books.

Both excellent, both broadly germane to KHIT topics.

Starting two more (notwithstanding that I still have a number of others in progress. Amazon "Buy with 1-click" is gonna BK me).

So much to learn. Love it. Given that we pretty much still have to stay inside, I'm grinding away with my studies,

Topically apropos, I read a Naked Capitalism post, which led me to this (and subsequent interesting stuff):

Startup Boom a “Dangerous, High-Stakes Ponzi Scheme”: Silicon Valley Investor

And, oh, yeah, I finished this one:

The less said about it, the better. I can't recall ever before having a book make me angry.
_____________ AnthropoceneDenial

More to come...

An important climate change update

From the NY Times:

U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy

Recall my prior posts on climate change (and apropos of my recent immediate recent posts on our California wildfire disasters).

WASHINGTON — A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

But in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds…

 I've just started studying the report. Going to the "Human Health" section first.

From The Atlantic:

"It may seem like a funny report to dump on the public on Black Friday, when most Americans care more about recovering from Thanksgiving dinner than they do about adapting to the grave conclusions of climate science. Indeed, who ordered the report to come out today?"

Let me guess.

UPDATE

From the report "health" summary section:

Impacts from climate change on extreme weather and climate-related events, air quality, and the transmission of disease through insects and pests, food, and water increasingly threaten the health and well-being of the American people, particularly populations that are already vulnerable.

Changes in temperature and precipitation are increasing air quality and health risks from wildfire and ground-level ozone pollution. Rising air and water temperatures and more intense extreme events are expected to increase exposure to waterborne and foodborne diseases, affecting food and water safety. With continued warming, cold-related deaths are projected to decrease and heat-related deaths are projected to increase; in most regions, increases in heat-related deaths are expected to outpace reductions in cold-related deaths. The frequency and severity of allergic illnesses, including asthma and hay fever, are expected to increase as a result of a changing climate. Climate change is also projected to alter the geographic range and distribution of disease-carrying insects and pests, exposing more people to ticks that carry Lyme disease and mosquitoes that transmit viruses such as Zika, West Nile, and dengue, with varying impacts across regions. Communities in the Southeast, for example, are particularly vulnerable to the combined health impacts from vector-borne disease, heat, and flooding. Extreme weather and climate-related events can have lasting mental health consequences in affected communities, particularly if they result in degradation of livelihoods or community relocation. Populations including older adults, children, low-income communities, and some communities of color are often disproportionately affected by, and less resilient to, the health impacts of climate change. Adaptation and mitigation policies and programs that help individuals, communities, and states prepare for the risks of a changing climate reduce the number of injuries, illnesses, and deaths from climate-related health outcomes.

UPDATE: SOME STRONG LANGUAGE

Trump's failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity
By Jeffrey Sachs

(CNN) - President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and others who oppose action to address human-induced climate change should be held accountable for climate crimes against humanity. They are the authors and agents of systematic policies that deny basic human rights to their own citizens and people around the world, including the rights to life, health, and property. These politicians have blood on their hands, and the death toll continues to rise…

As the Earth warms due to the continued burning of coal, oil, and gas, climate-related disasters that include high-intensity hurricanes, floods, droughts, extreme precipitation, forest fires, and heat waves, pose rising dangers to life and property. Hurricanes become more destructive as warmer ocean waters feed more energy to the storms. Warmer air also carries more moisture for devastating rainfalls, while rising sea levels lead to more flooding.

Yet Trump and his minions are the loyal servants of the fossil-fuel industry, which fill Republican party campaign coffers. Trump has also stalled the fight against climate change by pulling out of the Paris Agreement. The politicians thereby deprive the people of their lives and property out of profound cynicism, greed, and willful scientific ignorance…

Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. 

 Read all of it.

MORE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

The World Needs to Quit Coal. Why Is It So Hard?
By Somini Sengupta

HANOI, Vietnam — Coal, the fuel that powered the industrial age, has led the planet to the brink of catastrophic climate change.

Scientists have repeatedly warned of its looming dangers, most recently on Friday, when a major scientific report issued by 13 United States government agencies warned that the damage from climate change could knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end if significant steps aren’t taken to rein in warming.

