Happy Thanksgiving

Currier and Ives, Home to Thanksgiving (1867)

Delhi Blues

Delhi Blues

Cross-posted from CPRBlog.

Last weekend my son took part in a set of Boy Scout activities with his local Delhi scout troop. On the grounds of the former residence of the U.S. ambassador, the boys prepared a kabob lunch, practiced fire making, and even built a Medieval-style trebuchet. But all I could think about were the little striped mosquitoes that seemed to follow the kids everywhere—Asian Tiger mosquitoes, to be exact, the kind that carry dengue fever.



In New Delhi, dengue (DEN-gay) has reached epidemic proportions. The scouts, I’m happy to say, completed their tour without infection, thanks to lots of lotion, spray, and smoky coils. But not everyone was so lucky. I know at least five people who have been confined to bed for two weeks of fever, headaches, and joint pain. (My medical traveler’s guide says it feels as if “knitting needles have been driven into every joint of [your] body.”) The New York Times reported last week that Delhi hospitals “are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways.” The illness, which in extreme forms can require blood transfusions and even kill, is breaking out all over the country. Official reports say that this year 30,002 people in India have fallen ill with dengue through October. But experts believe the real number is around 37 million.

And last week, we had what I call the “Monster Smog,” a week-long haze of smoke and diesel fumes that the Financial Times described as “the worst occurrence of air pollution in a city long accustomed to dirty air, with the density of dust particles in some places reaching 30 times the guidelines set by the World Health Organisation.” City hospitals were once again overrun. Three Supreme Court Justices pledged to investigate the affair. The cause of the Monster Smog apparently involved some mix of tailpipe emissions, field burning in neighboring states, a lack of wind, and an unusual amount of moisture in the air.

Now with events like these, my “climate” radar goes up. I think of the mounting concern among health experts that warmer temperatures could broaden the reach and lengthen the season of mosquito-borne illnesses in some parts of India. Or the possibility that changes in air temperature and wind patterns will thicken India’s urban smog. (For examples of both, see this report.) And I think of how cities like New Delhi must begin to adapt to a changing climate.

I know such thinking just adds to the moral and logistical complexity of modern life. In this way, I am only slightly less annoying than that guy at the seafood restaurant who consults his “Seafood Watch” phone app at the table and warns his guests about the Chilean Seabass. (O.K., I did that once, but never again.)

Causing annoyance is one thing. But in my conversations on climate policy in India, I have sometimes felt that climate adaptation strikes people as tedious and boring. For instance, at a recent gathering of development experts here in New Delhi, I asked one of the speakers how global development strategies in Asia might change as interest in climate adaptation grows.

After expressing skepticism toward the international adaptation agenda (“code,” he said, for relieving rich nations of their duty to curb emissions), he explained that in developing countries increasing climate resilience was not that different from ordinary development. It was important, yes, but not conceptually challenging. As a policy, adaption was “just not that interesting.”

I can appreciate the point. Development has always been about insulating society from the vagaries of nature. That’s what air conditioning and insurance polices are for. Why burden basic development efforts with extra tweaking? It’s one thing for New York City to wonder how to protect its subways from higher seas in 2050. But many cities in India don’t even have public transportation. Or sewage treatment plants, or sufficient air quality monitoring, or available hospital beds, or any number of basic services Americans taken for granted. Isn’t any improvement in water management or air quality or health care also, at this stage in the game, a step toward climate resilience?

Yes, but it’s not nearly enough. In order to cope with climatic change, developing nations need to some idea of what the vulnerabilities are and what regions are more at risk. That requires huge investments in regional climate modeling, ecosystem evaluation, and public health monitoring. Few countries in the developing world have adequate resources in these areas. Understanding the possible effects of climate change on the spread of dengue in India, to take one example, would require regionalized information about trends in temperature, humidity, rain patterns, land surface hydrology, insect life-cycles, and human behavior. Experts now studying the issue are still in only the beginning stages.

In addition to assessing vulnerability, developing countries will also require decision-making tools that allow citizens and their representatives to manage climate-based risk in the face of uncertainty. They will need strategies, appropriate to their regions and cultures, for evaluating performance and revising their plans when new information arises.

My fear is that many in the halls of power and finance will see fancy computer models and special decision-making tools as “luxuries” that only cities like New York and London can afford. That would be a shame. Remember the motto: Be Prepared.

Robert Verchick is the author of Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World

The 2012 elections' biggest winner? In a landslide, big data and Nate Silver

A CBS News profile of Nate Silver, author of 538.

Lest the signal be lost amid the noise, we should now acknowledge one of the most decisive victories of the 2012 elections:

It was not on any ballot, but one of the biggest election contests this week pitted pundits against pollsters. It was a pitched battle between two self-assured rivals: those who relied on an unscientific mixture of experience, anecdotal details and “Spidey sense,” and those who stuck to cold, hard numbers.

When the results were tabulated, it became clear that data had bested divination.

The election results that delivered a second term to President Obama on Tuesday left some well-known pundits, many of whom have a partisan bent, eating crow on Wednesday morning — including analysts like Karl Rove, Dick Morris and Michael Barone, all of whom had confidently predicted a victory by Mitt Romney.

The results were much kinder to pollsters and the data devotees who aggregate and average polls, or who use mathematical models to make projections.

