Editorial Comment

	Vol. 227 No. 7
PERRY A. FISCHER, EDITOR

One + one = eleven. I remember being at a rural gas station some years ago, probably in 1999. Gasoline prices were about a dollar a gallon then. In the window was a politician’s sign, asking for my vote. The guy at the pump beside me nodded his head at the sign and said, “He’s a good man, but I can’t vote for him. He wants to raise county gas taxes to pay for that new school building.”

How much does he want?” I asked.

“He says he needs to raise it 1%, but a fellow on my income can’t afford that extra 10 cents a gallon every time he fills up.”

“Indeed,” was all that I could muster. For some reason, I didn’t have the heart to ruin his well-honed opinion with facts.

A friend of mine had just bought a Monster SUV. She did so because she could get the normally $40,000 car for only $36,000, since sales on the behemoths were low, due to the high price of gas. I told her that’s not surprising, with gasoline near $3.00. She commented that her husband had calculated the difference in actual money due to the price of gasoline, and found that it wasn’t significant. So, I asked her how many miles she drove in a year. She said about 15,000 miles.

I said, “Your husband is an idiot er, ah, mistaken.”

“How so?” she replied.

“It’s really quite simple. How many miles does the Monster get to the gallon?”

“Ten or so, I guess,” she said.

“OK,” I said, “Let’s do the simple math. Suppose you keep this car, or several ones just like it over time, for the useful life of the car. Let’s say that’s 160,000 miles. At 10 miles per gallon, it’ll use 16,000 gallons to go 160,000 miles. Right?”

We discussed the simple division for a minute, then she agreed.

“So,” I continued, “16,000 gallons, at $3 a gallon, would cost how much?

“Wow, $48,000!” She said.

“Right,” I continued, “And if, instead, you bought a car that got 20 miles to the gallon, you would save half that amount, or $24,000, since it would only take 8,000 gallons to drive the same distance. And if you got 40 miles to a gallon, you’d save $36,000 over your Monster, and so on. So, how is that ‘not significant’?”

She thought about it for a minute, then said, “You’re the kind of fellow that can screw up a perfectly well-honed opinion with facts!” To which, I could only plead guilty.

Then I joked, “Why not just be more honest and say, ‘I’ve got so much money, I don’t even care about $36,000?’”

Comparison of fuel costs over the life of a vehicle is a much more common thing to do in Europe than in the US. In terms of gasoline, the average US car or light truck gets 21.6 mpg, while its European counterpart manages 32.1 mpg, according to IEA. In the US, raising fuel-economy standards has thus far failed for the last 16 years, with large numbers of both parties defecting from their ranks, in favor of perpetual postponement. This, in spite of the simple numbers that say 42 to 45% of total US consumption is for light passenger vehicles, which is about 77 to 80% of all the oil that the US imports. The only change I can see are press reports saying used french-fry oil is in big demand among do-it-yourself mavericks. As if that had a proverbial snowball’s chance in a photon torpedo of making a difference.

I guess I was less willing to let my Monster SUV-owning friend slide on her bad, simple math, because I had just reread the book, written about 15 years ago, called Innumeracy: Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences, by John Allen Paulos. This excellent book spells out the severe consequences of a mathematically illiterate population. Honestly, I think that the situation has grown far worse since then. And it’s long affected US politicians.

Globally dim strangeness. This is almost in the stranger-than-fiction category, yet it appears to be true. In the 1950s, Dr. Gerry Stanhill was working for the Israel Ministry of Agriculture on a government project to measure the amount of sunlight that hit the ground, gathering the data for an irrigation project. Thirty years later, the same measurements showed that the amount of sunlight reaching the ground had fallen by 22%, which seems impossible for the sun to do.

No one noticed when he published his discovery, but it seems the same thing had happened to other researchers, independent of one another, and no one noticed their reports either. In Germany, Beate Liepert, then a young graduate student, found the same thing happening over the Bavarian Alps. Others found that the US fell 9%, some of the UK had 16% less sunlight, and the Antarctic was off 9%. Eventually, the research was combed, found and brought together. But that only deepened the mystery. 

Meanwhile, in Australia, Michael Roderick and Graham Farquhar had another paradox: there was a worldwide decline in the staggeringly boring pan evaporation rate.

It measures the evaporation rate from a pan of water. Every day, year after year, all over the world, unsung heroes come out in the morning and see how much water has evaporated since the previous morning. They write down their numbers, and the world yawns. More than a century passes since its inception.

By the mid-1990s, a few agricultural scientists noted that the rate of evaporation was falling worldwide. This made no sense, especially in light of global warming, which should have the opposite effect. So, like a puzzled dog, they scratched their ears, tilted their heads, and went about their day.

Then they did the math, the modeling, and discovered exactly which factors (wind, humidity, temperature, sunlight, etc.) contributed precisely what portion to the evaporation rate. The result was that less sunlight would produce exactly the evaporation deficit observed. In fact, although they didn’t know it at the time, it closely matched the amount of solar dimming that had been discovered by others, although by an entirely different method.

The working hypothesis is this: It’s dirt particles in air pollution that are causing more clouds to reflect more sunlight. So, there is now real concern that if we clean the soot out of the air, which has been masking (cooling) the effects of global warming, the planet will heat up twice as fast.

In other words, pollution has a bright side: It fights global warming. But not to fear, do-gooders will still keep trying to de-soot the air, despite the heat. They claim it has something to do with breathing.