Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, explains in this piece why our government is spending billions of dollars to prevent terrorism while spending virtually nothing to prevent an even surer threat to Manhattan — rising sea levels due to global warming. Terrorism violates our moral sensibilities, he argues. Global warming does not. He writes, “Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Registered?
Commenting on WE Blog now requires you to be a Kansas.com member. Use the links above to register, if you haven't already, or to log in.Contact us
Follow us
Daily Archives
-
Recent Comments
- SolDevVB on Open thread 11/24
- Phantom on Open thread 11/24
- sursum on Open thread 11/24
- SolDevVB on Open thread 11/24
- donndublin on Open thread 11/24
- DavidB on Open thread 11/24
- DavidB on Open thread 11/24
- BlueJay on Open thread 11/24
- KSGolfnut on Whose ‘unchecked spending’?
- outlander on Open thread 11/24
59 Comments
Can somebody explain to me how global warming causes the sea level to rise? Thermal expansion in the water may contribute a little, but I can’t see the melting of ice bergs and the polar ice caps doing anything. Because aren’t they displacing the water now?
You fill up a cup with ice and fill it in with water. The ice will eventually melt, but it doesn’t overflow or raise the water level in that cup.
I’ve heard if Greenlands glaciers all melt it will raise the sea level, but I hear it’s getting thicker and not melting.
I don’t know.
Plus! Aren’t we (the government) are spending billions on global warming research and working on combating the issue? I believe so. So Daniel Gilbert is wrong.
Global warming gets much more attention and lip service than the gay issue, so he is wrong there too.
I don’t know what he is getting at. Does he want Global Warming to be solved tomorrow?
Just think of the outcry if cigarette smoke contributed to global warming!
Joe – land-based ice such as glaciers and the continental sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are not currently displacing water. Go look at a map.
Scientists say Greenland is melting. The oil industry is claiming otherwise.
“combating the issue?” – NO
“Global warming gets much more attention and lip service than the gay issue” – I must have missed the big push for a Constitutional Amendment.
Thanks Melissa for following up my earlier posting. I reprinted Dr. Gilbert’s commentary on Monday in the “And No, It’s Not Coming from Trees” blog if anyone wants to read what Dr. Gilbert said.
Greenland’s glaciers are getting thicker in the middle, which is compatible with global warming producing more precipitation. But the coastal edges are melting. Gore’s movie also shows how seeping water can help glaciers slide faster to the ocean. Scientists say there is a net loss of ice in Greenland right now. Time will tell what happens in the future.
What did Al Gore do for the environment while he was vice president for 8 years? Other than voting against the Kyoto agreement that is …
I saw the movie last night. Fairly well done; nothing really new to me since I keep up with the technical literature. I chuckled when he showed the graph going back 650,000 years and commented “only a few scientists have seen this” or something like that – it is one of the graphs I have used. I DEFINITELY liked the comments about tobacco and “creating doubt”
The main weakness in the movie in my opinion is that he didn’t go into carbon cycle disruptions and how that creates its own feedback loops. Dead plants and fires release more CO2. Drying and warming soils release more CO2. These accellerate the process.
“why our government is spending billions of dollars to prevent terrorism while spending virtually nothing to prevent an even surer threat to Manhattan — rising sea levels due to global warming.”
A surer threat to Manhattan (than terrorism) is rising sea levels?
Can you be more dramatic? How do you ever hope to influence opinion when you make these wacko statements? Facts, figures, perspective. Got it! Global cycles versus ideolog psychos.
God, please download version two of the Human Race with the new security routine that eliminate extremist wackos.
ID – nothing wacko about the facts. Melting of Greenland will flood NYC.
Ben! Read! Ice sheets thickening.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/07/ice_sheets_thickening/
http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMILF638FE_planet_0.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1806
These are just the first pick of a string of hits on a Google search. Let me know what Gore thinks?
Overall – more melting than interior thickening. Also, when the openings melt the interior will more readily flow on out.
From the links:
However no-one is sure how long the change will last.
The big question is if the change marks the end of the retreat, or just a short-lived reversal.
