Talking prostates

In the last couple of years, there has been a sudden outbreak of people I know (including three that I am related to) who have had prostate problems - three cases of prostate cancer with surgical prostate removal, one case of some sort of prostate problem that still required surgery.  Admittedly, these are (with one exception) all in men who are about 6 - 7 years older than me, but it does tend to give one the gloomy feeling that such an unpleasant, and medically controversial, disease is likely looking to hit me too.   (I mean, the way every site assures us that virtually all men over 80 who haven't had it removed die with some form of prostate cancer cells helps give that impression too.)

But what are the figures for the number of men who do need to end up having the operation?

A review article from 2008 perhaps gives reason to feel a bit less foreboding:

The probability of developing prostate cancer increases from 0.005% in men younger than 39 years to 2.2% in men between 40 and 59 years and 13.7% in men between 60 and 79 years.^5–7 The current lifetime risk of developing prostate cancer is 16.7% (1 in 6 men). The probability of developing histological evidence of prostate cancer is even higher. Carter and colleagues⁸ showed that 50% of men between 70 and 80 years of age showed histological evidence of malignancy. A lifetime risk of 42% for developing histological evidence of prostate cancer in 50-year-old men has been calculated.^8,9 In men at this age, however, the risk of developing clinically significant disease is only 9.5%, and the risk of dying from prostate cancer is only 2.9%.⁹

Doesn't actually tell me how many have the operation, but still...

A more recent article notes:

Worldwide, more than 1 million men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year and more than 300,000 die of the disease¹. Current U.S. statistics show that either 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime. With such a high incidence, should we be alarmed? What is a reasonable response to a risk of cancer as high as 1:5?

 One in five is pretty high, I guess - but the odds are still in favour of not ever getting a diagnosis.

But - yes, I have a brother who had it, so that makes things worse for me, risk wise:

• Men with a brother who had prostate cancer had twice as high a risk of being diagnosed as the general population. They had about a 30% risk of being diagnosed before age 75, compared with about 13% among men with no family history.
• Men with a brother who had prostate cancer had about a 9% risk of getting an aggressive type of prostate cancer by age 75, compared with about 5% among other men.

 Well, the odds are still in my favour of not getting it by 75.  

Too much information?

Despite George Monbiot feeling upbeat about what seems to have been a good outcome for his prostate cancer surgery, the unpleasant details he provides about complications he suffered still probably makes for worrying reading for any man about to undergo the surgery.   (I'm not sure I needed to know he is also back to - approximately, and chemically aided - full sexual functioning, but I guess he is providing some hope by telling that part.)

Nice work if you can get it

It's unclear whether (or, probably more accurately, to what extent) Trump or his administration are going to be damaged by the money to Cohen allegations, but it sure stinks of some sort of corruption (and, no, is nothing like open payments made to the Clinton Foundation.)   And what about this (via NPR):

Swiss pharma giant Novartis, which is named in the Avenatti document, confirmed to NPR that it had hired the same shell company created by Cohen to pay Daniels, Essential Consultants.

Spokeswoman Sofina Mirza-Reid said in a statement that Novartis signed a one-year agreement with Cohen and Essential Consultants in February of 2017, after Trump's inauguration. After one meeting, Mirza-Reid said, Novartis concluded that Cohen could not "provide the services that Novartis had anticipated."

Even so, because the contract "could only be terminated for cause," the pharmaceutical conglomerate continued paying Cohen a total of about $1.2 million. In short, it paid him $100,000 per month over the following year even though he was doing no work.

According to an account in the medicine and pharma trade journal Stat, Novartis company officials feared that if they tried to cancel their payments to Cohen, even though they apparently weren't getting anything from them, that might anger Trump.

The company acknowledged it has given information to Mueller's team.

Yeah, swamp really drained, wingnuts.

Don't believe the wingnuts

An article at The Atlantic notes that, despite the best efforts of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of wingnut media, American public support for the Mueller investigation is actually pretty strong:

A Washington Post survey asked: “A special counsel at the U.S. Justice Department, Robert Mueller, has been investigating possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian govt to influence the 2016 election. Do you support or oppose Mueller investigating this issue?” Sixty-nine percent said they supported the probe as of last month.

The same Post survey asked: “Do you support or oppose Mueller investigating Trump’s business activities?” And 64 percent of Americans said that they supported that.

Fox News found something similar: “About two-thirds, 67 percent in the latest Fox News poll, say it is at least somewhat important the investigation continues, and 56 percent think it’s likely that Mueller’s probe will find Donald Trump committed criminal or impeachable offenses.”
A Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll got like results.

