Diagnosing Al Gore: Truth in the Balance
BY MELLIE GILDER

The Gospel according to Gore

During the first week of May the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) convened in Bangkok. I
was aware of this immediately, as the Bangkok Post is
one of my primary news sources. Eight months of work
with Burmese refugees in Thailand throughout my
undergraduate and medical school career has imbued me
with keen interest in the political plots unfolding in
Southeast Asia. Last time I was in Bangkok I joined the
thousands of people thronging the central streets and
protesting the corruption of their then prime minister
Thaksin. My memories are full of images of Bangkok as
a city brimming with people speaking out against injustice
and vibrant with political change. (Of course, these
demonstrations eventually led to the temporary military
dictatorship currently controlling Thailand, an inadvertent
consequence of our good intentions.)

With similar moral outrage the threat of global
warming has galvanized the developed world, and its
influence is now rippling through developing nations.
Liberals sounded the alarm, and conservatives are
responding with gradually mounting enthusiasm. Clergy
contribute by announcing the National Day of Hope,
Prayer and Reflection about Global Warming (April 22nd).
Atheists find new purpose and an ethical lodestone.
Americans slap concerned bumper stickers on their SUVs
and flock to An Inconvenient Truth. Hollywood swoons
and bestows on Gore’s slideshow two Academy Awards.
The scientific community churns out technical paper after
paper in the journals reporting the mounting evidence.

Or do they?

Gore assures us of it, stating that there is no
controversy. He refers to the multitudes of the world’s
top scientists voicing unmitigated concern through the
IPCC reports. He cites a study of a random sample of 928
articles on global warming, none of which were found to
express doubt. There is a consensus.

However, Michael Crichton (best known for his
novels but also a graduate of Harvard Medical School and
a former postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for
Biological Studies) warned his audience of the dangers of
“consensus science” in a 2003 speech,

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the
first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid
debate by claiming that the matter is already
settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of
scientists agrees on something or other, reach for
your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing
whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the
business of politics. Science, on the contrary,
requires only one investigator who happens to be
right, which means that he or she has results that
are verifiable by reference to the real world. In
science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is
reproducible results. The greatest scientists in
history are great precisely because they broke with
the consensus.

Many advances in medicine are attributable to
mavericks. Think of Semmelweiss and puerperal fever.
Think of Goldberger and pellagra. Examples abound in
other fields: Copernicus, Newton, Einstein. Even Gore’s
favorite example of continental drift highlights the folly
of the scientific consensus that mocked Alfred Wegener’s
theory of Pangaea for half a century.

Gore Goes to Hollywood (but not to Caltech)

In his film Gore urges an auditorium full of students
to “separate the truth from the fiction and the accurate
connections from the misunderstandings”. In keeping
with that exhortation I watched the An Inconvenient Truth
with careful attention to the research on which its
arguments were founded. On my second viewing, I began
to take notes and read the scientific literature.

Within the first half hour of the film it is clear that
Gore does not see global warming merely as a future
threat. He states, “Now we’re beginning to see the impact
in the real world.” The example of this impact that made
the biggest impression on me was that of Lake Chad in
Northern Africa. Gore showed dramatic satellite images
demonstrating the rapid shrinking of the once-giant lake
to near dryness since the turn of the previous century. He
suggested that this water shortage has brought on the
conditions that have lead to the tragedy and mass violence
in the bordering areas of Niger and Darfur. This made me
listen. I have seen first hand – both in Burma and Kenya
– the strain water shortage puts on communities. It
seemed plausible to me that these conflicts were
exacerbated by the lake water’s retreat. But what caused
that retreat? What would it take for a lake of such
magnitude to dry up? The warming must be dramatic
indeed. I decided to Google it.

