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Science Tuesday - Capsaicin, Bioethicists at work, fertility and the recession, and climate change
Q & A: Red Hot Chili Peppers
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, August 11, 2009
Q. If I eat a raw jalapeño pepper, my mouth is afire, my eyes water and my nose runs. How can some people eat pepper after pepper without pain? Have they destroyed the sensory receptors in their mouths and throats?
A. No receptors are destroyed, said Harry T. Lawless, a professor of food science at Cornell and an expert in the taste, smell and sensory evaluation of food. Instead, “people who eat a lot of the stuff tend to develop a tolerance that we call desensitization,” he said.
“There is nothing harmful in the capsaicin molecule, the active ingredient of hot peppers,” he said. “Capsaicin is kind of a harmless drug, and like any drug we develop a tolerance to it.”
One theory is that a neurotransmitter gets depleted so that people respond less vigorously to capsaicin the more they are exposed to it, he said.
The capsaicin molecule has both stimulating and anesthetic properties, Dr. Lawless said. In 1952, The Dublin Medical Press recommended it as a temporary cure for toothache, he said, and pharmacologists, particularly in Hungary, have studied this anesthetic property in related molecules.
“The antidote to the mouth burning and the eyes watering is to eat more,” Dr. Lawless said, “either right away or later.” Chronic desensitization seems to be a matter of long-term dietary change, he said, but there is also the short-term numbing effect.
If you just can’t eat another pepper, Dr. Lawless’s favorite antidote is frozen yogurt. “Indian mothers,” he said, “are known to give ghee,” or clarified butter, “to children who get too much curry.”
A Conversation With Paul Root Wolpe: Scientist Tackles Ethical Questions of Space Travel
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, August 11, 2009
Q. AS NASA’S CHIEF BIOETHICIST, WHAT DOES YOUR WORK INVOLVE?
A. I’m an adviser to the chief medical officer for the agency. I don’t make decisions. Instead, I analyze situations and policies and offer bioethical perspectives on specific problems.
NASA does hundreds of research studies. Every astronaut who goes into space is, essentially, a human research subject. NASA’s looking at the effects of weightlessness, of G-forces and radiation on the human body. One of the things I do is look over the research protocols and make sure they are in compliance with earth-bound regulations about informed consent and health and safety. I also try to help solve some of the thorny ethical problems of medical care for astronauts in space.
Q. WHAT WOULD BE AN EXAMPLE OF THAT?
A. According to OSHA regulations, workers — including astronauts — can only be exposed to a limited amount of radiation at their workplace over their lifetime. Humans in space are subjected to much more radiation than anyone on earth would be. So there was this one case where an astronaut was close to the limit of exposure because of space travel, and then he had medical radiation treatments for cancer.
Astronauts want to fly as much as possible. That’s what they do. This one didn’t want the medical radiation to count against the lifetime limit because it hadn’t happened in the workplace. NASA had to weigh the letter of the law against the intent of the law. I said, “Exposure is exposure.” The decision ultimately went that way.
Q. MOST BIOETHICISTS WORK IN HOSPITALS. HOW IS THE NASA JOB DIFFERENT?
A. In an earth-based medical situation, the priority is the health and well-being of the patient. On a spaceship, that has to be balanced with the health and well-being of the other crew members and the success of the mission itself. Ethics in space are more of a balancing act. You need to weigh a series of priorities and figure out which is paramount.
Imagine you had a severely injured astronaut on the surface of Mars — or a dead body. American soldiers will put themselves at great risk to retrieve a dead body. On Mars, you have a different situation. You might be endangering the entire mission by trying to retrieve the body. In that case, you might recommend that it be left behind, even if that is against our ethical traditions.
Or what do you do if someone has a psychotic episode while in space?
I’ve written that there has to be medication and restraints on the craft. If you have to restrain the person for a long period of time, you have to do it. You can’t thank the person for their service to the country and put them out into space. You can’t medicate them to insensibility for a year and a half. You have to find a reasonable way to manage the situation.
