Okay, First Things First: stop shooting at us.The threat of man-made climate change looms larger than any other problem facing the planet, so it's no wonder that the discussion about global warming has turned into a kind of choreographed screaming that drowns out the facts.

Science unequivocally tells us that climate change is real and caused by man, but predictions of destruction on an epic scale don’t stack up.

Consider the plight of the polar bear – a pin-up ‘victim’ of global warming. Some campaigners claim polar bears are dying because of warmer temperatures, but the facts don’t support the hysteria.

Since the 1960s, polar bear numbers have actually grown five-fold. Polar bears will eventually be affected by climate change, but many creatures and plants in the Arctic will do better as temperatures rise. That doesn’t make up for waning populations of polar bears, but we need to hear both sides of the story.

Scare stories are based on faulty assumptions about just one declining bear population. For the sake of argument, let's accept those faulty assumptions at face value. That means we are losing 15 bears a year to climate change. This means that – at most – 15 bears could be saved this year if we could stop global warming right now. Of course, we can’t. The Kyoto Protocol will cost $180 billion dollars, yet will not affect temperatures by very much: it would probably save .06 of one bear each year.

There are smarter alternatives. Hunters shoot between 300 and 500 polar bears each year. We can revoke hunting rights and clamp down on poachers. Surely it makes more sense to save 300-500 polar bears at virtually no cost than it does to spend hundreds of billions of dollars saving just one.

Of course, we don’t just care about polar bears, but also about the human toll of climate change. It seems logical to expect more heat waves and therefore more deaths. But though this fact gets much less billing, rising temperatures will also reduce the number of cold spells. And the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. According to the first complete peer-reviewed survey of climate change's health effects, global warming will actually save lives. It's estimated that by 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year. But at the same time, 1.8 million fewer people will die from cold.

The Kyoto Protocol, at great expense, is not a sensible way to stop people from dying in future heat waves. At a much lower cost, urban designers and politicians could lower temperatures more effectively by planting trees, adding water features, and reducing the amount of asphalt in at-risk cities. Estimates show that this could reduce the peak temperatures in cities by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Global warming will claim lives in another way: by increasing the number of people at risk of catching malaria by about 3 percent over this century. According to scientific models, implementing the Kyoto Protocol for the rest of this century would reduce the malaria risk by just 0.2 percent.

On the other hand, we could spend $3 billion annually -- 2 percent of the protocol's cost -- on mosquito nets and medication and cut malaria incidence almost in half within a decade. For every dollar we spend saving one person through policies like the Kyoto Protocol, we could save 36,000 through direct intervention.

The world shouldn’t ignore climate change. Rather than throwing trillions of dollars at a treaty that will achieve little, I advocate a dramatic increase in spending on research into low-carbon energy. If every nation took part, this would be much more efficient than Kyoto, yet cost almost ten times less.

We should remember when we respond to the threat of climate change that other huge challenges face the planet:

• 4 million people will die from malnutrition this year
• 3 million from HIV/AIDS
• 2.5 million from indoor and outdoor air pollution
• 2 million from lack of micronutrients (iron, zinc and vitamin A)
• And almost 2 million from lack of clean drinking water.

Climate change policies are not the most effective way of dealing with these issues.

My latest project, Copenhagen Consensus 2008, will look at the world’s biggest challenges and ask some of the world’s top minds to identify the best solutions to them. Four Nobel laureates and four other top economists will weigh up how much good could be achieved by different approaches to world problems, and will identify the most effective ways to make a difference.

There’s more information at Copenhagen Consensus.

Cutting carbon emissions through Kyoto has become the instantaneous answer to any problem, but we could achieve more through simpler policies.

For one thing, we should stop shooting polar bears.

Bjørn Lomborg is the organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus 2008, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and author of Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Project Chicken Soup: More than just soup. December first was World AIDS Day, and the entire month of December is HIV/AIDS Awareness Month. That being the case, I thought it might be nice to aim our tzedekah accordingly. Enter Project Chicken Soup, an organization serving the greater Los Angeles area with a simple yet wonderful goal. Project Chicken Soup, a part of Los Angeles Jewish AIDS Services, gets healthy kosher meals to people living with HIV/AIDS in LA County, and recently received The Congressional Hunger Center's 2007 Victory Against Hunger Award for their hard work. And, they, like most organizations, need support. 

You can PayPal them to donate, rock the lapel pin, order the cookbook, or, far better, you can read the volunteer page, show up on any of these dates and help them cook and deliver meals. Also, if you know someone looking for a B'nai Mitzvah project, Project Chicken Soup can help you with that, too.