The first site that came up was Wikipedia, where I
learned that, indeed, Lake Chad is a critical water source
for over 20 million people and its rapid shrinkage is
extensively documented. At this point the surface area is
1,350 km2, down from its all time high of about 400,000
km2 around 4,000 BC. However, there were also some
details that Gore failed to mention. The lake itself is only
seven meters deep at its deepest. Its average depth
currently is 1.5 – 4.5 meters (depending on your source).
Essentially, it is a large and geo-politically important
swamp. For comparison, Lake Champlain covers
approximately the same amount of land and has an
average depth of 19.5 m and a max depth of 112m. Lake
George, a small lake in upstate New York, has one tenth
the surface area and is almost nine times as deep. It turns
out Lake Chad has actually been dry multiple times in the
past: in 8500 BC, 5500 BC, 2000 BC and 100 BC.
Though Wikipedia and a paper in Journal of Geophysical
Research on the topic agree that global climate change
may have played a role, they also report that the major
factors were local changes – a rapidly expanding
population drawing water from the lake, the introduction
of irrigation technologies and local overgrazing. Yes,
these are anthropogenic causes, but they are neither global
nor warming, and are utterly independent of CO2. In
addition, Africa as a continent experienced a dramatic
shift towards dryer weather in the end of the 19th century
that is not generally attributed to CO2. (Coe, M.T. and
J.A. Foley, Human and natural impacts on the water
resources of the Lake Chad basin. Journal of Geophysical
Research (Atmospheres) 106, D4, 3349-3356. 2001)
Gore might as well have photographed a glass of water on
a picnic table, called it a lake, drunk its contents and then
attributed the change to global warming. Was he
purposefully misrepresenting the evidence or had he
really not done his homework even on the most basic
level?

The shrinking of the snows of Kilimanjaro is another
dramatic example. Scientists have noted this
phenomenon for over a hundred years. A search of the
scholarly literature immediately produced Georg Kaser’s
2004 article in The International Journal of Climatology
on the subject. He states that all three of the major East
African glaciers have seen significant retreat since the late
1800s. Kaser writes, “The dominant reasons for this
strong recession in modern times are reduced
precipitation and increased availability of shortwave
radiation due to decreases in cloudiness”. This dryness
began relatively abruptly around 1880. “In contrast to
this ‘switch’ in moisture conditions, there is no evidence
of an abrupt change in air temperature…. Temperature
increases in the tropics on the surface and in the
troposphere have been little in recent decades compared
with the global trend.” The very shape of the glacier
speaks out against Gore’s theory: melting from
temperature rise “would round-off and destroy the
observed features within a very short time, ranging from
hours to days”. Indeed, a year and a half record from
2000-2002 showed that air temperatures never exceeded -
1.6o C (in fact, Gore’s friend Lonnie Thompson reports
that the temperatures never rose above -2o C during his
research there), and permafrost extends far below the
edge of the glacier. (Kaser et al, Int. J. Climatol. 24: 329–
339 (2004)) In other words, not only is the recession of
Mt. Kilimanjaro’s snowy peak probably not due to CO2-
induced temperature rise, it isn’t even driven by
temperature rise at all.

At this point I would like to make a note about
methodology. The word “methodology” may not cause
your pulse to quicken, but flawed methods can render a
potentially groundbreaking study useless. And useless
papers are published regularly. In medical school we are
taught to carefully evaluate the validity of the studies on
which we base our treatment decisions. One thing we are
taught to be instantly skeptical of is “expert opinion” –
essentially the consensus of specialists in a certain field.
This is generally dismissed as a collection of prejudiced
guesses. The only thing lower in the hierarchy of
evidence is “models”, which in medicine consist of
attempts to simulate human physiology through animal
studies or bench research.

When searching for the articles cited in this essay my
goal was to hone in on studies of specific phenomena or
primary analysis of real-world data. I searched Google
Scholar, the Pubmed database, and occasionally
individual publications, such as Science. For example,
when I wanted to find articles about Lake Chad, I typed in
“Lake Chad”, and for the ice core record, I entered “ice
core record” and “ice core record timing”. I did not dig
though dozens of abstracts to pick out these ones, except
in the case of topics that are glutted with computer model
studies. (Computer modeling is very popular these days.
Granting organizations like it because it’s relatively
cheap. Students trying to get published like it because
they can get results during their summer vacation without
the cumbersome task of following up on long term results.
Politicians like it because it tends to produce predictions
so dramatic their explanation during a speech might
require an on-stage elevator.)

