Willis is about as wrong as usual

Willis wants us to know that carbon taxes, being regressive, are "cruel." So very, very cruel. This he will prove with data, because he is a Serious Person and not at all a shambolic dishonest embarrassment to the human species.

Immediately, however, we run into the problem that the numbers provided are not remotely plausible. All the numbers look far too high, but the figure on the bottom for thos making less than $20,000 a year is the standout. While poor Americans often spend more of their incomes on basic necessities like energy, the idea that they spend 40% of their income on energy is, frankly, utterly ludicrous.

To get here he cites a number of sources, fucking up in unknown ways to get answers that are wildly wrong:

Someone challenged me on this claim about energy taxes the other day, and I realized I believed it without ever checking it … bad Willis, no cookies. So of course, having had that thought I had to take a look.
The Energy Information Agency (EIA) collects data on this, with the exception of gasoline usage. I got the most recent data, for 2009. (Excel workbook). Gasoline usage figures are here from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Finally, income averages by tiers are available here from the Census Bureau.

While he laments the loss of his cookie, I would actually offer him two small cookies here. One, he is making an effort to check his intuitions against data. Two, the places he is going for data contain good reliable information: the EIA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau.

At that point Willis' cookie supply dries up, because he has mangled the data to get a grossly wrong answer. People who make less than $20,000 per year spend an average of $1,571 dollars a year on energy (slight more if you include gas). So Willis is asking us to accept that the average income of this group is $3,900 a year, and after spend almost half that on energy they are paying for housing, food, and clothes with $200 a month.

The sources Willis cites do not provide numbers for the average income of a household in a given income bracket. Possibly he was using the means as averages, although that would not explain his numbers by itself. The Social Security administration does provide averages, fortunately:

 If you plug those numbers in you get an average income, for those making less than $20,000 per year, of $8,124. That would make the energy costs in this bracket 19% (plus a couple percent for gas), which is quite high compared to expert estimates the very poor spend about 10% of their incomes on energy, but which is less than half the number Willis somehow obtained.

I don't spend as much time chasing the nonsense on WUWT as I used to, because so much of it is repetitive and deadly boring. It's also because those that want to be informed have a much clearer understanding of the workings of ideological alternative realities than was the case when I started this blog in 2010. For reasons I would never chose, the country and the world are much more familiar with the working of denialism than they were then.

This one caught my eye because Willis is trying to be good. He's looking up good sources. He's trying to test his intuitions against the facts.

He fails because he is still operating out of a denier mindset in which he expects to find something all the experts have missed. A simple google search should have altered him that the people who study energy poverty professionally put the cost of energy in the US to the poor at, at worst, 10-20%. He should then have tried hard to figure out where his calculations went wrong.

Willis has never learned how to manage a data set, which is to say, he's never learned the art of doing a little math as you go, checking the numbers against common sense, and circling back to recheck when the answers starting coming out weird. This is basic, habitual skepticism, and the scientists I know do it so adroitly it becomes invisible and almost unconscious, a reflex. Willis clearly doesn't know that he doesn't know how to do this. Despite gestures at an appropriate method of inquiry, the cruel cold talons of Dunning-Kruger still hold him firmly in its grasp.

There is no theoretical limit to the number of times a person can be shot in the face

Gabrielle Giffords -- techno-inspiration.

Following where the courageous Erle C Ellis has led, I want to correct a misconception that has been much circulated and widely believed, even among medical experts: there is, in fact, no firm limit to the number of times a person can be shot in the face and survive.

Many medical scientists and  activists -- anti-gun-violence advocates, anti-gang task forces, opponents of domestic violence and so on -- have frequently misrepresented the science of ballistics so far as to convey the impression that being shot in the face even three or fours times will always kill the victim. This is nonsense.

Now, I am in no way advocating shooting people in the face. As a medical doctor, I have seen and treated people who have been shot in the face, and very serious consequences can follow from that. Still, as a scientist, my first loyalty is to the truth, and the truth is: being shot in the face is not invariably fatal, and in fact as the science of medicine advances, being shot in the face is getting less and less lethal all the time.