Finally, Joughin says that two nearby West Antarctic glaciers are thinning rapidly, so the trend cannot be extended across the continent.
Modelling studies of the Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance under greenhouse global warming have shown that temperature increases up to about 3ºC lead to positive mass balance changes at high elevations – due to snow accumulation – and negative at low elevations – due to snow melt exceeding accumulation.Such models agree with the new observational results. However after that threshold is reached, potentially within the next hundred years, losses from melting would exceed accumulation from increases in snowfall – then the meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet would be on.
That’s good! We have another 200 years. Whew! From the Gore Lore, I was thinking we had 5 to 10 years at best.
200 years gives us enough time to rape the oil resources from the earth and meet our utter doom by being reverted back into the dark ages. And in 200 years from now, what little history books have survive the scorched earth, it will tell accuratly that Bush caused global warming and Gore was the 2nd comming of Christ but was crucified by the lethargic populas. And now Revoluations is here.
The end is nigh! Look up in the brown cloud! Behold a Pale Horse.
[Liberal Rant]
The Ice sheets aren’t thinkening. Everything is melting. Everything! Americans driving SUVs are making kitens cry, killing all sea life and making the Oceans rise. Al Gore says so. He is the expert. There is no other explanation. None. If you don’t believe this you are a fundamentalist born-again Christian red-state gun-toting bible-thumping Iraqi baby-killing Islamophobe fancophobe Europhobe undocumented-worker-hating women-hating closed-minded nazi racist bigot. Go drink Chlorox.
[/Liberal Rant]
:D
LRB! I’m glad you have a sense of humor. I was hoping some people on this blog does.
LRB? Remember that poster I told you about that you remind me of because no one can quite figure him out either? Meet Joe Williams.
My technology ran me outta room on the other global warming thread LRB.
You ackbowledge that global warming is real. You SEEM determined that it is a warming sun that is the mechanism. IF that is true them it will increase the NATURAL emmissions of greenhouse gases. Would it not be prudent in that light to REDUCE human caused emmission of green house gases to compensate?
LRB’s politically correct industry web site only claims that about a quarter is due to the sun, the remainder to atmospheric changes.
Joe – while I would like to believe we have the amount of time you claim the overwhelming scientific evidence says otherwise. I’ll stick with my bet on behalf of my son and grandkids. They will see it happen.
The industry websites have a clear conflict-of-interest motive to obscure the facts; my motivation is the fact that my grandchildren will reap that which we sow.
We all know Global Warming is here. Both caused by natural cycles and man made emissions.
My honest question is: When is the point of no return? Has it already passed? If we can’t reverse it, then the only thing we can do is slow it’s process down.
I’m all for electric cars and alternative energy and mass public transportation, green spaces, CO2 and other green house reductions, recycling and etc.
But the entire world needs to get on board also. The USA has gone through and continoue the effort to reduce pollution and I know more needs to be done. But it isn’t going to help if India and China get a pass and continue to pollute like the USA union Industralization years. What are they doing? This needs to be a global effort.
And Ben! Really honest question. Is it our generation or was it the generation before us that really did the most damage?
Well! You might be quite a bit younger than me, so that is probably not a fair question. But basically are we living in the consequences of the past and not in the recent years?
I wasn’t born during the polluting free-for-all smoke stacks, gas guzzling lead gasoline massive polluting hot rod cars, and free dumping in our lakes and streams.
I’m all for reduing oil consuption. If for no other reason to get our armed forces out of the Oil Sheik protection business.
There is one overriding Engineering axiom that is unescapable – energy is not free.
The furure is electric. Of that there is no doubt. Forget Hydrogen fuel cells. Hydrogen, if used in human transportation (losses), because it is a simple molecule-loving element, would cause more atmospheric damage that our current fosil fuel.
Solar? Forgetabout it. There isn’t enough nergy per square foot to do much.
Wind? Kills birds and is unreliable.
Waves? Wave energy generation kills sea life and is also unreliable.
Nuclear? Bingo.
But for every electric car we put on the road we will need to generate marginally more electricity to drive it.
