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That's an assertion. If the carbon sinks can behave in a coupled manner *with eachother*, it seems to follow that it is possible that they can behave in a coupled manner *without any outside influence*.

I'm not quite sure how you're missing this.

Let's get back to calories in/calories out, maybe this will help you.

Yes, the second law of thermodynamics apply - in order to get fat, you need more calories coming in than going out.

However, this says nothing about the cause of fat accumulation - it is merely a tautological requirement. Here's an analogy that might help:

But now imagine that instead of talking about why we get fat, we’re talking about a different system entirely. This kind of gedanken (thought) experiment is always a good way to examine the viability of your assumptions about any particular problem. Say instead of talking about why fat tissue accumulates too much energy, we want to know why a particular restaurant gets so crowded. Now the energy we’re talking about is contained in entire people rather than just the fat in their fat tissue. Ten people contain so much energy; eleven people contain more, etc.. So what we want to know is why this restaurant is crowded and so over-stuffed with energy (i.e., people) and maybe why some other restaurant down the block has remained relatively empty — lean.

If you asked me this question — why did this restaurant get crowded? — and I said, well, the restaurant got crowded (it got overstuffed with energy) because more people entered the restaurant than left it, you’d probably think I was being a wise guy or an idiot. (If I worked for the World Health Organization, I’d tell you that “the fundamental cause of the crowded restaurant is an energy imbalance between people entering on one hand, and people exiting on the other hand.”) Of course, more people entered than left, you’d say. That’s obvious. But why? And, in fact, saying that a restaurant gets crowded because more people are entering than leaving it is redundant –saying the same thing in two different ways – and so meaningless.

http://garytaubes.com/inanity-...

So yes, more CO2 in the atmosphere is because more CO2 was taken out than CO2 put in. But that's redundant - it says nothing about the cause.

The fact that CO2 sinks behave in dynamically reactive ways, rather than predictable linear ways, means we're a far cry from understanding causes at this point.

Capito?

Careers and status make major contributions. If you got onto the dietary cholesterol is bad for you theory early as a scientist, your entire career and standing is built around that theory.

As you gain influence and status over research proposals and funding, you're more likely to approve proposals that advance the theories you're invested in and reject proposals that might disprove your career-invested theories.

The entire process, not just individual studies or their results, becomes a victim of both ego and a kind of large-scale confirmation bias.

Gary Taubes wrote a great article for Science about this relative to research into dietary sodium intake. The people in charge of the money were heavily invested in the salt-is-bad-for-you theory and basically politicized the research process to further their own theories.

http://garytaubes.com/wp-conte...

It is clear that humans contribute to the rise of CO2.

No, let's be specific - it's clear that humans emit CO2. Butterflies emit CO2 as well. These are *facts*.

The rise of CO2 on a global level, however, is quite possibly *independent* of individual contributing factors due to the complexity of the carbon cycle. I had mentioned buffer solutions earlier, and I'm not sure if you picked up on that, but go back to some basic chemistry - you can have some systems (say, a buffer solution), which in fact, react to both the addition of acid and the addition of base in the same way with neutralization.

So imagine for a moment that in our global system, the buffer for CO2 is the ocean, and the temperature of the ocean (primarily determined by how much sunlight gets to the surface layer, mediated by the albedo of clouds, which unfortunately our GCMs aren't good at), is what truly controls CO2 levels. If humans, say, *stole* CO2 from the atmosphere on a massive scale, this buffer would simply replace that CO2 to get back to the partial pressure determined by temperature. If humans *emit* CO2 into the atmosphere on a massive scale, this buffer would simply absorb that CO2 to get back to the partial pressure determined by temperature.

Of course, this is a simplified example (although not nearly as simple as the dumb bathtub of water analogy CAGW zealots believe in), but a constructive one - many natural systems work this way, with emergent phenomena maintaining a surprisingly narrow band.