Q. YOU MENTIONED EARLIER THAT NASA DOES BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH IN SPACE. HOW DO THE ASTRONAUTS FEEL ABOUT BEING RESEARCH SUBJECTS?
A. For the most part, they want to help. There have been some who, in some situations, have refused. They are covered by something called the Common Rule, which includes the right to withdraw from an experiment at any time or to refuse to participate, without penalty — as any human research subject in the United States would be.
Astronauts have refused experiments that interfered with their getting enough sleep while in space — it’s very hard to sleep in microgravity. Others opted out because they were concerned that medical information collected on them couldn’t really be private and might interfere with their getting health insurance after retirement. But on a flight with seven people, if one opts out, you’ve cut your research population significantly. This led an advisory panel to suggest a “modification of the interpretation” of the Common Rule for astronauts.
I thought that the Common Rule was our most basic protection for human research subjects and said it was a mistake to erode it. I recommended that what NASA should do is continue to increase something they’d already started to do — involve the astronauts in every level of the research process. For a reasonable concern like health insurance, I suggested that NASA offer lifetime insurance to the astronauts, which they are trying to now do. It’s a comparatively low-cost way to solve a problem. To this date, there’s been no modification of interpretation of the Common Rule for astronauts.
Q. WHAT WAS THE MOST UNUSUAL QUESTION NASA HAS POSED TO YOU?
A. It wasn’t an ethical question, it was a religious one. My father, the late Gerald Wolpe, was a rabbi, as are two of my brothers. There had been an Israeli on the crew of the Columbia shuttle. After it broke up, NASA wanted to know about Jewish religious standards in regard to gathering and interring remains. NASA teams were recovering pieces of bodies on the ground in Texas and Louisiana, much of it unidentifiable. And NASA wanted to know if the Israeli government would want only Ilan Ramon’s flesh returned to it because, if so, NASA would have to do genotyping of every piece of tissue. That would take months.
I told them there were countervailing values. In Judaism you bury the body as soon as possible. I didn’t think the Israelis would want to have months and months pass.
I’ve since heard that a lot of the tissue buried in the various graves of these astronauts was unidentified. There’s something touching that some of what is buried in each of their resting places is tissue from all of them.
Q. DID YOUR BECOMING A BIOETHICIST HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOUR FATHER’S WORK?
A. I think so. He was very involved in bioethics, even before it was a recognized field of study. He taught a course about death and dying at a medical school. At a time when there were few dialysis machines for people with kidney disease, he was on a state commission to decide who could get priority access to them. All of that came home in 1986, when my mother had a stroke and he became her primary caregiver. It made the whole family even more aware of the stresses caregivers suffer.
I was in graduate school at the time this happened, studying medical sociology. But I could see that this new field, bioethics, was rapidly developing. It combined everything I loved: medicine, the life sciences and the ethics I’d grown up with. For me, it was the perfect fit.
Paul Root Wolpe, 52, is a medical sociologist and bioethicist who directs the Center for Ethics at Emory University and is the first chief of bioethics for NASA. We spoke this summer in New York after Dr. Wolpe appeared at the World Science Festival and then again in Philadelphia. An edited and condensed version of the two conversations follows.
Birth Rate Is Said to Fall as a Result of Recession
By SAM ROBERTS, The New York Times, August 7, 2009
For the first time since the decade began, Americans are having fewer babies, and some experts are blaming the economy.
“It’s the recession,” said Andrew Hacker, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “Children are the most expensive item in every family’s budget, especially given all the gear kids expect today. So it’s a good place to cut back when you’re uncertain about the future.”
In 2007, the number of births in the United States broke a 50-year-old record high, set during the baby boom. But last year, births began to decline nationwide, by nearly 2 percent, according to provisional figures released last week.
Those figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, indicate that births declined in all but 10 states in 2008 (most of them in a Northern belt where the recession was generally less severe) compared with the year before. Over all, 4,247,000 births were recorded in 2008, 68,000 fewer than the year before.
