Skepticism

[KatyBr]

OK, Henri, what is Sweden doing FOR conservation and preservation of the earth? I cited one thing we're doing, also we have our hybrid cars.

Katy
Somehow, Henri seems to avoid just these challenges.

[William]

As I said in an earlier post, I am not yet ready to dismiss global warming as a pressing issue for the world. But I'm not yet ready to accept it either. The proponents of the global warming theory tend to lose credibility when they use political power to stifle competing theories. After all, why does their pet theory need to be protected from competition if it's fact?

Therefore, Henri, I don't totally agree with you when you say that:

we now have, I believe, a fairly adequate understanding of the effects of man-made climatic gases on our environment.

Moreover, as you probably know, the Kyôto accords contain - and any successors will surely contain - provisions which allow for trade in «emission credits». These would allow, for example, a US firm to purchase credits from an inefficient Chinese plant which would then use the money to reduce its release of climatic gases...

Though the idea of emission credits might seem a viable tool in the economic give and take of greenhouse gas reduction it may not work so well in practice. But I concede that perhaps the best way to determine the effectiveness of the concept is to actually try it.

As regards the «legendary» Chinese concern for human life, my own impression is that Chinese people are as concerned for the lives of their near and dear as any other people.

Probably true, although I remember reading in the 1980s and 1990s that Chinese parents, limited by law, as they were in those days, to one child per family, were drowning baby girls because boy babies tended to have a much greater chance than girl babies of growing up and taking care of their aging parents. This would of course tend to promote the Chi-Com government's program to reduce the population. The fewer woman available for marriage, the fewer babies would be born, though this may have been a serendipitous effect. I'm not sure the government planned for that to happen.

I do imagine that the families who lost loved ones at Tianamen Square and the subsequent government crackdown were every bit as grief stricken as anyone who loses someone they care about.

I believe - but certainly cannot prove (didn't Tim call this «faith» ? - that were the US to abolish capital punishment, the Chinese leadership, at considerable political risk to themselves, would soon do the same....

While I support the fact that you allow a sort of "faith" to operate in your life, I have to disagree with you.

The Chinese government's persecution of the Fulan Gong movement in China indicates that they are not ready to imitate the free and open society of the United States. (I remember reading a report from an Eastern European newspaper after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States: at one point in the article the author said "The United States has so many religions not even God can count them".)

As for capital punishment, I support it in principle. Although some say that capital punishment tends to cheapen life, I believe just the opposite. I believe that the execution of someone who cold bloodedly murders someone else actually places the highest possible value on life. The murderer pays for the life of the victim with his or her own life. The problem is that through the years in the U.S., occasionally an innocent person is executed. So I am against capital punishment in practice, especially if the perptrator of a capital crime is convicted on circumstantial evidence, as in a recent case in California.

Execution as a means to eliminate political opponents, something that has happened in every dictatorship in history, including right wing monsters such as Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet, Porfirio Diaz etc., and left winge monsters such as Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse Dong, Kim il Jong, Pol Pot etc., is one of the world's greatest evils. And execution appears to still be used in China to eliminate real or perceived political opposition.

I was amused by this quote from an article in Economist.com concerning the ChiCom economy:

"One of China's richest private businessmen who knows the markets well calls them 'congenitally deformed children born after the rape of capitalism by socialism'".

[Apoclima]

"Do you believe in global warming? That is a religious question. So is the second part: Are you a skeptic or a believer?"

Once a person becomes a believer of global warming, "you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists -- except for a handful of corrupted heretics,"

"With respect to science, the assumption behind the [alarmist] consensus is science is the source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists [who agree.] But science is not primarily a source of authority. It is a particularly effective approach of inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science -- consensus is foreign," Lindzen said. [Bold mine]

"Kyoto itself will have no discernible effect on global warming regardless of what one believes about climate change,"

Meteorologist Likens Fear of Global Warming to 'Religious Belief'

Apo

[M. Henri Day]

OK, Henri, what is Sweden doing FOR conservation and preservation of the earth? ...

Not enough, certainly....

Henri

[KatyBr]

Apo,
agreed,agreed, agreed, and agreed!

Katy
and Henri,
one can never 'do enough', one can only do what one Can do. Here in the US we have many mandatory recycling garbage pick-ups, (one MUST separate one's trash; then giftwrap it in order for it to be picked up to be recycled. But then recycling does use up precious energy to do it's work. See? there are no Final Solutions.

Katy

[M. Henri Day]

... See? there are no Final Solutions.