The triumph of polling over punditry was staggering in its scale. Nate Silver, author of 538 and The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don't, ruled supreme. The following comparison of Silver's "538" model and actual vote tallies shows how the "king of the quants" nailed 50 states out of 50:

Those interested in winning future presidential elections — I'll even give the benefit of the doubt to a Republican Party that otherwise seems determined to commit demographic political suicide — might consider treating the Electoral College as a strategic game demanding simple combinatoric theory with detailed political data:

If this election settles just one thing, it should be the end of Karl Rove's political credibility. Alas, like the mirage of grand transformation in the Grand Old Party, not all that glitters in this quantitative age of Silver … is gold.

Now that the election is over, Sheldon Adelson's other shoe may drop

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bankrolled Republican candidates and causes in the 2012 election and rolled snake eyes. Recent legal developments may give this megadonor of the super-PAC era additional reason to worry: newfound competition from online gambling.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA), 31 U.S.C. §§ 5361-5366, has been widely regarded as a legal firewall against online gambling. If banks can't process payments for games of chance, that business would face a formidable legal barrier. Moreover, as Judge Thomas Shadrick of Portsmouth, Va., has reasoned, games such as poker are games of chance notwithstanding the element of skill, because each hand's success depends on an irreducible random element.

The first crack in this legal edifice appeared in December 2011. Reversing its previous position, the Department of Justice issued a new opinion that the Interstate Wire Act of 1961, 18 U.S.C. § 1084, applies only to sports betting.

In August 2012, Judge Jack Weinstein of the U.S. District Court delivered an even more serious blow to the UIGEA/Wire Act edifice. Judge Weinstein reasoned that poker is a game of skill and therefore falls outside the scope of the UIGEA. Judge Weinstein cited Rogier Potter van Loon et al., Beyond Chance? The Persistence of Performance in Online Poker. That paper's central finding, based on a deep database of poker hands, is as follows:

A major issue in the widespread controversy about the legality of poker and the appropriate taxation of winnings is whether poker should be considered a game of skill or a game of chance. To inform this debate we present an analysis into the role of skill in the performance of online poker players, using a large database with hundreds of millions of player-hand observations from real money ring games at three different stakes levels. . . . Our results suggest that skill is an important factor in online poker.

If John Boehner fulfills his pledge to bring America back from the brink of the fiscal cliff, the lame duck Congress may turn its attention to the proposed Internet Gambling Prohibition, Poker Consumer Protection, and Strengthening UIGEA Act of 2012. By offering individual states the ability to opt into permitting the processing of payments for online gambling, this bill may assign responsibility for resolving the legality of online gambling to individual states.

As if Sheldon Adelson and Karl Rove haven't already had a wretched month of November, Mr. Adelson's casino business faces a new phantom menace from online gambling and the big data that might tip the legal balance of power in the gaming industry.

Gotham gets it

Gotham Gets It: Mayor Bloomberg Calls for Government Action on Climate Change

Cross-posted from CPRBlog.

The most solemn commitment borne by an elected official is to promote the public welfare and keep the citizenry safe. As New York City struggles to rebound from one of the fiercest storms in memory, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg rose to that occasion with an urgent call for government at all levels to forcefully address climate change.

Yes, folks, Gotham gets it.

In an editorial for Bloomberg View, the mayor wrote:

The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast -- in lost lives, lost homes and lost business -- brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief. 

The floods and fires that swept through our city left a path of destruction that will require years of recovery and rebuilding work. . . . In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced us to evacuate neighborhoods -- something our city government had never done before. If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable. 

Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be -- given this week’s devastation -- should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.

He described New York City’s own efforts to fight climate change by reducing carbon emissions “by 16 percent in just five years.” He could also have noted his city’s impressive planning efforts to adapt to those climate effects that can no longer be avoided.

Then comes the kicker, which you’ve probably already heard about: the mayor called for the reelection of President Obama. Local governments “can’t do it alone,” he said.

We need leadership from the White House -- and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.

Is this the beginning of a tipping point? History shows that extreme events have the potential to focus people’s attention and energy in ways previously thought impossible. In the eighteenth century, the Lisbon Earthquake forced a dramatic rethinking across of Europe of the government’s role in hazard management. Portugal’s prime minister launched one of the first scientific inquiries into earthquake mechanics. The government imposed stricter zoning laws and Europe’s first seismic building codes.

Northeast governors whose states are receiving federal assistance after Hurricane Sandy have Herbert Hoover to thank. After the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, helped establish the national role for disaster recovery in the United States. Less than a decade later, the federal government boosted hazard protection across the nation by taking charge of all flood control projects on all federal waterways.

Even Hurricane Katrina, for all the dysfunction that ensued, can be credited with impelling the federal government to strengthen and re-energize FEMA and forcing the city of New Orleans to seriously confront long-standing problems with crime, education, and political accountability.

For a brief moment Hurricane Sandy has seized the attention of citizens across the nation and around the globe. In a twist unimaginable even a few days ago, it’s possible that global warming could even influence next week’s knife-edge presidential election.

As followers of this blog know, I’m living in New Delhi this semester. On Halloween morning I awoke to an article in the India Times, titled, “Frankenstorms Can Get Worse as Global Warming Intensifies” (it’s not a subtle publication). “Hurricane Sandy,” the writer speculated, “could be an answer to many who've wondered when America would smell the climate change.” Global warming is a bitter brew. But it must be acknowledged, planned for, and minimized. Mayor Bloomberg, a successful businessman and an effective politician, has announced he’s ready to face the day as it really is. Who’s next?

Robert Verchick is the author of Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World.