California logged 14,500 fewer births than in 2007, a 2.6 percent decline and the first since 2001, when the state struggled with job losses in Silicon Valley that led to layoffs in distribution, construction and other sectors.
Early figures for 2009 appear to confirm the correlation with the recession. As more families were feeling the effects of layoffs and economic uncertainty, births decreased even faster.
In Arizona, births declined about 3 percent in 2008, the first annual decrease since an economic downturn in 1991. In the first six months of 2009, 7 percent fewer babies were born compared with the year before. The state’s population bubble burst and the jobless rate rose from 5.5 percent to 8.7 percent in the 12 months ending in June.
In the first three months of 2009, births also declined 7 percent in Florida, another state where the economy took a tumble.
“It may be that many couples saw it coming,” said Carl Haub, senior demographer for the Population Reference Bureau.
Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group, said, “We probably can’t prove it yet, but I agree.”
“That’s what happened in the Great Depression,” Professor Coontz said, “and although in some periods since then, we have sometimes seen women decide to have a baby if they get laid off, that decision is usually only made if the husband is working and his job seems secure.
“More than 80 percent of the job losses in this recession have been borne by men,” Professor Coontz added. “There are a lot of families where a maternity leave would mean that no income at all was coming in.”
Historically, birth rates have fluctuated with the economy. Record lows were recorded during two economic crises: the Depression in the 1930s and the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s.
By the 1970s, birth rates were also affected by the rise of feminism and easier access to contraceptives and to abortion. But would they have dropped as low as they did, Mr. Haub asked, without “the added impetus of inflation, not to mention long lines at the gas station?”
“While that question can never be definitively answered,” he said, “we do know that the economic setting hardly seems conducive to starting families or having additional children. Double-digit inflation during the 1970s made two-earner, two-career families a virtual necessity for many.”
Stephanie J. Ventura, chief of the reproductive statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, said, “We’ve had these bumps and drops in the past, but 2009 will be critical.”
Mr. Haub agreed. “If the economic crisis can be given a start date of early 2008,” he said, “then evidence of a slump in the birth rate might become apparent as early as late 2008, but could not be really conclusive until well into 2009.”
“It is certainly too soon to tell if this economic crisis will result in a sharp drop in the birth rate,” he said, “but all the measures and indicators, along with the collapse of the mainstays of the economy, are much worse than in the 1970s.”
In 2006 and 2007, the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recorded a birth rate of 14.3 per thousand people. That number declined to 13.9 in 2008 (most sharply near the end of the year).
The fertility rate among women 15-to-44 years old, which rose from 68.7 per 1,000 in 2006 to 69.2 in 2007, dipped to 68.4 in 2008.
By Degrees: White Roofs Catch On as Energy Cost Cutters
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, July 30, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Returning to their ranch-style house in Sacramento after a long summer workday, Jon and Kim Waldrep were routinely met by a wall of heat.
“We’d come home in the summer, and the house would be 115 degrees, stifling,” said Mr. Waldrep, a regional manager for a national company.
He or his wife would race to the thermostat and turn on the air-conditioning as their four small children, just picked up from day care, awaited relief.
All that changed last month. “Now we come home on days when it’s over 100 degrees outside, and the house is at 80 degrees,” Mr. Waldrep said.
Their solution was a new roof: a shiny plasticized white covering that experts say is not only an energy saver but also a way to help cool the planet.
Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones, homeowners like the Waldreps are in the vanguard of a movement embracing “cool roofs” as one of the most affordable weapons against climate change.
Studies show that white roofs reduce air-conditioning costs by 20 percent or more in hot, sunny weather. Lower energy consumption also means fewer of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.
What is more, a white roof can cost as little as 15 percent more than its dark counterpart, depending on the materials used, while slashing electricity bills.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, has proselytized for cool roofs at home and abroad. “Make it white,” he advised a television audience on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” last week.
The scientist Mr. Chu calls his hero, Art Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission who has been campaigning for cool roofs since the 1980s, argues that turning all of the world’s roofs “light” over the next 20 years could save the equivalent of 24 billion metric tons in carbon dioxide emissions.