Katy, Endlösungen are not my cup of tea, either. What I am trying to suggest is that we can - and must - do better, in Sweden, in the USA, in China, and elsewhere. As for Apo's quote concerning belief in global warming as a religious question, I should say that the problem here lies not in the phrase «global warming», about which evidence, either positive or negative, can be gathered, but in the construction «belief in», with which I, for one, have always had great difficulty. Belief in God, for example, seems to me a religious question, as generally speaking those who discuss it are not talking about a concept which can or should be tested by means of experiments and observations - the God in which belief is or is not expressed is generally considered as transcendental, i e, beyond our world of sense data (cf Kant's Kritik). Belief in God, thus, and with a caveat regarding my limited understanding of such matters (perhaps Garzo, who has studied these matters would care to comment ?), seems to me not to be so much an intellectual conviction concerning existence (albeit in a world other than ours), but rather a commitment to certain precepts and rules which are thought to be in accordance with the Divine Will (and often, as well, a mystic sense of «unity» with the Divine). Belief in a purported phenomenon like global warming, on the contrary, is just such an intellectual conviction susceptible to critique based upon experiment and observation. I think it wise to attempt, at least, to hold these two distinct meanings of «belief in» apart....

Henri

PS : Apo, you also raised some interesting questions concerning the nature of what we call «science». If I have the time, I shall try to address them tomorrow - if not they will have to wait until after Easter. Tomorrow afternoon I'm off, for the first time in nearly half a year, for Stockholm. Halleluja and Glad Påsk to you all !...

[Brazilian dude]

That's why I never take part in these discussions!

Brazilian dude

[Apoclima]

Have a good time, Henri! I don't know how you keep up with everything with such a high stress job!

Apo

[M. Henri Day]

I wonder if it be possible to be skeptical, not only with regard to purported global warming, but also concerning GM crops ?...

Henri

Damning verdict on GM crop

Final report on world's most comprehensive field trials says oil seed rape varieties would harm wildlife and environment

Paul Brown and David Gow
Tuesday March 22, 2005

Guardian

The long-awaited final results of the GM trials for Britain's biggest crop, winter oil seed rape, show that wildlife and the environment would suffer if the crop was grown in the UK, in effect ending the biotech industry's hopes of introducing GM varieties in the foreseeable future.
The government, which has been keen to introduce GM crops, now has the results of the world's most comprehensive crop study, demonstrating that the GM varieties currently on offer would be detrimental to the countryside. Bayer CropScience, the company that owns the patent on the GM oil seed rape being tested, said afterwards that it was not going ahead with its application to grow the crop in Europe.

The Conservatives took advantage of the government's discomfort, with Tim Yeo, the environment spokesman, announcing that the party would not allow GM crops to be grown in Britain unless it could be proved they were safe for people and the environment.

The trials, whose results were published by the Royal Society yesterday, began before the last election when the public backlash against the government's plans to introduce GM crops stunned Downing Street.

Michael Meacher, the then environment minister, came up with a plan to get the government off the hook by running extensive trials of GM and non-GM crops to test their effects on bees, butterflies, bugs, weeds and other farmland wildlife in two farming regimes. Large fields were planted half with GM and half with conventional crops and the results compared.

It was widely predicted that the GM regime, which uses fewer applications of herbicide than conventional crops, would benefit wildlife, but for three out of the four crops tested the reverse was the case.

Yesterday's results were particularly significant because winter-grown oil seed rape occupies 330,000 hectares (815,000 acres) of British fields and is the largest single crop, and the one from which farmers make most money.

The main finding was that broadleaf weeds, such as chickweed, on which birds rely heavily for food, were far less numerous in GM fields than conventional fields. Some of the grass weeds were more numerous, although this had less direct benefit for wildlife and affected the quality of the crops.

The scientific results made it clear that it is not the GM crops that harm wildlife but the herbicide sprayed on them. Fields containing conventional crops are sprayed with a herbicide which usually kills weeds before the crops emerge but herbicide-tolerant GM crops can be sprayed later.

The results on this crop were that the patented glufosinate-ammonium weedkiller was so effective that there were one third fewer seeds for birds to eat at the end of the season than in a conventional crop. Two years later there were still 25% fewer seeds, even though the weedkiller had not been applied again.

Les Firbank, who was in charge of the trials, said: "These weeds are effectively the bottom of the food chain, so the seeds they produce are vital for farmland birds, which are already in decline. There were also fewer bees and butterflies in the GM crops. All the evidence is that it is the herbicide that makes the difference to the wildlife." Mark Avery, of the RSPB, said: "Six years ago, before the farm-scale trials, we were told that GM crops were good for wildlife and good for farmers' profits. Now, against all expectations, we are told they are bad for both. It is bad news for the biotech industry."

