[Editor’s Note: As a non-narrative book,” The Young Conservative’s Field Guide: Facts, Charts and Figures,” by Brenton Stransky and Andrew Foy, M.D., defies the usual short review and asks instead for a more comprehensive discussion. We are pleased to provide you with that discussion in several parts.]

There’s more oversimplification and cherry-picking to be found in discussions of healthcare and climate change: each deserves a greater overview than can be provided.

Healthcare

Mssrs. Stransky and Foy begin with a World Health Organization report that assigns a low rank to U.S. healthcare, with criticism about statistical methodology that is fair enough even if one could argue with their interpretation. Lacking in their discussion, however, is the fact that WHO isn’t the only organization to take a dim view of U.S. healthcare. In May 2007, the Commonwealth Fund published a report titled “Mirror, Mirror On The Wall: An International Update On The Comparative Performance Of American Health Care.” (http://www.commonwealthfund.org/1027_Davis_mirror_mirror_international_update_v2.pdf )

Their conclusion:

“Compared with five other nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand the United Kingdom—the U.S. healthcare system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equit and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity and health outcomes. The inclusion of physician survey data also shows the U.S. lagging in adoption of information technology and use of nurses to improve care coordination for the chronically ill.”

But the authors’ dismissal of the WHO report is as much driven by the same guilt-by-association tactic they try with John Maynard Keynes as it is by statistical interpretation. In their criticism, the authors point to an alleged political agenda on the part of WHO. The source of this alleged agenda? A call by WHO for Israel to halt hostilities against Palestinians during their 2008 Gaza offensive and provide relief supplies. Beyond the spurious reasoning, the authors again neglect contextual facts. For example, the staggering asymmetry between the Palestinians’ and Israel’s military capabilities, with Israel the far superior force. And consider this: 13 Israeli died from the crude rocket attacks, compared to an estimated 1,166 and 1,417 Palestinians. How, then, is it strange for an organization devoted to health to call for an end to hostilities and the start of humanitarian efforts? If anything, the charge of political bias on the part of WHO demonstrates a bias on the authors’ part.

Climate Change

The crux of the author’s arguments against climate change/global warming rests on the Vostok Ice Core samples, which they interpret to demonstrate that “CO2 content lagged behind shifts in air temperature by 800 to 5,000 years.” Ignoring their own reminder that “correlation does not imply causality,” they readily conclude that temperature change causes CO2 change, not vice versa. But what do climate scientists have to say about ice cores and CO2? Unsurprisingly, the issue gets complicated.

Jeff Severinghaus, Professor of Geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Director of its Climate-Ocean-Atmosphere Program, writes about this very issue in a post at RealClimate.org:

“At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperatures during glacial terminations. These terminations are pronounced warming periods that mark the ends of the ice ages that happen every 100,000 years or so. Does this prove that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming? The answer is no. The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000-year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.”

The post is worth reading in its entirety here (http://www.realclimate.org/co2-in-ice-cores/), along with this piece. (http://www.realclimate.org/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/)

In any case, “Over the last 150 years, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen from 280 to nearly 380 parts per million (ppm).” (http://www.realclimate.org/cosub2sub-increases/ ) That increase correlates with the industrial revolution and the increased burning of fossil fuels, mitigated only by absorption of CO2 by the oceans and biosphere. Unfortunately, the oceans and biosphere cannot absorb CO2 at a faster rate than our activities put it in the atmosphere – hence, the problem. The increase also correlates with data gathered from the measurement of carbon isotopes, that is, carbon atoms that have similar chemical behaviours but different masses. Since CO2 produced from plants and fossil fuels is different from atmospheric CO2, a study of isotopes in tree rings and how trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere yields data demonstrating that, over the past 150 years, atmospheric CO2 levels have increased.

The authors neglect to discuss tree ring data and the considerable amount of data from many other sources and lines of evidence. They do, however, point to a figure from a paper published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons – a publication whose expertise with climate science (or any science) is dubious at best – that purports to attribute global warming to solar activity. The article, by Robinson, Robinson and Soon, is titled Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and is also nicely discussed by Real Climate here: http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/

For those who would like a study provided by a credible source, here is one:
How Natural And Anthropogenic Influences Alter Global And Regional Surface Temperatures: 1889 to 2006 by Judith L. Lean of the Space Science Division, Naval Research Laboratory, and David H. Rind of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/2008_Lean_Rind.pdf) Using a multi-variate analysis to distinguish between natural and human-caused global warming, they state:

“None of the natural processes can account for the overall warming trend in global surface temperatures. In the 100 years from 1905 to 2005, the temperature trends produced by all three natural influences are at least on an order of magnitude smaller than the observed surface temperature trend reported by IPCC [2007]. According to this analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10 percent of the warming in the past 100 years, not 69 percent as claimed by Scafetta and West [2008] (who assumed larger solar irradiance changes and enhanced climate response on longer time scales)”.

The certainty with which Mssrs. Stransky and Foy strike the proverbial nail through the coffin is enough to cause environmentalists to pull their equally proverbial hair out. However, the authors attempt to soften the blow by refuting the impression that they are insensitive to environmental issues. In fact, the authors are quick to claim the conservationist mantle for themselves. How? By proudly invoking the very contemporary Theodore Roosevelt and his recent creation of the Forestry Service, national parks, and national monuments. In light of a recent United Nations Environment Program (http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/) on biodiversity loss warning that “…massive further loss of biodiversity is becoming increasingly likely, and with it, a severe reduction of many essential services to human societies as several ‘tipping points’ are approached, in which ecosystems shift to alternative, less productive states from which it may be difficult or impossible to recover,” it only seems fair to wonder what environment conservatives are conserving today. We can also ask how the conservative claim to have pioneered environmental conservation can be reconciled with calls to “make use of ALL of our natural resources from sea to shining sea. (oil, coal, natural gas).” To this, we can offer two words: British Petroleum.

As with the authors’ surface presentation on economics, the lesson to be gleaned from the book is that in regards to healthcare and climate change, we have to reach for our own shovel and do the digging ourselves.

Frederik may be contacted at fsisa@thefrontpageonline.com