Perhaps you are wondering where Gore got his article
proving the undisputed “consensus” on global warming.
The original study of the scientific literature was
published in the essay section of Science, written by Dr.
Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at UCSD.
It is really a survey of the opinions of the authors of these
928 papers – as opposed to a systematic review, which
would care less about the author’s conclusions and more
about the evidence on which these conclusions were
reached – and Gore appropriately used it as such. It is
indeed a study of consensus, not of evidence. In fact,
many of the authors I quote state the opinion that global
warming is a concern, even though their own studies do
not show evidence for it.

However, Oreskes’ article fails even as a
comprehensive review of opinions. Her search included
articles with “climate change” as a keyword, thereby
partially selecting for people of the opinion that climate
change is an issue of concern. She correctly identifies
that the majority of printed articles directly addressing the
theory global warming – as opposed to specific
measurable phenomena such as extreme weather events –
do not question it. A large proportion of these papers are
about climate models that are built with the a priori
postulation of global warming, and are just projecting
exactly how disastrous it will be. Even so, there are
several dissenting articles that she somehow missed, such
as MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen’s 1997
report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences entitled, “Can increasing carbon dioxide cause
climate change?” (Lindzen, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Vol.
94, pp. 8335–8342, August 1997). Dr. Arthur Robinson of
the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a widely
published chemist in his own right, has compiled a list of
some 18,500 skeptics with science degrees that further
belies the supposed scientific consensus.

To her credit, Dr. Oreskes did concede, “The
scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the
history of science teaches anything, it is humility….” In
light of that, I was encouraged to delve deeper.

There is one piece of evidence that was particularly
accessible to me as a medical student for critical analysis:
Gore pointed out the potential for increases in infectious
diseases due to expansion of areas suitable for insect
vectors. To illustrate this he listed fifteen new or recently
resurgent diseases: Ebola, Arena virus, Hanta virus,
SARS, multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR TB), E.
coli 0157:H7, Lyme disease, legionnaire’s disease, Vibrio
Cholerae 0139, Nipah virus, malaria, dengue fever,
leptospirosis, West Nile virus, and Avian flu.

This litany of killers is impressive until you realize
that out of the fifteen, only Lyme, malaria, dengue and
West Nile virus are spread by insect vectors. A closer
look at those four even further confounds the point.
Lyme disease – far from being a tropical disease
spreading northwards – originated in the temperate
climate of Lyme, CT and spread mainly South and West.
Malaria is a disease confined to the tropics more for
socioeconomic reasons than climatologic ones, and it was
once prevalent in Siberia and Northern Europe. Its
decline in these areas happened largely during warming
periods of history. There has been a recent resurgence of
malaria in some Eastern European countries that the
WHO attributes to socioeconomic instability. Paul Reiter
from the Pasteur Institute in Paris published a letter in
Emerging Infectious Diseases, refuting the section of the
IPCC report on infectious diseases. (Reiter was actually
drafted to be one of the authors of the IPCC report, but
withdrew and actually threatened to sue the organization
to have his name removed from the author list because he
was so disgusted with the inaccuracy of the final product.)
In an article on the Centers for Disease Control website,
Dr. Reiter concludes, “Public concern should focus on
ways to deal with the realities of malaria transmission,
rather than on the weather.”