Elliot Morley, the environment minister, will await the advice of the government's advisory committee before making a final decision, but said the trials demonstrated the government's "precautionary approach on GM crops".

The European commission will today reluctantly give the go-ahead for other GM seeds and plants to be used commercially in Europe and demand that Austria, Luxembourg, France, Germany and Greece lift national bans.

Although aware that the decision will provoke a public backlash and be open to challenge, the 25 commissioners, according to documents seen by the Guardian, say they have no alternative but to "fulfil their legal obligations" and force through a decision because a regulatory committee of national scientific experts and then ministers could not reach a majority decision.

"We're caught in a trap. Though these are decisions bequeathed by the previous commission, we are expected to break the deadlock - and take the political flak," a senior official said.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

[Apoclima]

Here, Henri, I think we are in full agreement.

The Environment and Environmental Concerns.
Genetic Engineering
A Series

I am esp. concerned about "terminator seeds," but the whole idea of GM plants (our food) is terrifying.

I am glad to see such organizations as this:

The Heritage Seed Library

However, there is always the spectre of crosspollination with GM plants.

Apo

[KatyBr]

I'm with ya guys on this too. Doing my part; I've prepared the soil for my butterfly garden, built 5 birdhouses and installed them near my butterfly/herb garden. I'm also building a fifty foot long raised bed to grow my saved Heritage seed tomatoes, peppers, cukes and 'old' roses. No pesticides, no herbicides, no Frankenfoods here.

Katy

[M. Henri Day]

Ekkis on Alpha Agora, Apo, Katy, and I in agreement on an important matter - perhaps I should take another look at this business of miracles in connexion with the Vernal Equinox and related holidays ! But if things are looking up in our little world, this, alas, doesn't seem to be the case in the larger one, as Tim Radford's article from today's Guardian, reproduced below, shows....

Henri

PS : Wise words from one of the most outstanding figures in human history - thanks, Katy, for bringing them to our attention !...

Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up'

Tim Radford, science editor
Wednesday March 30, 2005

Guardian

The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure.
The study contains what its authors call "a stark warning" for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself.

"Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," it says.

The report, prepared in Washington under the supervision of a board chaired by Robert Watson, the British-born chief scientist at the World Bank and a former scientific adviser to the White House, will be launched today at the Royal Society in London. It warns that:

· Because of human demand for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel, more land has been claimed for agriculture in the last 60 years than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined.

· An estimated 24% of the Earth's land surface is now cultivated.

· Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers has doubled in the last 40 years. Humans now use between 40% and 50% of all available freshwater running off the land.

· At least a quarter of all fish stocks are overharvested. In some areas, the catch is now less than a hundredth of that before industrial fishing.

· Since 1980, about 35% of mangroves have been lost, 20% of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and another 20% badly degraded.

· Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown disease to emerge.

In 1997, a team of biologists and economists tried to put a value on the "business services" provided by nature - the free pollination of crops, the air conditioning provided by wild plants, the recycling of nutrients by the oceans. They came up with an estimate of $33 trillion, almost twice the global gross national product for that year. But after what today's report, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, calls "an unprecedented period of spending Earth's natural bounty" it was time to check the accounts.

"That is what this assessment has done, and it is a sobering statement with much more red than black on the balance sheet," the scientists warn. "In many cases, it is literally a matter of living on borrowed time. By using up supplies of fresh groundwater faster than they can be recharged, for example, we are depleting assets at the expense of our children."

Flow from rivers has been reduced dramatically. For parts of the year, the Yellow River in China, the Nile in Africa and the Colorado in North America dry up before they reach the ocean. An estimated 90% of the total weight of the ocean's large predators - tuna, swordfish and sharks - has disappeared in recent years. An estimated 12% of bird species, 25% of mammals and more than 30% of all amphibians are threatened with extinction within the next century. Some of them are threatened by invaders.

The Baltic Sea is now home to 100 creatures from other parts of the world, a third of them native to the Great Lakes of America. Conversely, a third of the 170 alien species in the Great Lakes are originally from the Baltic.

Invaders can make dramatic changes: the arrival of the American comb jellyfish in the Black Sea led to the destruction of 26 commercially important stocks of fish. Global warming and climate change, could make it increasingly difficult for surviving species to adapt.

A growing proportion of the world lives in cities, exploiting advanced technology. But nature, the scientists warn, is not something to be enjoyed at the weekend. Conservation of natural spaces is not just a luxury.