The problem with electric cars is energy storage. That means batteries. Batteries use very toxic materials (cadmium, Lithuim, unobtainum, etc). The eventual disposal of billions of these as junk would be an environmental nightmare. Also batterys don’t work very well in cold temperatures. Batteries aren’t the primary solution.
The only feasible alternative is to design electic cars to tap into the electrical power source either in the road like a slotcar or above the road like a carnival bumper car.
Luckily, this solution is not that hard to realize. Note that as you drive down just about any road you will see power lines along it. Lucky us. We just need to either bury them in the road or string them over the road.
Another unintended consequence of this is that you can also carry information (Internet) on the electicity and you can sense where cars are. Meaning it is possible for your car to drive itself, avoid all other cars while you spend time describing the future to people thousands of miles away on the Internet.
Just a thought …
We find agreement LRB. I have long advocated nuclear; in fact I go a bit further and look to back-mixing decommissioned warheads material with depleted uranium to make fuel. High-enriched back to low-enriched; no longer suitable for weapons. I do, however, include solar and wind in the mix; they are proved to be reliable with today’s technology. I think the jury is out on H2 – your commetns about losses atr important.
Right now I think an easily available technology would be ‘plug-in’ hybrid. 95% of my use would be within battery range; using fuel only occassionally. Even without your interesting ’slot-car’ idea this would both displace almost all motor fuel and also clear the air in cities (where most driving is short distance)
Joe – it is more our current generation rather than the prior. And, I doubt very seriously that I am “a bit younger than you” as I am approaching 59 this month.
Our emmissions are increasing; not decreasing.
Hybrids are an interim solution. Today’s hybrids are still powered 100% by gasoline. Plug in is the way to go. But …
There is that problem of for every car we plug into the grid the more electricity we need to generate.
Right now it’s hard just to build a new high voltage transmission line without hippies chaining themselves to construction equipment and singing folk songs.
We aren’t politically ready to accept an electical future.
Good hearted as Joe is, he is often a little slow on observation. I was trying to figure out how to address Joe thinking “You might be quite a bit younger than me” about you Ben. Thanks for bailing me out on that! You need to tell me more about nuclear power Ben and how the wastes would be dealt with.
LRB!!!!
See this is why I had faith in you. Those are good ideas……even ideas I had never considered. I know you decry solar. But imagine your “road” ideas coupled with solar electicity generating road material.
Joe Williams,
You get about a 40-foot sea level rise if both Greenland and Antarctic melt, and/or break apart. As heartlander posted, meltwater is creating unknowns — like the Larsen B ice shelf collapse.
‘Ice Sheets and Sea Level Rise: Model Failure is the Key Issue’http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/ice-sheets-and-sea-level-rise-model-failure-is-the-key-issue/‘NASA Mission Detects Significant Antarctic Ice Mass Loss’March 02, 2006http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2006-028
LRB,
There’s a whole bunch of better, faster, and cheaper solutions than nuclear electricity. Spend a few days studying http://oilendgame.com — and then let me know what points you disagree with.
Actually LRB I think we can do the nuke construction again. There are a number of scientists like myself who are ‘environmentalists’ but whose science force to be ‘pro-nuke’. We can then communicate with the larger enviromental community.
JR – waste is an issue that we must deal with carefully. However, one thing about my scenario is that it approaches zero net ‘new’ waste. The reason for this is that I would use currently existing material – old warheads + depleted uranium = fuel. We have the stuff on hand anyway; we may as well use it. “Swords into plowshares.”
I have some interesting discussions with my environmental friends. We are on the same page on climate change and many other things. Then they find me pro-nuke and pro-incineration of a large fraction of solid waste. However, we can communicate because they know where I am coming from. That is why it can be done; there is a lot of good science supporting it.
cosmos – the issue you raise are also important parts. There is no ONE solution; it will take them all.
I cannot post fast enough….
LRB you were brilliant for one post. I said so.
While I was doing that you posted using words like “hippies”
Stay with being part of the solution whydoncha? Don’t bash.
Good point JR – thing is we were moving to consensus here. Who knows, I might even make you pro-nuke. Maybe even cosmos!
Well Ben it is my fault for not visiting the links you have posted in the past perhaps.
If you can deal with the long term hazardous waste issues with nuke power I will be all for it.
