9/11 exposed the dangers of “failure of imagination”. Really!

Baloney!

It is impossible to generate all scenarios which may be the next severe  terrorist attack causing mass casualties by a particularly malicious, suicidal and fanatic terrorist group!

Enduring lessons are preemptive measures against terrorist groups, active targeting of any country or individual that finances or supports terrorism and, of course, active monitoring/surveillance of terrorists. I think, we can learn a lot from e.g. Israel.

For the sake of humanity, in the 21st century we need to get rid of rogue countries like Russia under Putin the Terrible, North Korea, and Iran. These countries are warmongers and/or sponsors of terrorism!

"Which lesson feels most urgent today? For senior policy researcher David Luckey, it’s how 9/11 exposed the dangers of a failure of imagination, “specifically the inability to anticipate how adversaries might exploit emerging or unexplored vulnerabilities.”

That lesson resonates 25 years on, he says, as the world grapples with many new threats. ..."

"9/11 exposed the dangers of “failure of imagination,” specifically the inability to anticipate how adversaries might exploit emerging or unexplored vulnerabilities. Today, as we confront the intersection of AI and biological or chemical weapons, that lesson is more urgent than ever."

25 Years After 9/11: Lessons for Securing the Homeland | RAND

Science vs. Subjectivity in Environmental and climate Research articles

Food for thought! This research confirms that climate change and the environment are treated by too many scientists more like modern religions than science!

What is particularly disturbing is that subjective science articles may get more future citations than more neutral ones.

Most of these research results have been well known or strongly suspected for decades.

"... about how journal authors use subjective and emotional language when describing environmental or climate change–related issues more often than when writing about other topics.

Looking at 170,000 articles published between 1990 and 2023, they find that “subjective language is more prevalent in articles focused on environmental topics relative to non-environmental topics: by 12 percent in economics and by 42 percent in science.” They also find articles that use subjective language receive more citations than those that do not."

SSRN = Social Science Research Network

From the abstract:

"Objective science aims to uncover truths about environmental conditions, including those related to emission trends, biodiversity loss, climate change, and their economic costs.

When and why do scientists use subjective language to describe these conditions with bias, emotion, or advocacy? To shed light, we study determinants and trends in subjective language within the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions of over 170,000 peer-reviewed articles published during 1990-2023 in top economics and science journals.

Using machine learning to label and score text by subjectivity, we find that subjective language is more prevalent in articles focused on environmental topics relative to non-environmental topics: by 12% in economics and by 42% in science.

After accounting for factors such as article age, author experience, number of authors, and journal quality, higher subjectivity scores associate positively with future academic citations in both science and economics, especially if the article is focused on an environmental topic.

These findings, which imply subjective language has been rewarded in the academy, are consistent with informal theory suggesting subjective language will be used more frequently by scientists when expected rewards are high and risks are low."

Iran Is Still Losing, Badly

Science versus Subjectivity in Environmental Research

The richer get richer – not just materially, but socially | Cornell Chronicle. Really!

So what! Especially in America, an individual (no matter rich or poor or background) with skills and talent is most likely quickly spotted and given an opportunity.

It also depends very much on the individual him- or herself to make better "social connections" in life!

Is sociology a pseudoscience?

"... This familiar example of elite network influence proves the adage that it’s not what you know but who you know that matters. And such disparities in social connection are far more pervasive throughout daily life than generally recognized, Cornell sociologists argue in a new open-access book, “Friends and Fortunes: Social Capital Inequality in America.”

Inequality in social ties is as stark as income inequality in the United States, the researchers say – and the two are mutually reinforcing. ...

“Why should there be differences in access to valuable social connections? Are they not free?” the authors write. “One would hope so. But the data tell a different story.” ...

explain how social networks subtly feed hidden systems of power, prestige, wealth and, ultimately, life chances. ..."

The richer get richer – not just materially, but socially | Cornell Chronicle

Friends and Fortunes Social Capital Inequality in America

A satellite foundation model for improved wealth monitoring. Really!