But you’d never know any of that from the Rush Limbaugh Show, which portrays the Mueller investigation as an outrageous, undemocratic usurpation of the people’s will.

It's good to be reminded that not all of the US has gone nuts - only about 25-30% of them, and about 95% of Republican politicians.

Some of the weirdest politics in the world

I'm talking about Malaysia, not just because of a 92 year old winning, but because of the deal whereby he will let the protege he had framed and jailed for sodomy take over the leadership from him.  Talk about your hard ways to reach the Prime Ministership:

As part of his agreement with Pakatan Harapan, Mahathir will only be prime minister for two years, and then will cede power to Anwar Ibrahim.

Anwar, who was also once Mahathir’s protege, is currently in jail serving a second sentence for sodomy.

Mahathir and Anwar fell out publicly in 1999 and Mahathir was responsible for jailing Anwar, but the pair put aside their differences in their united desire to take down Najib.

The plan now is for Mahathir to have Anwar pardoned so he can take office. “He’ll be released in June,” said Mahathir. “Once he’s pardoned, he’s eligible to be PM again.” Mahathir also announced after his win he would apoint Wan Azizah, Anwar’s wife, as his deputy prime minister.

I heard of this deal in a discussion on the radio last week, but I hadn't realised Anwar was still in jail when the deal was reached.

Does Putin want US in or out of Iran deal?

While Trumpkin conspiracy believers are always thinking that everything Trump does is part of his brilliant game of 4 (or 5 or 6) D chess (because they would rather believe that than Trump not having enough smarts to make decisions on any basis other than an egotistical whim),  when it comes to Putin such an argument (that his true aim is not the one he publicly advocates) seems more plausible.  

So, while Trumpkins are claiming that Trump's decision is proof that he's not in Putin's pocket (because the Kremlin had been urging the US to keep to the agreement),  some are saying that Trump's leaving serves a bigger purpose for Putin:

Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and author of the new memoir From Cold War to Hot Peace, has one more reason to keep the deal: Abandoning it would play right into Russian president Vladimir Putin’s narrative that the US is untrustworthy.

McFaul worked on the Iran deal under Barack Obama. In a phone interview with Quartz, he recalled the lengthy talks held between the Obama administration and the P5+1 (the five permanent UN security council members plus Germany, which allied to negotiate the deal with Iran) to create the deal. Based on the Trump administration’s current lack of “diplomatic enthusiasm” for renegotiation, McFaul predicts the US will walk away from its historic agreement.

“Russia will be fine with that because they will be on the side of the rest of the international community. We—the Trump administration and the United States—will look like the outliers; we will look like the non-cooperative ones and Russia will look they’re like part of international law and cooperation,” he said.

Or, as someone argues at Huffington Post:

As the U.S. puts more economic pressure on Iran, the Islamic republic will find it harder to acquire friends. That leaves Tehran with Moscow. Though the two are uneasy partners, they have cooperated to combat international initiatives that might challenge their own interests. In Syria, for instance, they fight side-by-side and present a united front in global organizations to defend their mutual friend Syrian President Bashar Assad. 

Hard-liners in Tehran want to deepen that relationship. In the process, they seek to boost the sense of righteous resistance to the West that keeps aggressive nationalism strong among their base and ensure that their country remains a Putin-style autocratic society, rather than gaining more exposure to the Western liberties that many ordinary Iranians have clamored for.

A more isolated and paranoid Iran means “the Russians gain geostrategically,” said Reza Marashi, the research director at the National Iranian American Council and a former State Department official.
The United States, he added, is helping reinforce a perception that the Russians want to strengthen: that today Washington may hold sway in the southern half of the Middle East, but the north ― including key areas in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey ― is under Moscow’s influence.

And that plays precisely into what Putin deeply desires ― to make Russia, 27 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, once again look like an equal to the U.S.

Sounds more or less plausible to me...

Update:  noticed this via Twitter -

Two Iranian airlines have signed deals to buy 40 passenger planes from Russia’s Sukhoi Civil Aircraft Company, amid slow progress with orders of western-built aircraft.
Aseman Airlines has agreed to buy 20 of the Sukhoi SuperJet 100 planes while Iran Air Tours, a subsidiary of national carrier Iran Air, has also ordered 20 of the planes. With an average list price of $50.5m each, the orders have a total value of just over $2bn.

 The article does note that Iran already has much bigger orders with Airbus and Boeing, but the planes are coming slowly.  If the US prevents Boeing completing its orders, it's potentially a further win for Russia, and possibly Airbus?