I think the best solution is to ‘glass’ it – obsidian-type minerals have been shown to be quite stable. Recycling is the best for most of it – I’m talking a sort of breeder here which is probably about as politicall incorrect as I can get!
“While I was doing that you posted using words like “hippies”"
I can’t be true to you unless I am true to myself. I call ‘em as I see ‘em. Don’t expect politcal correctness from me. I use words that create a very specific image on purpose. I don’t see Donald Trump protesting new power line construction. I see hippies doing that. Old hippies. Old hippies who should have hung up the beads and put away the tie dyed shirts 5 presidents ago.
Funny thing is – I am probably one of them. And I will be pushing the power lines. So will Sierra Club; they lobbied for legislation to facilitate power lines to tie together large wind farms to harvest the “Saudi Arabia of Wind.”
The key to ‘fixation’ of waste to be long-term stored is to mimic geology where we know forms that are resistant to leaching.
By the way JR – more radioactivity is emitted by a coal-fired plant than by a nuclear plant.
I’ll look into that further Ben. I TRUST you your take because I know that you care about the environment.
Sigh…..
LRB??? You are such a puzzle. You have such visions but you bash on “visionaries”.
“Hippies” as you call them bucked the status quo. That is how you bring change. Don’t attack and deride people who care. Reach out to them! They are the most open minded to ideas. And even if sometimes you may see them as misguided, deal is that “guided” folk have their stake not in the greater good but the status quo.
Nathan and I had an interesting talk about this at the first meetup – again a lot of common ground.
The reason for the radioactivity from coal is thorium and K-40.
I’m pro nuclear also. Although I doubt we can run mini-nuclear reactors in our automobiles. Reading articles back in the 50’s and the up and coming Nuclear Age, many people thought we would be completely nuclear power dependent, including running our automobiles.
I know 3-mile island and Chernobyl scared the hell out of everybody, not including the NIMBY effect that it comes with, but new nuclear plants are a ways off in America. Although Japan and France really embraces them.
To JR: “You might be quite a bit younger than me”
My fault. Slipped a Bush in my brain. Revise! “I might be quite a bit younger than you.”
Guess it just my right side working tonight. It’s hard for me to go to the left.
I’ve posted this before, but I’m a big fan of the electric car. http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/?detectflash=false
I have a Fiero that I plan on converting over to electric.
Posts crossed. I’ll look into that too Ben.
I’m not an engineer and I am not a scientist.
I’m just an agitator. I hope I do some good.
I’m not here to bash hippies. That would be far too easy. If they want to remain stuck in a lifestyle of the 1960s – so be it. I find them as curious as another group stuck in a long ago era – the Amish.
The point is that at one time the hippies were bucking the staus quo they are now defending it. No new roads, no new power plants, no new stores, no new electrical transmission lines. No new restaurants, no new birdfeeders. Well, maybe new birdfeeders are ok only as long as the materials are organic and the seeds are free range.
To be honest I think hippies today are standing in the way of any type of progress. They are just like those they protested against long ago.
LRB,Actually, the hippies, as you call them, of today are the ones who generally are looking at ways to IMPROVE the environment. They were the ones who first read Silent Spring, and assisted in the developement of the EPA. They are the ones who, today, are out there on the front lines trying to stop the corporations from further destroying the wetlands, polluting the waters, and generally paving over much of the United States.
While you prefer not to bash people you seem to think are an easy target, I would suggest you replace that bullseye you carry on your forehead with a brain. The world is NOT in good shape at this moment, and will not get better without people like hippies, scientists, futurists, and people who arn’t afraid of taking off their rose-colored glasses and seeing what is really going on.
The “hippies” took off theirs’ years ago. The vintage hippy stepped out of that box when he/she found they really could make a difference. Your “box” apparently is a coffin, something you seem to have made a home out of. Brain cells can regenerate if used. You might try that.
How deadly was DDT? Did it really cause cancer and kill birds?
I’ve read and watch mini-documentaries on it, which states the hysteria of banning DDT around the world resulted in millions of deaths in 3rd world countries due to contraction of insect borne diseases that would have been greatly reduce if DDT were used.
