U.S. Life Expectancy in an Era of Death Trains and Death Factories

Didn’t the new administration and the Tom Dashle book (Critical) say that the elderly use too much of the nation’s health care dollar? They suggested that those resources should be redistributed to the younger set that ostensibly has many productive years ahead rather than the resource sucking of late retirement.
If the administration gets it way on the carbon cap and trade front and health care “reform” and universality, who would be tempted to assert a shortened life expectancy was due more to decreased CO2 or to decreased health services available to the elderly?

But the models didnt predict this therefore reality must be wrong

It is shameful that Dr Hansen would appear to want millions and millions of people to die from hypothermia every winter.

Brilliant. This is one in the eye to all those climaholic $cientologists! Its like those crazy fools were blaming the killer smogs in the UK in the 50s on coal power. But you have wonderfully proven them wrong. Life expectancy goes UP because of coal use. We need to start posting this message everywhere on the internet we find it. Its the same story as DDT all over again. Crazy psuedoscientist claiming a wonderful technology is ‘killing’ the birdies. We ban DDT and millions die…….

In the end what everyone would support is a stable world population at a sustainable level of resource consumption per capita.
That will need to involve voluntary reproductive restraint globally.
The only way to get the third world to participate in the tendency of the west to reproduce at less than replacement rate is to provide an economic incentive.
People will only voluntarily have less children if children become an economic drain rather than an economic lifeline.
That means that everyone globally and especially the elderly have to get wealthy enough to change their reproductive decisions.
If one removes wealth from the elderly to pass it to the young then again more children will be an economic advantage in old age. That is the last thing we need.
Why is there so little logic applied to basic human behaviour when people talk about these issues ?
We need to use a lot more energy of every kind to keep the west wealthy enough and make everyone else wealthy enough for reproductive decisions en masse to get us past the coming population peak as fast as possible. Thereafter global population could well embark on a long term manageable decline.
The more we panic now the more we risk an infinite deferral of that happy scenario with unlimited death and environmental destruction instead.

But the Malthusians, Eugenicists and assorted misanthropes actually want to reduce life expectancy. Saves them from reintroducing the real death trains. They spend their lives telling us there are far too many humans (always the other guy though; the assorted misanthropes invariably consider themselves the superior part of the race).
(I reckon, if nature knows best, there are exactly the right number of humans)
I grew up with rows; my parents didn’t get on. But I learnt that when in a row, humans accuse their opponents of exactly what they are doing themselves. All the disasters the AGW/greenie/misanthrope set are warning us about are exactly what we will get if their policies are implemented.
I’m 60 in a few weeks time. If I had to stop breathing I wouldn’t be able to tell the youngsters about the ways I’ve been so dumb over the years. Not that it matters much; they’ll just find their own ways.
By the way, I think I have discovered a new medical condition:
Hansenile Megalomania
AM

$6 Australian Dollars per household per week would support some third world families for a month if not squandered on the vast infrastructure required by carbon trading and the inevitable corruption.
It could push many poor Australian families over the brink of insolvency if accumulated over time.
Who believes the burdens have been properly calculated anyway ?
The burden will not be distributed equally leaving many with a much greater financial burden and many with no burden at all.
Who is to say the costs will not escalate as soon as the requisite machinery is in place ?
Anyone who thinks the whole process will be cheap and cheerful is living a fantasy.

DJ (02:57:58) wrote: “real analysis using scientific methods shows the costs of reducing CO2 are tiny…”
And some real analysis using scientific methods says we should increase CO2 – hence the debate.
And I suggest on your “playing the man” line that in this case Gore and Hansen are also “the ball”; which is why they get played.

DJ (02:57:58) :
My income will not increase by $20000 as the article suggests, in fact it has declined by 50% these last 6 months.
“In the case of Australia, they showed that a 30 per cent emissions reduction below 1990 levels by 2020 and a 60 per cent reduction by 2030 could be achieved by developing technologies and energy efficiency measures costing $2.9 billion, or an average cost of $290 per household per year. This is based on a carbon tax of $65 a tonne.”
$2.9 billion to develop AND IMPLEMENT by 2030 is totally unbelievable. this would not even cover the cost of a single nuclear energy plant.

From DJ’s article: “Thermal inertia, the fact that it takes up to a century for carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere to have its full climatic impact, means that there is a further 0.6 degrees of global warming in the pipeline”
Hilarious. Now if we could learn how to capture “thermal inertia” then maybe all of our energy problems would be solved.