An October report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on global warming found that avoiding the worst devastation would require a radical transformation of the world economy in just a few years.

Central to that transformation: Getting out of coal, and fast.

And yet, three years after the Paris agreement, when world leaders promised action, coal shows no sign of disappearing. While coal use looks certain to eventually wane worldwide, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency, it is not on track to happen anywhere fast enough to avert the worst effects of climate change. Last year, in fact, global production and consumption increased after two years of decline…

In the public imagination, the coal miner has long been a symbol of industrial virility, a throwback to an era when hard labor — particularly men’s labor, rather than robots — fueled economic growth.

That idea has been central to politics. German coal miners have lifted the fortunes of that country’s far-right party. Poland’s right-wing government has promised to open new coal mines. Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, rose to power as a champion of coal.

President Trump has promised, unsuccessfully so far, to revive coal mining jobs and instructed his Environmental Protection Agency to roll back rules to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants.

That message might be welcome in American coal country, but the industry’s future in the United States is not promising…

Again, read the entire article.

ERRATUM

I cut my white collar teeth in a forensic-level environmental radiation / mixed waste lab in Oak Ridge in the 1980s (computer systems development and lab QC - pdf). I have known since those days about this (that hardly ever gets mentioned):

Coal is largely composed of organic matter, but it is the inorganic matter in coal—minerals and trace elements— that have been cited as possible causes of health, environmental, and technological problems associated with the use of coal. Some trace elements in coal are naturally radioactive. These radioactive elements include uranium (U), thorium (Th), and their numerous decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn). Although these elements are less chemically toxic than other coal constituents such as arsenic, selenium, or mercury, questions have been raised concerning possible risk from radiation. In order to accurately address these questions and to predict the mobility of radioactive elements during the coal fuel-cycle, it is important to determine the concentration, distribution, and form of radioactive elements in coal and fly ash... [USGS, 1997]

Radionuclides in the the coal seams. Lovely.

MONDAY CODA

President Trump on the report he did not and will not read:

POTUS speaks eloquently to the Washington Post, Nov. 27th:

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.”

Verbatim. SMH.

OH, AND ONE MORE THING...

From Naked Capitalism:

How Economists Impede Addressing Climate Change

Posted on November 28, 2018 by Yves Smith

On a recent post, some readers recoiled at the idea of putting a monetary value on human life. Yet that happens all the time. Courts come up with damages for injuries and wrongful deaths. Younger people with high earnings are more “valuable” than other people. And remember the Pinto? Companies similarly put a value on how much it is worth to them to spend on safety to prevent deaths and dismemberment.

As this article indicates, this sort of thinking winds up playing a role any time companies or governments look at making financial outlays. And this situation is made worse by the fact that due to reasons of cognitive bias or bad incentives, people and institutions have a predisposition not to do difficult things now. People engage in procrastination and hyperbolic discounting. Politicians find “kick the can down the road” strategies to be the best approach most of the time...

Read it. Read the comments as well. NC rocks.

BTW, see also The Atlantic's "Why the U.S. Can't Solve Big Problems."
_____________ AnthropoceneDenial

More to come...

Next up for California, flooding, mudslides, and more misery

It's finally raining in northern California.

Below, a photo from a 2017 CA post-fire mudslide.

Up next: flooding and mudslides and newly homeless refugee miseries -- including severe health problems upticks.
_____________ AnthropoceneDenial

More to come...

Define "science"

OK, continuing my riffs begun by "define 'evidence'" and "define 'expert'"--do we all mean the same thing by the word "science?"

Physicians are usually quick to point out that the word "cancer" actually denotes a host of diseases that share not only core etiologic similarities but also significant clinical differences. Similarly, when we say "science" are we really alluding to many "sciences" that differ materially (and range from heuristically "soft" to algorithmically "hard")?

Dr. Rudolph's book has thus far got me off down a number of interesting rabbit holes.

...[W]hen I began studying to be a science teacher in college, I was surprised to learn that there was no such thing as the scientific method. That was certainly the message my science-teaching methods professor instilled in us. He taught that the focus of our teaching instead should be on something called “scientific inquiry,” the details and complexities of which we learned about from an early 1960s essay by a University of Chicago professor by the name of Joseph Schwab.

