Scientists Find Link Between Global Warming and Earthquakes
One would not necessarily assume that the recent earthquake activity around the globe these past few years is in any way, shape or form related to climate change. It just seems implausible that warming seas and a warming atmosphere, the drivers of climate change, would have any effect on the slow process of plate tectonics, in which one plate shifts under or over another, occasionally producing the large earthquakes such as those that devastated the peoples of Indonesia, New Zealand, South America, and Japan to name but a few recent events.
However, scientists have for the first time released a study that indicates that man made changes to our climate are also quite probably effecting the movement of tectonic plates around the globe as well. The implications of their research are far ranging as well as frightening:
SYDNEY (AFP) – Scientists have for the first time shown a link between intensifying climate events and tectonic plate movement in findings that could provide a valuable insight into why huge tremors occur. [...]
An Australian-led team of researchers from France and Germany found that the strengthening Indian monsoon had accelerated movement of the Indian plate over the past 10 million years by a factor of about 20 percent.
Lead researcher Giampiero Iaffaldano said Wednesday that although scientists have long known that tectonic movements influence climate by creating new mountains and sea trenches, his study was the first to show the reverse.
"The closure or opening of new ocean basins or the build of large mountain bands like the Andes or Tibet itself, those are geological processes that affect the pattern of climate," said Iaffaldano, an earth scientist with the Australian National University.
"We are showing for the first time that the opposite also is true, that the pattern of climate is then able to affect back in a feedback mechanism the motion of tectonic plates."
Call this this one more example of the law of unintended consequences. For over one hundred years scientists have been stating that increases in human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation would invariably have an effect on our climate by raising the mean temperatures of the oceans and the atmosphere. We have and are currently witnessing the effects of those predictions, based on principles of physics that were first explained in the 19th century.
What few foresaw however, was that changes to our surface climate would impact the movement of the large crustal plates that cause the continents to drift and that form mountain ranges and cause earthquakes. The research is obviously in its early stages, but I do not think we should take the findings of these scientists lightly or diminish their import.
The relationship of the movements of continental plates affecting climate is well established, as the lead earth scientist for this study quoted above noted. It is not, therefore illogical to assume that changes to climate in a feedback loop would also effect the movement of those plates. This study demonstrates that such is the case, at least with changes to the climate involving the increased intensity of monsoons in the Indian Ocean.
I am no scientist, but many scientists have been telling us that the changes we see are now locked in and will occur even if we ended all carbon, methane and other greenhouse gases today. We are now only at a point where the only valid debate the extent of the damage that will occur to life on this planet if we can end or do not curb greenhouse gas emissions and other human activities that are driving climate change.
We had thought those effects would be primarily climate related, i.e., intensified storms, harsh droughts and desertification in some areas, increased and more intense precipitation in others, rising sea levels, more intense heat waves and wildfires, species extinction, increased disease vectors, and so forth. Now we are learning that once again, we may have underestimated the impact of human activities on the earth. I cannot say how climate change now and in the future, will impact plate tectonics. However, if further research supports the study discussed above, we may be able to add increased or more intense earthquakes and tsunamis to the list of adverse consequences that are caused in part by the change to our climate brought about by our species "dominion over the earth."
Let me give the study's lead researcher a few more comments:
Iaffaldano collaborated with Universite de Rennes geoscientist Laurent Husson and Hans-Peter Bunge from Munich's LMU university on the study, which was recently published in the Earth and Planetary Science Letters journal.
The team plans to build on the study by probing whether climate events have had a similar impact in other regions.
"For example I can imagine that there might be a signature of climate in the Andes for example or in the Rocky Mountains," said Iaffaldano.
"This is something that we should look at in the future."
It is definitely something we should look at in the future considering the massive damage that has occurred from large earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand in 2011, in Haiti in 2010 and in Indonesia and Asia after the earthquake and tsunami in 2004, as well as the recent large earthquakes in Indonesia earlier this month.
We, as a species that lives upon this earth with billions of other species, have been in the denial business far too long. We cannot afford to neglect any scientific finding that adds to the information we have learned about our changing climate and this world that is our only haven.
