| Friday,
December 31, 2010
Happy New Year
.
The
December Mailbag is up as Chaos Manor Reviews. I have sent copies to
Platinum subscribers. Now it's time for my walk. Back in a bit.
Records cold in Los Angeles and Florida, and other places.
Of course climate is not weather. But there are indications that we are
headed for another cooling period, while government power over the economy
in the name of saving the Earth from global warming, oops, Climate Change,
oops, uh, Global Climate Disruption, by bankrupting the West while watching
India and China forge ahead with fossil fuel plants augmented with nuclear
power augmented with a devil may care pollution attitude -- have you seen
the great brown cloud? -- all that grows. During 2010 we set up even more
government hampers to building the Western economy, and while we continue to
fund regulations to control AGW, oops, oh to hell with it -- while we
continue to fund regulations to control AGW, we don't fund any studies to
look into the reliability of the data collection and massaging that goes
into the models, and the models don't seem to get any better at making
actual predictions.
I was recently told that anyone who thinks that the climate
models ought to be able to take 1950 initial conditions and predict the
climate patterns leading to the present shows a lack of understanding of the
purpose of the models. I expect that's a true statement, but it does raise
the question of why tax money ought to fund the models. It may well be that
we ought to fund them, but that ought to be explained if it turns out their
purpose is not to provide predictions of just what is going on in climate
modeling. What I see, though, is increasing petulance among the Believers.
Given that it was freezing in Florida and the San Fernando Valley last
night, and we continue to get higher and higher heating bills, surely
something other than smug assurances is forthcoming? Ah well. And now it is
time for my walk. It's cold outside.
===========
Does anyone here actually know much about genetic
engineering? It's something that happened well after my time. I know
something about hybrids and plant breeding, but my last studies in genetics
were before the engineering revolutions. I do know that we have developed
gene therapy for immune disorders -- there are now "bubble kids" raised in
isolation because of their deficient immune systems that now lead normal
lives -- and those procedures don't seem to be under attack by
"environmentalists." I also know that many "environmentalists" are
ignoramuses, like the head of the major California environmental movement
who boasted that "the only physics I ever took was EX-LAX" as he led
protests against nuclear power plants that would have brought actual clean
energy to California back in the days when we worried about smog. And then
there is the environmentalist leader Jeremy Rifkin. I found this about him
on Wikipedia:
Rifkin's work has also been
controversial, and opponents have attacked the scientific rigor of his
claims as well as some of the tactics he uses to promote his views. A 1989
article about Rifkin in
Time bore the title, "The Most Hated Man in Science".[10]
Stephen Jay Gould characterised Rifkin's 1983 book Algeny as "a
cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as
scholarship".[11]
I'm no great fan of Stephen Jay Gould, but if he can
say that about Rifkin I suspect my friends would have even more to say in
that vein.
None of which is decisive evidence about the value and
safety of genetic engineering. In particular we have the cost of sugar
rising. Sugar is protected by heavy tariffs and subsidies to begin with. Now
we have an upcoming shortage and higher prices. See today's Wall Street
Journal article "A Spoonful of Sugar Will Soon Cost More" (link).
It appears that we have environmentalism of the Jeremy Rifkin kind run riot.
My question is, is this a matter of science or just more politics? Are we
being protected from Frankenfoods, or is the whole mess a scam to keep
prices higher and make more money for those who finance the sugar lobby?
It's one thing to protect people from some future disaster, and quite
another to use the bureaucratic system to protect the profits of a group of
lobby association members.
My suspicion is that genetic engineering of sugar plants
isn't harmful, although I have residual doubts about the effects of the
herbicide that the genetic engineering enables the plant to resist. One
would think that a genuine environmentalist might be more concerned about
the use of glyphosate than about genetically engineered plants that resist
its effects. I infer that the use of herbicides for weeding sugar beet
fields (and alfalfa) is widespread. I have no idea what the effect of that
may be, but my first instinct is to think that the glyphosate residuals
might pose a greater health risk than the genes in the Frankenfoods.