“That is what the whole world emitted last year,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “So, in a sense, it’s like turning off the world for a year.”
This month the Waldreps’ three-bedroom house is consuming 10 percent less electricity than it did a year ago. (The savings would be greater if the family ran its central air during the workday.)
From Dubai to New Delhi to Osaka, Japan, reflective roofs have been embraced by local officials seeking to rein in energy costs. In the United States, they have been standard equipment for a decade at new Wal-Mart stores. More than 75 percent of the chain’s 4,268 outlets in the United States have them.
California, Florida and Georgia have adopted building codes that encourage white-roof installations for commercial buildings.
Drawing on federal stimulus dollars earmarked for energy-efficiency projects, state energy offices and local utilities often offer financing for cool roofs. The roofs can qualify for tax credits if the roofing materials pass muster with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program.
Still, the ardor of the cool-roof advocates has prompted a bit of a backlash.
Some roofing specialists and architects argue that supporters fail to account for climate differences or the complexities of roof construction. In cooler climates, they say, reflective roofs can mean higher heating bills.
Scientists acknowledge that the extra heating costs may outweigh the air-conditioning savings in cities like Detroit or Minneapolis.
But for most types of construction, they say, light roofs yield significant net benefits as far north as New York or Chicago. Although those cities have cold winters, they are heat islands in the summer, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of roof surface absorbing energy.
The physics behind cool roofs is simple. Solar energy delivers both light and heat, and the heat from sunlight is readily absorbed by dark colors. (An asphalt roof in New York can rise to 180 degrees on a hot summer day.) Lighter colors, however, reflect back a sizable fraction of the radiation, helping to keep a building — and, more broadly, the city and Earth — cooler. They also re-emit some of the heat they absorb.
Unlike high-technology solutions to reducing energy use, like light-emitting diodes in lamp fixtures, white roofs have a long and humble history. Houses in hot climates have been whitewashed for centuries.
Before the advent of central air-conditioning in the mid-20th-century, white- and cream-colored houses with reflective tin roofs were the norm in South Florida, for example. Then central air-conditioning arrived, along with dark roofs whose basic ingredients were often asphalt, tar and bitumen, or asphalt-based shingles. These materials absorb as much as 90 percent of the sun’s heat energy — often useful in New England, but less so in Texas. By contrast, a white roof can absorb as little as 10 percent or 15 percent.
“Relative newcomers to the West and South brought a lot of habits and products from the Northeast,” said Joe Reilly, the president of American Rooftile Coatings, a supplier. “What you see happening now is common sense.”
Around the country, roof makers are racing to develop products in the hope of profiting as the movement spreads from the flat roofs of the country’s malls to the sloped roofs of its suburbs.
Years of detailed work by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory have provided the roof makers with a rainbow of colors — the equivalent of a table of the elements — showing the amount of light that each hue reflects and the amount of heat it re-emits.
White is not always a buyer’s first choice of color. So suppliers like American Rooftile Coatings have used federal color charts to create “cool” but traditional colors, like cream, sienna and gray, that yield savings, though less than dazzling white roofs do.
In an experiment, the National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., had two kinds of terra-cotta-colored cement tiles from American Rooftile installed on four new homes at the Fort Irwin Army base in California. One kind was covered with a special paint and reflected 45 percent of the sun’s rays — nearly twice as much as the other kind. The two homes with roofs of highly reflective paint used 35 percent less electricity last summer than the two with less reflective paint.
Still, William Miller of the Oak Ridge laboratory, who organized the experiment, says he distrusts the margin of difference; he wants to figure out whether some of it resulted from different family habits.
Hashem Akbari, Dr. Rosenfeld’s colleague at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, says he is unsure how long it will take cool roofs to truly catch on. But he points out that most roofs, whether tile or asphalt-shingle, have a life span of 20 to 25 years.