Stephen Wilde (02:55:33) wrote: “That will need to involve voluntary reproductive restraint globally.”
Or, Stephen, we simply wait for the normal levelling out that comes when the standard of living of those currently breeding rather freely reaches a western level when birthrates seem to fall naturally to the stage where folks are not even replendishing themselves.
There is generally a nice balance in natural things which does not require the numb hand of government to derail; and even when that inept hand does intervene, time will mostly consign it to the halls of infamy.
It’s a big, wide, wonderful world we live in. Celebrate it.

anna v (00:42:19) :

. . . I wonder that political advisers to Obama are not reading this and similar blogs. Obama is in a very real danger of being remembered for posterity as the head dancer in a rain dance. Anybody who believes in his potential to improve the US should be advising him to hold his horses on cap and trade for the next few years ( renewable energy goals are fine, imo). What if the next winter is even worse than this one?

If anyone in the White House is readings blogs like this one, they’re doing it just to disparage them. The people behind Obama don’t care a whit about the facts. ‘Climate change’ is just an excuse to push for aggressive tax-and-control legislation, which unless it can be stopped in the Senate, is what they’re going to get.
/Mr Lynn

DJ (02:57:58) :
The decline of this site continues. Playing the person – if its not Hansen is Gore if not Gore its Hansen.

You’re right, thas been noticable since winning the award, many of the guest posters have been very poor, it will soon get back to normal I’m sure once Anthony has finished his station review. The constant right-wing agenda and political mud slinging being spouted by many of the ‘new’ people has been tedious so will welcome a return to good science based posts

Well, there is not any direct relation between coal use and life expectancy. Most of the improvement in average life expectancy over the past couple of centuries or so is a direct result of (a) improvements in public sanitation (no more open sewers), and (b) reductions in childhood mortality. There was a time (and it still obtains in the underdeveloped world) where a high percentage of children would not live to adulthood.
Clearly an industrialized society with a large surplus of energy can afford to devote resources to public health, mitigation of childhood diseases, and (most recently) elder longevity. Fossil fuels, including coal, have given us that large surplus, which the Algoracle and his Alarmist acolytes are now attempting to eliminate. The relationship between coal and life expectancy is not causal, but enabling.
/Mr Lynn

DJ: Other estimates in the U.S. (here, for instance) show low-income families paying between $750 and $950 per year for the proposed cap-and-trade regime. Higher income families would almost certainly be a good deal higher than that. That is not a “tiny” sum. If you assume it averages $1200/year for a family with median income, that’s 3% of their after-tax income. Maybe you consider that a “bargain”, but you’ll need to pardon those of us who do not. Especially those of us who think this is the most over-hyped “crisis” in history. For us, that’s just $1000 or $1500 or more per year out of pocket and into the hands of government bureaucrats who think they know how to spend our money better than we do.

It’s very simple:
Energy is life.
Cheap energy is prosperity.
Anyone opposing reducing energy expansion has a death wish.

Sandy
“Actually CO2 needs to be increased.”
That is about the gist of it. We are at a very long term low in CO2 concentrations. There is not a single known incidence of thermal runaway in the geologic record even with CO2 levels 10-20 times that of today.
The recent biomass surveys seem to indicate a growing amount of land-based plant matter (I haven’t heard of any results regarding ocean based biomass changes) despite the concerns of deforestation. Apparently the deforested land is re-cropped with non-tree vegetation overall. This is ‘corellating’ with a rise in CO2 concentrations of ~35% during roughly the same time period.
The Earth seems to benefit from the increase in plant ‘fertilizer’ and from a very minor increase in temperature over the past couple centuries.
There is so little evidence to the contrary. Why do we pick on CO2 as being ‘bad’? Would we rather have less biomass? Not be able to recover from deforestation? Be colder? Have shorter growing seasons?

Mary H, I don’t have a problem with the sometimes weird vitriolic diatribes against the opposite side, IE from you, DJ, or conservatives. And I don’t have a problem with the posts. While I visit this site everyday twice a day, it is not the first site I go to.
Here is my daily routine, twice a day.
Check satellite infrared weather systems at several km distances. Check the jet stream globally. Check ice extent and area globally as well as temperatures at the poles. Check snow pack. Check local weather predictions for several locations and elevations. Check sea surface temperatures globally. Check ozone. Check water vapor. Don’t check CO2 because it tells me nothing. Then I end up here. I do that twice a day. Sometimes I don’t check everything on my list. But I get around to them at least every other day. I never go here first.
Why you might ask? Because I want to form my own opinion about weather patterns and predictions. Tell me, what data sites do you check daily before talking about weather? I can give you my list of links if you like.

It’s quite correct to say that as the poorer nations get richer their birth rate will drop. Current estimates are that the population will stabilise at about 9 billion round about mid-century (give or take). But we can’t force that except by taking the sort of action that will enable them to improve their own conditions — better access to good health care and above all abundant clean water.
Unfortunately for them the eco-fascists don’t want that for reasons I have never quite fathomed. I suspect they don’t understand the equation.
Two things that will help in the long run are an increase in global CO2 levels to improve crop returns and the use of GM crops designed to produce in unfriendly conditions. I’m in favour of both because I reckon the Bangladeshis have just as much right to live till they’re 80 as I do.
Incidentally, Ms Hinge, since I’m UK-based I don’t have any sort of right/left bias as far as your politics are concerned and nor do I have any connections with Big Oil or Big Pharma or Big Anything Else. But as someone else said above, if Gore and Hansen want to make themselves the ball instead of just the player then they will get kicked.
I don’t know whether Hansen knows exactly how offensive his “trains of death” comment was to Europeans; I expect he does. That’s not just “playing the man”, Ms Hinge; that’s “playing” several million of them and over here we have long memories.