By Steven D | Sourced from 1410
Posted at April 14, 2011, 8:01 am
Friday, April 15, 2011
Nicholas Wade on Language
Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born By NICHOLAS WADE A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists. The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most. Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes. This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science. Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time. Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, “but this paper comes closest to convincing me that this type of research is possible,” said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started applying to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical methods developed for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences. These efforts have been regarded with suspicion by some linguists. In 2003 Dr. Atkinson and Russell Gray, another biologist at the University of Auckland, reconstructed the tree of Indo-European languages with a DNA tree-drawing method called Bayesian phylogeny. The tree indicated that Indo-European was much older than historical linguists had estimated and hence favored the theory that the language family had diversified with the spread of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, not with a military invasion by steppe people some 6,000 years ago, the idea favored by most historical linguists. “We’re uneasy about mathematical modeling that we don’t understand juxtaposed to philological modeling that we do understand,” Brian D. Joseph, a linguist at Ohio State University, said about the Indo-European tree. But he thinks that linguists may be more willing to accept Dr. Atkinson’s new article because it does not conflict with any established area of linguistic scholarship. “I think we ought to take this seriously, although there are some who will dismiss it out of hand,” Dr. Joseph said. Another linguist, Donald A. Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania, said, “It’s too early to tell if Atkinson’s idea is correct, but if so, it’s one of the most interesting articles in historical linguistics that I’ve seen in a decade.” Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language “is not something my method can speak to,” Dr. Atkinson said. His study was prompted by a recent finding that the number of phonemes in a language increases with the number of people who speak it. This gave him the idea that phoneme diversity would increase as a population grew, but would fall again when a small group split off and migrated away from the parent group. Such a continual budding process, which is the way the first modern humans expanded around the world, is known to produce what biologists call a serial founder effect. Each time a smaller group moves away, there is a reduction in its genetic diversity. The reduction in phonemic diversity over increasing distances from Africa, as seen by Dr. Atkinson, parallels the reduction in genetic diversity already recorded by biologists. For either kind of reduction in diversity to occur, the population budding process must be rapid, or diversity will build up again. This implies that the human expansion out of Africa was very rapid at each stage. The acquisition of modern language, or the technology it made possible, may have prompted the expansion, Dr. Atkinson said. “What’s so remarkable about this work is that it shows language doesn’t change all that fast — it retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years,” said Mark Pagel, a biologist at the University of Reading in England who advised Dr. Atkinson. Dr. Pagel sees language as central to human expansion across the globe. “Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species,” he said. In the wake of modern human expansion, archaic human species like the Neanderthals were wiped out and large species of game, fossil evidence shows, fell into extinction on every continent shortly after the arrival of modern humans.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Richard Muller on Climate change
Richard Muller who's book we read "Physics for Future Presidents"- comes up in
today's Paul Krugmen column - very interesting-
Randy
The Truth, Still InconvenientBy PAUL KRUGMAN
So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of
marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five
“expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on
climate science.
But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two
actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.
Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate
skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project,
an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate
deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate
trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley
project would conclude that global warming is a myth.
Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results
find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”
The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly.
But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the
same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held
since the G.O.P. retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these
people?
My favorite, still, was Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which
the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing Abraham
Lincoln as a “horrific tyrant” — and for advocating a new secessionist movement
as the appropriate response to the “new American fascialistic state.”
The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the
same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One
was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas
emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a
century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making
this up.
Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies
to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to
show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and
the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental
regulation.
But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong:
he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,”
and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including
the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not
surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would
support their case.
You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.
Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web
site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to
accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But
never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those
preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science
political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed
Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”
Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody
who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would
accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a
moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.
For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with
increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will
be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to
assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach
the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists
are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.
But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial
hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant
ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in
the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long
ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
on his not understanding it.
But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that’s
what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about climate change
until catastrophe is already upon us.
So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the G.O.P.;
actually, the joke is on the human race.
today's Paul Krugmen column - very interesting-
Randy
The Truth, Still InconvenientBy PAUL KRUGMAN
So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of
marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five
“expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on
climate science.
But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two
actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.
Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate
skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project,
an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate
deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate
trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley
project would conclude that global warming is a myth.
Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results
find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”
The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly.
But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the
same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held
since the G.O.P. retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these
people?