When top ML & AI researchers naively think they can improve social outcomes or social improvements! In this case it is Stefano Ermon of Stanford University! Lets' not forget that the brilliant physicist Albert Einstein was a stupid socialist!

This paper is most likely a joke! How easy is it for wealthy individuals to fool this model?

Will this kind of wealth modeling not be abused by greedy governments to tax the rich? The rich will vote with their feet etc. to avoid extra tax burdens.

From the abstract:

"Poverty statistics guide social policy, but in many low- and middle-income countries, censuses and household surveys that collect these data are costly, infrequent, quickly outdated, and sometimes error-prone.

Satellite imagery offers global coverage and the possibility of predicting economic livelihoods at scale, yet existing approaches to predicting livelihoods with imagery or other non-traditional data often fail to reliably identify local-level variation and, as we show, degrade under temporal shift.

Here we introduce Tempov, a satellite foundation model pretrained by self-supervision on three million bi-temporal Landsat pairs and adapted with parameter-efficient fine-tuning to sparse survey labels. The model enables large-scale, high-resolution wealth mapping and dynamic measurement, including zero-shot nowcasting up to a decade after observed labels, retrospective hindcasting, and decadal change tracking, while outperforming existing neural network and geospatial foundation-model baselines.

In low-label regimes, Tempov achieves competitive accuracy with only 10% of survey samples, indicating substantially reduced dependence on expensive label collection.

The model further generalizes across populous countries within and outside Africa, and scales to a unified Africa-wide model with strong continent-level performance (, ), from which we generate high-resolution decadal maps of wealth and wealth changes for the African continent.

Analysis of these maps shows large variation in recent economic performance both within and across countries. Our open-source approach provides a pathway to timely, scalable, low-cost monitoring of wealth and poverty from routinely collected satellite data."

[2604.23166] A satellite foundation model for improved wealth monitoring

When the once prestigious AAAS again promotes demagoguery and fallacies

Bad news! What a shame and pseudoscience by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)!

Because of the global reduction in air pollution, now we have to reflect the "sun's radiation back to space"? What a nonsense!

"Global warming [???] is bad news for polar bears, seals, and walruses; the Arctic sheets of seasonal sea ice they frequent have been on the decline for decades.

An ambitious idea seeks to intervene: sea ice thickening [???], where engineers drill through the ice and pump up ocean water to freeze on top in an attempt to delay summertime melting. If successful, the extra ice would also make the poles brighter, reflecting more of the sun’s radiation back to space [???] and lessening a dangerous climate feedback loop.

Like all geoengineering ideas, it’s controversial. But field trials have begun, and the first results are out: while pumping thickens ice, those gains don’t stick around. ..."

"A simple idea [??] underpins an audacious intervention to augment Arctic sea ice and slow the climate feedback loop accelerating its disappearance. Drill holes through a floe, pump seawater onto its surface, and let the cold do the rest. The first results from two field tests show the technique can thicken the ice. But they also show those gains don’t last. ..."

ScienceAdviser

Artificially engineered sea ice grows—but tests are too small to combat melting "First Arctic trials show pumped seawater can bulk up ice, but results aren’t lasting—and may not scale"

The case for a new economic theory of how markets really work without the Invisible Hand. Really!

Food for thought! However, I am not getting smart out of the abstract of this research article. It sounds like gibberish to me!

Is it possible that the authors here wrongly connected market clearing with the Invisible Hand? I bet!

Service economy is not a new concept! It has been around for several decades. So what is new here? Well, manufacturing is still very much alive and kicking too, because humans can not live by services alone, products are still needed.

"... In the real world, it is rare that markets “clear”—meaning that all the products reach customers thanks to the balancing of the invisible hand. Businesses must often commit to what they will charge and how much they will produce before they know what the actual demand will look like. 

A Model for the Service Economy

While traditional economic theories were built in an era of manufacturing, this research is particularly descriptive of the modern service industry [???], which now dominates the U.S. economy. ..."