Certainly, if you are shot in the face repeatedly, there may be negative consequences for your health. But it's important to keep things in context: most people die of cancer, COPD, heart disease and infections, not being shot in the face.

Humans are endlessly adaptive. If we look at people being being shot in the face, they will often bite or claw at their attackers, which can be highly effective at deflecting the shot. If the bullet makes contact, the result is frequently a graze or damage to the facial bones and the soft tissues of the neck. Even several of these, taken together, are unlikely to be fatal. Every shots to the brain may not be fatal -- consider Gabrielle Giffords notable recovery.

Giffords benefited from rapid emergency response and the near availibilty of first-rate trauma care, including a neurosurgeon on standby. Without glossing over her very serious injuries, it is apparent that if every single person on earth were within ten minutes of a level one trauma center, deaths from being shot in the face -- all deaths by being shot, in fact -- would be much reduced. Therefore -- no matter how ludicriously unrealistic that scenario is as it pertains to the present moment -- it logically demonstrates that there is no necessary relationship between being shot in the face a certain number of times, and dying.

We can, and indeed should, look even further forward, to a time when humans will be able to be cloned from a single cell, our memories and thought patterns stored on hard drives in anticipation of the need to copy them onto the cloned bodies in the event of accident or violence -- such as being repeatedly shot in the face. In such a case no amount of gunshots -- even a high-velocity Gauss-type future weapon vaporizing the head and leaving only a bloody stump -- would cause true, permanent death.

In no way should we allow the incidental and irrelevant detail of the vast gap between the future society of our imaginations and the reality of the present day to cloud our reasoning -- there is no hard and fast theoretical limit upon how many times a human being can be shot in the face and live, any more than there is upon how many human beings can share a fixed amount of soil, water, or cropland. These things are theoretically limitless, however much it might be that they are limited, in practice, at the present moment.

Food prices hockey stick, and the folly of climate isolationism

H/t Climate Progress. When we talk about starvation and climate change, the image that is invoked is one of an apocalyptic future in which absolute scarcity brings hunger to rich and poor alike.That may be in our future, but that's not the way it starts.

We know global warming is already depressing yields of rice, wheat, and corn. This raises the price of these staples -- which, along with soya, ultimately account for three-quarters of the calories we eat. Among those already at the edge of starvation -- the 1.1 billion people living on less than a dollar a day -- sharply higher food prices will push some of them over the edge. Among the 925 million people who are undernourished, some will starve outright (some six million children a year) and many more will have their lives stunted or cut short by ill health. When you double food prices, as has happened over the last ten years, more of those people will go under.

Global warming is not the major driver of the current price rise -- food prices have also spiked due to increasing population and increasing consumption among the wealthy and middle class in the developing world. But they are contributing (and that contribution will only grow), and those that do not have the resources to fight for calories are among the first fatalities from climate change.

There will be some who say, and more who feel, that we can ignore these victims because they are poor, that better governments and better markets could have saved them, and that greenhouse gases and the warming therefrom can be just another export to the developing world from the rich world, that we can live with climate change in which they starve, and we cope with a big hurricane now and then. But that view is willfully blind to the facts. Yes, global warming will hit the poor first and hardest, but it won't stop there.

Eventually, if we do not act, those with the best governments and the best markets will be overcome too. Because of our institutions and our wealth, we have a much greater capacity to adapt, but not a limitless one. The poor, if I may be forgiven a cruel analogy, are canaries in a coal mine. And not just that. We are more connected to each other now than we were in the 20th century. People and their diseases move more freely. Nuclear weapons have spread more widely. Global terrorists have shown their reach. Climate isolationism is no more practical than the traditional sort.

There are those who say, "Let us ignore the continent of Europe. Let us leave it with its hatreds and its armaments, to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels, and decree its own doom. Let us turn our backs to this melancholy and alarmist view. Let us fix our gaze across the ocean and see our own life in our own dominions and empires." 

There would be very much to this plan if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations, and could tow them three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, and anchor them safely upon the smiling coasts of Canada; but I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done. No engineer has come forth with a plan. It would, in any case, take a long time. Have we got a long time?