May 16 2013: I stop on holiday with an ex-farmer who decided that a 100-head herd was uneconomic, so he went into the tourist industry instead.
Down the road, a farmer expanded to 2000-head. These are kept on concrete in sheds, where they lie on mattresses. They eat only cattle feed, and not grass. If the cattle feed eventually comes from GMO crops, as I believe is already the case in the USA, then whatever is in those crops will get concentrated in the cows and can end up in higher concentrations on our plates.
Everything could just possibly turn out ok, but the risks are obvious. We are already warned not to eat some fish, because their mercury levels are dangerously high. So the riks are there. I will personally remain very suspicious of GMO, until there is proper expert discussion of risk assessment and how the trials that have been carried out, have shown these risks to be acceptable.
May 16 2013: I certainly agree with you. One factor in the mass death of bees is the use of neo-nicotinide systemic pesticide. This penetrates the whole of the plant, and has been detected in nectar that is I believe 1000 days old! You can't get any more systemic than by changing the genes so the plant makes its own pesticide.It is reported that these neo-nicotinides do not decay in the soil and may be killing earthworms. That suggests that they may not decay during cooking. so that could go for GMO-produced pesticides too. So even if the bacteria that are used in the production of the GMOs are kept secure (and there is little evidence for this), we can, as you say, still end up eating large quanatities of pesticides.These issues are so frighteningly complex and non-local, that a journalist making great hand-waving generalisations about them, has no credibility whatsoever.We have had asbestosis, thalidomide, the Bhopal pesticide factory, and BSE. The record of chemical and biochemical companies is not a good one.
May 5 2013: The bias against vitamins and antioxidants is very dangerous. I developed Stage 1 diabetic retinopathy (despite passing glucose load tests for the last 8 years). I cured it with a drastically lowered glucose level, exercise, weight loss, and a lot of vitamins and antioxidants. So I collected papers in this area. Here is my discussion of just a couple of these:
As regards the effect of antioxidants on the endothelium, an interesting 2007 paper is at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1474-9726.2007.00339.x/full
“Vascular superoxide and hydrogen peroxide production and oxidative stress resistance in two closely related rodent species with disparate longevity”.
In short, one mouse species with a lifespan of 8 years had much less endothelium damage and much higher levels of glutathione peroxidase, a known antioxidant produced in the body, than another species with a lifetime of 3.5 years.
Astaxanthin, which I have been taking, is a known precursor to glutathione.
There is a 2011 paper from Hong Kong at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21217409
Entitled “Relationships among diabetic retinopathy, antioxidants, and glycemic control.”
I can access only the abstract, which states the following result:
“Overall DR(diabetic retinopathy) prevalence (amongst a group of type II diabetics) was 89%. No significant differences in any demographic measures or biomarkers were found among those subjects with different DR grades, or in those without DR. Significant correlations (p < 0.0001) between HbA1c and DNA damage, (ρ = 0.32) and fasting plasma glucose and DNA damage (ρ = 0.52) were seen. DNA damage was also significantly and inversely correlated (p < 0.0001) with both plasma ascorbic acid (ρ = -0.41) and plasma total antioxidant level (ρ = -0.21).
May 5 2013: A bit too glib. In fact a lot too glib.Talking catastrophies, you forgot "mad cow disease" or BSE, which in the UK resulted in the slaughter of millions of cows. The biologists working for the animal feed companies thought that 80 degree centigrade sterilization would kill all known pathogens. However, they neglected prions. Big mistake, eh?The climatologists thought that climate change due to global warming would result in a warmer climate for Europe. Completely wrong. The winters have got colder and longer, because their models did not properly take account of the Jet Stream.GM foods are genuinely frightening. When fed to rats over a full liifetime, the tumour rate increases markedly. "RoundUp ready crops" encourage farmers to spray herbicide onto growing food crops, which then concentrate it accumulatively so that it gets into our bodies. In order to introduce pest resistance into crops, bacteria are used as a carrier of the gene. These bacteria have been found in the waste ground around biochemical plants. Our guts are full of bacteria, and bacteria swap DNA between each other. It is quite possible that we may end up with bacteria in our guts that produce pesticide.So please do not do a whitewash for GM crops. Regarding antioxidants, there are lots and lots of scientific papers showing beneficial effects in rats and mice, and in reversing retinopathy in humans (only vitamins C and E have been researched in human trials so far).This talk is now talking about fraud. This talk is a fraud and is very dangerious indeed.
Mar 16 2013: It is in the very nature of simple conditioning that two stimuli have to have a high covariance at a fixed interval of time between them. For example, meat is presented to a dog exactly 2 minutes after a bell sounds, and after repeated training that you can detect an increase in salivation around 2 minutes after the bell is sounded, even without the presence of meat.
So if neurons are suffering from a "hyperactive state" so that they continue to fire for some time after the stimulus is removed, they are by that very fact going to learn associations less thoroughly. Any stimulus you present them with will occur at some random time within the fading activation from an earlier stimulus. The neural net will detect the co-occurence of two stimuli at a given interval between them, far less strongly, because it perceives a whole range of possible intervals. It has a big wide gaussian distribution curve, and not a tall sharp one. So learning will necessarily fall off as "hyperstimulation" takes over. The brain will not be able to pick out the particular pair of stimuli that the experimenter presented, from the delayed decaying response to earlier stimuli.