"These are dangerous illusions that ignore the vast benefits of nature to the lives of 6 billion people on the planet. We may have distanced ourselves from nature, but we rely completely on the services it delivers."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

[KatyBr]

I agree we haven't husbanded our soil resources properly. God "suggested" that we give the land a 'rest' every 7 years. And indeed He took this "suggestion" more seriously than did 'His' people, because He put those people into captivity for the number of years by 'weeks' of years that they'd refused to allow that land to rest.
our soil is completely used up. Only 'natural fertilizers can renew them, the Chemicals actually make things worse (as man's "solutions" usualy do) by robbing the soils of trace minerals when the unbalanced chemical solutions are used, thus leaving our topsoil incapable of giving our crops the building blocks needed to keep us from getting the epidemic severe diseases we are so much more prone to, nowadays(i.e. MS, cancers, Diabetes, and so forth).

I can come up with many others who can add to, or coroborate this. Let me know if you want someone else's take on this.

For this and so many other reasons I believe that there exists "two truths" The real truth, and the "official" BS. That our officials tell us that chemical fertilizers are "good for us" , That eating a complete, whole, raw and organic diet "is not necessary", and all the other mob mollifying cr*p the 'officials' feed us.

Katy

[M. Henri Day]

I think we need to remember the limits of our understanding, and (attempt to) refrain from being seduced into concluding that the great deal we have learned in the course of being H sap sap is on a par with the oceans of our ignorance concerning the Universe of which we constitute a part, but hardly the master. Prudence then dictates that we do not, in our hubris, destroy the foundations of our existence, whether the matter in question is man-made global warming or GMOs. Of relevance in particular to the latter issue is, perhaps, the article below, which to my minds shows how much we have yet to discover concerning the workings of evolution (strictu sensu, Apo !)....

Henri

March 23, 2005

Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene

By NICHOLAS WADE

n a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier.

The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.

The discovery also raises interesting biological questions - including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism rather than being put right by a backup system.

"It looks like a marvelous discovery," said Dr. Elliott Meyerowitz, a plant geneticist at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, described the finding as "a really strange and unexpected result," which would be important if the observation holds up and applies widely in nature.

The result, reported online yesterday in the journal Nature by Dr. Robert E. Pruitt, Dr. Susan J. Lolle and colleagues at Purdue, has been found in a single species, the mustardlike plant called arabidopsis that is the standard laboratory organism of plant geneticists. But there are hints that the same mechanism may occur in people, according to a commentary by Dr. Detlef Weigel of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Weigel describes the Purdue work as "a spectacular discovery."

The finding grew out of a research project started three years ago in which Dr. Pruitt and Dr. Lolle were trying to understand the genes that control the plant's outer skin, or cuticle. As part of the project, they were studying plants with a mutated gene that made the plant's petals and other floral organs clump together. Because each of the plant's two copies of the gene were in mutated form, they had virtually no chance of having normal offspring.

But up to 10 percent of the plants' offspring kept reverting to normal. Various rare events can make this happen, but none involve altering the actual sequence of DNA units in the gene. Yet when the researchers analyzed the mutated gene, known as hothead, they found it had changed, with the mutated DNA units being changed back to normal form.

"That was the moment when it was a complete shock," Dr. Pruitt said.

A mutated gene can be put right by various mechanisms that are already known, but all require a correct copy of the gene to be available to serve as the template. The Purdue team scanned the DNA of the entire arabidopsis genome for a second, cryptic copy of the hothead gene but could find none.

Dr. Pruitt and his colleagues argue that a correct template must exist, but because it is not in the form of DNA, it probably exists as RNA, DNA's close chemical cousin. RNA performs many important roles in the cell, and is the hereditary material of some viruses. But it is less stable than DNA, and so has been regarded as unsuitable for preserving the genetic information of higher organisms.

Dr. Pruitt said he favored the idea that there is an RNA backup copy for the entire genome, not just the hothead gene, and that it might be set in motion when the plant was under stress, as is the case with those having mutated hothead genes.

He and other experts said it was possible that an entire RNA backup copy of the genome could exist without being detected, especially since there has been no reason until now to look for it.

Scientific journals often take months or years to get comfortable with articles presenting novel ideas. But Nature accepted the paper within six weeks of receiving it. Dr. Christopher Surridge, a biology editor at Nature, said the finding had been discussed at scientific conferences for quite a while, with people saying it was impossible and proposing alternative explanations. But the authors had checked all these out and disposed of them, Dr. Surridge said.