Coal without a doubt has improved the well being of people and was behind the Industrial Revolution. As the old C&O Railway film “Coal Bin of America” says “Coal is power”.There have been technological improvements with coal usage to generate electricity. I remember reading that back around a hundred years ago several pounds of coal were required to generate a certain amount of Kwh of electricity, by the 1970’s it was down to ounces of coal to generate that amount of Kwh.
Windmills, solar and waterwheels ain’t gonna do it. I mention waterwheels because that is how the very early factories in Waterbury,CT ran their operations. Rumor has it they were able to generate up to 750 horsepower.Now you know why they call the place Waterbury ;and, of course ,they generated their own power with coal later because it was cheaper and better than waterpower.And they didn’t have to build the factories next to the rivers and brooks anymore.

DJ (02:57:58) : As for a cost benefit analysis – real analysis using scientific methods shows the costs of reducing CO2 are tiny – eg
The cost analysis of the administration’s cap and trade scheme indicates that it will suck up 4% of the national GDP (at today’s productivity level) from the power companies alone. That cost will be passed on to the energy users — industry and the poor alike. The half trillion dollars that goes to the government from the scheme (not a “tiny” sum) will be applied to the deficit reduction plan. This inefficient movement of capital will have a profound negative effect on the economy. Perhaps econometric methods should be used in the analysis instead of scientific methods. The scientific method is showing the cap and trade scheme will not have an appreciable effect on the climate. The econometric analysis clearly concludes the scheme will be quite expensive. So, on balance, why do it?

The “tiny” cost that DJ speaks about is built on a LOT of assumptions.
The reason the cost is small is because supposedly we could make a heck of a lot of per person/building changes that will reduce emissions and also save us moneyover time (assumes with a $50 ton carbon tax as an incentive to make these changes).
The amount of savings is relatively minor per person and the up front costs are relatively high, but these barriers to adoption are essentially ignored, and the assumption is that virtually everyone makes these changes.
Then, these projected savings from increases in efficiency are used to offset the costs of CO2 savings activities which have increased costs over current methods (Wind, PV, CCS etc)
See page 20 of:
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pdf/US_ghg_final_report.pdf
Note the big savers are Commercial Electronics, Residential Electronics, Residential lighting, Commercial Lighting, Automotive Fuel Economy, and improvements in Shell construction for houses and businesses.
The NET of this is that virtually every sector of the economy would have to focus most, if not all, of their free available capital spending over the next 20 or so years on replacing old appliances, lighting or other forms of energy efficiency to make a scenario like this come true.
Arthur

So, on balance, why do it?
Why indeed.
Mark

Rossa (00:13:07) :
“If the EPA can categorize CO2 as a pollutant then in this virtual world that Hansen lives in we would all have to apply for licenses to breath out. So every year you could buy your right to breathe for whatever the current carbon credit exchange rate is.”
And consider for a moment the warning labels on every beer and soda container:
“Warning, the EPA has determined that carbon dioxide is a hazardous material. Ingesting this product which contains CO2 may cause life threatening symptoms including but not limited to effervescence in nasal passages and noisome expelling of gastric air.”

Mary Hinge,
I am one of those “new people”. I visit this site daily and I enjoy it immensely. I enjoy the science and the politics. I even enjoy the condescending views of some of the more arrogant posters. I am not a scientist, but I do have enough of a scientific mind to administer anesthesia to healthy and sick patients almost every day. As an anesthetist who deals with c02 during every anesthetic I find alot of the science and politics of c02 very interesting.

Ah, now I see, this is what tipping points are about. A thousand years ago, while we scandinavians were still vikings, there existed something called “ättestupa”, a steep slope where old folks in a family jumped out and ended their lives. Much cheeper than todays retirement plans. Just think of the huge savings those tipping points will generate! So from nowon tipping point = “ättestupa”.

[Snip – ad hom ]
[Hansen’s] statements especially about coal trains as death carriers; however, there are many other variables to consider when addressing life expectancy such as a much higher death rate in infancy in the early 20th Century, the introduction of antibiotics, and other advances in medicine.