If the roughly 5 percent of all roofs that are replaced each year were given cool colors, he said, the country’s transformation would be complete in two decades.
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, August 11, 2009
Q. If I eat a raw jalapeño pepper, my mouth is afire, my eyes water and my nose runs. How can some people eat pepper after pepper without pain? Have they destroyed the sensory receptors in their mouths and throats?
A. No receptors are destroyed, said Harry T. Lawless, a professor of food science at Cornell and an expert in the taste, smell and sensory evaluation of food. Instead, “people who eat a lot of the stuff tend to develop a tolerance that we call desensitization,” he said.
“There is nothing harmful in the capsaicin molecule, the active ingredient of hot peppers,” he said. “Capsaicin is kind of a harmless drug, and like any drug we develop a tolerance to it.”
One theory is that a neurotransmitter gets depleted so that people respond less vigorously to capsaicin the more they are exposed to it, he said.
The capsaicin molecule has both stimulating and anesthetic properties, Dr. Lawless said. In 1952, The Dublin Medical Press recommended it as a temporary cure for toothache, he said, and pharmacologists, particularly in Hungary, have studied this anesthetic property in related molecules.
“The antidote to the mouth burning and the eyes watering is to eat more,” Dr. Lawless said, “either right away or later.” Chronic desensitization seems to be a matter of long-term dietary change, he said, but there is also the short-term numbing effect.
If you just can’t eat another pepper, Dr. Lawless’s favorite antidote is frozen yogurt. “Indian mothers,” he said, “are known to give ghee,” or clarified butter, “to children who get too much curry.”
A Conversation With Paul Root Wolpe: Scientist Tackles Ethical Questions of Space Travel
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, August 11, 2009
Q. AS NASA’S CHIEF BIOETHICIST, WHAT DOES YOUR WORK INVOLVE?
A. I’m an adviser to the chief medical officer for the agency. I don’t make decisions. Instead, I analyze situations and policies and offer bioethical perspectives on specific problems.
NASA does hundreds of research studies. Every astronaut who goes into space is, essentially, a human research subject. NASA’s looking at the effects of weightlessness, of G-forces and radiation on the human body. One of the things I do is look over the research protocols and make sure they are in compliance with earth-bound regulations about informed consent and health and safety. I also try to help solve some of the thorny ethical problems of medical care for astronauts in space.
Q. WHAT WOULD BE AN EXAMPLE OF THAT?
A. According to OSHA regulations, workers — including astronauts — can only be exposed to a limited amount of radiation at their workplace over their lifetime. Humans in space are subjected to much more radiation than anyone on earth would be. So there was this one case where an astronaut was close to the limit of exposure because of space travel, and then he had medical radiation treatments for cancer.
Astronauts want to fly as much as possible. That’s what they do. This one didn’t want the medical radiation to count against the lifetime limit because it hadn’t happened in the workplace. NASA had to weigh the letter of the law against the intent of the law. I said, “Exposure is exposure.” The decision ultimately went that way.
Q. MOST BIOETHICISTS WORK IN HOSPITALS. HOW IS THE NASA JOB DIFFERENT?
A. In an earth-based medical situation, the priority is the health and well-being of the patient. On a spaceship, that has to be balanced with the health and well-being of the other crew members and the success of the mission itself. Ethics in space are more of a balancing act. You need to weigh a series of priorities and figure out which is paramount.
Imagine you had a severely injured astronaut on the surface of Mars — or a dead body. American soldiers will put themselves at great risk to retrieve a dead body. On Mars, you have a different situation. You might be endangering the entire mission by trying to retrieve the body. In that case, you might recommend that it be left behind, even if that is against our ethical traditions.
Or what do you do if someone has a psychotic episode while in space?
I’ve written that there has to be medication and restraints on the craft. If you have to restrain the person for a long period of time, you have to do it. You can’t thank the person for their service to the country and put them out into space. You can’t medicate them to insensibility for a year and a half. You have to find a reasonable way to manage the situation.