DDT and its metabolites are endocrine disrupters. Laboratory studies administering DDT were found to cause the same eggshell thinning in birds of prey as was observed in the wild. DDT is also persistent for long periods in the environment and animals’ (including humans) fatty tissues. This is the reason that raptors were first identified as DDT-injured species: smaller birds at DDT-containing insects; they accumulated DDT. Raptors ate these birds and concentrated the DDT to higher levels in their tissues. They suffered reproductive failure and species like peregrines became endangered.. We see the same phenomenon at work in large fish like tuna and swordfish having high mercury levels: plankton take it up at low concentrations, anchovies and sardines concentrate it, larger fish eat the smaller fish and concentrate it more, and the largest predatory fish concentrate it further. Similarly, orcas in PCB-contaminated Puget Sound are food-chain concentrators, some having high enough PCB levels that if they are found dead, they must be treated as hazardous waste.
A good rule of thumb is that whenever you develop a poison to kill certain species, the odds are pretty high that it will kill and injure other, unintended species as well. There is no such thing as a magic-bullet pesticide. The best we can do is to design pesticides that break down rapidly after application, a lesson learned from the DDT ecologic near-disaster.
Or we genetically alter crops to be pest resistance?
Just came across an article about a six stroke engine.
http://www.autoweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060227/FREE/302270007/1023/THISWEEKSISSUE
Hippies are lost in a cloud of hallucinogenic fog of an era of long ago. Trapped in a timeframe and lifestyle that would have made make Rod Serling feel uncomfortable.
Having an unwashed sexagenarian showing up to a climate change conference in a tie-dye shirt and doused in pachouli oil is akin to having grandpa show up to an Allen Ginsberg reading of Howl during the beat generation era dressed up in a powdered wig and codpiece.
We have real problems then need actual solutions. And an actual solution does not involve have a hippie commune living in a windmill running a free store.
Sorry.
Ben,
One huge problem with nuclear is it’s not cost competitive. Other sources and higher efficiency are cheaper and faster. A good explanation on page 258 (PDF pg 282) at http://oilendgame.com
LRB – better a hallucinigenic fog than a cocaine psychosis like we have with your bunch. Since I have not seen any “unwashed sexagenarian showing up to a climate change conference in a tie-dye shirt and doused in pachouli oil” your comments are meaningless. (What the heck is pachouli oil anyway?)
Joe – there are serious issues with DDT; I think the mechanism has to do with Chlorine free radical production as it is metabolized to DDE.
Agree with you on genetics/pest-resistant. I don’t know that we can totally ‘organically’ feed 6 billion people.
cosmos – I’ll have to study your further. My feeling right now is that nuclear will have to be part (but not all) of the mix.
Genes are problematic because they REALLY persist. We have to remember that insects and plants have coexisted, and supported dense econetworks of other species for millions of years. Communities of plants have done this too. Industrial ag says, “We want this plant variety, and no other plant variety in this field, and we weant nothing eating it.”
Chemo-agriculture is only a century old. It’s productive to be sure: this is how the earth is now supporting 6.2 billion people. But it violates natural forces’ equilibrium. It’s a very dangerous experiment.
We see the egregious abuse of livestock as well, and hog and chicken contract farmers, who understand animals and the land hate what urban corporate agribusiness executives are forcing them to do, i.e. degrading the animals and those who raise them. It’s a pathologic paradigm.
BTW, the Green Acres store at Bradley Faire sells locally-grown organics and hosts a Thursday farmer’s market. Organic food costs more, but poison-free food is worth the price, for our and our children’s health, and for the planet’s health. Wal-Mart sells organics, albeit not Kansas-grown. Supporting local farmers’ efforts to reduce their dependency on chemo-ag commodity grains is a worthy cause.
heartlander – you raise valid points. I guess I was tending more toward genetis as breeding rather than chemical splicing. However, it will take extreme caution lest we run into very serious ‘unintended consequences.’
I see what you’re talking about. Some plants activate genes to synthesize substances to deter insects when they start getting munched on. In some cases they also emit volatile small molecules that alert nearby members of the same species to turn on their genes. It’s quite remarkable.