The late
Arthur Kantrowitz
spent a good part of his later life trying to get the US to create a
"science court" in which scientific questions such as this might be decided,
rather than trust them to uneducated juries' abilities to sort out the
claims of competing "experts" as we do now. He had in mind issues like the
Dow Corning breast implant court battles:
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s,
class-action
lawsuits
claimed that Dow Corning's silicone
breast implants caused systemic health problems. The claims first
centered around
breast cancer, and then migrated to a range of
autoimmune diseases, including
lupus,
rheumatoid arthritis and various neurological problems. This led to
numerous lawsuits beginning in 1984 and culminating in a 1998
multi-billion dollar
class action settlement. As a result, Dow Corning was in
bankruptcy protection for nine years, ending in June 2004.
A number of large, independent reviews of the
scientific literature, including the U.S.
Institute of Medicine, have subsequently found that silicone breast
implants do not appear to cause breast cancers or any identifiable
systemic disease.[1][2]
[3]
There have been a lot of other issues like this, in which
the "science" was settled by juries listening to "experts" hired by the
various lawyers, with judges who have no concept of the science involved
presiding over legal stuntwork and competing presentations about the
expertise of their experts vs. the other side's experts. The whole mess is
disgusting, but the legal profession has one of the most powerful lobbies
ever conceived, so nothing is ever done.
There being no science courts, is there any way we as the
people who have to pay for all this brouhaha about genetic engineering of
alfalfa and sugar beets can get a handle on the realities of the science
involved? At one time that wouldn't have been so hard, but after Climategate
the presumption that scientists are being frank and open and scientific has
suffered some hard blows -- and the way that the AGW crowd treats Freeman
Dyson doesn't help restore our confidence. Of course genetic scientists are
not the same as climate scientists.
On the gripping hand, I remember a AAAS meeting in San
Francisco in which the students in the genetics department at Stanford,
egged on by faculty, stormed a AAAS panel chanting "Hook and Page, Put them
in a cage", and wearing football helmets stormed past the ushers demanding
the right to attend sessions without badges. That was long enough ago that
those same students are likely professors of genetics now. (There was a
third panelist with Sidney Hook and Professor Page; he was from the
University of Connecticut and he walked out of the panel in disgust after
the AAAS failed to enforce its own rules; alas, I forget his name although I
did a short interview with him as he left the room; I published the account
long ago, but I can't find anything about now. This was in the days of
Selectric Typewriters and carbon paper, so I don't have any copies, alas. I
may have pictures of the incident but they'd be on slides without labels and
I'm not likely to go through years of slides looking for them. So it goes.)
My point is that once political fervor trumps scientific dedication,
"expert" testimony can no longer automatically be accepted. Those familiar
with the long career of Sidney Hook may find a certain irony in the demand
that he be put in a cage for his views on genetics and heredity.
I see I am rambling again. I have some undergraduate books
on modern biology, and I have spent some time with gene therapy MD's
learning what is apparently possible in the field of genetic engineering
applied to medicine, but I know little about the reality of the "Frankenfood"
threat. I'd appreciate enlightenment from those who know more than I do
about all this.
==================
 Warning!
Take heed:
Jerry,
Your Letters column references a "press release"
about Adobe Acrobat 2010". I ran the update function in my Acrobat Reader
9 and it said it was up to date. Then I Googled and found this on the
Adobe forums.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2870577
"I just received a bogus offer to download "Adobe
Reader 2010." This is a TROJAN! Don't download it!"
I have not researched it any deeper, but you might
want to take the unusual step of amending your column.
Roy Harvey Beacon Falls, CT
I presume that readers will understand that you never do an
update on anything from anywhere but the actual site of the actual
publisher, and don't do third party updates of critical applications unless
you absolutely know what you are doing. We'll amend the column to reflect
this.
It's still important to keep Acrobat up to date. Just be
sure to do it from the Adobe web site, not from somebody offering to be
helpful.
And thanks.
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