Rudolph, John L. (2019-05-31T23:58:59). How We Teach Science. Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

Schwab, 'eh?

...Joseph Schwab (1909–1988), a contributor to the innovative Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) high school biology course materials, who advanced our understanding of inquiry-based instruc- tion. He enrolled in the university at age 15, earning undergraduate degrees in English and physics and later a doctorate in genetics (Westbury and Wilkof 1978). Schwab worked at the University of Chicago for over 50 years, where John Dewey had set up the Lab School and where educator Ralph Tyler (1902–1994) became well-known for his work in curriculum development. 

The phrase “teaching science as enquiry” is conspicuous in a 1962 lecture by Schwab at Harvard University titled “The Teaching of Science as Enquiry.” Schwab preferred the use of enquiry to inquiry, because he disagreed with the ideas surrounding inquiry then being promoted, especially by psycholo- gists. His idea of enquiry instruction was to teach students about the major paradigms of science, that is, the manner in which a certain community of scientists view a major idea and the way they investigate it. In his lecture, Schwab urged science educators to stress the conceptions of science and how they change over time. He placed a premium on how scientists view the ideas (content) they are developing and how these ideas shape what scientists do and say about the data they collect. Science should not be viewed as dogma, he said, but as revisionary and fluid. Teachers misrepresent science when they present it as a rhetoric of conclusion or as a finished product... "Historical development of teaching science as inquiry."

"Inquiry" vs "enquiry?" Any substantive connotative difference there, or just "you say 'tomato' I say 'tomahto?'

BTW, regarding "educate," my grad school program director and mentor, the late Dr. Craig Walton, was fond of asserting that the etymology of the term is "e-ducere,"--to elicit, draw out, which requires of the learner both persistent, wide-ranging curiosity and a "critical thinking" mindset. Differs fundamentally from "instruction" and training.

 Back to John Rudolph (apropos of my KHIT-related interests):

Discussions of scientific methodology typically erupt publicly when the authority or the legitimate scope of science is in conflict with other social or cultural norms, knowledge systems, or local claims. The sociologist Thomas Gieryn has referred to these moments as boundary disputes. In debates over what does and does not count as science, what gets ruled in (as science) is allowed the authority to decide what counts as true. While a boundary dispute centers on the question of where the line between science and non-science is drawn, the decision about where to make that demarcation almost always hinges on an interpretation of process or methodology...

"Climate change," anyone? We know what Donald Trump "thinks."

IT MATTERS

Continued #AnthropoceneDenial will beget #ClimateApartheid--at BEST.

We may end up at Peter Frase's Quadrant IV: "Hierarchy + Scarcity = Exterminism" (See "Four Futures")#GlobalWarming #ClimateEmergency #ClimateChangeIsReal pic.twitter.com/iZQFDTC3o9

— Bobby Gladd (@BobbyGvegas) June 27, 2019

Dr. Rudolph also makes considerable note of this:

You can buy the Kindle version for $9.99 or read for free it online.

Chapter 1: THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

Over the course of human history, people have developed many interconnected and validated ideas about the physical, biological, psychological, and social worlds. Those ideas have enabled successive generations to achieve an increasingly comprehensive and reliable understanding of the human species and its environment. The means used to develop these ideas are particular ways of observing, thinking, experimenting, and validating. These ways represent a fundamental aspect of the nature of science and reflect how science tends to differ from other modes of knowing.

It is the union of science, mathematics, and technology that forms the scientific endeavor and that makes it so successful. Although each of these human enterprises has a character and history of its own, each is dependent on and reinforces the others. Accordingly, the first three chapters of recommendations draw portraits of science, mathematics, and technology that emphasize their roles in the scientific endeavor and reveal some of the similarities and connections among them...

OK, that publication is necessary and good, but 25 years old. What have we accomplished? Where are we of late in terms of "science cred?" From "Research!America"-

From natural disasters to an opioid epidemic that prompted a public health emergency declaration, science was at the forefront of events that shaped our nation in 2017. National public opinion surveys commissioned by Research!America throughout the year revealed that a majority of Americans agree that public and private sector research is critical to better health, economic growth, global competitiveness and more. While the perception of science and scientists is positive, based on survey findings, scientists and our nation’s scientific enterprise remain largely invisible to the public.

