Category: Science

The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

…But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

…In an interview with the Guardian, he said he would finance this investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effects of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare.

The full story is here.

For background, Cyprus allows commercialization of the practice and many European nations do not:

According to a 2010 study by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, nearly 25,000 egg donations are performed in Europe for fertility tourists every year. More than 50% of those surveyed traveled abroad in order to circumvent legal regulations at home. The Cypriot government estimates that, each year, 1 in 50 women on the island between the ages of 18 and 30 sells her eggs. One NGO analyst says that among the island's Eastern European immigrants, the rate may reach 1 in 4, and some women give up their eggs several times in a year. By comparison, only 1 of every 14,000 eligible American women donates.

Here is the full story, the article is interesting throughout.  Can you guess which women face the highest demand for their eggs?  I thank Alex Mann for the pointer.

Is it possible that the relative price of helium will rise in nearly unprecedented fashion?  Robert Richardson voices his opinion:

[The US government should] Get out of the business and let the free market prevail.  The consequence will be a rise in prices.  Unfortunately party balloons will be $100 each rather than $3 but we'll have to live with that.  We will have to live with those prices eventually anyway.

He notes:

There is no chemical means to make helium.  The supplies we have on Earth come from radioactive alpha decay in rocks.  Right now it's not commercially viable to recover helium from the air, so we have to rely on extracting it from rocks.  But if we do run out altogether, we will have to recover helium from the air and it will cost 10,000 times what it does today.

Yet helium is the second most abundant element in the universe and it accounts for 24% of the mass of our galaxy, according to Wikipedia.  The marginal cost curve stands between plenty and scarcity.

We also use helium in machines designed to detect radioactivity.  Right now the government is committed to selling off its strategic reserve of helium, located near Amarillo, Texas, by 2015.  Here is a dialog on helium extraction.  Here is a dialog on the forthcoming helium crisis.  Here is another short article.  Here is a book chapter on the helium reserve.  Richardson claims the helium crisis will arrive in twenty-five years' time.

Here’s a video of a small town in Britain that turned its traffic lights off.  Order ensued.

The experiment is not unique. Tom Vanderbilt wrote an excellent piece in The Wilson Quarterly a few years ago on traffic revolutionary Hans Monderman (see also this NYTimes piece) who has redesigned a number of city centers:

At the town center, in a crowded four-way intersection called the Laweiplein, Monderman removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, “traffic islands,” and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a “squareabout,” in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law.

As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process–stop, go–the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.

A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection–buses spent less time waiting to get through, for example–but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third.

The experiments are interesting in their own right but they are also very good illustrations of spontaneous order; how order is possible without orders.

Hat tip: Dan Klein.