Sometimes, humans do stupid things: FILM AT 11

Matthew Yglesias notes that driving a car is very likely to kill your child. Yes, you--you in the back, dangling your remote starter, waiting for the lecture to be over. This is actually a really important point: owning a car is basically the leading cause of death for children.

Don't believe me? Here's the Center for Disease Control's statistics for causes of death in 2007 (I assume 2007 is the latest year for which complete data is available.)



So, "unintentional injury" is the leading cause of death, ahead of homicide by a country mile. Note for a moment that "only" 2,285 children died of homicides that year. What, exactly, makes up "unintentional injury"?



More than twice as many children are killed in traffic accidents as are murdered. The reasons for this are pretty simple: children don't die of heart disease or cancers (mostly) because they're not smokers or sedentary overeaters. (Yet.) So motor vehicle fatalities are the biggest remaining cause. And yet, people regularly choose to drive their children to school for fear of some trauma befalling their children on the way there. Because people don't regularly research childhood death statistics (and really, who would want to?) people don't realize that by unnecessarily putting their kids in a car, they're putting them in more danger, not less.

What's your most hated legacy policy?

Scott Adams offers an interesting idea:

One of the biggest problems with the world is that we're bound by so many legacy systems. For example, it's hard to deal with global warming because there are so many entrenched interests. It's problematic to get power from where it can best be generated to where people live. The tax system is a mess. Banking is a hodgepodge of regulations and products glued together. I could go on. The point is that anything that has been around for awhile is a complicated and inconvenient mess compared to what its ideal form could be.

My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country.

Okay, so what legacy systems would we reform/kill?

Um, criminal justice in a big way. Between the number of offenses that make no sense in law, or the conditions in which we jail people, I really wonder if redeploying all of our efforts at incarceration towards simply putting more police on the streets to prevent crime would be more worthwhile, even if you assume that everyone who wasn't deterred got away with it. And that doesn't even get into issues of discrimination...

Telecommunications. AM, FM, Television, telephones, cell phones, all are increasingly irrelevant, or would be in a world where incumbent powers didn't own the best parts of the radio spectrum and the wired grid.

Here's one: end of life care in medicine. The inability to have a mature discussion about the end of our lives--between patients, doctors, and families--is absolutely a holdover from a different age (when medicine was usually powerless before a rapid death) and has serious real-world consequences for the survivors. Families are left heartbroken as their last months are spent with pale shadows of their former loved ones, and -- there's no way to put this that doesn't sound grisly -- their fellow citizens bear the costs, either directly or indirectly, of massively expensive treatments that all too frequently don't work, or add days to a person's life at the expense of weeks of painful treatments. See this Atul Gawande article for a truly depressing exploration.

Intellectual property: boy is this not working at all. A 20-year copyright would allow even the most avariciously successful artists to extract 99% of the value of the current system: only the longest of the long-tail successes would be hurt, but even then not by much. Paul Simon would no longer be getting cheques for his LPs with Art Garfunkel, but he would have continued to get beer money from Graceland until 2006. U2 would still be getting money for Achtung Baby until next year. A 50-year copyright would be almost indefensible in my view, but I'd still take it in a hot second as an alternative to what we have now, provided that we chiselled that bastard in stone.

And yes, then it too would become a hated legacy policy someone would be out to destroy.

Anyway, Adams' thought experiment has a lot in common with the philosophy behind the Seasteading Institute, who want to start ocean-borne colonies with the explicit purpose of escaping the legal and political restrictions on land. Though they're basically a bunch of glibertarian Galtists, there's part of the vision that really interests me.

Also, I'd sign up with the North Pacific Kibbutz and wait for the Galtists to collapse under their own ego. At which point we'd kindly offer to help them out, provided they learn the lyrics to the Internationale.

linkdump

• Solar power now cheaper than nuclear, according to Marxists at the NY Times.
• Hey, the government killed an investigation in to pollution in the tar sands. Ho hum.
• CYBORG ARM. CYBORG ARM!
• Christ did not die on a cross?
• A professor contemplates how, and why, he punished a student he caught plagiarizing.
• And yes, let's please be careful about this whole shale gas bonanza.

From the mailbag

Catelli writes:

"A common theme for defenders of the Afghanistan mission is that we have to stay to impose Western (or "Universal Human") values on an ignorant population.