My favorite, still, was Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which
the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing Abraham
Lincoln as a “horrific tyrant” — and for advocating a new secessionist movement
as the appropriate response to the “new American fascialistic state.”
The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the
same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One
was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas
emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a
century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making
this up.
Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies
to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to
show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and
the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental
regulation.
But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong:
he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,”
and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including
the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not
surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would
support their case.
You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.
Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web
site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to
accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But
never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those
preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science
political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed
Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”
Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody
who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would
accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a
moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.
For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with
increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will
be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to
assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach
the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists
are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.
But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial
hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant
ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in
the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long
ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
on his not understanding it.
But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that’s
what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about climate change
until catastrophe is already upon us.
So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the G.O.P.;
actually, the joke is on the human race.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
More interesting ways to present information
This was posted to our listserv and it reminded me of another interesting video map that can really put things into perspective.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
---How to take back our media:
--ATTN: blogees: several times at the BookClub I mentioned how corporations are taking over America's media, and I met up with disagreements. I have paid close attention to media issues (reading Robert McChestney, Lawrence Lessig, Amy Goodman, and Eric Alterman @ The Nation magazine; along with the blogs: www.mediamatters.org & david.a.dobbs@gmail.com). Big media is taking over radio, broadcast TV, the newspapers; they have tried to debunk NPR and PBS, and public libraries--trying to deny their public funding. The people rallied to save our media since 2003. It is now deja vu all over again. We have to write to our Congress-officials ASAP to ask them to please rescue our public treasures, our libraries and our public broadcasting. Anyone who wants to get involved can attend The National Conference For Media Reform (NCMR)--- to learn How To Confront the Big Business Take-Over of American Media --- April 8-10 --- @ the Boston Seaport Trade Center ---to register: www.freepress.net the people of the ScienceBookClub know that I am a public media supporter---who lists each month the shows-not-to-overlook on PBS and DW-TV & C-span --- which you can access via Public Access-TV. over&out Carolyn
Monday, March 21, 2011
Washington vs. the Merciless
Joe Levee asked that this be posted on the blog for your consideration:
Click on this link to go to the New York Times article.
Washington vs. the Merciless
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 19, 2011
Click on this link to go to the New York Times article.
Washington vs. the Merciless
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 19, 2011
My subjective gut feeling
My view is that we should accept the IPCC findings as correct- they do seem to be our best source of information. (It's very disturbing that we have eliminated US funding for the IPCC in our present budget.)
My subjective gut feeling (very subject to change) is that the one degree change we have seen so far isn't going to do much- but a 3 or 4 degree change in the next 50 years or so is reason for concern, but not for alarum.
We should proceed in a thoughtful and objective way, freely facing up to the good points and bad points of the various remedies. Some solutions may well make things worse. We can fill the west with windmills chopping up raptors, but windmills might not really cut significantly into our use of fossil fuels. The energy loss in transmitting electricity long distances is huge. Power plants can’t always use the extra power from sources which are sporadic.
We are going to be generating CO2 for some time, but hopefully not for ever.
We should be monitoring the tundra very carefully, a sudden increase in methane from this source could really mess things up.
It’s ironic that most of the proposed solutions have a much bigger foot print than the nuclear and fossil fuel plants we are presently using.
I’m not thrilled with thousands of acres of windmills or solar panels.
I’ll be struggling through Jefferson Tester’s Sustainable Energy-Choosing Among Options. This 800 plus page work is a text book used in a graduate level MIT course on these issues. I consider Dr. Tester a much more objective student of these issues than Lester Brown and his ilk. .
My subjective gut feeling (very subject to change) is that the one degree change we have seen so far isn't going to do much- but a 3 or 4 degree change in the next 50 years or so is reason for concern, but not for alarum.
We should proceed in a thoughtful and objective way, freely facing up to the good points and bad points of the various remedies. Some solutions may well make things worse. We can fill the west with windmills chopping up raptors, but windmills might not really cut significantly into our use of fossil fuels. The energy loss in transmitting electricity long distances is huge. Power plants can’t always use the extra power from sources which are sporadic.
We are going to be generating CO2 for some time, but hopefully not for ever.
We should be monitoring the tundra very carefully, a sudden increase in methane from this source could really mess things up.