From the abstract:

"Modern theories of the business cycle do not allow for the simultaneous rational choice of both prices and quantities, instead assuming that an “invisible hand” determines one of these variables to clear markets.

In this paper, we develop a macroeconomic framework in which both prices and quantities are chosen directly by firms, and exchange is both voluntary and efficient. Because of uncertainty about demand and productivity, individual product markets can be in excess supply or rationed.

The absence of market-clearing changes pricing and production in qualitatively important ways: markups are no longer determined solely by the elasticity of demand, and higher uncertainty reduces production and increases markups.

In equilibrium, production in rationed markets has a negative aggregate demand externality on demand in slack markets.

Differently from New Keynesian economies, monetary shocks propagate by reducing economic slack, raising aggregate labor productivity and consumption, while uncertainty shocks act as stagflationary cost-push shocks. We integrate our theory of disequilibrium in a dynamic, rational-expectations “New Old Keynesian Model” and demonstrate its implications for the business cycle."

The case for a new theory of how markets really work | Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics "A new framework shows how uncertainty and real world constraints break traditional models and offers a more realistic theory of pricing inflation and productivity."

Pricing And Production Without The Invisible Hand

The implications of overshooting 1.5 °C on Earth system tipping elements—a review

Again a science journal publishes some rubbish about global warming! Fact is that climatology is a very complex science that we still do not understand very well. 

When pseudo scientists engage in alarmism and hysteria like with this article! Was this done for more funding?

1.5 °C is a joke by charlatans not scientists! Nobody is able to measure global atmospheric temperature with such accuracy!

"Tipping elements" or "tipping points" what is that? Smells a lot like junk science!

This article appears to repeat a litany of claims by environmentalists like "deforestation in the Amazon" etc.

From the abstract:

"Due to insufficient emission reductions in recent years, it is increasingly likely that global warming will exceed the 1.5 °C temperature limit in the late 2020s or 2030s. As a result, several Earth system tipping elements [???] could, at least temporarily, have their tipping points [???] surpassed, posing risks of large-scale and profound structural change.

Tipping does not always occur immediately upon crossing such a critical threshold. If the length of time the driver is beyond the critical level is short enough, tipping could still be avoided for some slow-responding elements of the climate system.

An improved understanding is therefore needed of whether tipping remains avoidable, for which systems, and under what conditions. Here, we review how minimising the magnitude and duration of any temperature overshoot beyond 1.5 °C could decrease tipping risks.

Tipping elements with fast response times, such as warm-water coral reefs, are especially vulnerable to overshoot. In contrast, those with slow response times, such as polar ice sheets, may be less sensitive to temporary overshoot. Potential interactions between tipping elements and additional human pressures, such as deforestation in the Amazon or pollution and overfishing of coral reef habitats, may further lower tipping points, narrowing the range of overshoot trajectories that can still avoid it.

The vulnerability of many tipping elements, even under shorter overshoot conditions, underscores that global warming must peak below 2 °C [???] above pre-industrial levels, return to below 1.5 °C as quickly as possible (i.e. within this century), and to around 1 °C thereafter to limit tipping point risks."

The implications of overshooting 1.5 °C on Earth system tipping elements—a review - IOPscience

Fig. 2. Overshooting 1.5 °C risks crossing Earth system tipping points. Illustrative temperature overshoot pathways, exceeding and then returning to below 1.5 °C (solid black line) and other stabilisation pathways (dashed black lines), dependent on uncertainties in future emissions and Earth system feedbacks.

Why are Homo sapiens the only species of human left? Really!

Absolutely astonishing this Christ Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London did not mention genetics at all.

Is it not possible that e.g. Neanderthals mated with Homo Sapiens etc. Well, there is evidence for that.

1,200 Year-Old Ice cores Reveal Truth Behind Ancient Civilization’s Collapse | BBC. Really!

This video awfully reeks of pseudoscience! Drought in the northern hemisphere and only the Mayans were affected according to one character in the surviving writings of the Mayans! Please try again!