Has any society successfully occupied another and imposed its values without a revolt or reversion after the occupiers leave? If so, how long did it take?"

Hm. It would be best to answer this question when I haven't spent the evening drinking with friends on a glorious summer night. But what fun would that be?

The quick answer would be no, I can't think of a single example of a country imposing its own values on a country without a revolt or reversion post-occupation. But the terms "values", "country", and "occupation" are all difficult to define. Japan, for example, very much made a pro-American transformation after the end of WWII, but frankly picking a date for the end of the occupation is at best arguable considering that Japan still operates under an unmolested constitution written by the staff of one Douglas MacArthur and, by the way, Japanese Prime Ministers are still regularly humiliated by the necessities of American foreign policy.

To go waaaaaay back, there's the Hellenistic age, where victorious Greeks spread their values throughout the known world and were dominant for a couple of centuries. Whether their values ever actually spread downwards from the elite strata is very, very doubtful. (Cleopatra was the first of the Hellenistic rulers of Egypt to ever bother learning the local language.)

There is, of course, the option of unrestricted killing, which has been remarkably successful in forcing European values on to the American landmass and which shows no sign of diminishing its powers here. That said, smallpox-infected blankets are a bit out of style these days.

None of these examples (with the possible exception of Alexander the Great) have a terrible amount of relevance to the example of Afghanistan. The one arguable success (Japan) had a number of preconditions that simply aren't being recreated: a previously-industrialized society that bought in to "western" norms of governance and politics, a postwar leadership that recognized the Americans as a lesser evil, and an American government that wasn't looking for an exit from the Pacific theatre.

So based on the examples I've given I'd say that if imposing our values is the reason we're in Afghanistan then boy howdy are we out of luck. That said, I don't actually think that's why NATO is there. America is, mostly, looking for an exit from Afghanistan and Iraq but can't fathom an endgame where they don't "win". The problem is that nobody has an agreed-upon definition of the verb "to win", as far as it applies to Afghanistan.

Atrios used to write that as far as George W. Bush understood it, leaving Iraq meant losing, so staying forever meant winning. The same basically applies to Afghanistan, given that the original victory condition (bin Laden's head on a pike) seems to have eluded us.

Obama has already demonstrated that, where the small stuff counts, he's able to face down the military. The big test will come when it comes time to admit that a) Afghanistan has been a failure and a waste, and b) we're leaving anyway.

*happy dance*

Hey, nobody told me Chet was back! And I'd like to entirely endorse his argument here: Harper is trashing the long-form census because facts have a well-known liberal bias. No, I'm not kidding--look at the conservative reaction to the Statscan report 2 years ago which showed that income inequality continued its 30-year trend of getting worse in Canada. The hissy fit the right threw over the census data back then was bad enough--imagine what it would have shown as the Canadian economy went through a recession?

Well, that's all you'll be able to do--imagine. Because the Tories want it that way.

Two graphs

Here's the first.



Here's the second.



Now, these are two graphs that concentrate a lot of complicated variables into very simple graphics. The first is the Keeling Curve, basically a measure of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It has ticked upwards basically as long as we've been measuring it. When Charles David Keeling started in 1958, CO2 was at 315 ppm in the atmosphere. Now it's at 392 as of June 2010--a nearly 25% increase in 50 years.

The heat-trapping properties of CO2 have been understood for more than a century, and nothing has changed the basic scientific understanding that "more CO2 = more heat in the atmosphere". Yet, of course, as science becomes more precise the particular details of what "more heat" actually means are refined. But the same warning that the Charney Report gave 30 years ago remains fundamentally true: the effects are going to be major, negative, and unpredictable. Waiting to find out will mean waiting too late.

So that's Keeling.

The second graph is two variables instead of one: oil discoveries and oil consumption. There's continual argument about what and whether oil production will peak and decline in the imminent future--if I have any regular readers left, they'll know I am in the imminent camp--but the key argument can be distilled in much the same way climate change can be:

Before oil can be used, it needs to be discovered.

That's the big secret, and all the argument over when oil production peaks needs to be prefaced by that basic fact. Look again at the second graph. Oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s, have been on a long decline since then, and since the 1980s we've been using more oil every year than we've discovered. (There are some arguments about data sources, but the basic facts aren't really in contention.)