Last week Democratic Senator Barack Obama made headlines by suggesting that public schools teach “age-appropriate," "science-based” sexuality lessons to kindergarteners. He later clarified that "age-appropriate" means teaching children how to avoid predators, not how to unroll condoms. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tried to sensationalize Obama’s position —formerly Romney’s own position, but what isn’t?—saying, “We should be working to clean up the filthy waters our kids are swimming in.” There are few statistics for how many of America’s young people are hooking up in filthy water—although as a teenager I did manage to get laid in a bathtub once or twice, which always leads to more pulled neck muscles than orgasms. Still, there’s just enough data for the government to consider itself a ...

If you don’t know that George Bush just doubled the size of PEPFAR, the Bush anti-HIV/AIDS initiative that was already the largest and most ambitious anti-disease program in human history, you shouldn’t feel too bad. PEPFAR has never gotten much media attention, and this week’s stunning announcement was no different. Here are the dull details, accurately presented by Dan Turner in an L.A. Times op-ed:

Today, Bush upped the ante by asking Congress to double the size of his AIDS program, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, to $30 billion over five years. That is a vast commitment that dwarfs past efforts and provides real hope that humanity will in the near future be able to stop the spread of AIDS—an accomplishment akin, at least in scope, to putting a man on the moon. This disease has killed 25 million people so far and is still raging out of control, especially in Africa.

According to Newsmap, which visually represents how much attention a given topic gets from the international newsmedia, the top story in the UK last night was “Hamas says Israel wounds 2 Gaza gunmen.” PEPFAR? I can’t find it on the UK Newsmap at all. Or on the American one. Or the Canadian or French or Spanish or Australian or German or any of the others.

But can you blame them? Isn't it all a bit dull? I mean, how many stories are you going to write about the fact, as Turner puts it, George Bush “has done more to relieve poverty and disease in Africa…than any other American president”?

My own interest is partly due to a memorable conversation I had with an HIV pharmacologist from the Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala, Uganda. She described how people like her had spent the Clinton administration tirelessly but fruitlessly begging Clinton and other world leaders to send the antiretroviral medication needed to save the lives of those infected. As she watched patient after patient die for lack of meds readily available in the West, progress was virtually non-existent. By the end of the Clinton administration, the number of people in all of sub-Saharan Africa receiving ARV therapy was still pitifully small, almost darkly absurd: 50,000. Then Clinton left, Bush arrived, and before long she was struggling with a very different sort of challenge: finding enough doctors to prescribe the crates of ARV meds that kept arriving. “Bush’s money,” as she repeatedly referred to it, had changed everything.

I hope we can celebrate PEPFAR as a boon for HIV-infected Africans without being insensitive to the plight of the progressive, socially-conscious Westerners who find the program’s existence so irritating. You’ll get a sense of their confusion and pain if you play a little parlor game I’ve developed. Find an article on PEPFAR in a left-of-center publication, and see how long it takes to spot an egregious factual error or misrepresentation that conveniently diminishes the accomplishments of the program.

For a taste of egregious factual error, try this line from an extremely rare attempt by Counterpunch to write about PEPFAR: "three-fourths of the monies allocated for treatment must be spent on the purchase and distribution of antiretroviral drugs from U.S. pharmaceutical manufactures and cannot be substituted by generic alternatives."

Well...no. Not exactly. Or even at all. PEPFAR uses both foreign-made and generic drugs. In cases in which a foreign-manufactured drug violates a patent held by an American pharmaceutical company, the FDA still approves the drug for use by PEPFAR though not for sale in the U.S. itself. So the Counterpunch quote is dead wrong, a plain fabrication that portrays the Bush administration and PEPFAR as slaves to corporate avarice.

Continue reading...

Hail Selassie: The Old Testament-Style Emperor of AbyssiniaThere's a phrase from Auden's "Spain 1937" that I don't think I'll ever read the same way again: "Nipped off from Africa." The great poet of twentieth century political disillusionment was symbolizing continental shift ("soldered so crudely to inventive Europe" is what was done to the African fragment) but now we can associate another sort of nipping with the land of gazelles, Serengeti sunsets, and epidemic retroviruses:

A Ugandan paper reports that last year of 2,500 people circumcised at various clinics, half of them were male adults, compared to less than 400 in 2005.

And to think Haile Selassie's Solomonic iconography in Ethiopia used to be the be-all of Africa's love affair with Jewish custom...

The real question is: Will HIV-averse, bell-end dongs become selected for in the future without the need of circumcision? All the moyels in the room feel like humans after dolphins develop posable thumbs. "Oh shit," they say.

Men the world over are pondering their foreskins with a renewed sense of purpose due to a recently published clinical study in Africa that claims circumcised men are significantly less susceptible to HIV. Those curious about the gritty details of the operation can consult Slate’s Explainer column, which is so full of information that I understand a pop-up book based on the column is already in production. Even if you’d rather not consider the snipping options, though, you have to wonder: How much does it hurt?