Given a correlation between temperature and CO2, and the fact that human activity is causing a rise in CO2 , there is no doubt that if we continue, there will rising oceans, which will in turn cause massive displacement of humans.

Okay, now you've taken one reasonable assertion, on doubtful one, and jumped onto a crazy conclusion. Yes, there is a correlation between temperature and CO2 - although you apparently haven't figured out the causality there. It's *possible* human activity can cause a rise in CO2, but given the nature of the oceans and how they buffer atmospheric CO2, the rise would be almost indistinguishable from other factors.

And oceans. My my, the oceans :)

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/20/sea-level-rise-climate-change-and-an-ocean-of-natural-variability/

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 2007, “Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 mm per year.” This translates to a 100-year rise of only 7 inches and 12 inches, far below the dire predictions of the climate alarmists.

But three millimeters is about the thickness of two dimes. Can scientists really measure a change in sea level over the course of a year, averaged across the world, which is two dimes thick?"

So, hypothesis: CO2 is correlated with Temperature. null hypothesis: CO2 != temperature.

That makes no mention of humanity's CO2 emissions, nor does it determine causality. Please, try again.

Experiment: look at ice cores: conclusion: yes, there is a correlation.

Again, correlation isn't causality :)

If you'll note, the ice cores show temperature changing *first*, followed by CO2 changes. This is literally indisputable.

Here's another correlation/causality for you - people who consume more calories than they utilize or excrete correlate to the accumulation of fat.

Would you believe that in fact, the causality actually *starts* with fat accumulation, which *causes* the consumption of more calories than they utilize or excrete?

If you're interested in learning about other scientific blunders of "consensus", check out http://garytaubes.com/lectures/ - he's got a great history lesson on nutrition, obesity and chronic diseases.

Good luck getting approval to inject insulin into healthy people to see if it makes them fat.

That's been done before, they even have a word for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipohypertrophy

http://garytaubes.com/2012/02/on-the-greatly-exaggerated-demise-of-the-insulin-hypothesis/

Heck, they even use it as a therapy for anorexia:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201206/evolution-and-anorexia-nervosa

Lipohypertrophy simply confirms insulin as the mechanism for fat storage which everyone agrees on.

The anorexia link is more compelling but there's an important caveat "AN [anorexia nervosa] may be caused by defects in the evolutionarily conserved response to food and nutrient shortage associated with reduced calorie intake". If there's a defect in the pathway regarding hunger insulin injections might fix that defect, just like fixing a flat tire makes your car go faster. But that doesn't mean that tires regulate your car's speed.

What you'd need to show is insulin injections can cause obesity (not just lipohypertrophy) in healthy patients. And even then it only becomes a potential mechanism since you haven't proven that's what's occurring out in the wild.

Cultures that eat a ton of white rice? They stay thin.

Um, try Hawaii and obesity levels amongst native Hawaiians, who have a *ton* of white rice in their diet.

You have a citation for that? It looks like rice is their staple starch but we don't know their total carb intake.

Some places is asia hit 80% of their calories from rice. But the real measure is to see what their % of calories from carbohydrates is (which I couldn't find)

Inject insulin into rats? Thin

Again, animal model versus human reality. If the rat model was an accurate depiction, anorexics who were treated with insulin would lose weight :)

Insulin plays the same role in their system, I suspect they'd experience lipohypertrophy as well but couldn't find mention either way.

Either way the rat caveat only weakens it as value against the insulin hypothesis, I still haven't seen any evidence for the insulin hypothesis that isn't already consistent with the current state of nutrition research.

Fat people without insulin issues? Significant portion.

As per my other reply, let's say we stipulate to 30% of fat people without insulin issues...are you agreeing that the other 70%, the vast majority, *do* have insulin issues?

Maybe we already have 70% agreement :)

I agree the other 70% have insulin issues, but I challenge that their obesity is caused by those insulin issues instead of insulin issues caused by obesity.