There is a similar lack of evidence for climate-
associated spread of dengue fever. A search of health
journals through Pubmed reveals abundant articles on
models projecting spread of dengue with temperature
increases, but very few documenting actual changes in
incidence over time. This highlights the tragedy of the
modeling mania currently gripping some branches of
science. In fact, dengue is one of a small group of
infectious diseases that have been gaining momentum in
the past century, and it has even accelerated in spread and
severity since the seventies. Systematic study of the
causes of this spread and effective protective measures
could save lives and abort epidemics, but an article
published in Environmental Health Perspectives in 2001
states that, “the factors that determine whether epidemic
transmission will occur are complex and not well
understood”. The recent resurgence of dengue in South
America is attributed to a failed effort to eradicate the
mosquito vector, Aedes Aegypti. Though mosquitoes are
critical for propagation of the disease, other factors such
as piped water systems and window screens seem to be
even more significant in its epidemiology. Aedes Aegypti
has been common in the Southeastern United States for
220 years, but local spread of dengue in that area is
almost unheard of. (Gubler, D et al, Environmental
Health Perspectives, Vol 109, suppl 2, May 2001, pp.
223-233) The few studies that have directly analyzed the
relationship between dengue transmission and
temperature have arrived at mixed conclusions. (Chadee,
DD et al, Ann Trop Med Parasitol. 2007 Jan;101(1):69-
77; Bangs, NJ et al, Southeast Asian J Trop Med Public
Health. 2006 Nov;37(6):1103-16).

Of Gore’s list of diseases, the one most commonly
attributed to Global warming is West Nile Virus (WNV).
Once again, the science doesn’t hold up. The disease
vector, Culex pipiens (also responsible for transmitting St.
Louis encephalitis), is the most widely distributed
mosquito in the world, common on every continent but
Antarctica. Prevalent in temperate, not tropical, zones, it
is readily found as far north as Nova Scotia. WNV’s
arrival in the US had nothing to do with changes in vector
habitat conditions. (Emerg Infect Dis 6(4), 2000; and also
Environmental Health Perspectives Supplements Volume
109, Number S1, March 2001)

On the other hand, two of the diseases – SARS and
MDR TB – are transmitted person-to-person by
aerosolized droplets and are therefore more likely to be
spread during cold weather when people are in closer
quarters. This is evidenced not only by the pattern of
their epidemiology (hospitals for SARS, prisons for TB)
but also by the seasonal (winter) pattern that we see in the
US of other infections transmitted through the respiratory
tract. Conversely, it could be argued that increased use of
air conditioners – one route of dissemination for
Legionella pneumophilia – in a warmer world might lead
to a higher incidence of legionnaire’s disease. I guess.
It’s a stretch.

Arena virus, Hanta virus and leptospirosis are spread
by aerosolized rodent feces or direct contact with rats.
Human contact with rodent populations is complex and
poorly studied (not surprisingly), but epidemiologic data
show that it is largely related to precipitation and
flooding. (Climate Variability and Change in the United
States: Potential Impacts on Vector and Rodent-Borne
Diseases, Environ Health Perspect. 2001 May; 109
(Suppl 2): 223–233) The conflicting predictions of both
draught and flood by climate change modelers makes
quantification of the impact on these diseases
approximate at best. The effect of climate change on pigs
(the Nipah virus vector), chickens (Avian flu) and non-
human primates (the presumed vector for Ebola) is not
immediately obvious. (Though the effect of
socioeconomic development on the incidence of people
living in close contact with these animals is clear.) New
strains of V. cholera and E. coli are spread the same way
as the old strains: contaminated food or water. Though V.
cholera has been shown to multiply more rapidly in
warmer weather and show seasonal variability, this effect
is minimal compared to socioeconomic and hygienic
factors. (Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine, 2nd Ed.
Eddleston, M et al. 2005.) The past 15 years has shown a
significant decrease in both cholera cases and deaths
reported to the WHO despite increases in population in
vulnerable areas. Models projecting worldwide diarrheal
disasters look at seasonal phenomena and extrapolate
them out through half a century of global warming, but
ignore actual global decadal trends.