California and big government

Why don't "small government/low taxes always is best" advocates address the matter of how California now has the world's 5th largest economy?   This was in the news a lot last week.  The New York Times explains:

As the state has blossomed, outpacing many others, it has reinforced a liberal narrative about growth, that a state can have big government and a booming economy, too. (Texas is the conservatives’ counterexample: a big, fast-growing economy under laissez-faire government.)

California has strict environmental protections, a progressive tax system and an ascendant minimum wage, now $10.50 an hour and set to rise in stages to $15 in 2023. The state welcomes immigrants, celebrates ethnic and linguistic diversity, and actively tries to combat climate change. And with all that, its economy continues to soar.

“We have raised income taxes and imposed increasingly high fees to reduce greenhouse emissions,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “None of that has overridden the attractiveness of this state for talent and innovation and entrepreneurship.”

California’s economic success underpins the state’s audacity and its defiance of President Trump. It is an invisible buttress when the governor and attorney general harangue the Trump administration, as they did recently at a news conference in Sacramento, for “basically going to war against the state of California.”

 Everyone acknowledges the state does have its problems too.   But one of the big ones (unfunded future liability for pensions) is apparently shared by many other, less liberal states.   

Out of Iran

Vox went and found one not entirely nutty expert who supports the Trump pull out of the Iran deal, but I have to say, I don't find his reasoning terribly convincing, and all of the objections the interviewer raises make more sense to me.

In other Trump pull out/not pulling out news, a lot of people on Twitter are finding very plausible the theory explained at length at the New York Magazine that Trump is the true beneficiary of a (much bigger than Stormy Daniels') affair silencing deal.   If that turns out to be true, I suspect it might be the personal scandal that would start undoing Trump's grip on the Presidency. 

What a suck up

A secular hymn

So, I'm slowly catching up with what the young'uns have long known about technology and music by paying for a family subscription to Spotify.   (It does seem ridiculously good value.)  I'd never used the app before until last weekend.

For someone of my vintage, it's remarkable to think how this digital world really makes previous decades of physically collecting recorded music largely redundant.   Not that I have ever collected much myself - listening to music probably plays a smaller role in my life than it does for the average person.   But still, I can retrospectively now deem my lack of interest in acquiring vinyl and cds as justified by technological changes that I never saw coming.

I say this by preamble of posting a song by Michael Nesmith which I hadn't listened to for years - Harmony Constant.   At the risk of sounding morbid, I've always felt that this would be a good one to play at a (my?) funeral service, as it definitely has a spiritual aspect and is rather uplifting.   I have found a good bit of commentary about the song here, calling it a secular hymn, which seems accurate.   



Update:  Hmmm.   While it's OK seeing Nesmith singing the song, his vocal in that version isn't that great.  I much prefer the album version which can be heard on the next clip, starting at 2min 55sec.   But you should listen to his cheering version of "Different Drum" at the start too.

Fantasy budget time again

David Leyonhjelm likes to do a fantasy libertarian budget every year, although it's hard to see why he bothers, since the details need never change when you're an ideologue who lives by simple rules (government is essentially bad; taxes must be absolutely minimal so that government must be tiny.)

One thing of interest, though, is how his libertarian policy is completely against government foreign aid (other than short term disaster aid), which presumably would mean leaving that field wide open to the big pockets of China - a country with internal policies which are pretty much the complete antithesis of what libertarians like that's actively seeking to spread its influence with foreign aid deals.  Way to step back and let China buy its way into favour with all of our near neighbours, Senator Blofeld.


    

A good idea, I think

It was only back in October last year that I wondered why it didn't make sense for governments (at least in sunny states, like Queensland) to make it compulsory for new house builds to have solar power and battery storage.

It seems I wasn't the only person thinking about it, as California is likely to go down that path (at least for the solar cells, if not the storage):

California may soon be the first state in the nation to require virtually every new home be fitted with solar panels.

The mandate, which would take effect in 2020, is expected to be approved by the California Energy Commission on Wednesday as part of the state’s ongoing push to move from fossil fuels to renewable power.

Under the proposal, all new homes and apartments three stories or less would be required to include solar installations. Exceptions would apply to houses built in shady areas or new structures that include other sources of renewable power.

The proposal is expected to raise the average home cost by nearly $500 annually over the term of a 30-year mortgage, according to state officials. However, homeowners are expected to save nearly $1,000 a year on their power bills, officials said.

I think that this idea would go over well in at least Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.   I'm not so sure about Victoria and South Australia, where cloudier, wetter winters than the northern  States enjoy probably make solar power seem of limited use for several months of the year. 