Settling the Debate on Whether Green Investing Pays. It is slightly negative. No greenium for ESG!

Yale University admits it! Common sense and reality are hard to beat!

And this despite massive government promotion and subsidies!

What are "brown assets" anyway??? This study smells like junk/pseudo science.

"... In a new study ... replicated several papers from the green finance literature based on different measures of an asset’s “greenness,” testing their methodology with realized stock returns—that is, the actual profit or loss from stock sales—in multiple markets around the world. But they found that the results were sensitive to the specific measure of greenness and varied substantially from market to market. So the researchers instead proposed their own methodology for constructing a more comprehensive—and useful—green score, and moved from using backward-looking realized returns to forward-looking expected returns. 

The researchers found that their own green score, which they constructed by averaging key greenness measures from leading data providers, revealed a small cost of investing in climate-friendly stocks, meaning that investors is expected to get 0.50% less in returns each year when investing greenest tercile of stocks relative to the brownest. Corporate bonds and sovereign bonds displayed similar patterns as their greenness increased. ‌..."

From the abstract:

"The greenium (the expected return of green securities relative to brown) is a central impact measure for ESG investors. Replicating the literature’s wide range of equity greenium estimates based on realized returns, we find that these are not robust to changing the greenness measure or time period. Instead, we propose a robust green score combined with forward-looking expected returns, yielding a more precisely estimated annual equity greenium of -25 basis points per standard deviation increase in greenness. The greenium is more negative in greener countries and over time. Finally, we provide greeniums for corporate bonds, weighted-average costs of capital, and sovereign bonds."

Settling the Debate on Whether Green Investing Pays ‌‌ | Yale Insights "Does climate-friendly investing earn a higher return? In a new study, Yale SOM’s Theis Jensen and his co-authors find that the “greenium”—the return from green investments relative to brown ones—is slightly negative. He says that’s actually good news for the planet."

In Search of the True Greenium (open access)

To curb plastic pollution, we need to do these four things. Really!

The alarmism and hysteria about plastics is unbearable! It is being used/abused like the global warming hoax and climate change religion to impose big government!

And this ideology and indoctrination or pseudo science is spread by none other than the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Interesting also how these pseudo scientists try to link plastic pollution to climate change! Nice try!

Most of the authors of this study are affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. Does this ring a bell?

Alert: Plastophobia is a serious disorder. Please seek immediate medical help!

Like the global warming hoax, this research also relies on what most likely are junk computer model simulations into the future.

Certainly more research is needed to find better ways to break down plastics and/or to convert them back into useful precursors. Maybe that could be e.g. incentivised as an opportunity for private businesses. I just blogged e.g. here about the catalysis of so called forever plastics (PFAS).

"Ever since the invention of plastics, humanity has been littering the planet with them. Plastic pollution has become such a huge, global issue that governments large and small have sought solutions. Now, a sophisticated model has weighed the effects of the most common proposals, finding that a combination of four strategies could reduce plastic pollution by 91% by 2050.

First, the team built a comprehensive database of the plastic lifecycle, including production, consumption, and end-of-life management, from already-available sources around the world. Then, using machine learning, they looked at how eight policy options being discussed currently might impact plastic pollution.

The single most effective option was to mandate a 40% minimum recycled content for any newly manufactured plastics,
followed by enforcing limits on new plastic production. Those two strategies plus a packaging tax and investment in waste management were the most effective combination, the team found. ...

The study arrives just as final negotiations on a global plastics treaty are about to be held in South Korea. ..."

From the abstract:

"Plastic production and plastic pollution negatively affect our environment, environmental justice, and climate change. Using detailed global and regional plastics datasets coupled with socio-economic data, we employ machine learning to predict that, without intervention, annual mismanaged plastic waste will nearly double to 121 Mt (100 - 139 Mt 95% CI) by 2050. Annual greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic system are projected to grow by 37% to 3.35 Gt CO2 equivalent (3.09 - 3.54 CO2e) over the same period. The United Nations plastic pollution treaty presents a unique opportunity to reshape these outcomes. We simulate eight candidate treaty policies and find that just four could together reduce mismanaged plastic waste by 91% (86% - 98%) and gross plastic-related greenhouse gas emissions by one third."