Life expectancy, the most efficient energy sources, and wide spread access to the affluence efficient energy can bring are all inextricably intertwined. Coal remains essential as does oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy. We should continue their development in technologically cleaner versions as we invest in more efficient forms of renewables.
An important historical memory — and today in China and elsewhere — are that those living close to the production of energy in all its forms — mining, transportation, industrial and manufacturing transformations — have had to pay a price of shortened life spans for others’ longevity. Government can be very helpful not only by protecting citizens from private industry abuses, but also by helping to maintain a relatively equal playing field through regulations (if only our U.S. financial industry had been required to keep their regulations), testing the education of students so citizens can identify successful schools, providing access to health care in public-private partnership so that no one is left out, and investing in a society’s necessary infrastructure. (The military is a given for longevity in any society.) I guess these ideals show that I am a liberal — but one who wants science and representative democracy. I don’t see many, if any, liberals running government today. I cringe at “conservatives'” ideas of what went wrong with their ascendancy.
Regarding population decrease, I have no objection to this idea. I do believe that all societies and the earth’s flora and fauna would fare better. What no one has mentioned so far that is one key to a more reasonable population is the education, social protection, and access to resources of girls and women in every society. (At the same time I am not slighting boys and men.) If the developed world had used its affluence to support those societies that furthered these goals (and worked to influence or exclude from “humanitarian aid” those who did not), we would be in much different place today. And science rather than propaganda might be our ideal.
To Sam the Skeptic: Birth rates will not necessarily drop just because a society has more wealth. You must ask the questions: who owns the wealth; who owns women’s bodies; and is reproduction being put at the service of “increase-and-take-over-the-world” propaganda. Science is important in these matters as well.
To the DJs and Mary Hinges: Investigations of who wants what for which purposes are also in the service of scientific inquiry. Even more so when debate is squelched, data are manipulated, historical data are changed, and false — and easily proven false — theories are put forward as “settled science”.

Clearly an industrialized society with a large surplus of energy can afford to devote resources to public health, mitigation of childhood diseases, and (most recently) elder longevity. Fossil fuels, including coal, have given us that large surplus, which the Algoracle and his Alarmist acolytes are now attempting to eliminate. The relationship between coal and life expectancy is not causal, but enabling.

It’s similar to evolutionary paths from total vegetarian to omnivore. Eating meat provides more calories and protein, meaning the organism spends less time foraging for food and can pursue other matters.

Life expectancy in the U.S. is irrelevant. We’re rich.
I would like to see a graph of life expectancy in impoverished areas dependent on food aid from the US and the UN.
On the same graph plot the global cost of grain and the percent of grain used globally used to make ethanol.
Global starvation is today’s reality, and the believers in AGW are just making it worse.

Stefano (05:56:43) :

. . . Show me a species which can feed on coal and oil and radioactive rocks.

Well, a multi-cellular species, anyway! 😉
/Mr Lynn

Stephen Wilde
Don´t worry about us, third world countrymen. You know, nature is by far wiser than any of us, and it will take care of the population issue by reducing the amount of people in the NH.

MartinGAtkins (09:01:12) :
Stefano (05:56:43) :
” So Nature evolved a brain and a consciousness which could go beyond blind hunter gathering in a limited resource environment, an intelligence which could invent new resources. Show me a species which can feed on coal and oil and radioactive rocks.”
Gaia had us evolve because the earth was running out of CO2 and needed us to dig it all up again.
Maybe we are on our way to extinction like the dinosaurs.
When I was in college some fifty years ago the following joke went around:
Dinosaurs became extinct because the size of the brain was too small for the volume of the body it had to control.
Homo sapiens evolved.
Homo sapiens +car will become extinct because the brain is too small for the volume sapiens+car.

DJ, and Australia have it wrong. It will not cost $6 per household per week.
California (that state that knows ALL about global warming) has decreed that IT COSTS NOTHING AT ALL, in fact, IT SAVES MONEY to go green. In addition, new jobs are created, the economy roars, and we all sing kum-ba-yah. (I made up that last part about singing. The others are truly part of their claims).
Here are the links:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/cc.htm
Scoping Plan is at:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/scopingplan/document/scopingplandocument.htm
Economic Assessment is here, and see Appendix G:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/scopingplan/document/appendix2.pdf
Those interested can see my analyses at: (and other postings with AB 32 in the title)
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/ab-32-and-electric-power-sector.html
I should note that independent analyses of the Scoping Plan, conducted by economic experts, showed that the Scoping Plan is hopelessly optimistic. But, California forges ahead without any regard to what the experts publicly stated.
And Obama wants the national plan to mirror the California plan.

Jeff Alberts (08:52:57) :
You know I didn’t make that up (although it ought to be (SOYbean + LENTil) SOYLENT Corp., the name of the company that manufactured the food pellets in the film “Soylent Green”.
Here’s a review from Wikipedia. WIki sets the scene in the first sentence with a mention of global warming along with overpopulation in the year 2022 as the cause of mankind’s suffering. When I saw that I checked other reviews and none mentioned global warming using instead pollution and overpopulation. Novel was written in 1966, film made in 1973, I don’t think they had global warming in mind. Some Wiki contributor stuck it in!!!