Of course, like climate change, there are lots of details that need to be sorted out--and they're crucially dependent on choices made in the real world, like whether Americans all decide to spend 10 years driving SUVs for no reason other than hastening the apocalypse.

Anybody who wants to argue against anthroprogenic climate change needs to argue that a) CO2 isn't rising (verifiably false) or b) the well-understood properties of CO2 are wrong (laughable.) Anyone who wants to argue against oil production peaking at all--and this is still a surprisingly prevalent opinion--needs to show where all the new oil is going to come from, and where Saudi-style volumes are being hidden. They should also try to explain how super-large reservoirs have stayed so well-hidden for so long.

This is all basic reasoning informed by a little bit of science. I mention it--repeating myself a little bit, I know--only because when you've got, say, climate scientists on the wrong end of death threats and oil companies demanding the unlimited right to destroy the planet in search of the last barrel of oil, it's worth going back to first principles.

He's really a vanilla kind of callous [Updated]

Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario:

“He told us, ‘Just remember, the same guy who gave us the Charter also gave us the War Measures Act,’” said one startled MPP, noting the premier also refuted calls from several members to strike a public inquiry into the G20 debacle.

McGuinty’s contrasting of Trudeau’s 1982 entrenchment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution to the former prime minister’s use of the War Measures Act during the 1970 October Crisis in Quebec was “bizarre,” said another member.

“Then things got even weirder—he said: ‘Don’t forget about the silent majority.’”

So many interesting things here. One, McGuinty's government is not known for its leaks from caucus--not saying they don't happen, just that it's not notorious the way other governments and parties have been. (See Dion, Stephane) So the fact that we're hearing this at all is, as Scott Tribe notes, itself noteworthy.

Two: if we're hearing about this now, it's because there's a lot more than just this grumbling in the Liberal caucus. I have exactly zero recent insider information about the politics of Queen's Park, but here's some supposition.

Many observers--including people in his own party--came away from the 2007 election victory convinced that McGuinty was not going to run again: he would serve out the rest of his term and then go on his way. This would make room for others who wanted to run (note what former Deputy Premier George Smitherman is doing instead this summer.) This was not just idle speculation: statements from McGuinty himself led many to believe this.

But, well, these jobs aren't often given up willingly. By anyone. Premier of Ontario is a pretty unimpressive title by the standards of international politics, but it's a damn sight better than "blogger sitting out the heatwave in his underpants", to pick an example entirely at random.

So McGuinty wanted to stay and get one more kick at the can. He must have rationalized it any number of ways -- "Ontario's not ready for a gay premier (Smitherman)", "only I've beaten Eves and Tory--who else is gonna beat Hudak", etc. But the long and short of it is if he leaves this job it's gonna be involuntary. Part of me believes, in fact, that the HST is basically McGuinty's insurance policy: even if there was a credible challenge to his leadership (and there really isn't now) they sure as hell don't want to wear the HST in the next election. So let the Old Man have his chance. Hey, there's always an election in 2015, and how much trouble could the Tories do in 4 years?

So you've got a bunch of people in his caucus who wake up every morning thinking they could be Premier if only... Add in a lot of anxiety over the HST, a new eco-fee the province hasn't really told anyone about, and the unpleasantness over the G20. The fact that we're seeing caucus leaks spill out on to the pages of the Star is about all of this and none of it.

What it's really about is Liberals wishing McGuinty had done the honorable thing and taken an early bow. They'd like to go in to the next election with a Premier who the public hasn't seen every day for 8 years, who isn't saddled with questions about basic honesty to the voters, who can say more than just "Remember Mike Harris? I'm not him!" [1]

Liberals would like to say all of that, but they won't be able to unless they lose the next election.

[1] Liberals really, really like to forget that Mike Harris won this province twice--besting McGuinty to do it the 2nd time. For a lot of people, saying "I'm not Mike Harris" is a con, not a pro.

UPDATE: An actually-informed source draws my attention to two things about this story. One, it's unclear how many anonymous sources this story is drawing on, but it's at least two and as many as four, though one of these is from outside caucus. A careful reading suggests there's less to this story than meets the eye, at least as far as grumbling within caucus goes. Two grumbling MPPs does not a caucus revolt make.