ScienceAdvisor

Pathways to reduce global plastic waste mismanagement and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (open access)

Fig. 4. Projected Impacts of Potential Policies.

It’s Actually a Huge Failure That We Can’t Control Hurricanes

Very recommendable! The article offers some background/overview on past efforts to control weather.

Yes, it is indeed astonishing that at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we humans are still not able to prevent hurricanes or tornadoes from causing death and injuries to humans and damages to humans structures. That is true irrespective of facts like that human structures are often built in flooding or disaster prone areas (e.g. in Florida).

It also tells you that our knowledge about weather and climate are still very limited. That is one reason among others why Global Warming is a hoax and Climate Change is a religion!

It’s Actually a Huge Failure That We Can’t Control Hurricanes | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

20th-century gains in human life expectancy are slowing down in 10 wealthy countries or the Implausibility of radical life extension in the twenty-first century. Really!

What a nonsense! You got to love alarmism and hysteria! Of course, several news media lapped up this incredible story!

Just the title of the study (see below) is already ridiculous! I am not sure why this study was accepted for publication! It pretends to forecast the 21st century!!!

Just the fact that we are at the cusp of the AI revolution tells you that healthy longevity probably well beyond 100 years is within reach in the next 10-20 years.

I bet, cancer will be history in about 10-15 years! 

"20th-century gains in human life expectancy are slowing down—rising only six and a half years since 1990, per a Nature Aging study of 10 wealthy countries, hinting that the human lifespan is reaching a limit. The Independent"

From the abstract:

"Over the course of the twentieth century, human life expectancy at birth rose in high-income nations by approximately 30 years, largely driven by advances in public health and medicine. Mortality reduction was observed initially at an early age and continued into middle and older ages. However, it was unclear whether this phenomenon and the resulting accelerated rise in life expectancy would continue into the twenty-first century. Here using demographic survivorship metrics from national vital statistics in the eight countries with the longest-lived populations (Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland) and in Hong Kong and the United States from 1990 to 2019, we explored recent trends in death rates and life expectancy. We found that, since 1990, improvements overall in life expectancy have decelerated. Our analysis also revealed that resistance to improvements in life expectancy increased while lifespan inequality declined and mortality compression occurred. Our analysis suggests that survival to age 100 years is unlikely to exceed 15% for females and 5% for males, altogether suggesting that, unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century."

Global Health NOW: Transportation Justice in Music City; The New Fight Against Fistula; and Health Workers Traumatized With Nowhere to Turn

Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century (open access)

Police stop more Black drivers, while speed cameras issue unbiased tickets − new study from Cornell U and Rutgers U and others. Really!

This annoying and tiresome nonsense of systemic racism obsession by U.S. professors! Another piece of pseudoscience!

The headline of this article by these professors is already a lie! The tickets were not at all unbiased as they document in their research (see below). Shame on these professors!

This propaganda and demagoguery was even published in the prestigious PNAS!

Notice again the ideology and indoctrination of Black spelled with a capital B. These researchers also use White as if to show equity!

The PNAS research article clearly states that speed camera enforcement also confirmed that black drivers are disproportionally cited! Are the cameras racist or are they placed with racist intent?

No explanation provided why traffic stops surged!

"... Meanwhile, traffic stops have surged in Chicago, rising from less than 200,000 in 2016 to over 570,000 in 2023. And much like stop and frisk, police disproportionately stop Black drivers in Chicago, according to our latest study examining racial bias in traffic enforcement. ..."

So what! What if more black drivers find it cool to drive fast or prefer certain roads to drive fast? And so on ...

" ... Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road. ...

How many of the police officers involved are black or Hispanic? Were the black drivers perhaps more noticeable in their driving behavior or perhaps more risky drivers that caught the attention of police officers?

