Friday, July 18, 2008

1. GOOD LORD! GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS VANDALIZE APS.

Science is open. If better information becomes available scientists rewrite the textbooks with scarcely a backward glance. The Forum on Physics and Society of the APS exists to help us examine all the information on issues such as global climate change. There are physicists who think we don't have warming right, I know one myself. It is therefore entirely appropriate for the Forum to conduct a debate on the pages of its newsletter. A couple of highly-respected physicists ably argued the warming side. Good start. However, on the denier's side was Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who inherited his father's peerage in 2006. Lord Monckton is not a scientist, his degree is in journalism and he's a reporter for the Evening Standard, an English tabloid. Whatever it is that Viscounts do, he may do very well, but he doesn't know squat about physics and his journalism suffers from it. Worse, somebody fed the media the line that Monckton's rubbish meant the APS had changed its position on warming; of course it has not. Few media outlets took the story seriously.

2. SPACE STATION: "SEND IT SOMEWHERE SPECIAL."

I have a place in mind. Space-science writer Michael Benson used this title in The Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post. Benson asks whether the International Space Station, at a cost approaching $100 billion, is being finished just so we can drop it in the ocean? It is; so what's his alternative? Attach engines and send it, with its crew, off to explore other planets. Three days later the Post carried a rebuttal by NASA contractor Jeff Volosin. The ISS, he argued is needed to prepare crews to travel to Mars and back. He didn't say for what. As James Van Allen would have said of both ideas: "How old-fashioned." Wake up: Voyager 2 just entered interstellar space, Messenger revisited Mercury, Phoenix found water on Mars. Somebody, anybody, tell me what humans can do in space as well as the robots?

3. BLOOPER: WORLD POPULATION IN 1798.

I wrote in last week's WN that, the "world population in 1798 was less that 1 million." I should have said 1 billion. I apologize; my fingers have a mind of their own, but they aren't very smart. I always appreciate being told of errors and atoned by responding to more than 300 emails. They are still coming in today.

4. POPULATION: U.S BIRTHS SET RECORD.

The U.S. population clock as I write this is at 304, 633,590, but the scary number is the growth rate, 4,315,000 births in 2007, more than double the number a century ago, and topping the number born in 1957 at the height of the post-war baby boom. The biggest factor by far is immigration. The birth rate among Hispanic immigrants far outpaces the modest 2.1 average births per women.

5. YEMEN: GOVERNMENT IMPLEMENTING FAMILY PLANNING.

One of the poorest and least pleasant countries in the world despite booming oil revenues, it has one of the highest birth rates. Yemen must import 75 percent of its food and suffers acute water shortages. The government campaign aims at reducing the awesome fertility rate by raising awareness. It is widely believed in Yemen that contraception can cause health problems and is forbidden in Islam.

Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.