To return to Gore’s original point, however, there is
no evidence that any of these diseases emerged or
resurged due to global climate change. Talking about
these diseases in an article about Global warming is like
listing Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Idi Amin as examples of
the depravity of American politicians. Like the tragedies
in Darfur and the loss of Mt Kilemenjaro’s glaciers their
mention in An Inconvenient Truth is totally irrelevant and
manipulative – just smoke and mirrors, a distraction from
the dearth of good evidence.

But these kinds of “examples” go on and on: another
is the storm argument. Are we having more storms, as the
film states? No. The chilling chart that Gore employs to
prove this point plots rapidly increasing economic losses
due to extreme weather events over time. A correction
was published in 2005 by the American Meterorologic
Society after a similar argument was made in their
bulletin. The authors pointed out that “a robust body of
research shows very little evidence to support the claim
that the rising costs associated with weather and climate
events are associated with changes in the frequency or
intensity of events themselves.” Instead this change in
financial losses is due to a steady increase of people living
in vulnerable areas – from Californians moving to the
coast to the shantytowns of Calcutta. (Pielke R, Bulletin
of American Meteorological Society, 2005, Vol 86 (10),
pp. 1481-1483) Despite this dramatic expansion of
vulnerable populations, the number of deaths from
extreme weather events has fallen steadily since a peak in
the 1920’s. (Goklany, I, Death and Death Rates Due to
Extreme Weather Events: Global and U.S. Trends, 1900-
2004, report for the US Office of Policy Analysis.)
Shall we address all of the evidence: the drowning
computer-animated polar bear, the simulated submersion
of Manhattan…?

Even if every example of the current impact of CO2
driven temperature rise could be disproved, one stunning
visual from the movie remains to haunt the viewer with
doubts. Gore shows us two lines – one plotting
temperature over the past six hundred and fifty thousand
years, the other plotting atmospheric carbon dioxide.
They appear to rise and fall with a synchronicity that
would be the envy of many an aquatic acrobat. If
temperature and carbon dioxide really have shown such a
strong correlation over the centuries, isn’t it still probable
that CO2 drives temperature? This is possible, of course,
provided that the CO2 rises coincide with or slightly
predate the rises in temperature. Correlation is sensitive,
but not specific – it can pick up a whole range of possible
causes, but cannot prove causation. On the other hand, as
we have all learned by now, if a sensitive test is negative,
it can rule out a potential cause. Lack of correlation rules
out proximate causation. Is CO2 inducing this global
fever?

Probably not.
That is, not if you trust the ice core records that Gore
speaks so highly of in his Oscar-winning Powerpoint
presentation. The Antarctic melting during the third
glacial termination (210-225 thousand years ago) show
that the CO2 rise lagged behind the temperature increase
by about 800 years. An article by Fischer in Science
reported a lag of 400-1000 years during all three glacial
interglacial transitions on record. A later analysis using
argon – which has been shown to correlate with
temperature as well as the standard oxygen isotopes and
would be less prone to inaccuracies in timing – confirmed
the previously reported findings. That kind of a lag is easy
to miss in charts covering hundreds of millennia, but it is
hard to dismiss as insignificant on a practical level. The
Fischer article states that the generally observed
correlation between CO2 and temperature rise and fall is
“connected to a climate-driven net transfer of carbon from
the ocean to the atmosphere”. In other words, the ocean
acts as an enormous organism that exhales carbon dioxide
during warming periods of earth’s history, and absorbs it
during periods of cooling. Caillon et al report that “this
confirms that CO2 is not the forcing [that is, the causative
factor] that initially drives the climatic system during a
deglaciation”. (Caillon, N. et al, Science 14 March 2003:
Vol. 299. no. 5613, pp. 1728 – 1731; Fischer, H et al,
Science 12 March 1999: Vol. 283. no. 5408, pp. 1712 –
1714).

The temperature records have more to tell: even with
a cursory investigation of Gore’s charts you will notice
that the temperature rose during the early part of the 20th
century. This rise began decades before cars or planes
were in use, at a time when the global economy was
struggling under war and economic depression. Industry,
and with it, CO2 emissions, didn’t really take off until the
post-war period, at which point temperatures went down.
I’m not making this up.