"... For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops. ..."

From the significance and abstract:

"Significance

This study pioneers in mapping the racial composition of roads. Our findings highlight a disproportionate rate of citations for moving violations among Black drivers through both speed camera enforcement but more so via police stops, challenging the neutrality of police traffic stops and suggesting a racial bias in enforcement practices. This research underscores the need for a more equitable traffic enforcement system and opens avenues for future investigations into the biases ingrained in traffic stop locations and camera placements.

Abstract

This paper exploits the potential of Global Positioning System datasets sourced from mobile phones to estimate the racial composition of road users, leveraging data from their respective Census block group. The racial composition data encompasses approximately 46 million trips in the Chicago metropolitan region. The research focuses on the relationship between camera tickets and racial composition of drivers vs. police stops for traffic citations and the racial composition in these locations. Black drivers exhibit a higher likelihood of being ticketed by automated speed cameras and of being stopped for moving violations on roads, irrespective of the proportion of White drivers present. The research observes that this correlation attenuates as the proportion of White drivers on the road increases. The citation rate measured by cameras better matches the racial composition of road users on the links with cameras than do stops by police officers. This study therefore presents an important contribution to understanding racial disparities in moving violation stops, with implications for policy interventions and social justice reforms."

Police stop more Black drivers, while speed cameras issue unbiased tickets − new study from Chicago

The racial composition of road users, traffic citations, and police stops (open access)

Laufen Klimamodelle zu heiß? Ganz klar!

Empfehlenswert!

Light pollution is shrinking the brains of city-dwelling spiders, study says. Really!

How much can a small brain shrink? 😊 

Will the brains swell again if we were to turn off city lights at night? 😊

Light pollution is also one of the terms of art of propaganda & demagoguery! The history of (often unfounded) complaints about night time light pollution is decades long and voluminous!

A case of alarmism and hysteria? Probably!

Of course, this study was picked up by the leftist The Guardian and other leftist leaning outlets! In this case, it was spread by the famous Royal Society!

"Light pollution is shrinking the brains of city-dwelling spiders in ways that could affect their ability to climb and hunt, according to new research.

The study published in the journal Biology Letters found exposing juvenile garden orb weaving spiders to light pollution reduced their brain development, particularly in an area used for vision. ..."

From the abstract:

"Artificial light at night (ALAN) is an increasingly pervasive pollutant that alters animal behaviour and physiology, with cascading impacts on development and survival. Recent evidence links exposure to ALAN with neural damage, potentially due to its action on melatonin synthesis, a powerful antioxidant. However, these data are scarce and taxonomically limited. Here, we used micro-CT to test the effects of short-term ALAN exposure on brain volumes in the Australian garden orb-weaving spider (Hortophora biapicata), a species commonly found in urban areas and, specifically, around street lights. We found that short-term ALAN exposure was linked to reductions in the volumes of brain structures in the primary eye visual pathway, potentially as a consequence of oxidative stress or plastic shifts in neural investment. Although the effects of ALAN were subtle, they provided new insights into potential mechanisms underpinning the behavioural and physiological impacts of ALAN in this important urban predator."

Light pollution is shrinking the brains of city-dwelling spiders, study says | Environment | The Guardian

Credits: The Royal Society: Public Newsletter

The effects of artificial light at night on spider brains (open access)

Figure 1. Schematic for the central nervous system (dorsal view) of H. biapicata. 

Bat Declines Linked to increased Infant Mortality in the U.S. Really!

Seems to be a case of pseudo science! This research seems to be driven by ideological goals and personal preferences of the scientist and not by science!

I have serious doubts that this study would pass scrutiny! We are talking here about 121 infant deaths per year across the entire U.S. between 2006-2017. The author did not explicitly rule out e.g. if there were any serious child disease epidemics during this 11 year period that may have caused excessive deaths etc. On average there were 70 million children total per year during this period. Infant mortality is roughly 20 thousand per year in 2022.