July’s Popular Science has a great article on emerging energy-generation technologies. We don’t have to depend on foreign oil, we don’t have to create anti-US terrorists in foreign-oil countries, and we don’t have to squander our capital trying to overcome them and control the oil that they think belongs to them, and that they think we are stealing. It doesn’t matter whether or not they never would have tapped it themselves, what matters is that they’re sitting on it, and it’s a lot harder to mount offensives thousands of miles from home than it is for resident insurgents to resist invasion, and make it cost-ineffective for the invaders. We have all the energy we could ever use, right here in the good old USA, and much of it won’t even generate CO2.
Ben – new nuclear plants probably will be part of the mix, at least for a while. They’ve got a powerful lobby, and it’s widely perceived as a non-carbon solution for climate change.
But eventually, the costs may kill it. Note how proponents cite the lowest “operating costs”, but hide the building, decommision, and spent fuel storage costs.France has relatively high rates, and a huge debt from their nuclear.
On GE and similar issues,http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_environment/genetic_engineering/
Back on rising sea levels…Greenland Ice Loss Doubles in Past Decade, Raising Sea Level Fasterhttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2006-023
Greenland Melt Extent, 2005http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/steffen/greenland/melt2005
“What the heck is pachouli oil anyway?”
Ben, dear, are you SURE you were around in the sixties?
heheheheh
One of many problems with GMO food is that it is hard to contain in a specific area, and it is hard to keep out of the human food supply. Look at “roundup ready” corn. It can NEVER be completely removed from the human food supply.
I used to get inquiries all the time from the new “farm-acutical” manufacturers who want to grow our medicine with GMO plants. They ALWAYS wanted a 2-3 mile barrier around the facility they were proposing.
That was the best they could do to stop cross contamination and cross pollination. They are and have been WELL aware of the dangers of what they are doing.
GMO foods are a genie best left in the bottle, but unfortuately, monsanto, cargill, and the rest of the gang are already sniffing the cork.
We could feed more people if grain were going for real food, and not for corn sweetner and ethanol. Not to mention the water going to grow and process corn. And the subsidies.
Saying we need GMO to feed people just furthers the aims of the corn growers and their associations. We just need food for food, and water for all crops and activities, and a reduction in energy consumption. And biomass technology for ethanol, not grain based ethanol.
Farmers could easily feed the world right now, but the subsidy game has ag structured in a “non food” economy if you can believe it. A push for growing NON food use crops is displacing crops for food.
And if grain were going to humans instead of livestock, we could more efficiently feed humans. And yes, I am a cattlewoman. But my critters are grass fed, not grain fed. Not, at least, until they get to the corporate feedlot.
It should be noted the EU was against GM crops. They called them Frankenfood and organized mass protests against US firms. That is until they developed their own European GM industry. Now everything is fine.
Here is one for you guys:
The New Pollution
If you’re ashamed of America’s standing as the world’s biggest polluter, don’t worry, relief is in sight. Not because we’re getting any better, but because China is starting to make us look like chumps.
China is facing an environmental crisis as rapid industrial growth and rampant pollution threaten to turn the nation into the “Cleveland of the East.”
In the latest environmental disaster to hit the mainland – let’s call this one “Toxic Spill 7329: Escape from Shanxi Province” – a frantic cleanup effort is in progress after a truck loaded with coal tar overturned into the Dasha River. Original reports had the truck’s cargo pegged at 60 tons of coal tar – a number that’s since been revised to 80 tons. And you might not guess it, but 20 tons of coal tar makes quite a difference.
Following the spill, workers built dams to prevent a plume of toxic sludge from reaching a downstream reservoir that provides water to a city of 10 million and is a standby source of water for the 2008 Olympics. Fortunately, most Olympic athletes already have plenty of foreign substances in their system.
- from AP, reprinted on the Daily Show.
See, we rnt that bad…
Tony! It’s still Bush’s fault!
Being a little sarcastic Joe?
kfg – maybe you will have to teach me about pachouli oil … sounds like fun … hehehe
Tony is right about Chine – and I would add India. the developing world is a real time bomb.