The 131st Skeptics' Circle

You can now find the 131st Skeptcs' Circle at Providentia. I found the list of areas of knowledge needed for skeptics, and the dowsing for bombs articles to be particularly interesting.
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Overpopulation and the Illinois Family Institute

The Illinois Family Institute only occasionally talks about issues that intersect with the things I like to talk about on this blog. Their primary purpose is political, not social, by their own admission, and I don't really want to discuss politics that much in my blog posts. There are better sites for that. However, when they do discuss issues of science, you can rely on them to be wrong. So, when I saw a couple of videos that were filled to the brim with misleading information on overpopulation, I thought it was worth mentioning. I will discuss some of the facts on these videos, and how meaningful they are, below the fold.

Each video has its own justification page, so I’ll start there for The Making of a Myth.

Claim: Did Malthus really say to kill off the poor? Yep. Reality: There is a the usual quote mine that does not directly support the contention. Malthus did favor enacting conditions that would increase mortality, but nothing in the quote mine nor the link suggests killing off the poor.
Claim: Malthus thought doctors shouldn't cure diseases? Reality: Malthus says that if we stop curing diseases, we can marry at puberty and not starve. There was no recommendation offered.
Did Paul Ehrlich really say that famines would devastate humanity in the 1970s? Reality: while not hundreds of millions, in facts millions did die from famines in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in undeveloped countries. Ehrlich seemed to underestimate the impact of the Green Revolution.
Claim: The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was founded in 1969, the year after Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Reality: Being founded the year after a specific book is published is not evidence the book is a cause. In fact, it’s much more likely the UNFPA’s originators were working independently from the same data.
Claim: Their complicit work with the infamous "one-child policy" ... led the United States to pull its funding. Reality: The UNPF (name changed in 1987) was funded by Congress in every year of its existence. In some years, Reagan and the Bushes chose to not send the funding of the US to the UNPF.
Claim: The wealthy of the West, in their terror of poverty, have given copiously to the UNFPA and its population control programs. Reality: There are over 180 nations that fund the UNPF.
Claim: Every family on this planet could have a house, and a yard, and live together on a land mass the size of Texas Reality: By their own calculations, this living space is slightly less than 33 ft by 33 ft per person. This does not allow for farming, schools, hospitals, work places, streets, sidewalks, places of business, utilities, sewers, parks, etc. The claim is plainly false, we could not live together in such a fashion.
Claim: The population of the earth will peak in 30 years. Reality: Only under the low-fertility variant option.
Claim: While they provide Low, Medium, and High Variants, the Low Variant is the one that keeps coming true, so the Low variant numbers are the ones used in this video. Reality: The database being used to assemble the data is from 2008. The Low, Medium, High, and Constant-fertility estimates (which are higher than High) have an identical historical record.

Then we can move on to 2.1 Kids: A Stable Population.
Claim: But even that is assuming that every woman has children, and that there are no effects from famine, war, or disease Reality: No, a rate of 2.1 children per woman who go on to reproduce already incorporates the effects of famine, war, disease, and the choice of some women not to have children.
Claim: If society does not replace itself every generation, human numbers begin to fall exponentially. Reality: The children of the fecund women will also tend to be fecund, and their numbers will increase while the offspring of other women will decrease, slowing the overall effect of the population decrease. This also leads to cultural change where discouragement of large families is no longer a feature of society.
Claim: Elderly people retiring begin to outnumber people entering the workplace. Reality: As fewer young people enter the workplace, elderly people tend to keep working for longer periods in their life. While anecdotes are not evidence, my father is 72 and plans to retire in 15 years or so, health permitting. I won’t be retiring before the age of 75, and will probably keep working after that.
Claim: many societies are facing a danger of extinction. Reality: None of them are.
Claim: When a population decreases in size, the number of potential mothers also decreases. We say that countries with very low birthrates--like Japan's 1.21 children per woman--are in demographic collapse because each new generation is little more than half the size of the one that preceded it. At this rate, it would take only four generations to reduce the size of population to 10 percent of its initial size. Reality: Based on having one hundred women born from every two hundred and seven live births (a number they use earlier), a replacement rate of 1.21 children per woman give a population of 11.67% of the original, not 10%.
To offset this decline and restore the population to its initial numbers, each woman would need to have 20 children! Hardly a tenable solution.
Reality: Offsetting a decline of four generations within one generation would be daunting (although 18 children will be enough to do the trick). However, having 4.25 children per woman replaces the population in only three generations, and 3.55 children will replace it in four.