“But these details are missing the point,” I hear you
cry. “The critical issue is that we’re seeing extreme, rapid
climate changes.” Not really. If you look back at Gore’s
chart of the past couple hundred thousand years (though
not his chart of the past 2000 years which does not
resemble most of the published literature), even he shows
our current temperature as still within the high end of the
normal limits. His graph also reveals something else,
noted by a team of Chinese scientists in The Geophysical
Research Letters in 2003. In their paper Ming Tan and
his colleagues record data taken from temperature proxies
found in a 2560-year-old stalagmite. They report that
over this period warming and cooling trends have
followed a distinct pattern: the warming occurring rapidly
over approximately a century followed by gradual, multi-
centennial cooling, creating what they described as a
“saw-toothed pattern”. (Geophysical Research Letters,
Vol. 30, No. 12, 1617, 2003. This article also contains a
markedly different two millennia temperature record than
that shown in An Inconvenient Truth.) Based on available
records, the current warming curve is consistent with the
known historical pattern.

Unlikely CO2, possible meteorites, probable sunshine

Carbon dioxide has never driven temperature. In
fact, the evidence shows that historically, temperature has
driven CO2. We cannot rule out the possibility that CO2
could drive climate, just as it would be hard to rule out the
possibility of a devastating meteor striking earth. But we
are not enacting expensive legislation to erect retractable
meteorite shields around major US cities, or pouring
money into the development of meteorite-proof material.
No one is pressuring poor nations to sign treaties
swearing they will dedicate a portion of their meager
GDP to combat this potential threat. It would be absurd.
And in that case we’re talking about an event that has
actually happened in the past.

So, if it isn’t CO2, what does drive climate change?

I don’t know.

One convincing theory is that of solar magnetic
activity (solar storms) and irradiance – two separate but
generally coinciding phenomena. An article in the
Astrophysical Journal in 1996 argues for a combined
effect of greenhouse gasses and solar factors, with solar
factors contributing a more significant amount. (The
Astrophysical J., 472: 891-902, 1996 Dec 1) The authors
of the article on the saw-toothed climate pattern favor the
solar explanation, saying, “All centennial to sub-
millennial scale cycles exhibited by the WTR [warm
season temperature record] could be connected to solar
variation cycles.” (Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30,
No. 12, 1617, 2003) Other articles expressly denounce
these solar theories or claim they are insufficient to
account for the full extent of the warming. (The
Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 25, No. 23, pp 4377-
4380, Dec. 1, 1998; GSA Today, v. 14, no. 3, 1052-5173,
2004) There is the potential for localized anthropogenic
warming effects secondary to changes in land use, which
have been widely documented and are known as the
“urban heat island effect”. (e.g. The Urban Heat Island
Effect at Fairbanks, Alaska, Theoretical and Applied
Climatology; Volume 64, Numbers 1-2 / October, 1999,
pp. 39-47.) There are the ocean currents and oscillations,
such as the Gulf Stream and El Nino, which have changed
throughout the Earth’s history and to which many
significant warming and cooling effects are attributed.
The fact is weather is a complex, perhaps even chaotic,
system. It is determined by multi-factorial processes.
Some variables are independent and others are
interdependent in complex and unpredictable ways. Some
are subject to human manipulation, but we are utterly at
the mercy of others.

Crichton states, “Nobody believes a weather
prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re being asked to
believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the
future? And make financial investments based on that
prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?” He goes on
to point out:

Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New
York. If they worried about people in 2000, what
would they worry about? Probably: Where would
people get enough horses? And what would they
do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad
in 1900, think how much worse it would be a
century later, with so many more people riding
horses?

One hundred years ago Tuberculosis accounted for
about 200 deaths per 100,000 people per year.
Diphtheria, Typhoid and Syphilis were other major
killers. By the 1970’s the mortality rates from those
diseases were measured in fractions of a death per
100,000. In 1907, AIDS was unheard of, as were
antiretrovirals or antibiotics, for that matter. The people
of 1907 didn’t know what a Nazi or Nissan or a neutron
was. It was an entirely different world.