P Folkens (23:55:22) :
“Didn’t the new administration and the Tom Dashle book (Critical) say that the elderly use too much of the nation’s health care dollar? They suggested that those resources should be redistributed to the younger set that ostensibly has many productive years ahead rather than the resource sucking of late retirement.”
I have an opinion which may run contrary to this concern. I’m a retired physician (got out while I still have a sense of humor). If denying health care for the elderly starts happening on a grand scale, I expect lifespan numbers to go up. It may be that the healthiest thing for old folks like me is to stay away from doctors as much as possible. Taking bushels of medications and undergoing invasive diagnostic procedures in an effort to make your lab tests approach a statistical ideal is a lousy way to live. Life can be just fine over here on the right side of the bell-shaped curve.
If you want to live better and longer, trade your uncomfortable dining room chairs for comfy swivel office chairs. Sit down with your family at meals, talk and laugh, find out what’s going on in each others’ lives. Have a glass of wine, and just enjoy each other while you still have each other. Push your worries aside, and listen to what people are saying. Take your time. Hold your opinions until asked. Notice what good people your family members are, and what that really means.
I’m not convinced that doctors can make you as an individual live a single day longer than your “allotted span”, but never forget: we can surely prolong your dying.
Henry

RJ Hendrickson (10:26:20) :
Amen! And they have the whole conventional pollution thing to deal with yet before they start thinking about co2.

Henry Phipps (10:25:39) :
…
I’m not convinced that doctors can make you as an individual live a single day longer than your “allotted span”, but never forget: we can surely prolong your dying.

Enjoyed and heartily agree with your philosophical comments.
Reminds me of the eulogy from the film “Being There” which ends “… and no accountant can audit life in our favor.” [or close to that anyway].

As far as life expectancy goes modern plumbing has contributed a significant percentage of the gains.
http://plumbing.1800anytyme.com/info/history_of_plumbing.php
Particularly important was the 1876 publication of George Waring’s landmark book, The Sanitary Drainage of Houses and Towns, along with various other books and articles explaining how to correctly design plumbing systems that worked the way they were supposed to. And thus began the good life as we know it today. Famed physician-writer, the late Dr. Lewis Thomas, former Chancellor of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, wrote in 1984: “There is no question that our health has improved spectacularly in the past century…One thing seems certain: It did not happen because of medicine, or medical science or even the presence of doctors.
Much of the credit should go to the plumbers and engineers of the Western world. The contamination of drinking water by human feces was at one time the single greatest cause of human disease and death for us; it remains so, along with starvation and malaria, for the Third World type Countries. Typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery were the chief threats to survival in the early years of the 19th century, mainly in New York City and highly crowded and populated areas, and when the plumbers and sanitary engineers had done their work in the construction of our cities these diseases began to vanish.”
Dr. Thomas also said, “One of my key points is to criticize our country’spolicy of building high-tech medical facilities in underdeveloped countries. What would benefit the Third World much more is decent plumbing.”
I would add that the chlorination of our drinking water was a large part of it too…
Mike Bryant

Smokey (11:08:26) :
So can you and your ~snip~ explain why temperatures are rising now, when all the indicators you and your minions spout out would mean the earth should be cooling rapidly?
Amongst the theories put forward on this site to explain why the earth should be cooling are low sun spot numbers/ solar minimum; -ive PDO; ENSO, whilst not a La Nina is very close. All of these should, according to what has been said on this site, be causing the earth to cool….it isn’t, so can you explain why this is happening?

anna v (11:02:43) :
I am sure that humans controlling the weather by controlling CO2 emmissions belongs to the rain dance gene.

I am trying to remove the image from my mind of an ostrich doing a rain dance! Take your head out of the sand and you might enjoy better rhythm.

E.M.Smith (01:37:17) :
That period around 1970 is mighty interesting.
Look at the period circa 1987. That’s when the speed limit increased to 70 mph. I can’t recall the figure, but it increased oil consumption immensely.
DJ (02:57:58) :
in the Australian context amounting to just $6 per household per week…. Similar results through the peer reviewed literature which you choose to ignore.
Actually, we know exactly what it will cost in the U.S., and you’re way off.
In Obama’s budget is a plan to raise $650/yr billion with cap and trade. Assuming 300 million population gives $2166 per person. Average houshold size around 3.5 gives $7583. Guess you missed that.

Smokey, LALALALA I can’t hear you. LALALA, I still can’t hear you.

Mary, please. When you start with a false premise, then your conclusion is false.
Um, no, this is not true, Smokey. False premises can lead to correct conclusions (not that hers is). Of course, a false premise followed by a correct conclusion in no way makes the premise any less false. There is a brief article on it at the Wiki if you wish to head over there.
Mark

Great link, Sam. Now I understand my denial is a sickness, and can only be cured by proper treatment. Maybe Mary and DJ can develop a 12 point program for us to follow.