The public overwhelmingly (82%) considers scientists trustworthy spokespersons for science, far above elected officials and the media. This level of trust includes an expectation that scientists will be the primary messengers for scientific issues, even those with policy implications. More than half of Americans agree that scientists should play a major role in shaping public policy in many areas, not only in medical and health research, but also in education (58%), infrastructure (55%) and national defense (51%). Americans recognize that science plays a role in their well-being, where they live, work and play. Yet many are unaware of the science community and those responsible for scientific advances. A strong majority of Americans (81%) cannot name a living scientist, more than two-thirds (67%) cannot name an institution, company or organization where medical or health research is conducted, and less than a quarter (21%) know that medical research is conducted in all 50 states. The findings have been consistent over the past decade, indicating the need for stronger engagement between scientists and the public.

A strong majority of Americans (71%) say they have confidence in scientific institutions compared to only 31% for Congress and 46% for the Presidency. When asked if great strides in science and innovation will continue while Donald Trump is President, opinions were divided (46% agree, 33% disagree and 22% not sure), with more Republicans (74%) than Independents (44%) and Democrats (22%) agreeing. Furthermore, a significant number of Americans (79%), including strong majorities across the political spectrum, agree that it is important for President Trump to assign a high priority to putting health research and innovation to work to assure continued medical progress (85% of Democrats, 79% of Republicans and 72% of Independents). As we pivot towards midterm elections in 2018, it is important for scientists and science advocates to ask candidates about their level of commitment to research and innovation to ensure a healthier and more prosperous future for our nation.

OK, back to the top. Define "science." See "Our Definition of Science" by the UK Science Council.

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

 Ahhh... "evidence." That which makes a true conclusion more likely (or "proves" it, best case).

I searched "Science for all Americans" from beginning to end. The word "evidence" appears 57 times. Not once is there any definition of what the word means. It is simply assumed that we all have the same understanding. Is that OK? No biggie? BTW, the word "evident" shows up eight times, again with the assumption that we all know what is meant.

UPDATE, DR. RUDOLPH'S BACKSTORY ON PROJECT 2016

Chapter 9: Project 2061 and the Nature of Science

If the period from the mid-1950s through the 1960s was the golden age of science education, with its unprecedented levels of federal funding and involvement of bill laureates and other top scientists, the decade of the 1970s into the first half of the 1980s represented an era of comparative neglect. Attention to academic subjects in schools declined with the new political emphasis on urban poverty and concerns about the regressive nature of formal education that arose in the late 1960s with the more liberal views of the rule of schooling in American society. At the same time, the image of science in public favor in these years as a result of his association with environmental degradation, on one hand, and with militarization and the Vietnam War, on the other. This shift in educational priorities along with the new critical views of science led to conditions of general decline in science education that raised alarms among the scientific elite.

Those worries were felt acutely by the leadership of the American Association for the advancement of science, prompting its executive director, William Carey, to recruit Jim Rutherford in 1981 to lead a new effort to rebuild science education across the nation. Rutherford came to the AAAS from his stint as assistant director for education at the National Science Foundation the position as assistant secretary for research and improvement at the newly established Department of Education. He was someone earlier with the levers of change, such as they were, in the American educational system Rutherford's immediate task was to move education to the top of the AAAS agenda, and specifically to enact elements of a January 1981 resolution passed by the Association's Board of Directors quote to reverse the damaging decline of science and engineering education in the United States."

The challenge Rutherford-based was profitable. Since the mid-1970s, science education had been pushed to the margins of public consciousness, and the crushing recession along with the education version of the newly installed Reagan administration made prospects for any federal initiatives bleak. "It is easy enough to say that business and industry, the scientific and engineering societies, and the foundations are to pick up the slack," Rutherford wrote to a friend. But it wasn't clear to him at the time what those institutions could do to really make a difference. What was obvious to Rutherford was that a long-term plan was needed rather than some fixed. As he saw it, his job was to develop something that quote the Association can stick with the decade or longer that it takes for anything to have a lasting impact on our complex educational system."