My central beef with Taubes is nutritionists already know a huge amount of the story of what causes obesity. They know a lot of why people get fat and they know how those people can lose weight. The problem is applying that knowledge and getting people to do it in the modern world where we have a bunch of hyper-palatable foods, sedentary lifestyles, tons of fat and salt, numerous social cues, and a bunch of other stuff. I'd like to be thinner, but I also ate some cookies when I wasn't really hungry last night. The carbs in the cookies weren't the problem, the problem was that they were cookies.

Taubes is part of a long line of fad diets, blame obesity on a single cause (which may or may not be part of the big pictu

The NASA example was obviously just for rhetorical purposes. But I've included numerous links to scientific papers, and the Guyenet links I included all used multiple citations.

Yes, we've addressed the issues with rat models, and conflicting papers :)

And my apologies - I wasn't clear that I was critiquing your rhetorical appeal to unnamed authorities. I do appreciate the *actual* references and papers you've cited!

Good luck getting approval to inject insulin into healthy people to see if it makes them fat.

That's been done before, they even have a word for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipohypertrophy

http://garytaubes.com/2012/02/on-the-greatly-exaggerated-demise-of-the-insulin-hypothesis/

Heck, they even use it as a therapy for anorexia:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201206/evolution-and-anorexia-nervosa

Cultures that eat a ton of white rice? They stay thin.

Um, try Hawaii and obesity levels amongst native Hawaiians, who have a *ton* of white rice in their diet.

Inject insulin into rats? Thin

Again, animal model versus human reality. If the rat model was an accurate depiction, anorexics who were treated with insulin would lose weight :)

Fat people without insulin issues? Significant portion.

As per my other reply, let's say we stipulate to 30% of fat people without insulin issues...are you agreeing that the other 70%, the vast majority, *do* have insulin issues?

Maybe we already have 70% agreement :)

People with diabetes are going to be a lot worse off because this guy is pretending to be an expert.

Except in this case, the government "experts" that have been pushing the low-fat/low-calorie/high-exercise diet for the past 40 years are the ones who have caused the epidemics of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and other chronic diseases.

If you want the low down on the real science of nutrition, and just how badly all of these licensed nutritionists have gotten it, check out any of Gary Taubes' lectures: http://garytaubes.com/lectures/

Type 2 diabetes is caused by excessive carbohydrate intake. Paleo regimes greatly restrict carbohydrates. If every diabetic listened to this man, they'd get *better*.

Ah, I see the problem. Until I got to you last line there I'd thought maybe we were having two separate conversations. Look, there are plenty of nutty and self-interested people who deny climate change because "the facts aren't all in" or "further research is needed" or whatever, and this has pushed climatologists to ever more extreme language to counter them. They start trowing around words like "fact" and "indisputable." It's an unfortunate perversion made necessary by the public's inability to deal with things that aren't certainty.

There's a similar problem with evolution, but there's the thing: people aren't saying things like "evolution is a fact" or "climate change is a certainty that needs to be dealt with" lightly. Climate change has a huge amount of supporting data and very few credible detractors while evolution is one of the most thoroughly demonstrated theories in science. This fructose theory has no credible detractors (that I know of), that's good. As for support... there's a correlation between increased sugar consumption and a rise in obesity and diabetes, as you say. This is simply not sufficient to start throwing around absolutes. Especially in medicine and double especially when it comes to dietary advice:

http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-and-meat/

I am admittedly shy about accepting health advice, but I have good reason to be. Most health reporting is just malarkey. That's true for science reporting in general actually, but health reporting is half of all science reporting because the public just eats that shit up. Antioxidents help you live longer? Bunk. Fish oil makes you smarter? Bunk. "Staying hydrated?" Bunk.

As for the video, yeah I know it's ninety minutes. I thought about providing a more specific reference but came to my senses before I wasted an hour and a half just to win an internet argument. I also wish you wouldn't use the term "mainstream medicine." Around here we just call that "medicine."

