Friday, July 18, 2008
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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