Rutherford told the possibilities in the summer of 1982. The scientists of the 1950s had had the shock of Sputnik and the military threat from the Soviet Union to help usher reforms into the schools. The biggest threat of the 1980s, however, was economic — from Japanese automobile imports, for example. Grasping for something bold and symbolic, Rutherford latched onto Halley's comet — a satellite of a different sort. It seemed to fit the bill. The famous comet, he noted, was due to appear that October, the same month as the 25th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, and it would be 75 years before it would return again. What sort of changes might take place in our civilization between those visits? Used Rutherford. Looking at the dramatic changes that had occurred between prior flybys, he concluded that "we cannot accurately describe the world as it will be when Halley's comet next returns." However, he asserted, we do know that "the changes that will be brought about in our culture, in our way of life, will have more to do with the utilization of science and technology than with anything else."

What was needed, and Rutherford's view, was an entirely new approach to science education, one that would prepare children born in 1986 — the year of the comet would make its closest pass by Earth — to live in the scientific and technological 2, when those students would grow up to work, have children, eventually retire, and live to see the comment return in the year 2061. The length of time between sightings gave Rutherford the Longview he and AAAS were looking for to avoid yet another crisis driven crash program that was unlikely to produce meaningful and enduring change. Project 2061, as he named it, was bold and imaginative, clearly something outside the typical educational reform box. Its central goal was to articulate "what understanding of science and technology will be important for everyone in tomorrow's world" and then to work towards realizing that goal in a systematic way... [How we teach science, pp 180-182]

I encourage everyone to read the entirety of Project 2061 material. And buy and read John Rudolph's book. And join AAAS.

ALSO OF RELEVANCE TO TEACHING SCIENCE

I've previously cited this fine book:

 

Another important historical read. Lots of overlap with "How We Teach Science."

What's my point here? Go back to my "Is there a 'science of deliberation'?" What do we mean by "deliberation?"

When you encounter the word "deliberation," what typically comes right to mind? Jury service, yes? I'm looking into the psychology of that as well. (Excellent book.) Also, in my grad school program, deep and thorough "moral deliberation" was our constant focus ("Ethics & Policy Studies").

Finally for now, is there really such a thing as "Data Science?" Or that mostly another Bright Shiny Thing marketing hook for expensive, institutionally lucrative graduate school programs?

Stay tuned, Not done by any stretch. Juggling a lot of bowling pins this week.

UPDATE: JUST IN

Science Based Medicine rocks.

Media Literacy Is Key
Media literacy is an important component to teaching science and critical thinking. We’ll add that to our to-do list.

Educating the public about medical myths and misconceptions has various challenges. The psychological deck seems to be stacked against us. It’s easier to scare people with possible risks than to reassure them with facts. People tend to be more compelled by emotional anecdotes than dry data. There is something inherently compelling about conspiracy theories that attract many people. People are good at remembering dramatic details, but poor at remembering whether or not they are true and what the source of the information is.

But perhaps the most profound factor making our job difficult is that once an idea has taken root in someone’s mind, it is remarkably difficult to change. Humans are instinctively good at motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. We see what we want to see, remember the bits that support our narrative, and can rationalize away pesky things like logic and evidence. The result can be a powerful, even overwhelming, illusion of confident knowledge, even in notions that are patently absurd. We can then erect elaborate defenses around these beliefs to protect them from reality…

There are basically three types of preventive education that are likely to reduce susceptibility to pseudoscience. The first is scientific literacy. There is some controversy over how effective this is, however. A few decades ago the “knowledge deficit model” was dominant, and the prescription for belief in pseudoscience was to teach people science. However, recent research has not been kind to the knowledge deficit model. You cannot usually change someone’s mind about an emotionally held belief with just information…

…You can move the needle a bit with public education about certain topics. Sometimes beliefs are based more on misinformation than emotion or identity, and if you correct that misinformation you can change beliefs. This is very topic specific, and also is affected by the kind of information you give and how it is presented. For example, global warming denial is strongly predicted by political ideology, and not at all by scientific literacy. However, vaccine denial does correlate with low scientific literacy, which implies that science education can be a mitigating factor…

The second type of education is critical thinking. This relates more directly to the point about narratives. Critical thinking is about metacognition, knowing how to think with a valid process that is self-reflective and therefore potentially self-corrective. If someone understands exactly how conspiracy thinking is a cognitive trap, they are less likely to fall into that trap. Critical thinking and scientific literacy is a powerful combination – this is essentially what we mean by scientific skepticism, which is exactly what we are doing here (in the realm of medicine)…

'eh? Read all of it. This is why SBM is a requisite daily stop for me. As is The NeuroLogica Blog.

apropos, see my prior post "Selling science: effective communication with decision makers."