Mary Hinge, something I’ve wondered is why for trends we look at 30 years?
Why not 3 or 300 or 3000 or 30000 ?
I gather some solar theories suggest we should be looking at cycles on the order of 200 years. And I gather a colleague of Mann’s wrote a book suggesting man’s influence on climate was detectable since the dawn of agriculture on the order of 10000 years.
Somebody somewhere chose 30 years. And if we have cooling for another 15 then maybe they should be talking about 60 years. Or longer. Or less. Or whatever.
Someone chose 30. Do you know why?

1)We admitted we were powerless over our denial—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2)We came to believe that Gore could restore us to sanity.
3)We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Gore as we understood Him.
4)We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5)We admitted to Gore, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6)We were entirely ready to have Gore remove all these defects of character.
7)We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8)We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9)We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10)We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11)We sought through reeducation and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Gore as we understood Him, asking only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12)Since we have had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we will try to carry this message to deniers, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Fight the damnable warmth!!!

Ben Lawson (14:33:17) :
It was James Hansen who likened coal to death camps. The chart shows that although the use of coal increased, the rate of deaths decreased. James Hansen has once again made wildly inaccurate claims. Why don’t you take correlation/causation issue up with him?

Stefano (05:56:43) wrote a post including: “Which is in itself already a homocentric stance; we are not humans separate from the planet and separate from Nature. We ARE Nature.”
A very fine piece, Stefano, which I applaud. Thank you.

Sorry, Moose. I’ll go down to the government commissary and put my name on the list to make my presentation to the federal bureau of low watt bulbs which bulbs I will receive “free” according to my needs.

Jim (06:23:00) wrote: “Why do we pick on CO2 as being ‘bad’?”
Because it can be measured, partly attributed to man, and therefore taxed, Jim.

James Hansen is very wrong …… again.
Anyone surprised?

Ben Lawson,
I think you missed the main point.Here is a quote about what James Hansen stated:
“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”
Indur stated a question:
“So what’s happened to US life expectancy as the number of coal fired death factories have multiplied and as the climate has gotten warmer?”
The Chart showed that DESPITE decades of increasing use of Coal.We are on average living longer than ever.
Indur goes on with this:
“As the above figure shows, US life expectancy at birth increased by 30.5 years, from 47.3 years to 77.8 years, between 1900 and 2005, while coal usage more than tripled. Carbon dioxide emissions in 2005 were nearly nine times the 1900 levels. And, of course, the climate has also gotten warmer (not shown). To appreciate the magnitude of this improvement in life expectancy, consider that the approximate life expectancy in pre-industrial societies varied from 25-35 years.”
It seems very clear that we are not hurting from the use of Coal.A primary source of electrical power.
Thus what James Hansen claims is nonsense.
I wonder how you can come up with a very different conclusion?

Mary Hinge (12:10:04) :
Amongst the theories put forward on this site to explain why the earth should be cooling are low sun spot numbers/ solar minimum; -ive PDO; ENSO, whilst not a La Nina is very close. All of these should, according to what has been said on this site, be causing the earth to cool….it isn’t, so can you explain why this is happening?
anna v (11:02:43) :
I am sure that humans controlling the weather by controlling CO2 emmissions belongs to the rain dance gene.
I am trying to remove the image from my mind of an ostrich doing a rain dance! Take your head out of the sand and you might enjoy better rhythm.
Sad. You must not realize how the caricature applies to yourself like a glove, just from your statement above that ignores natural cycles and the cooling that has started.

Ben Lawson (14:33:17) :
Yawn. Another attempt to define a possible correlation as a causation. The chart actually shows NO correlation between life expectancy and either coal consumption or CO2 emissions. Unless they all kind of go upwards, most of the time, sort of, except differently counts as statistically relevant.
Backpedaling a bit by saying that the life expectancy increase “was enabled in one way or another by the prosperity fueled in large part by coal and fossil fuel consumption” is rather slippery too. You could make a much stronger argument that improvements in public sanitation alone would be a better fit. Not to mention those other energy-irrelevant areas like medicine, diet, “old-fashioned” pollution, education, etc.”
Public sanitation could be applied because there was enough energy available to apply it. All improved solutions in human societies take extra energy to be applied. Without the cheap energy available to the western societies, we would be at the same level as the third world countries on all counts. energy=money really.

Roger: “…and we all sing kum-ba-yah. (I made up that last part about singing…”
I’ll try to break this to you gently, Roger. Kumbaya *is* part of the plan. Even as we converse the White House is working on a directive that will require the recitation of at least three verses per day by every American.
Believe me, I’m as gutted about this imposition as you are, but we all have to make sacrifices for Holy Mother Earth, and aesthetic preference is simply no excuse not to participate in this sacred communal activity.
On the positive side, those with elitist musical tastes might be able to secure permission to pay for a proxy to perform the service.
In the meantime, after me: “Something’s warming, Lord…”

anna v (21:31:12) :
Public sanitation could be applied because there was enough energy available to apply it.