But two, and this is something I should have caught on the first reading, take the Nixonian element out of the "silent majority" quote. This should actually be setting off alarm bells in the party for a different reason: the use of the phrase "silent majority" is a dead giveaway for a government that is losing (or lost) touch with the electorate.

Those two things are my better-informed interlocutor talking, but to expand on this a bit: we actually have pretty good ways of measuring public opinion, and have for most of the last century. Governments rely on these measures daily, so when a leader says he's relying on "the silent majority", that's a different way of saying he's listening to the voices in his head.

Just as a for example, Ernie Eves and Stephen Harper were proud to address a pro-Iraq War rally in April 2003 that called on the "silent majority of Canadians" to back the US. Harper said the same thing to CTV.

Of course, there is not and never has been a "silent majority" of Canadians clamoring to board that particular train. A poll in March 2003 showed nearly three-quarters of Canadians opposed and it was just as unpopular a year later, if not more so. Ernie Eves would learn what the actual majority of Ontarians wanted later that year when he lost to the current Premier.

It appears Dalton McGuinty now needs to learn the lessons that Eves did in 2003. And it's terribly sad to have to write that sentence.

Nine years to make a dustier Beirut

That's all I can think when I read this:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is exploiting the troubled United States military effort in Afghanistan to drive home a political settlement with Afghanistan that would give Pakistan important influence there but is likely to undermine United States interests, Pakistani and American officials said....

Pakistan is presenting itself as the new viable partner for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai, who has soured on the Americans. Pakistani officials say they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement.

In addition, Afghan officials say, the Pakistanis are pushing various other proxies, with General Kayani personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership.

Boy, nothing screams stability and prosperity like "tri-partite power sharing between heavily armed factions in a narco-state".

No, wait, that doesn't sound right at all.

So, if this comes through the endgame will be more or less what people predicted years ago: the Taliban win, in that they survive and return to some kind of operation power. (I continue to believe that Karzai's position within any power-sharing arrangement will be brief, and possibly end on a lightpost.) Pakistan maintains its strategic depth in Afghanistan, and India gets a little more boxed in.

Sure makes the last few dozen dead Canadians worth it, doesn't it?

China's role in Middle Earth

Middle Earth here meaning, roughly, "places that aren't rich & white, or Japan." Three data points.

1) Sometime in 2002-2003, African GDP started going rapidly upwards in a way it had not for some time. This is easily attributable to the commodity boom sparked by the Chinese economy. Whether this is an accurate attribution is another thing, but I think most leaders would perceive it that way.

2) China played a little-noticed, but vital, role in ending Sri Lanka's civil war on behalf of the Sinhalese. See especially this line:

Suddenly, thanks to China's diplomacy, the hectoring of the US and Europe didn't matter any more. After nearly 500 years under the thumb of the West, the immensely strategic little island in the Indian Ocean had a new sugar daddy...

Now, though this is far less direct, see the reports of Turkey becoming increasingly more independent of US wishes.

Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”

One quote does not a foreign policy make, but the NYT quoting the CFR is really as close to a formal statement of policy as you need.

The point isn't that China is pulling strings in Ankara -- hell, the Chinese have a warmer relationship with Jerusalem. The point is that China's mere existence -- even outside of areas where it's acting directly -- creates space for other smaller powers to act independent of the US's wishes.

The example of Sri Lanka is interesting to me because it happened in the context of a decade of US efforts to improve relations with India -- the one bright spot in Dubya's foreign policy. What does that do? Does India value a calmer southern coast? Or are they more concerned about the possibility of a Chinese naval presence in "their" waters?

I don't know.

Link-clearing

Jesus, I'm a lazy blogger.

• Pseudo-science deployed against wind power is crap.
• You know how I knew that the National Post's Lawrence Solomon wrote a crappy hit piece that dishonestly portrayed a legit science article? Because it was written by the Post's Lawrence Solomon.
• The Republican Party faces a whole bunch of structural problems.
• Given the news that the BP well cap failed and had to be replaced today, it's worth saying that it might be entirely unfixable.
• Hey, genetic engineering fungus to help rice yields. I am ambivalent on GM foods as a concept, but always on the lookout for specific examples that look promising.
• I am cautiously optimistic about the capacity of aquaculture to feed people in the future, and entirely, hopelessly pessimistic about its capacity to save wild fish. In any case, here's a NYT article about the soon-to-be-extinct tuna, and here's the MP3 link to a Quirks and Quarks piece about fish farming.