Time for more climate change whiplash

This article in Nature News:  Can the world kick its fossil fuel addiction fast enough is another in the long line of "climate change whiplash" reporting we've been seeing for a few years.  On the one hand, emissions are clearly still going up when the economy picks up; on the other, past estimates of the decreasing cost and increasing deployment of renewable energy were clearly underestimates, and a lot of renewable energy deployment is in the pipeline.

As to whether market based policy is going to work fast enough, there seems to be increasing doubt:

But politics can also help to bring about rapid change. While Trump is fighting on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry, leaders of other countries are moving in the opposite direction. The United Kingdom and France have both announced plans to ban the sale of petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040. And more than two dozen countries have committed to phasing out coal by as early as 2030.

These types of mandate are a sign that energy politics might be shifting towards more brute-force methods, says Michael Mehling, an energy and environmental-policy researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Economists tend to favour market-based programmes, such as the EU’s Emissions Trading System, but Mehling says there is little evidence that such arrangements will drive the kind of rapid transformational change needed to meet global climate goals. Old-school government mandates might be the last resort, Mehling says. “If the decisions are made at a sufficiently high level,” he says, “they can change the landscape pretty much overnight”.

In any case, as I've been posting for some time, it's not as if those who are supposed to be the Right wing proponents of small government and free market solutions (libertarians and so called "classical liberals") are actually interested in addressing climate change at all:  they are more interested in corporations making money now, and a gormless in principle belief that governments never doing anything is better than governments doing something, such that they will clasp any reason (ranging from entertaining outright denialists to a "it's too late now anyway" defeatism) so as to justify not endorsing any policy action.   They are worse than useless, and just need to be bypassed.  

And to be fair, the Left of politics needs to be criticised for a certain gullibility in the policies and advice they have promoted, too.   At least they are interested in solutions, which is the first step in the process.

But look at the revision now going on regarding the estimates of the social cost of climate change, just in the matter of agriculture.  From this paper's abstract:

Despite substantial advances in climate change impact research in recent years, the scientific basis for damage functions in economic models used to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC) is either undocumented, difficult to trace, or based on a small number of dated studies. Here we present new damage functions based on the current scientific literature and introduce these into an integrated assessment model (IAM) in order to estimate a new SCC. We focus on the agricultural sector, use two methods for determining the yield impacts of warming, and the GTAP CGE model to calculate the economic consequences of yield shocks. These new damage functions reveal far more adverse agricultural impacts than currently represented in IAMs. Impacts in the agriculture increase from net benefits of $2.7 ton⁻¹ CO₂ to net costs of $8.5 ton⁻¹, leading the total SCC to more than double.

That's some massive change to an input into an IAM, isn't it?

And further to my skepticism that IAMs could have adequately worked out the cost of intense rainfall and sea level rise, I note from a review of a new book on the latter (my bold):

Projections diverge on how fast the inundation will proceed if nations stay on a “business as usual” path in their greenhouse gas emissions. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a maximum of about three feet by the year 2100; James Hansen and colleagues project several times that much over the same time frame; a recent research paper that recalculates the dissolution of Antarctic ice warns of five feet as a median estimate. Sea level rise on such a scale would submerge an area inhabited, just now, by 153 million people. For an indefinite number of decades or centuries after that, the rise would continue.

As former presidential science advisor John Holdren once pointed out, human beings have three options: reduce the amount of climate disruption they are causing, adapt as intelligently as possible to the change they can’t avoid, and suffer. “The question – the issue that’s up for grabs – is what the mix going forward is going to be,” Holdren has said.

Under a “work and hope” scenario – one in which the world cuts emissions with extreme speed and hopes that the more optimistic climate change projections are the accurate ones – sea level rise might be limited to something like two feet. But even that more modest figure would imply worldwide consequences exceeding our ability to comprehend them. “Staggering,” “catastrophic,” and other alarm words have lost much of their voltage. In these busy times, “trillions” are the new “millions” – and thus rather negligible. But two feet of sea level rise is, beyond question, coming.

So, have IAMs been worked out on the "best case" scenario of 2 feet by 2100, when it may be 2 1/2 times  that, and causing the re-location of 153 million people? 

But, again, why should this be taken as a licence to do nothing in terms of CO2 reduction?   Even if it takes 200 to 300 years (instead of 100 years) of increase to reach a 3 metre sea level rise, slowing down the rate surely buys time for (some) cities to respond.  

It's about time I revisited the matter of ocean acidification too.  That is a key area that, I believe, is not realistically amenable to to geoengineering, regardless of what techno-optimists may think can be done temperature wise.  

Oh look, another libertarian do-nothing

For reasons unimportant to this post, I was searching through this blog for past entries about Helen Dale, and was reminded that she had written this in 2013:

5. Libertarians in particular need to drop their widespread refusal to accept the reality of climate change. It makes us look like wingnuts and diverts attention from the larger number of greenies who spew pseudoscience on a daily basis. 