Errr, so what about the Romans? Marvelous race the Romans………….

Public sanitation costs money. A lot of money. That is why many Third World countries still lack it. Cheap energy is what enables many, many life saving, and life extending technologies. Life expectancy followed the labor saving technologies enabled by coal. Google “coal” to see how it was regarded a hundred years ago.
By the way, If the Romans had had access to coal, gasoline and the internal combustion, we would still be speaking Latin. Sorry Mary, that one don’t fly either.

The degree to which a society can support people in the sciences, engineering, military, business, arts, and (yes) government is directly related to the amount of surplus resources available, once the basic needs of the population (food and simple housing) are taken care of. It was the utilization of fossil fuels, principally coal, that leveraged human effort, made the industrial revolution possible, and created the conditions we see today, where only a small percentage of the population is engaged in providing the basic necessities of life. It is somewhat simplistic, but the evolution of culture can be seen as the evolution of energy utilization (see the works of Marvin Harris).
For us to eschew the use of coal, of which we still have plenty, without an economical substitute, and to do so on the highly dubious ground that CO2 emissions present a hazard for the future, would be the height of self-destructive folly. For the next century, the growth of the American and world economies is going to depend on increasing the amount of energy we generate, from every source, especially coal.
/Mr Lynn

Mary Hinge
I have asked you and Joel nicely several times before on what basis you believe global temperature data back to 1850 has any scientific validity. If I ask you nicely again can you explain how a tiny number of unreliable, random, constantly chaging stations should be used to underpin what is supposed to be a scientific theory? Thank you.
TonyB

Before responding to Ben Lawson (14:33:17; 20:20:50), I must thank Sunsettommy, April Coggins, anna v, Mike Bryant, Chuck Bradley, Mr Lynn, Stefan, and others who either came to my defense or tried to educate Ben by pointing out the errors in his ways, etc.
Ben Lawson’s suggestion that improvements in public sanitation, medicines, nutrition, education, etc. may have a better fit to improvements in life expectancy than coal usage or CO2 emissions, may or may not be correct — more on this below — but his claim that I claimed a correlation or causation between coal usage or CO2 emissions is simply incorrect. Specifically what I said was that

“According to my eyeball analyzer there seems
to be a better correlation between life expectancy and coal use (and CO2 emissions) or their logarithms than that between temperature increase (either for the US or the world) on the one hand and, on the other hand, coal use (and CO2 emissions) or their logarithms.” [Emphasis added.]

But let’s not belabor the nuances of the English language, and turn instead to the broader issue of the proximate causes of the increases in life expectancy. To quote from the original post:

“While the increase in life expectancy is not directly due to greater coal use or CO2 emissions, much of it was enabled in one way or another by the prosperity fueled in large part by coal and fossil fuel consumption …” [Emphasis added.]