Q. YOU MENTIONED EARLIER THAT NASA DOES BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH IN SPACE. HOW DO THE ASTRONAUTS FEEL ABOUT BEING RESEARCH SUBJECTS?
A. For the most part, they want to help. There have been some who, in some situations, have refused. They are covered by something called the Common Rule, which includes the right to withdraw from an experiment at any time or to refuse to participate, without penalty — as any human research subject in the United States would be.
Astronauts have refused experiments that interfered with their getting enough sleep while in space — it’s very hard to sleep in microgravity. Others opted out because they were concerned that medical information collected on them couldn’t really be private and might interfere with their getting health insurance after retirement. But on a flight with seven people, if one opts out, you’ve cut your research population significantly. This led an advisory panel to suggest a “modification of the interpretation” of the Common Rule for astronauts.
I thought that the Common Rule was our most basic protection for human research subjects and said it was a mistake to erode it. I recommended that what NASA should do is continue to increase something they’d already started to do — involve the astronauts in every level of the research process. For a reasonable concern like health insurance, I suggested that NASA offer lifetime insurance to the astronauts, which they are trying to now do. It’s a comparatively low-cost way to solve a problem. To this date, there’s been no modification of interpretation of the Common Rule for astronauts.
Q. WHAT WAS THE MOST UNUSUAL QUESTION NASA HAS POSED TO YOU?
A. It wasn’t an ethical question, it was a religious one. My father, the late Gerald Wolpe, was a rabbi, as are two of my brothers. There had been an Israeli on the crew of the Columbia shuttle. After it broke up, NASA wanted to know about Jewish religious standards in regard to gathering and interring remains. NASA teams were recovering pieces of bodies on the ground in Texas and Louisiana, much of it unidentifiable. And NASA wanted to know if the Israeli government would want only Ilan Ramon’s flesh returned to it because, if so, NASA would have to do genotyping of every piece of tissue. That would take months.
I told them there were countervailing values. In Judaism you bury the body as soon as possible. I didn’t think the Israelis would want to have months and months pass.
I’ve since heard that a lot of the tissue buried in the various graves of these astronauts was unidentified. There’s something touching that some of what is buried in each of their resting places is tissue from all of them.
Q. DID YOUR BECOMING A BIOETHICIST HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOUR FATHER’S WORK?
A. I think so. He was very involved in bioethics, even before it was a recognized field of study. He taught a course about death and dying at a medical school. At a time when there were few dialysis machines for people with kidney disease, he was on a state commission to decide who could get priority access to them. All of that came home in 1986, when my mother had a stroke and he became her primary caregiver. It made the whole family even more aware of the stresses caregivers suffer.
I was in graduate school at the time this happened, studying medical sociology. But I could see that this new field, bioethics, was rapidly developing. It combined everything I loved: medicine, the life sciences and the ethics I’d grown up with. For me, it was the perfect fit.
Paul Root Wolpe, 52, is a medical sociologist and bioethicist who directs the Center for Ethics at Emory University and is the first chief of bioethics for NASA. We spoke this summer in New York after Dr. Wolpe appeared at the World Science Festival and then again in Philadelphia. An edited and condensed version of the two conversations follows.
Birth Rate Is Said to Fall as a Result of Recession
By SAM ROBERTS, The New York Times, August 7, 2009
For the first time since the decade began, Americans are having fewer babies, and some experts are blaming the economy.
“It’s the recession,” said Andrew Hacker, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “Children are the most expensive item in every family’s budget, especially given all the gear kids expect today. So it’s a good place to cut back when you’re uncertain about the future.”
In 2007, the number of births in the United States broke a 50-year-old record high, set during the baby boom. But last year, births began to decline nationwide, by nearly 2 percent, according to provisional figures released last week.
Those figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, indicate that births declined in all but 10 states in 2008 (most of them in a Northern belt where the recession was generally less severe) compared with the year before. Over all, 4,247,000 births were recorded in 2008, 68,000 fewer than the year before.