As for their proposal of a backup RNA genome, "that is very much a hypothesis, and basically the least mad hypothesis for how this might be working," Dr. Surridge said.

Dr. Haig, the evolutionary biologist, said that the finding was fascinating but that it was too early to try to interpret it. He noted that if there was a cryptic template, it ought to be more resistant to mutation than the DNA it helps correct. Yet it is hard to make this case for RNA, which accumulates many more errors than DNA when it is copied by the cell.

He said that the mechanism, if confirmed, would be an unprecedented exception to Mendel's laws of inheritance, since the DNA sequence itself is changed. Imprinting, an odd feature of inheritance of which Dr. Haig is a leading student, involves inherited changes to the way certain genes are activated, not to the genes themselves.

The finding poses a puzzle for evolutionary theory because it corrects mutations, which evolution depends on as generators of novelty. Dr. Meyerowitz said he did not see this posing any problem for evolution because it seems to happen only rarely. "What keeps Darwinian evolution intact is that this only happens when there is something wrong," Dr. Surridge said.

The finding could undercut a leading theory of why sex is necessary. Some biologists say sex is needed to discard the mutations, almost all of them bad, that steadily accumulate on the genome. People inherit half of their genes from each parent, which allows the half left on the cutting room floor to carry away many bad mutations. Dr. Pruitt said the backup genome could be particularly useful for self-fertilizing plants, as arabidopsis is, since it could help avoid the adverse effects of inbreeding. It might also operate in the curious organisms known as bdelloid rotifers that are renowned for not having had sex for millions of years, an abstinence that would be expected to seriously threaten their Darwinian fitness.

Dr. Pruitt said it was not yet known if other organisms besides arabidopsis could possess the backup system. Colleagues had been quite receptive to the idea because "biologists have gotten used to the unexpected," he said, referring to a spate of novel mechanisms that have recently come to light, several involving RNA.



Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[M. Henri Day]

... I'm also building a fifty foot long raised bed to grow my saved Heritage seed tomatoes, peppers, cukes and 'old' roses. No pesticides, no herbicides, no Frankenfoods here.

The article reproduced below is for Katy. I like people who don't always do precisely what is expected of them....

Henri

March 29, 2005

THE CITY LIFE

Street Gardening With Maggie and Bette

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

When the two-fisted singer Bette Midler took on Rudolph Giuliani six years ago, rescuing scores of flourishing street gardens from the City Hall auctioneer's gavel, happy community groups were entitled to write their good fortune off to a passing touch of noblesse oblige. But it turns out the Divine Miss M is in it for the long run.

"Oh no, Ms. Midler don't mind coming back, getting down and dirty with me - brings her own tools," said Maggie Burnett, one of the city's legendary street gardeners, who tills a narrow, vacant-lot parcel on West 149th Street, just off Broadway.

Having fought off addicts and aphids for three decades, Ms. Burnett watched in desperation as the Giuliani administration put her verdant patch of squatter's land up for sale in 1999. There was similar gloom across leafy swatches in the five boroughs. But Ms. Midler strode in at the last minute, buying up dozens of endangered neighborhood gardens through a rescue organization she calls the New York Restoration Project.

The singer put extra money into upgrading the 149th Street plot, officially named it Maggie's Garden, appointed Ms. Burnett the manager, and even showed up with President Bill Clinton for a dedication. "That was one wonderful day," said Ms. Burnett, whose enduring gratitude is lately mixed with a determination to find spring.

"Tomatoes," she recited, anticipating her growing season. "Beans, green peppers, bell peppers, collard greens." Ms. Burnett continued through an urban cornucopia that seemed pure fantasy as she stood amid the dregs of a perverse spring snowfall. The bare sign of vernal possibilities on the street was a twittering couple of birds confidently bolstering a nest inside the hollow cross pipe of a street lamp above the snaking traffic of Broadway.

But Ms. Burnett could see well beyond to another growing season. "We'll soon be turning the soil," she promised. Her faith in the earth is particularly poignant for being ringed by a relentless horizon of asphalt and walk-up flats. Ms. Midler's restoration group is driving all manner of city improvements, from large-scale resurrection of waterfront tracts to spectacular turnarounds in public parks like Fort Tryon. But the humbler squatter's gardens now preserved into perpetuity are the ultimate sights for sore eyes.

Mr. Giuliani may have been dubbed America's Mayor, but hardly on West 149th. There reigns Ms. Burnett, invoking Bette Midler for another harvest. "She does come to visit her garden," Maggie the manager said with great satisfaction of Bette the singer.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company