"A “groundbreaking” study showing the connection between bats’ decline in the U.S. and infant mortality is the latest to demonstrate the stark toll of imbalanced ecosystems. 

According to the research, published last week in Science, a decline in bat populations due to a fungal disease led farmers in 245 counties to increase their use of insecticides by 31% to combat an increase in insect activity.

In those same counties, infant mortality rose by ~8%—accounting for 1,334 infant deaths—from 2006 to 2017. ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

White-nose syndrome has caused declines in bat species across North America. Because bats typically prey on agricultural insect pests, this decline can be treated as a natural experiment to quantify the costs associated with the loss of an important ecosystem service. Frank used quasi-experimental methods to investigate how insecticide use can compensate for the loss of natural pest control from bats by considering both the economic and health costs of insecticides (see the Policy Forum by Larsen et al.). County-level insecticide use and infant mortality due to internal causes both increased after the emergence of white-nose syndrome, whereas farms’ crop revenue decreased. This study provides an example of how biodiversity loss affects human well-being and presents observational methods for quantifying those costs.

Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION

...  Specifically, I use the sudden emergence of a deadly wildlife disease in insect-eating bats—known as white-nose syndrome—to quantify the benefits from their provision of biological pest control. I validate previous theoretical predictions that farmers respond by substituting bats with insecticides; however, because those are toxic compounds, by design, this substitution leads to higher human infant mortality rates in the areas affected by the bat die-offs.

RATIONALE

...

RESULTS

I used annual data at the county level on insecticide use and estimated that after the onset of bat die-offs, farmers in the county increase their insecticide use by 31.1%, on average. This demonstrates the substitution between a declining natural input and a human-made input—providing the first empirical validation of a fundamental theoretical prediction in environmental economics. I proceeded to document that infant mortality rates due to internal causes of death (i.e., not due to accidents or homicides) increased by 7.9%, on average, in the affected counties. This result highlights that real-world use levels of insecticides have a detrimental impact on health, even when used within regulatory limits, which highlights the difficulties of assessing the public health impacts of pesticides when regulating them individually.

The staggered expansion of the wildlife disease supports the causal interpretation of the results. Any additional alternative explanation would need to change along the expansion path of the wildlife disease around the same timing of its expansion. In additional analyses, I demonstrate that changes in crop composition, in other types of mortality, or in economic conditions fail to explain the observed results, even when controlling for fine-scaled and flexible time trends.

CONCLUSION

These findings help validate previous theoretical predictions regarding well-functioning ecosystems, where interactions between natural enemies—insect-eating bats and crop pests—allow farmers to use lower amounts of toxic substitutes. Not only are these results informative about natural enemy interactions generally, and biological pest control more specifically, they also highlight the direct agricultural and health benefits that bats provide. ...

Improving our understanding of how changes in biodiversity affect human well-being will be important when designing and implementing conservation policies. These findings inform ongoing efforts, such as pursuing the ambitious goal to place 30% of land and marine areas under protection by 2030, and highlight the importance of continued monitoring of biodiversity levels, as in the assessments released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services."

Global Health NOW: Sudan’s Widening ‘Nightmare’; No Known Animal Contact in Missouri Bird Flu Case; and Bat Declines Linked to Infant Mortality

The economic impacts of ecosystem disruptions: Costs from substituting biological pest control (no public access)

Schematic framework linking the ecosystem and human health as being intermediated by the agricultural system.

Government regulation abruptly and drastically reduced sulfur content in shipping fuel associated with increased maritime atmospheric warming

The so called unintended consequences at work! Cleaner air, warmer earth! Poetic justice! 😊

Since climate models are junk, can we trust this modeling study? The study also uses the very controversial term "anthropogenic green house gases" indicating  politicization!

These scientists even suggest more government intervention into nature by calling for more geoengineering! It can be a curse to be a PhD leading to a pretense of knowledge!