California logged 14,500 fewer births than in 2007, a 2.6 percent decline and the first since 2001, when the state struggled with job losses in Silicon Valley that led to layoffs in distribution, construction and other sectors.
Early figures for 2009 appear to confirm the correlation with the recession. As more families were feeling the effects of layoffs and economic uncertainty, births decreased even faster.
In Arizona, births declined about 3 percent in 2008, the first annual decrease since an economic downturn in 1991. In the first six months of 2009, 7 percent fewer babies were born compared with the year before. The state’s population bubble burst and the jobless rate rose from 5.5 percent to 8.7 percent in the 12 months ending in June.
In the first three months of 2009, births also declined 7 percent in Florida, another state where the economy took a tumble.
“It may be that many couples saw it coming,” said Carl Haub, senior demographer for the Population Reference Bureau.
Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group, said, “We probably can’t prove it yet, but I agree.”
“That’s what happened in the Great Depression,” Professor Coontz said, “and although in some periods since then, we have sometimes seen women decide to have a baby if they get laid off, that decision is usually only made if the husband is working and his job seems secure.
“More than 80 percent of the job losses in this recession have been borne by men,” Professor Coontz added. “There are a lot of families where a maternity leave would mean that no income at all was coming in.”
Historically, birth rates have fluctuated with the economy. Record lows were recorded during two economic crises: the Depression in the 1930s and the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s.
By the 1970s, birth rates were also affected by the rise of feminism and easier access to contraceptives and to abortion. But would they have dropped as low as they did, Mr. Haub asked, without “the added impetus of inflation, not to mention long lines at the gas station?”
“While that question can never be definitively answered,” he said, “we do know that the economic setting hardly seems conducive to starting families or having additional children. Double-digit inflation during the 1970s made two-earner, two-career families a virtual necessity for many.”
Stephanie J. Ventura, chief of the reproductive statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, said, “We’ve had these bumps and drops in the past, but 2009 will be critical.”
Mr. Haub agreed. “If the economic crisis can be given a start date of early 2008,” he said, “then evidence of a slump in the birth rate might become apparent as early as late 2008, but could not be really conclusive until well into 2009.”
“It is certainly too soon to tell if this economic crisis will result in a sharp drop in the birth rate,” he said, “but all the measures and indicators, along with the collapse of the mainstays of the economy, are much worse than in the 1970s.”
In 2006 and 2007, the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recorded a birth rate of 14.3 per thousand people. That number declined to 13.9 in 2008 (most sharply near the end of the year).
The fertility rate among women 15-to-44 years old, which rose from 68.7 per 1,000 in 2006 to 69.2 in 2007, dipped to 68.4 in 2008.
By Degrees: White Roofs Catch On as Energy Cost Cutters
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, July 30, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Returning to their ranch-style house in Sacramento after a long summer workday, Jon and Kim Waldrep were routinely met by a wall of heat.
“We’d come home in the summer, and the house would be 115 degrees, stifling,” said Mr. Waldrep, a regional manager for a national company.
He or his wife would race to the thermostat and turn on the air-conditioning as their four small children, just picked up from day care, awaited relief.
All that changed last month. “Now we come home on days when it’s over 100 degrees outside, and the house is at 80 degrees,” Mr. Waldrep said.
Their solution was a new roof: a shiny plasticized white covering that experts say is not only an energy saver but also a way to help cool the planet.
Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones, homeowners like the Waldreps are in the vanguard of a movement embracing “cool roofs” as one of the most affordable weapons against climate change.
Studies show that white roofs reduce air-conditioning costs by 20 percent or more in hot, sunny weather. Lower energy consumption also means fewer of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.
What is more, a white roof can cost as little as 15 percent more than its dark counterpart, depending on the materials used, while slashing electricity bills.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, has proselytized for cool roofs at home and abroad. “Make it white,” he advised a television audience on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” last week.
The scientist Mr. Chu calls his hero, Art Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission who has been campaigning for cool roofs since the 1980s, argues that turning all of the world’s roofs “light” over the next 20 years could save the equivalent of 24 billion metric tons in carbon dioxide emissions.