The above makes no claim that either coal or CO2 usage is the proximate cause – that’s an inference that Ben Lawson jumped to on his own. But it does claim that whatever agencies caused it, they were “enabled” by coal/fossil fuel use.
What precisely do I mean by “enabled”? Let’s elucidate in the context of some of the possible causes of higher life expectancy listed by Ben.
First, Ben mentioned sanitation. And I agree it’s an important factor. In fact, I would lump it with safe water (because one of the major functions of sanitation is to reduce water contamination so that it is more fit for human consumption or human contact). But what enables sanitation and access to safe water to consumers?
With respect to sanitation, waste water has to be collected, then treated and, finally, discharged. With respect to safe water, water has also to be collected, treated and then delivered to consumers. In most places, collecting and moving water requires an expenditure of energy to run pumps and other equipment (unless one is fortunate to be in one of the few locations where gravity does the entire trick). Energy is also needed to operate many of the processes employed in sanitation and water treatment plants. In the U.S., more likely than not, energy consumption means fossil fuels, and if there were no fossil fuel energy, there would be fewer central sanitation and water treatment plants.
Next, let’s consider nutrition, which I would lump together with food. Indeed without sufficient food, our immune systems would be compromised and mortality would be higher for all age groups. But what makes it possible to grow and distribute sufficient food and nutrition to the population? A short list includes nitrogen fertilizer (remember the Haber Process?), transportation of agricultural inputs from producers to farmers, transportation of agricultural outputs from farmers to the eventual consumers, and farm machinery. Each of these is enabled by fossil fuels. Without them, farmers would not have enough surplus food to meet the demands of the total population, and many more of us would be hungry, malnourished and susceptible to death and disease. Also, absent energy consumption, there would be virtually no fresh produce outside of the growing season which, of course, is a recipe for poor nutrition.
Third, let’s examine education. [I would generalize this to “human capital,” which is indeed a critical factor.] We are all more knowledgeable, although not necessarily better educated (he says with a smile), in part because we have cheap and good lighting at our disposal. Without such lighting (made possible by electricity or fossil fuels such as gas, propane, or oil once we got beyond whale oil and tallow), there would be fewer hours in the day that we could put to good use. Without fossil fuels, primary and secondary education would probably not have been K-to-12 but K-to-15 or K-to-16 to impart students with the same amount of information. Of course, without fossil fuels, chances are that children wouldn’t have either the time or the (personal) energy to get a lot of education, particularly considering all the hours they would have had to spend doing chores, raising crops, cutting wood for fuel, drawing water, feeding the animals that would literally have been the workhorses on the farm, washing clothes by hand, etc. In fact, without cheap and readily available energy, the labor of children would be a critical asset for survival of the family that wouldn’t be allowed to go to waste. Children would be put to work as soon as they could to watch over a goat, feed the horses, lift a bag, or sow a sock. Getting an education wouldn’t be at the top of the “to-do” list for children. [Has it occurred to you, Ben, why child labor, for example, exists in poor agrarian societies, but I digress.]
Moreover, it takes lots of energy to make paper, without which most of us wouldn’t have text books or notepaper which until very recently were absolutely critical to education. Today we may be able to get by through reliance on computers and IT, but that too is enabled by cheap and accessible energy. Similarly, energy is critical to manufacturing lunch boxes that children drag to school, whether they are made of aluminum, plastic or cardboard. Trivial as this may seem, the notion that adequate sustenance is critical to education is a cardinal rationale for the school lunch program. Notably, manufacture of paper, cardboard, aluminum and plastic are among the most energy-intensive industries.
Fourth, let’s consider medicines and, more generally, medical advances. How do the medicines that we consume get to us? That requires transportation (and energy consumption). Did your mother, Ben, deliver you in the relatively safe and clean environment of a hospital? How did she get there, and bring you back? Ever been in a hospital without a physical plant? Would you go to a hospital that lacked electricity? Why do hospitals generally have back-up power in case of emergency? Without readily accessible and cheap energy, access to medicines would be poorer, and medical establishments wouldn’t function as well as they do (or don’t, depending on your point of view).
Virtually anything that one consumes is associated with some energy consumption, if for no reason other than the fact that unless one grows or makes it oneself, relatively cheap transportation is necessarily involved. And even if one grows or makes it on site, energy probably was used in its production. Even our loved ones contain some energy, because they are built from the food they consume, which as already noted, requires energy. Similarly, virtually everything that one does requires electricity or some other form of energy. And in the U.S., energy is and has been for over a century almost synonymous with fossil fuels (barring the portion that nuclear contributes). Hence it’s accurate to say that whatever the proximate causes of the increases in life expectancy from 1900 to 2005, none of them would have operated without ample use of coal or other fossil fuels.
Finally, I should note that there is a relatively good correlation between life expectancy and the logarithm of GDP per capita, as noted in the book, The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives, etc. And GDP per capita is not unrelated to energy use.
Incidentally, the factors discussed above are noted in that book as significant contributors to the “Cycle of Progress” which enables — that word again — economic development, and increases in human capital and technological prowess that have helped improve our standard of living (including life expectancy).

Indur Goklany (20:24:13): Thank you, Indur! Gained much to think on from your essay.

This is true, but the fact that most of us ignore is the fact that the misanthropes don’t care about the improved human condition. Rememeber, we are destructive parasites of the earth to the Gaia worshippers. They want us eliminated, ergo movies and TV shows about what life would be like without humans.
Articles like this enrage the sociopath misanthropists, because they hate all humanity except for themselves.

“Truth be told, they probably hate themselves, too.”
If they hated themselves, they’d all off themselves to lead the way to a “healthier” planet. Seeing that they refuse to do so implies to my feeble, conservative mind that they hate others but love themselves. Or they think they’ll be spared in any economy-choking carbon free regime.

Indur Goklany (20:24:13) :
Excellent post, and good summary of the enormous benefits that cheap and accessible energy bring to human society and development.
If the Luddites demonstrating in DC the other day, not to mention the millions more who are gulled into thinking that just turning off the lights is going to ‘save the planet’, have their way, we will be forced back to the days of back-breaking poverty, poor sanitation, and rampant disease—and the elimination of probably 9/10ths of the human population.
We need to counter these fools. “Drill here! Drill now!” had some brief popularity back during the Presidential campaign when gasoline crested $4 a gallon. But already that is forgotten. We need a political party that will not kowtow to the Luddites, but will campaign forcefully and constantly for more energy, more prosperity, more growth, and the continued evolution of technological man. The Solar System, and eventually the stars, await, but not for the timid.
/Mr Lynn