Probably like arugula

John Cole makes life worth living:

Uttering anything more complicated than “Drill, baby, drill” makes you an elitist. Apparently Obama should have grabbed his balls and said “Don’t worry, ‘Murica. We’re gittin ‘er done!”

Context here.

Ooh, more data on the merger idea

..but before I get to that, I'd like to take a purposeful digression to Dan Arnold's Mark piece about rebuilding the Liberals out west:

But there’s no reason the Liberal party can’t compete in large- and mid-sized cities in the four western provinces. The same types of people who vote Liberal elsewhere – older women, immigrants, well-educated Canadians – all live there.

And if you think westerners are just more conservative in nature, try telling that to the recent NDP governments in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and B.C. Hell, Edmonton is nicknamed “Redmonton” by Albertans.

I respect anyone who's willing to grapple with the fact that, yes, the Liberals are substantively unpopular in many parts of the country and this is not solely due to NDP intransigence.

That said, Arnold makes a little crack at the merger hubbub at his blog:

I foolishly overlooked the idea of blowing up the party as a solution, suggesting instead that the Liberals need to expand their support base outside of the GTA.

I noticed this only because there's yet another poll out about an NDP/Liberal merger, coalition, or cooperation of some kind. Harris-Decima has a poll (PDF) showing that:

• 14% of Canadians support a post-election coalition between the parties
• 13% support a merger before the next election, and
• 28% support an electoral non-compete agreement.

I kind of feel like an electoral pact is sort of like a gateway drug to an eventual party merger: get your voters used to the idea of one slate of candidates, even if they technically have different party names.

More intriguingly, throughout the west there seems to be a correlation between support for merger and support for an electoral pact: in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, the numbers are pretty close with the caveat that Alberta's higher Conservative numbers bring the "no cooperation at all" numbers higher than elsewhere. British Columbia looks a lot closer to Ontario, perhaps because the two provinces aren't quite the electoral wasteland for the Liberals as the stretch between Thunder Bay and the Rockies.

Arnold may have only been making a joke, but I'd bet he's actually very correct: the stark choice is either rebuild Liberal numbers in AB/SK/MB or see some kind of merging of the parties.

re: mergers and acquisitions

1) While I still think the idea is basically a non-starter, the idea of a Liberal-NDP merger just keeps getting kicked around. Especially funny is the idea that the Liberals, in courting the NDP, would demand that it renounce socialism and embrace the mixed economy and accept Michael Ignatieff as leader. Sooo... if the NDP were willing to do all that, why wouldn't they have simply all signed Liberal membership cards?

2) Something to ask yourself when considering political mergers: in what year did Harper's Conservatives actually exceed the 2000 combined national vote for the old Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties?

Answer: a trick question--Harper still hasn't exceeded the combined political appeals of those electoral leviathans, Joe Clark and Stockwell Day.

1993, PC & Reform: 34.73%
1997, PC & Reform: 38.19%
2000, PC & CA total: 37.68%
2004, Conservative: 29.63%
2006: 36.27%
2008: 37.65%

The numbers are pretty clear: even with Sheila Fraser's help, the immediate impact of the merger between right and righter was for Harper to underperform the combined vote of Kim Campbell and Preston Manning. (!!!) People remember old Tories like Joe Clark heading for the doors, right?

A similar dynamic would undoubtedly play out in any NDP merger, especially with the existence of the Greens today.

There's some argument to be made for trying to unite the left, but the Liberal conditions that have been mentioned are ridiculous on their face, and a party that was actually capable of any kind of critical inquiry in to its circumstances would realize that.

One poll isn't conclusive, but it's all the data we've got so far so take a look at the Angus Reid poll from two weeks ago: In every merger scenario, the Tories gain -- but they gain the most if Michael Ignatieff is the leader of a merged party, and gain the least is Jack Layton is the leader. The Layton Hypothetical is the closest the merged party comes to actually keeping 100% of the separate party vote.

