Malaria and Global Warming

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Roger Pielke Jr., my favorite thrower of inconvenient hand grenades, wrote a provocative post this week about the linkage between malaria and global warming.

Malaria, Jeffrey Sachs writes, causes poverty. (( The End of Poverty, p. 197)) It does this by reducing economic productivity, creating a vicious cycle in which people get sick, can’t work, are less productive and therefore can’t afford the relatively inexpensive steps needed to protect against, and treat, malaria.

The result, according to Sachs (all the cool kids seem to be reading him these days): 3 million deaths, and a billion people sick from malaria every year in Africa. ((Common Wealth, p. 232))

Providing the necessary assistance to help the extremely poor (those living on $1 or less a day) deal with malaria seems like a no brainer for the rich world. First of all, it’s the right thing to do. I mean, 3 million kids dying a year of a disease that’s treatable and preventable? What more need be said? But providing that necessary help, as Sachs and Richard Collier ((Bottom Billion)) note, is also critical to helping pull the extremely poor out of that status.

But what is “pulling them out of poverty” if not increasing their economic footprint? And what goes along with that increasing economic footprint? Increased carbon emissions.

Roger’s done a notional back-of-the envelope calculation showing the dramatic increase in global warming emissions in Africa if we help them deal with malaria. In other words, treating malaria in Africa will contribute to global warming. I have no idea if Roger’s numbers are right in detail, but he’s clearly got the sign right (increase in greenhouse gas emissions). And the magnitude, whether it’s more or less than his number, is clearly going to be significant.

This is not, of course, to argue against treating malaria. It’s merely another illustration of the tangled relationship between disease, poverty, economics and climate change on a global scale. It’s a really hard problem.

(Picture courtesy Kenya Medical Mission)

Recommended Reading

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I’ve added a new goober over in the far right rail called “recommended reading.” The idea came from my old pal Chuck Taylor, who’s involved in an interesting experiment up in Seattle called “Crosscut“. More on that later (I had an interesting visit with Chuck, and I’m intrigued by what they’re attempting), but the easy bit was a trick Chuck shared.

He used Google Reader, as do I, to process the flood of RSS feeds he reads. Google Reader has a feature called “share” that allows you to tag items to share with others. And then Google builds an RSS feed of those shared items, which can be made public if you choose. So I’m just pulling that RSS feed into a WordPress widget, and “presto,” a flow of the most recent five cool blog items I thought notable enough to share.

Food Price Index

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I’ve been looking for a standard food price index comparable to the “barrel of oil” or the “gallon of gasoline” we’ve all come to know and love and, more importantly, intuitively grasp. The idea here is a number that’s standardized, readily available and easy to grasp.

The Economist has its Food Price Index, but WTF is a “food price index”? Still, it’s the best I’ve got right now. Is there a standardized “bushel of rice” or “bushel of wheat” or something that shows up on the data pages of the Wall Street Journal every day?

For now – Economist FPI: 264.6, up 4.2 percent from a month ago and 69 percent from a year ago.

Great Blue Heron

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great blue heronBack in the late ’80s, Lissa and I were camped along the lower Colorado River somewhere near Blythe. It was winter, but it’s always warm there. Out in the middle of the river, on an island, we watched an enormous bird, just sitting. The bird book and binoculars suggested a great blue heron. Our old copy of Peterson’s “Field Guide to Western Birds” has this note:

11/86 – Sat on tiny island in Colorado River all morning, picking at its feathers.

It is our tradition to make marginal notes in whatever bird book we happen to have with us. There are an additional 8 great blue heron sitings noted in our Peterson’s, and another 2 in our copy of The Sibley Guide to Birds. My favorite is the great blue that followed us on a boat trip down the San Juan River in Utah in 2002.

I suspect it is not the same bird, following us around over the decades, but there is a certain familiarity about him, a comfortable patience. This year, Lissa spotted him as we were driving down a sand spit on Lopez Island, in the San Juans north of Seattle. He was sitting in a hollow in the salt marsh on the inland side of the spit. Just sitting. We saw him again the next day, or perhaps one of his chums, as we were walking down a cold and deserted beach.

Also seen:

  • a sea otter fishing
  • gulls picking at the fried clams and bread on the Seattle pier (they really are lovely birds, despite their common trash-picking image)
  • dogs more than happy to chase sticks in the chilly Puget Sound water as far as their humans could throw them
  • boats of all sorts – ferries, sailboats, fishing boats, drug smugglers (not sure which were the latter, but surely some of the boats we saw plying the narrow San Juan waterways must have been)
  • heavy snow falling into the ocean – big, warm, wet flakes glimpsed from the warmth of a ferry
  • friends
  • family

(photo courtesy of Fermilab – we didn’t have a camera)

Off to the Great Northwest

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Seattle ferryWhen I was coming of age, I spent six great years in the Pacific Northwest, and I’ve always held a romantic fondness as a result. I’ve not been back in a long time, so Lissa and I are off for 10 days to Seattle and the islands to the north. They’ve got oceans and boats and rain and stuff – things we don’t have much of here in the desert southwest.

See ya in a couple of weeks.

Adaptation v. Mitigation – Again

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For those of you who insist that of course every right thinking person agrees that the need to adapt to climate change shares equal importance with greenhouse gas reductions, Roger Pielke Jr. has another example worthy of your attention. The quote is from ClimateWire:

Environmental and humanitarian activist groups plan to formally ask the World Bank to back away from plans to create a $500 million trust fund aimed at helping poor nations cope with climate change.

Hair Dye

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Drought in northern India has led to a ban on hair dye:

At least 11 farmers have died from swallowing the hair dye in a drought-hit region of Uttar Pradesh state in the past three months, said Rajiv Agarwal, a senior state official.

Two-thirds of India’s 1.1 billion people depend on agriculture, and most have been left out of India’s economic boom. In parts of western and southern India, the dire economic state of farmers has been blamed for thousands of suicides in recent years.

The hair dye leads to kidney failure, said Ganesh Kumar, principal of the Maharani Lakshmi Bai Medical College.

“We have banned the sale of the cheap dye made locally in Uttar Pradesh state,” Agarwal told The Associated Press.

Wind, Solar and Economies of Scale

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Rich Sweeney goes beyond my casual “go read it” reference to the Economist article on renewables in Germany and actually explains its implications:

Like a lot of things, economies of scale are more complex than the renewables lobby would have you believe (Joseph Romm makes the scale argument a lot, and recently Daniel Weiss made a similar claim). However, government can’t simply, and infinitely, induce cost reductions by just promoting scale (I think Stalin made a similar miscalculation). Especially when one of the production inputs is scarce, as silicon is (at least in the short run).

Diseconomies of scale are actually even more of an issue for wind, as I’ve been meaning to post for some time. The technology itself, ie wind turbines, have been around for awhile and could probably be best characterized as mature (at least for high-speed winds). So the potential for cost reduction is probably relatively limited on the capital side. The other main input, however, is finite – wind. Moreover, not all winds (?) are created equal, with some sites being much harder to get too and further away from the grid. So for wind energy, there’s a real possibility of decreasing returns to scale, depending where you are on the supply curve.

Food Trade Issues

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Via Michael Tobis, a Financial Times story about growing export restrictions in response to global food shortages:

On Monday, India scrapped tariffs on edible oil and maize and banned exports of all rice except the high-value basmati variety, while Vietnam, the world’s third biggest rice exporter, said it would cut rice exports by 11 per cent this year.

The moves mark a rapid shift away from protecting farmers, who are generally the beneficiaries of food import tariffs, towards cushioning consumers from food shortages and rising prices.