It’s ironic that most of the proposed solutions have a much bigger foot print than the nuclear and fossil fuel plants we are presently using.
I’m not thrilled with thousands of acres of windmills or solar panels.
I’ll be struggling through Jefferson Tester’s Sustainable Energy-Choosing Among Options. This 800 plus page work is a text book used in a graduate level MIT course on these issues. I consider Dr. Tester a much more objective student of these issues than Lester Brown and his ilk. .
Global Warming
This is a comment about global warming. To begin we might ask how to make a decision about the following:
1. Is Global Warming (GW) a fact?
2. If so, is a significant part of it due to humans?
3. If not, how can we correct the claims for GW?
4. If 1 or 2 is correct, should we do anything about it?
First I note that science is not a democratic process. Both the education and experience of a writer are very important as well as their recognized expertise. Within mathematics and physics (my areas), the important problems are most often set by experts in the field. There is also a general consensus about the identity of the experts. While there are exceptions (else new experts might seldom emerge) there are standard paths by which one becomes an expert. (A Cincinnati boy, Thomas Kuhn, discusses this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions---I hasten to add that GW falls in the area of Kuhn's "normal science.")
While consensus indicates a kind of democracy, one should not think that there are "votes" on the important problems in graph theory. Nor are there "votes" on the direction that particle physics should take.
With that in mind, I will refer the reader to the NASA website on Climate Change:
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
There are links to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) at the NASA site.
We find there this statement:
"The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years."
There is also a quote from the IPCC:
"Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal."
1. Is Global Warming (GW) a fact?
2. If so, is a significant part of it due to humans?
3. If not, how can we correct the claims for GW?
4. If 1 or 2 is correct, should we do anything about it?
First I note that science is not a democratic process. Both the education and experience of a writer are very important as well as their recognized expertise. Within mathematics and physics (my areas), the important problems are most often set by experts in the field. There is also a general consensus about the identity of the experts. While there are exceptions (else new experts might seldom emerge) there are standard paths by which one becomes an expert. (A Cincinnati boy, Thomas Kuhn, discusses this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions---I hasten to add that GW falls in the area of Kuhn's "normal science.")
While consensus indicates a kind of democracy, one should not think that there are "votes" on the important problems in graph theory. Nor are there "votes" on the direction that particle physics should take.
With that in mind, I will refer the reader to the NASA website on Climate Change:
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
There are links to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) at the NASA site.
We find there this statement:
"The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years."
There is also a quote from the IPCC:
"Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal."
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Radiation in Japan
Randall Monroe always make information clear and interesting.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Economics for the future
This was posted by Roy Auerbach on our listserv, but I am cross posting it here for public consumption and comment.
I am somewhat of a pessimist about the current state of affairs, but am hopeful for humanity in the long term. You can translate that to mean that we will step into the coming crisis, with attendant waste of resources, death, and human suffering, but hopefully blunder our way through to the other side poorer, but living more in line with our means. In doing so, we will squander an opportunity to better use the easily gained resources we now have.
What I find interesting is that we have had a nearly unbroken rise in technology over the last several thousand years. It is true, we find some interesting artifacts such as batteries and astronomical computers from ancient times, but overall, regardless of the rise and fall of civilizations we seem to progress. I anticipate the same happening, even if we must stop being so proliferate with our carbon resources.
We will eventually deal with climate change, but only when it is too late.
I am reminded of a realization when I was a teenager. I read about a crop failure leading to a rise in a food commodity price (today I can't remember anymore what it was). I saw that supermarkets had marked up the prices in stores. I was puzzled by this as the supermarket had clearly bought the items on the shelves at the lower price. The reasoning behind this change was that the supermarket had to price according to the replacement value of the goods it contained. We find ourselves in the same place which is much of the point of ecological economics. Our current market structure and philosophy seems adamantly opposed to this way of thinking.
I must admit I am not a fan of free market economics. It suffers from two failures. The first is that it assumes the individuals and companies making up the market are rational. It is quite clear that this is a fallacy. There are recent books on real behavioral economics such as "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely that illustrate this. The second is that free market economics is too cruel a philosophy. It may be efficient, but will leave a trail of destruction and death in its wake.
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