A year after that, she started her (brief) career as a staffer for David Leyonhjelm, the accidental Senator whose party's policy is still a facade for denialism:

Scientific evidence suggests that the Earth’s climate has changed throughout its existence, sometimes dramatically, and that changes in climate have impacted human civilisation. Much of human history has been subject to the effects of global warming or cooling – the origins of the Sumerian, Babylonian and perhaps also biblical stories of a great flood, for example, are probably due to a massive rise in sea levels following global warming 7,600 years ago.

Global cooling from 1300 to 500 BC gave rise to the advance of glaciers, migration, invasion and famine. The Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 AD led to the Vikings establishing colonies and trade routes.

Whether human activity is causing climate change or not, the important issue is whether governments are capable of implementing policies that mitigate it without reducing the prosperity of future generations.

Should the evidence become compelling that global warming is due to human activity, that such global warming is likely to have significantly negative consequences for human existence, and that changes in human activity could realistically reverse those consequences, the Liberal Democrats would favour market-based options.

And Leyonhjelm himself makes denialist quality tweets, such as:

 I also see (from her Facebook page, I think) that Dale is attending the Friedman Conference in Sydney later this month, which as I have already noted, is having climate change denialists Ian Plimer and "Jonova" as speakers.

What's the bet that Dale will not make a scene at the conference about it inviting as speakers only full blown climate change deniers?  

And that Chris Berg will appear on the ABC again and not be challenged about his similar status as fellow traveller with climate change denialism.  

Intense rain, climate change, again..

It's long been a theme here that new records for intensity of rainfall and resultant flooding, due to even the relatively modest increase in the atmosphere's water carrying capacity is likely the first big problem with climate change in many parts of the world.

And it's a hard one to deal with:   sure, in theory, you can argue that flood prone cities can prepare themselves by spending more on higher capacity drainage systems.  But replacing pipes and drains of one diameter that used to be adequate 100 years ago with significantly larger drains to cope with the increased frequency of intense, overwhelming rainfall, is  surely going to be very expensive; and for a regional government it is not going to be clear which particular location is going to face an unexpected downpour first.

Why on earth should I think that the economic modelling of climate change effects could be accurately making estimates of that when tallying up the figures for their estimates of when the benefits of climate change crosses the line of being clearly outweighed by the harm?    I would think they can put a rough estimate of of the cost of increased damage from flooding - they've got some historical guidelines for that - but as flooding increases, governments will be under pressure to pre-empt them by the expensive sorts of capital works that I would think is very, very hard to estimate.


Anyway, these thoughts were inspired by the news of (what sounds like) a new rainfall record in Hawaii, which has caused lots of damage:

A staggering rainstorm on the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Kauai is the latest clue that climate change-related impacts are already threatening the islands. On April 14 and 15, a gauge in Waipa recorded 49 inches of rain in 24 hours. For perspective, the rains from Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches last year, occured over a four-day span.  

The state is still assessing the full extent of damage, and Gov. David Ige recently announced a plan to help farmers who suffered losses during the storm. More than 220 people had to be airlifted to safety by the Army and National Guard as a major road was blocked by landslides. A herd of bison was carried off by the flood waters, with some animals having to be rescued from the ocean.

A group within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that investigates extreme weather and climate events is analyzing the storm to  determine whether the storm broke the national record for the most rainfall within a 24-hour period.

The current 24-hour record  is 43 inches, set in Alvin, Texas in 1979.

Setting a new record will be just the latest reminder that as the climate warms,  parts of Hawaii are already experiencing bigger torrential rains and will likely see more frequent tropical cyclones. Pao-Shin Chu, Hawaii’s state climatologist and a professor at the University of Hawaii, noted that his research showed that the Big Island has seen more frequent heavy rains in the past 50 years.

“If given a one degree C warming, the atmospheric moisture is expected to increase by 7 percent. With this additional moisture available in the air, it may help trigger heavy downpours if other conditions are right,” Chu said by email.

Of course, the damage caused in a rural area is not even necessarily preventable by better drainage.   It can be hard to retain a hillside if it collapses.

Here's a recent article, too, from DW about extreme weather being validly linked to climate change is increasingly proved by science.  Interesting that it deals with the Roger Pielke Jr claim that that increased costs from weather events is more related to increased building in risk prone areas (and therefore not proof there are more extreme events causing damage.)   The insurance industry doesn't believe it; scientists don't believe it.   And Pielke Jr's continuing contrarianism is fading from influence, anyway.  Good.