That explains the co-occurrence of apparentt hyperactivity with learning disorder in a very simple fly brain. It could not be otherwise.
If you take learning of vocabulary in a child, you are dealing with a completely different phenomenon. Experiments have shown that a word has to be presented in only a small number of differing contexts, for it to be permanently learnt. This is not like simple conditioning. Recent books like that by Dehaene show by fMRI and PET that quite widely-spaced areas of the brain are involved in the reaction to a single word, so the training to recognize such a word is unlikely to resemble simple conditioning. We might also remember the work in cognitive psychology on context. Divers remember objects on the sea-bed less well when they return to the surface, but if they dive again memories return.
May 30 2012: Thank you for a lovely concise exhaustive analysis.
But although you show the energy density of tidal stream to be 2.5 times that of wind, you did not discuss this source. The Severn estuary and the westerly tips of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall come immediately to mind, but maybe the funnelling effect of the Channel would make the North Sea more suitable. Transmission losses should be lower because of the shorter distances to near-coastal cities.
Everybody talks about the challenge of storage during cloudy and wind-less days, but presumably tidal stream is only inoperable at slack tide for a couple of hours. We seem to hear very little about this energy source, which would seem ideal for our geography.
Like you I have heavily insulated my house, with cavity wall, new double-glazing and lots of loft insulation, and heavy curtains over doors and windows, and blinds half into the window-recess. These curtains and blinds make my living room 3 degrees warmer on winter mornings. Nowadays I hardly use my electric storage heaters and rely instead on quartz radiative fires which heat me and not the room.
I am considering a heat pump, which should get my overall annual (electric only) energy costs below the current £700.
May 23 2012: At first glance this analysis is a cause for moderate relief, although an expected rise from 7 million to 10 million is still a 43% increase.
However, a Web search reveals that the 10 most generous nations in overall dollars given to aid, total 46 billion dollars, and range from 12.9 down to 1.8, between the United States and Norway.
India and China, whom your graphs show to hold the vast majority of the world's population, do not figure at all in this list.
For China and India to get down to 2 to 3 babies per woman is a first step, but they must also generate their share of foreign aid to the countries that still have 5+ babies per woman, and whose population can clearly be seen to be growing at an un-diminished rate. In other words their round symbols must not only stay at their newly vertically depressed level, but they must move far to the right, and they must be encouraged to spend a growing proportion of income on those countries still growing their populations.
Without this, the top ten givers will have to more than double their current contributions over the coming years.
This is a simplification, since at least India no longer requires aid from the United Kingdom, but it still gives us a ball-park feel for the unfair burden that is likely to fall on the current top 10 givers, at a time when they are suffering austerity at home. UK aid may only be $87 per head at the moment ($340 for a 2-child family), but this will double, and it represents a fifth to an eighth of typical petrol/diesel costs. If you have not got a job, that is a lot of money.
Mar 20 2012: Dr. Hansen's conviction is obvious.But from his presentation, the argument still looks "unproved" to me.From the 800,000 year ice core data, the CO2 peak of 120,000 years ago was about 275 ppm. whilst the current level is 290. (There was in fact a peak to current levels 350,000 years ago, followed by a steeper-than-average decline.)That is just a 5% increase. Details of temperature derivation are not supplied, but I think it was done indirectly from gas isotope ratios, and the obvious question is "is the accuracy better than 5%?".The next obvious stage in analysis is to plot the solar energy input changes due to orbital variations, and the exclusion of this data is very suspicious.We got up to the current CO2 levels 120,000 years ago (less 5%) but then global temperature and CO2 started to decline, presumably due to reductions in solar input. But unless the solar input is plotted, we get no feel at all as to whether our 5% increase in CO2 is significant. I buy into his arguments about ice melting and positive feedback, but the vector for this is temperature, and if the peak was reversed 120,000 years ago, why should it not be again reversed very shortly?The earlier graph of solar input from 1975 to 2010 shows a reduction in the last period of a minimum, in 2008, of only 1 part in 4000 compared to earlier minima, whilst the claim is that global temperature continued to rise. The graph at http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/shows the opposite to be true: a small fall in global temperature since 2008, following a steady rise since 1985.Certainly the 800,000 year ice core data (and ocean data too, so how are these differentially weighted?) strongly suggests that we are about to see a peak in global temperatures with accompanying sea level rises. But nothing really suggests that by minimising CO2 output we might avoid this. Money could well be better spent on the unavoidable task of moving cities.We need better analysis of these mechanisms.
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A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
Down the road, a farmer expanded to 2000-head. These are kept on concrete in sheds, where they lie on mattresses. They eat only cattle feed, and not grass. If the cattle feed eventually comes from GMO crops, as I believe is already the case in the USA, then whatever is in those crops will get concentrated in the cows and can end up in higher concentrations on our plates.