“That is what the whole world emitted last year,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “So, in a sense, it’s like turning off the world for a year.”
This month the Waldreps’ three-bedroom house is consuming 10 percent less electricity than it did a year ago. (The savings would be greater if the family ran its central air during the workday.)
From Dubai to New Delhi to Osaka, Japan, reflective roofs have been embraced by local officials seeking to rein in energy costs. In the United States, they have been standard equipment for a decade at new Wal-Mart stores. More than 75 percent of the chain’s 4,268 outlets in the United States have them.
California, Florida and Georgia have adopted building codes that encourage white-roof installations for commercial buildings.
Drawing on federal stimulus dollars earmarked for energy-efficiency projects, state energy offices and local utilities often offer financing for cool roofs. The roofs can qualify for tax credits if the roofing materials pass muster with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program.
Still, the ardor of the cool-roof advocates has prompted a bit of a backlash.
Some roofing specialists and architects argue that supporters fail to account for climate differences or the complexities of roof construction. In cooler climates, they say, reflective roofs can mean higher heating bills.
Scientists acknowledge that the extra heating costs may outweigh the air-conditioning savings in cities like Detroit or Minneapolis.
But for most types of construction, they say, light roofs yield significant net benefits as far north as New York or Chicago. Although those cities have cold winters, they are heat islands in the summer, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of roof surface absorbing energy.
The physics behind cool roofs is simple. Solar energy delivers both light and heat, and the heat from sunlight is readily absorbed by dark colors. (An asphalt roof in New York can rise to 180 degrees on a hot summer day.) Lighter colors, however, reflect back a sizable fraction of the radiation, helping to keep a building — and, more broadly, the city and Earth — cooler. They also re-emit some of the heat they absorb.
Unlike high-technology solutions to reducing energy use, like light-emitting diodes in lamp fixtures, white roofs have a long and humble history. Houses in hot climates have been whitewashed for centuries.
Before the advent of central air-conditioning in the mid-20th-century, white- and cream-colored houses with reflective tin roofs were the norm in South Florida, for example. Then central air-conditioning arrived, along with dark roofs whose basic ingredients were often asphalt, tar and bitumen, or asphalt-based shingles. These materials absorb as much as 90 percent of the sun’s heat energy — often useful in New England, but less so in Texas. By contrast, a white roof can absorb as little as 10 percent or 15 percent.
“Relative newcomers to the West and South brought a lot of habits and products from the Northeast,” said Joe Reilly, the president of American Rooftile Coatings, a supplier. “What you see happening now is common sense.”
Around the country, roof makers are racing to develop products in the hope of profiting as the movement spreads from the flat roofs of the country’s malls to the sloped roofs of its suburbs.
Years of detailed work by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory have provided the roof makers with a rainbow of colors — the equivalent of a table of the elements — showing the amount of light that each hue reflects and the amount of heat it re-emits.
White is not always a buyer’s first choice of color. So suppliers like American Rooftile Coatings have used federal color charts to create “cool” but traditional colors, like cream, sienna and gray, that yield savings, though less than dazzling white roofs do.
In an experiment, the National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., had two kinds of terra-cotta-colored cement tiles from American Rooftile installed on four new homes at the Fort Irwin Army base in California. One kind was covered with a special paint and reflected 45 percent of the sun’s rays — nearly twice as much as the other kind. The two homes with roofs of highly reflective paint used 35 percent less electricity last summer than the two with less reflective paint.
Still, William Miller of the Oak Ridge laboratory, who organized the experiment, says he distrusts the margin of difference; he wants to figure out whether some of it resulted from different family habits.
Hashem Akbari, Dr. Rosenfeld’s colleague at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, says he is unsure how long it will take cool roofs to truly catch on. But he points out that most roofs, whether tile or asphalt-shingle, have a life span of 20 to 25 years.
If the roughly 5 percent of all roofs that are replaced each year were given cool colors, he said, the country’s transformation would be complete in two decades.