Studies indicate that three in 1,000 uncircumcised American men end up going under the knife annually, for aesthetic, religious, and medical reasons. A number of these are Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet bloc; under Communism, hospitals refused to perform circumcisions, and mohels ran the risk of arrest. It’s important to note that while circumcision halves the odds of HIV/AIDS in the African study, that does not equate in the US. The spread of AIDS in Africa is largely through heterosexual sex, whereas in the US the prime vectors are intravenous drug use and anal sex.

Then there’s Abraham. He was 99 years old when he performed a circumcision on himself, presumably without even a topical. One could argue that at 99 there is even less feeling down there than at one week, but these days, Abraham would be encouraged to see a qualified doctor, who would inject a local anesthetic into his penis. That stings a bit, but it prevents pain during the next step, when the foreskin is snipped away. After the anesthetic wears off, however, the area will be sore and tender, often for several weeks. The recovery hurts; the procedure doesn’t.

In Africa, researchers are also looking into the ever popular “bloodless” method of circumcision, which entails the following: Gather up your foreskin in a tight clamp; hold it in place for approximately one week while the bloodless flesh slowly rots off like a co-star in an all-penis remake of Night of the Living Dead. Bloodless? Perhaps. Painless? Uh, fuck no.

The difference for adults and babies is largely one of anesthesia and time. Whether the procedure is done in a hospital or by a mohel, babies get very little in the way of pain relief. In a hospital, they may get a dab of lidocaine, but because of the potential neurological dangers of using anesthesia on newborns, doctors shy away from the pharmacological options. During a brit mila, the mohel gives the baby a small amount of wine, which helps during the procedure, but very little after. Fortunately, for babies, the entire process takes just a few minutes, the healing time is about a week, and they don’t remember any of it.

Adults get the painkillers, but they also have to endure a more complex bit of surgery. It used to be that men could have the operation performed under a general anesthesia, allowing them to simply wake up missing their foreskins. Now, however, most adult circumcisions are done as an outpatient procedure via a local anesthesia (which, while supposedly pain-free, sounds terribly unappealing, though, of course, I need a general anesthesia when my dog gets her teeth cleaned). Healing time is typically four to six weeks, during which time the patient must abstain from sex. Erections in general are best avoided; let me tell you, from experience, I endorse this advice wholeheartedly. And, unlike babies, adult patients remember all of it.

Take it from me. While I was circumcised shortly after birth and thus don’t remember the experience, I do have good reason to conclude that circumcision as an adult (or child, or teenager, or frat boy) hurts quite a bit.

The Zipper Incident (circa 1979): On a frigid winter day at Castle Rock Elementary school, I got it in my mind that I’d like to pee behind the tree by the bike racks. After quickly ensuring that neither Renee Sandoval nor Margaret Cashion could see me, I unzipped and let flow a torrent of juice-box-fueled urine. I remember thinking that it was a tremendous relief until I saw über-bully Brian Camp approaching. Surely Brian would tell the girls. Surely I’d be humiliated, not to mention suspended. I shoved all of my machinery back into place and yanked my zipper up, slicing a fair portion of skin off the bottom side of my penis. Pain factor, on a scale of one to ten: ten.

The Friction Incident (circa 1987): Five Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. A thick pair of Guess? jeans. One 16-year-old girl named Michelle wearing equally thick Guess? jeans and a shirt by Genera that glowed in the dark. Two hours of friction, soundtrack provided by The Cure, lubrication provided by denim. Pain factor (during incident): 0, wine coolers presumably having dulled the sensation. Pain factor (after incident): ten.

The Shaving Incident (circa 1995): Given a pair of electric hair clippers, some men make the decision to look less like themselves and more like porn stars. My own adventure in pubic topiary started swimmingly. Places I hadn’t seen since 1979 were suddenly visible. The air seemed cooler. The sky seemed brighter. I thought about buying a Speedo. And then I cut a chunk of flesh from my penis with the clippers. Pain factor: ten.

What these incidents have in common is that they were done outside of a hospital, largely without anesthesia (save for the wine coolers), and long after I’d actually been circumcised. So while I didn’t have a memory of the original process, my nerve endings likely did, and what they communicated to me was that keeping sharp objects away from my penis should become my life’s work.

I'm glad our most barbaric tribal ritual is finally getting some rational justification beyond "Abraham did it, and you'll do it to your own kid." Just take it slow--and let's get some Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers over to Africa pronto.

Goldberg, P.I. would like to thank Dr. Doug P. Lyle.

Got a Jewish question? Send it to goldbergpi@jewcy.com.