Everything could just possibly turn out ok, but the risks are obvious. We are already warned not to eat some fish, because their mercury levels are dangerously high. So the riks are there. I will personally remain very suspicious of GMO, until there is proper expert discussion of risk assessment and how the trials that have been carried out, have shown these risks to be acceptable.
A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
Who are you to tell me what I should or should not get into?
"Imagine that we have here a machine, a cool GMO machine, and you all have to eat what it produces".
Such talk is not appropriate to democracies operating under the rule of law.
A reply on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
A reply on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
As regards the effect of antioxidants on the endothelium, an interesting 2007 paper is at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1474-9726.2007.00339.x/full
“Vascular superoxide and hydrogen peroxide production and oxidative stress resistance in two closely related rodent species with disparate longevity”.
In short, one mouse species with a lifespan of 8 years had much less endothelium damage and much higher levels of glutathione peroxidase, a known antioxidant produced in the body, than another species with a lifetime of 3.5 years.
Astaxanthin, which I have been taking, is a known precursor to glutathione.
There is a 2011 paper from Hong Kong at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21217409
Entitled “Relationships among diabetic retinopathy, antioxidants, and glycemic control.”
I can access only the abstract, which states the following result:
“Overall DR(diabetic retinopathy) prevalence (amongst a group of type II diabetics) was 89%. No significant differences in any demographic measures or biomarkers were found among those subjects with different DR grades, or in those without DR. Significant correlations (p < 0.0001) between HbA1c and DNA damage, (ρ = 0.32) and fasting plasma glucose and DNA damage (ρ = 0.52) were seen. DNA damage was also significantly and inversely correlated (p < 0.0001) with both plasma ascorbic acid (ρ = -0.41) and plasma total antioxidant level (ρ = -0.21).
A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
A comment on Talk: David Anderson: Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals
So if neurons are suffering from a "hyperactive state" so that they continue to fire for some time after the stimulus is removed, they are by that very fact going to learn associations less thoroughly. Any stimulus you present them with will occur at some random time within the fading activation from an earlier stimulus. The neural net will detect the co-occurence of two stimuli at a given interval between them, far less strongly, because it perceives a whole range of possible intervals. It has a big wide gaussian distribution curve, and not a tall sharp one. So learning will necessarily fall off as "hyperstimulation" takes over. The brain will not be able to pick out the particular pair of stimuli that the experimenter presented, from the delayed decaying response to earlier stimuli.
That explains the co-occurrence of apparentt hyperactivity with learning disorder in a very simple fly brain. It could not be otherwise.
If you take learning of vocabulary in a child, you are dealing with a completely different phenomenon. Experiments have shown that a word has to be presented in only a small number of differing contexts, for it to be permanently learnt. This is not like simple conditioning. Recent books like that by Dehaene show by fMRI and PET that quite widely-spaced areas of the brain are involved in the reaction to a single word, so the training to recognize such a word is unlikely to resemble simple conditioning. We might also remember the work in cognitive psychology on context. Divers remember objects on the sea-bed less well when they return to the surface, but if they dive again memories return.
A comment on Talk: David MacKay: A reality check on renewables
But although you show the energy density of tidal stream to be 2.5 times that of wind, you did not discuss this source. The Severn estuary and the westerly tips of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall come immediately to mind, but maybe the funnelling effect of the Channel would make the North Sea more suitable. Transmission losses should be lower because of the shorter distances to near-coastal cities.
Everybody talks about the challenge of storage during cloudy and wind-less days, but presumably tidal stream is only inoperable at slack tide for a couple of hours. We seem to hear very little about this energy source, which would seem ideal for our geography.
Like you I have heavily insulated my house, with cavity wall, new double-glazing and lots of loft insulation, and heavy curtains over doors and windows, and blinds half into the window-recess. These curtains and blinds make my living room 3 degrees warmer on winter mornings. Nowadays I hardly use my electric storage heaters and rely instead on quartz radiative fires which heat me and not the room.
I am considering a heat pump, which should get my overall annual (electric only) energy costs below the current £700.
A comment on Talk: Hans Rosling: Religions and babies
However, a Web search reveals that the 10 most generous nations in overall dollars given to aid, total 46 billion dollars, and range from 12.9 down to 1.8, between the United States and Norway.
India and China, whom your graphs show to hold the vast majority of the world's population, do not figure at all in this list.
For China and India to get down to 2 to 3 babies per woman is a first step, but they must also generate their share of foreign aid to the countries that still have 5+ babies per woman, and whose population can clearly be seen to be growing at an un-diminished rate. In other words their round symbols must not only stay at their newly vertically depressed level, but they must move far to the right, and they must be encouraged to spend a growing proportion of income on those countries still growing their populations.
Without this, the top ten givers will have to more than double their current contributions over the coming years.
This is a simplification, since at least India no longer requires aid from the United Kingdom, but it still gives us a ball-park feel for the unfair burden that is likely to fall on the current top 10 givers, at a time when they are suffering austerity at home. UK aid may only be $87 per head at the moment ($340 for a 2-child family), but this will double, and it represents a fifth to an eighth of typical petrol/diesel costs. If you have not got a job, that is a lot of money.
A comment on Talk: James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change