Science is the proposition of a falsifiable hypothesis, the ruthless attempt to find those falsifications, and the *failure* to do so after concerted effort.

http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-and-meat/

"Science is ultimately about establishing cause and effect. It’s not about guessing. You come up with a hypothesis — force x causes observation y — and then you do your best to prove that it’s wrong. If you can’t, you tentatively accept the possibility that your hypothesis was right. Peter Medawar, the Nobel Laureate immunologist, described this proving-it’s-wrong step as the ”the critical or rectifying episode in scientific reasoning.” Here’s Karl Popper saying the same thing: “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” The bold conjectures, the hypotheses, making the observations that lead to your conjectures that’s the easy part. The critical or rectifying episode, which is to say, the ingenious and severe attempts to refute your conjectures, is the hard part. Anyone can make a bold conjecture. (Here’s one: space aliens cause heart disease.) Making the observations and crafting them into a hypothesis is easy. Testing them ingeniously and severely to see if they’re right is the rest of the job — say 99 percent of the job of doing science, of being a scientist."

How hard have you tried to prove Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming *wrong*? How hard has Hansen tried? :)

Your post makes me think of two recent instances in my field (I am a non-ruminant nutritionist).

1st had to do with a Professor down in Texas who is pushing the feeding of supplemental L-arginine to sows and a "consultant" for an Arginine manufacturer. He's been pushing it based on (frequently) contradictory reports of improved litter sizes and reduced piglet mortalitites. However, he's never had sufficeint statisitcal power. You need at least 100 sows per treatment because of the high standard deviations involved, but he frequently uses less than 10 sows per treatment. At the Midwest American Society of Animal Science meeting in Des Moines, IA this year there were two presentations from industry where they EACH used over 100 sows per treatment and found no positive effects of feeding supplemental L-arginine. They never mentioned the Texas professor directly, but you could tell that both studies were intended to be a rebuttal of what they considered bad, and self-serving science.

2nd has to do with an article I read critiquing the use of what is called "Nutritional Epidemiology," and can be found here. It is incredibly long, but very insightfule critique of a field that is given far too much credence simply becuase of where the scientists work, and how free they are with chicken-little-esq proclomations about how meat is going to increase your chances of dieing by 30%!! (everyone has an exactly 100% chance of dieing).

Depends on the advice. If it's the "low-fat/low-calorie/exercise" advice of the past 40 years, yeah, I ignore it. If it's carbohydrate restriction, I'll go with it. Why? Because while a doctor may speak with *authority* about the low-fat dogma, there has never been any proof that it is effective in preventing heart attacks. In fact, the opposite is quite true - low-fat/high-carbohydrate diets have dramatically increased the incidence of obesity, cancer, heart disease and other chronic diseases over the past 40 years.

Here's how science should be done: http://garytaubes.com/lectures/

Observational studies are almost always behind these news reports. Please ignore them. They don't prove causation. Here's some detailed analysis from the latest "red meat causes x" articles to get an idea why they're so unreliable:

http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-and-meat/
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/will-eating-red-meat-kill-you
http://waroninsulin.com/nutrition/is-red-meat-killing-us

Scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, not by consumption of carbohydrates.

Fun fact - carbohydrates leach vitamin C from your body. Sailors got it because they spent months eating hard tack rations.

Take a couple of guys, send them to live with the Inuit for a year without a single fruit or vegetable...no scurvy.

Watch one of these lectures if you want substantiation: http://garytaubes.com/lectures/

The best indicator of heart disease is triglyceride level/HDL, which, is adversely impacted by chronic insulin levels. The AHA is a marketing organization, and don't understand the science.

Cancer cells outcompete other cells because they thrive in a high blood sugar environment - a corollary to high insulin levels.

Fat cells are driven to hold onto fat by insulin. Basic biochemistry.

Alzheimer's - the damage done to the brain cells also correlates with insulin, being "Type III" diabetes as it were.

Watch some lectures, and get back to me: http://garytaubes.com/lectures/