"An 80% reduction in sulfur dioxide shipping emissions observed in early 2020 could be associated with substantial atmospheric warming over some ocean regions, according to a modeling study published in Communications Earth & Environment. The sudden decline in emissions was a result of the introduction of the International Maritime Organization's 2020 regulation (IMO 2020), which reduced the maximum sulfur content allowed in shipping fuel from 3.5% to 0.5% to help reduce air pollution. ..."

From the abstract:

"Human activities affect the Earth’s climate through modifying the composition of the atmosphere, which then creates radiative forcing that drives climate change. The warming effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases has been partially balanced by the cooling effect of anthropogenic aerosols. In 2020, fuel regulations abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80% and created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact. Here we estimate the regulation leads to a radiative forcing of 

Wm−2 averaged over the global ocean. The amount of radiative forcing could lead to a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020 s compared with the rate since 1980 with strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity. The warming effect is consistent with the recent observed strong warming in 2023 and expected to make the 2020 s anomalously warm. The forcing is equivalent in magnitude to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020. The radiative forcing also has strong hemispheric contrast, which has important implications for precipitation pattern changes. Our result suggests marine cloud brightening may be a viable geoengineering method in temporarily cooling the climate that has its unique challenges due to inherent spatiotemporal heterogeneity."

Reduced sulfur content in shipping fuel associated with increased maritime atmospheric warming

Abrupt reduction in shipping emission as an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock produces substantial radiative warming (open access)

What a pseudoscience or demagoguery chart looks like (there is absolutely no evidence that the linear trend would continue):

Fig. 3: Time series of global temperature anomaly since 1980 (Lensen et al., 2019).

Accelerated Aging associated with Cancer at younger age? Really!

Healthy dose of skepticism is probably in order! This seems to one of the latest fads in media coverage of cancer!

Something is wrong! The articles, I have seen do not include any link to the research study itself. Google search and Google Scholar search do not produce a link either to this study. Dubious! Peer reviewed? Published research?

"As researchers struggle to understand why more young people are being diagnosed with cancer, they’re exploring a possible contributor: accelerated biological aging. 

Cancer is an “aging disease”—but age is more than accumulated years, ... a new study that examined the records of 148,724 people ages 37-54 in the U.K. "

"... colleagues hypothesized that increased biological age, indicative of accelerated aging, may contribute to the development of early-onset cancers, often defined as cancers diagnosed in adults younger than 55 years.  ...

To examine the association between biological age and cancer risk in younger individuals, Tian and colleagues examined data of 148,724 individuals housed in the U.K. Biobank database. They calculated each participant’s biological age using nine biomarkers found in blood: albumin, alkaline phosphatase, creatinine, C-reactive protein, glucose, mean corpuscular volume, red cell distribution width, white blood cell count, and lymphocyte proportion. Individuals whose biological age was higher than their chronological age were defined as having accelerated aging. ..."

Global Health NOW: Viral Hepatitis Deaths Increasing; Public Health School Rankings; and the Explosive Toll of Landmines in Burma

Accelerated Aging May Increase the Risk of Early-onset Cancers in Younger Generations

Johns Hopkins University report provides up-close look at pro-democracy conservatives. Really!

Nice example of Orwellian double speak produced by an elite U.S. university, i.e. Johns Hopkins U.! 

If you question the election integrity of the 2020 elections and there is lots to question, you are a contra democracy conservative! According to this report, more than 67% of conservatives are not pro-democracy! What a joke! Pseudoscience!

These researchers are with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University: "Strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue"

"Pro-democracy conservatives appreciate diverse political ideas, value journalism, and trust institutions including elections, according to a new report that defines this quiet but potentially powerful movement. ...
an effort to explore and define a conservative pro-democracy agenda. "Whether you agree or disagree with them on policy, these conservatives will play a critical role in fomenting a healthier democracy, starting with the 2024 election." ..."

Report provides up-close look at pro-democracy conservatives | Hub In contrast to those who reject the results of the 2020 election, nearly a third of Republicans accept the results, trust institutions, and appreciate diverse political perspectives

Understanding Pro-Democracy Conservatives: A Report on Current Levels of Election Trust and Partisan Identity