While these so-called family groups are harping on the supposed myth of overpopulation, we are seeing fresh water shortages over many parts of the earth, caused by farming in the attempts to feed the burgeoning population. This will not be changed by a couple of cute videos.

However, some might wonder why these family groups worry so much about what will boil down to the choice of the individuals involved anyhow. Fortunately, you can always count on these groups to explain their motivations. In this case, it’s Muslims. I’m not kidding, they are worried about Muslims taking over Europe. For all their claims that population control advocacy has a racist history, their own real motivation is bigotry. This is not surprising.
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Would Cothran wear a coat inside a freezer?

Over at Vital Remnants, Martin Cothran has some fun (because, he is so very seldom serious) sneering at Josh Rosenau's comprehension of English, with gems like

Rosenau is not familiar with Latin, of course, but that is not really his problem. His problem is that he doesn't seem to understand English too well.

I've mentioned before that, for an instructor in logic, Mr. Cothran is rather incompetent at it. It turns out his English is not nearly sufficient to warrant his casting of dispersion on other posters, or maybe it's his grade-school-level-science that is lacking. I would hate to prejudge on that score, as Mr. Cothran is ignorant in so many areas that I would not presume to pick just one. More below the fold.

Later on in the same post, he presents

I had pointed out the record level of snowfalls (something Global Warming advocates said there would be less of because of Global Warming--when they're not saying the complete opposite) and I pointed it out as a subtle way of mocking their own process only using opposite evidence. And when the Warmers began lecturing me about weather not being the same thing as climate, I simply pointed out that if it wasn't for me, then it shouldn't be for them.

and

So let me put the implicit argument of my post in the form of a logical syllogism (And I should probably issue a warning, in doing so, about the possibility that Rosenau might once again try to imitate this exercise himself on his own blog with the usual amusing results):

If individual warm weather events are confirming evidence for Global Warming, then individual cool weather events are disconfirming evidence for Global Warming

But cool weather events are not disconfirming evidence for Global Warming

Therefore, individual warm weather events are not confirming evidence for Global Warming.

Now this is not tu quoque argumentation, it is the logical process called modus tollens. But then we are speaking Latin again, aren't we? To someone who doesn't know Latin--or logic.

Notice the slide from "the record level of snowfalls" to "individual cool weather events"? However, it snows regularly during individual warm-weather events in places like Nome (where even a warm winter day can be well below freezing), while I certainly experienced a few cold-weather events this year with no snow at all falling from the sky. The phenomena are distinct, and treating record snowfalls as indicative of cold weather is a non sequitur. Of course, that's a Latin phrase, so Cothran can obviously translate it. Unfortunately, he apparently does not understand its importance to logical thinking.

So, here's an example to help him out. I'd suggest he get a job at any local fast-food or convenience store (I believe he can stretch his intellectual capabilities that far) and stand in the freezer in the back (say, unloading the weekly shipment). It will not snow inside the freezer, I positively guarantee it. So, according to Cothran-logic, it can't be cold. How long will he be willing to stay in there without a coat?

Of course, this type of confusion is typical of the denialists, pretending that one sort of event is really another.
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The 130th Skeptics' Circle

I've been feeling a little overwhelmed lately, so I have not posted much. Meanwhile, a very nice compilation was made at The Lay Scientist for the 130th edition of the Skeptics' Circle. Featured is reported on the massive homeopathic overdoses seen in England in late January, the results of which were predictable (at least to skeptics).
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