Every now and then the world is trying to tell you something, and events conspire in a flash of synchronicity to reveal a truth so deep and powerful that ordinary genius alone would have been insufficient to figure it out. Such was the case recently, when I was leafing through Garry Wills’ New York Review of Books article on Harvey Mansfield’s studly paean to all that is virtuous and masculine, entitled simply Manliness. (Now, it’s true that the sight of Professor Mansfield giving a high-five to Stephen Colbert demonstrated pretty clearly that, on the electrical-appliances scale of manliness, Harvey is less of a drill press or band saw and more of a cappucino maker or perhaps a motorized salad spinner. But that doesn’t affect the persuasive grandeur of his argument.) At the same time, I was mulling over the implications of An Inconvenient Truth, the global-warming scare-movie from noted beta-male Al Gore. Mr. Tree-Hugger himself would prance about in front of his fancy charts and graphs that looked like this:
And then, girly-man that he is, he would act all scared that the world was going to melt or some such nonsense. Crazy alarmist.
In a flash of insight, it hit me: this must be feminism’s fault, somehow. Those pushy women have tipped the balance of the universal order, and thrown Nature’s intricate equilibrium out of whack. Fortunately, I was handed just the tool I needed to prove this obviously-correct hypothesis by Brad DeLong, in the form of Gapminder World from Google. Check it out, peeps: here is a graph of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, as a function of the ratio of girls to boys attending school in different countries.
You can see it right there, science doesn’t lie. The correlation is clear as the Los Angeles haze — countries that educate women are dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, unless you’re crazy enough to think that it’s the CO2 that is causing all those girls to go get themselves an education, I think the implication is obvious: feminism is destroying the planet. We can now add this to Professor Mansfield’s insight that gender equality leads to less exciting sex lives, as one more level-headed condemnation of these tiresome females and their outdated Enlightenment aspirations.
I think it’s got a lot to do with the recent rise in dubious trend stories published by papers that should have known better. But that’s just my own correllation.
Tiptree’s two possums that shipped out in ’73 will be coming back with those aliens from Roswell. Then things’ll get fun.
I like correlation of number of cell phones per capita with lifespan. If we only got Africans nations some cell phones, their life expectancy will immediately increase from 30-something to 70-something years!
So…feminism is destroying the planet, while making the country richer. Ergo, feminism=capitalism?
It isn’t the data that’s funny, it’s the interpretation. The double-whammy irony is that equally dubious connections are reported with a straight face all the time.
Feminists? Oh, please. The CO2 graph makes it clear that greenhouse gas emissions really took off in 1859, the year when Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. Clearly the problem is evilutionism; feminism is at best an evilutionist ally.
(Though there’s also a bit of a reduction in CO2 levels around the time when the Germans caused all that unpleasantness in Europe in the last century; I don’t know how to explain that.)
I just gotta ask. Why did the data collection site shift from Antartica to Mauna Loa?
Elliot:
Data from Antarctica is from analysis of air trapped in ice cores.
Data from Mauna Loa is data from measurements of CO2 (begun by the very forward thinking Ralph Keeling).
Kramer, The CO2 from ocean island basalts? I know the geochemists like the Hawaiian island basalts because of what seems to be a long conduit to an undegassed reservoir in the mantle where the abundances of the noble gases are high.
Elliot, other places you can look if you are interested in the primordial CO2 are well gases (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/285/5436/2115) and ‘popping rock’, which are mid-ocean ridge basaltic glasses thought to be undegassed material from the Earth’s upper mantle. It is called ‘popping rock’ because when they are recovered from the seafloor and sitting on the ship’s deck, they ‘pop’ from the gases trapped in individual vesicles. Is that cool or what?
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Beta-male?
Why don’t you test that by allowing Gore to punch your face?
Oh, maybe you are afraid of becoming two-dimensional all of a sudden?
That would be the result of Gore’s punch. Trust me he can hit like noone else. Not even Ahhhhnold.
Amara, but wait, graph internet usage to %girl/boy and you will find the graph is almost identical…hmmmmmm. 😛