UPDATE

I continue to plumb "How we teach science" (while finishing up two Game Theory books).

My path here thus far has been cut-to-the-chase circuitous (an expedient MO I employ when I trust an author and the book lends itself to a non-linear read): Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 10, Conclusion, Chapter 4, Chapter 6, Chapter 7.

Final words:

The continued focus on students mastering scientific practice—doing science—in the hopes that some of these larger, contextual understandings will come along for free seems misguided. Perhaps the last word on this is best left to Schwab. During the Golden age of science curriculum reform, he warned that many science classrooms were "being converted into research microcosms in which every high school student, regardless of interest and competence, is supposed to act, on a small scale, like a scientist." This, unfortunately, seems to be where the current emphasis lies as well (when it isn't on the technical content of science itself). And Schwab noted to that such an approach was poorly suited to accomplishing if a understanding of the nature of scientific work. Given the choice between teaching about scientific inquiry and having students engage in the actual process of inquiry, "it is the former which should be given first priority," as Schwab said. Understanding what science is and how it works in the social context of our time is the necessary end for which we need to strive if, in Schwab's words, "we are to develop the informed public which our national need urgently demands." [How we teach science, pp. 230-231]

ERRATUM

I forgot to cite my earlier post "Is there a science of success?"

CODA

All of the foregoing brings me back to my initial core KHIT concern--science-based, optimally effective health care, aided by technology where appropriate. Today I reflected on a book I bought in hardcopy back some time ago. It's now available in Apple iBook format, which I rarely use.

Well, lookeee who shows up right off.

Foreword by Harlan M. Krumholz, MD, MS 
Medicine is an information science. In an earlier era, medicine moved from religion to science via laboratory work on the mechanism of disease. Doctors improved their results by reflecting on the likely cause of disease and the likely response of an individual to a treatment based on that understanding of disease. Although many benefitted from that approach, others were harmed because assumptions were not sufficiently tested empirically. There was a recognition that advances in the lab needed to be supplemented with more rigorous studies in patients, especially when the benefit was modest and not easily demonstrated. Moreover, as these studies grew, the need for doctors to be able to manage the information, understand it, and apply it wisely also grew. 

Today, the expert clinician must have a command of information and know how to apply it. There is more attention than ever on the quality of treatment decisions and the assumptions that underlie them. The key to knowing how best to synthesize the available information and produce the best recommendations and decisions requires an appreciation of cognitive science...
 
Preface 
Medical education tends to focus on medical content. We teach the facts and emphasize what is known. We often assume that if we apply the facts and rules, as an engineer applies principles and equations, we can solve most medical problems. But clinical medicine is not engineering—there are simply too many missing pieces, too much uncertainty. When faced with uncertainty, we inevitably use reasoning. But medical education gives the process of medical reasoning short shrift and rarely teaches it explicitly. We diligently teach the “what” but students often learn the “how” on their own...
 
This book does not present any great discoveries but, instead, synthesizes ideas that have been hiding in plain sight for years. During the past three decades, the field of cognitive psychology has developed a substantial literature on decision making but somehow hasn’t had much influence on doctors, who make tough, nuanced decisions every day. I am not a cognitive psychologist, but I have learned a great deal from Herbert Simon, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, Gary Klein, and others whose work on intuition and heuristics is directly relevant to medical decision making. Influenced by the work of Ian Hacking, I have included some introductory ideas about probability, logic, and statistical inference. I am also steeped in the literature on clinical reasoning by authors such as Alvin Feinstein, Larry Weed, Jerry Kassirer, Harold Sox, David Sackett, Pat Croskerry, Donald Redelmeier, Jerome Groopman, and Kathryn Montgomery. I continue to learn about medical reasoning from many colleagues, too numerous to list, and I hope that this book accurately reflects their teaching…

Pretty cool, I have to say. BTW: See my 2014 riff on "The Art of Medicine."
_____________

More to come...