Now, this is not because Layton is a political genius, but because of something much more basic: Canadian politics has already been half-sorted. There are no more significant electoral gains for the Liberals on the centre-right. Old Joe Clark Tories have, more or less, been convinced that the new Conservatives are not gonna burn the place down, and have made their peace. That's why, in these hypotheticals, the Conservatives gain so little from exiled blue Liberals: there simply aren't that many left in Canada. (There are a shit-ton left in the Liberal Party, of course, and they're incredibly influential, but that's a separate issue.)

If there's going to be a single opposition to the Canadian Conservative party, the votes are going to have to be won on the left, not the right or even the centre. This has been the case for, oh, at least four years. Whether the Liberals are ready to learn this lesson or would instead prefer to lose another election and then blame the rest of us for not jumping on the Ignatieff bandwagon, is a question I leave for you.

Thoughts on one of my wedding gifts, and mortality

1) The existence of the Playstation 3 makes me resent the fuck out of young people today. If I had the kind of free time today I did when I was 13...

2) Speaking of, I've now reached the age where putting aside enough time to finish even one level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 feels like a real victory for leisure over the rest of my life.

3) At some point in the future, I will yell at a child of mine to turn off that damn video game. Shortly thereafter, I will have to begin planning my father's funeral, because he will actually die of unending, pitiless laughter.

Oh, and by the way

Was radio silent because I got married on May 29th. There were Stormtroopers. And the officiant used the words "by the power of Grayskull", as previously agreed.

Aside from that, I can't really remember much.

My wife is already well on the way to winning the marriage, with the following quote: "Look: I'm married now, so I'm gonna get fat. I'm gonna be a fat motherfucker. I'm gonna wash myself with a rag on a stick."

I swear I wasn't even saying anything about her weight.

A rather important point

In the libertarian universe[1], it's a terrible affront to liberty to force a businessman to accept black customers. It is entirely acceptable to send a black man to jail for trespassing if he should try and force the matter.[2]

[1] I know there are lefty small-government types. To avoid confusion, I tend to call them anarchists in the Emma Goldman variety. Rand, and the white, wealthy conservatives who are uber-concerned about the Civil Rights Act, are libertarians.

[2] This is especially relevant in an age--like the 1950s, and increasingly today--where public services were/are delivered by private means. For example, Rosa Parks was riding a privately-owned bus (delivering a public service in contract to a city government) when she refused to give up her seat.

There's nothing hard about justifying your own privilege

....asshole.

PAUL: You had to ask me the "but." I don't like the idea of telling private business owners -- I abhor racism. I think it's a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant -- but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that's most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.

"[T]his," Paul said, "is the hard part about believing in freedom."

Yes, of course there's nothing braver in life than arguing against laws that would restrain your ability to reinforce white power over blacks. Can't think of a thing.

Am I the only one who finds the whole schtick, primarily by conservatives these days, of feigning bravery by telling white conservative men exactly what they want to hear repulsive?

Oh. My. God.

I suppose it's not like its a disqualifying lapse, but it truly is bizarre how a US Senator could be totally ignorant of certain staples of modern living. It certainly doesn't give me any confidence that these guys and a few ladies know how to properly regulate derivatives or photovoltaic solar panels.

So, how likely are we to make the planet uninhabitable?

If the status quo persists, about 5%. Or, to rephrase,

The bottom line conclusion is that there is a small - of order 5% - risk of global warming creating a situation in which a large fraction of the planet was uninhabitable (in the sense that if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die). To give you a feeling for the likely uninhabitable regions... it includes most of the eastern US, much of inland Brazil and Latin America, tropical Africa, pretty much all of India, portions of northern China, and most of Australia. Plenty to qualify as a "Risk to Global Civilization", I think.

We are, it's clear, currently in a "do nothing serious about climate change" mode. If this continues, we're looking at CO2 concentrations going up, close to quadrupling pre-industrial levels, and putting us very much in the apocalypse. 1000 ppm would certainly ruin the oceans from acidification alone. This paper just demonstrates that some of the most densely populated parts of the planet would also die.

This is all conceivable by 2100, 2150 tops. That's the status quo.

Jeffrey Simpson is correct about something

The annual dance about cod fishing in the east is basically a joke. What's more, any serious observer of the collapse of the cod fishery needs to grapple with what this means for stuff like climate change: even after a world-historical economic calamity, the forces pushing to hammer the last nail in to the ecology are stronger than the forces of conservation.

To put it another way, if we can't get cod right, what makes anyone think we will get oil and coal right?