The profound weakness of the climate models on
which so many policy makers hang their hats is that they
project our present conditions into the future. Of all the
possible scenarios for the year 2100, the least likely is one
in which humans are using the same technology that we
use today. Odds are it will be cleaner, more efficient and
more powerful. This change will require no global
treaties, just as no worldwide movements to ban
horsepower were necessary in the first decades of the 20th
century.

Counting the cost of the precautionary principle

People will appeal to the Precautionary Principle –
that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Why not sign global
treaties to limit carbon emissions? Several recent news
stories have come out in the wake of the Bangkok IPCC
report marveling at how cheap it will be to combat global
warming – 0.12 percent of annual world gross domestic
product. Why not encourage developing nations to get
with the program and use more clean energy?
Well, why don’t you have a solar paneled house?
Probably because it’s too expensive. No matter what we
say about saving costs down the road or fraction
percentages of GDP, as a practical matter these solar
technologies involve too much of an initial capital
investment to be feasible even for most Americans.
Installation costs for one entirely solar house in Boston
was $35,456. Presumably the technology will get
cheaper and more efficient in the future, but this is where
it stands today. A recent article came out about a group
of Virginia Tech engineering students who designed a
solar energy system to power a clinic in Getongoroma
village in Southwestern Kenya. The high tech system will
provide the clinic with an ample 24 kilowatt hours per day
(25% more than was requested, but still 20% less than the
average US household uses). The projected cost:
$120,000. Surrounded by the relative riches of America,
the project is still in the fund raising stage. How can we
possibly be serious in prescribing this to countries where
the average person earns a couple of dollars a day? James
Shikwati, a Kenyan economist and author, has said, “The
rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious
experimentation with other forms of energy.”

Of course, there are places where solar energy is the
best option for electricity in developing countries. These
are generally places that have no hope of getting
connected with a power grid, such as remote clinics in
agricultural communities in Kenya or guerilla-controlled
areas of Burma. The technology most often used in
clinics along the Thai-Burmese border, for example,
utilizes solar panels which each cost $525. Sounds a little
more reasonable, right? Each of these panels supplies 130
watts of power. If you have two incandescent light bulbs
on in your house right now, you are probably exceeding
this wattage. If you made coffee this morning, you used
almost seven times this amount of power. The medics
along the Thai-Burma border don’t really focus much on
immunizations because a refrigerator requires at least
200-700 watts of power. Of course, this also precludes
the possibility of blood banks, in a part of the world
where medics are frequently faced with treating
postpartum hemorrhage, malarial hemolysis and trauma.
At a household level, lack of refrigeration has profound
repercussions in the form of prevalent and deadly
diarrheal diseases that account for 50% of childhood
mortality in this population. What else might you want in
a clinic? An ultrasound? Cautery? A microscope that
can be used at night? A pulse-oximeter? A UV lamp?

These affordable solar panels are a valuable stopgap,
but they are by no means a permanent panacea for the
word’s energy needs. “I don’t see how a solar panel is
going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going
to power a railway train network,” remarks Shikwati. “It
might work to power a small transistor radio….” By
telling developing countries to use “clean energy sources”
what we are saying is, “You will not have electricity at
all.” We are saying, “You will live a life of backbreaking
work. You will see at least one of your children die in
early childhood, probably more than that. You will
experience incomparably more painful and dangerous
pregnancy and labor than women in developed countries,
and you will face it more frequently because you will fear
losing your children to disease, starvation or violence.
You will be too busy struggling for survival to protest the
rampant official corruption or the government troops who
rape you, destroy your villages and disregard your votes.
Ultimately, you will die 20-30 years younger than I will.”

This is unacceptable. When making worldwide
policy decisions there is no room for action based on
conjecture and polished Powerpoint presentations sold as
science.

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