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Craig Venter Tackles Global Warming
Venture$cience writes: "Fresh from his arguably successful sequencing of the human genome with his company Celera Genomics, Craig Venter is now entering the field of global warming. Specifically, he is readying an ocean wide expedition to harvest novel forms of bacteria from the ocean's deep. From these collections he hopes to find bacteria that excel at converting CO2 into proteins, sugars, and methane. The current candidate for an atmospheric "scrubber" is the ancient Archae family of bacteria that is believed to have helped modify the early Earth's original atmosphere. This all brings up another question concerning what cross-contamination protocols should they use? What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?"
Venter is a egotist to the nth degree, as we saw when he revealed that much of Celera's gene database is comprised of his own genetic code. The news related to the whole Celera enterprise over the last few years is rife with other examples.
Global warming, in my opinion, is not a well understood phenomenon, scientifically. In fact, I'm not convinced that it is even a problem to worry about, but I don't wish to become involved in that debate in this context.
What concerns me is Venter's apparent disregard for scientific procedure, which is often quite rightly conservative. I am afraid that Venter is just the man to unleash a dubious solution to a phantom problem, potentially unbalancing the environment with his CO2-eating bugs much worse than "global warming". Thusfar, Mankind has been shown to be ineffective in reversing the global processes of nature, unless global warming really is such an effect. Attempting to create a form of life with the intent to reverse a reversal of natural processes seems to like playing with fire... or nuclear weapons.
All things in moderation.
I don't understand scientists...how long have we been seriously studying global climate? half a century reliably by my best guess, how long do these scientists say the earth has been around...MANY MANY times longer...and they somehow think they can understand what's going on...pretty dumb notion if you ask me, they can't accurately tell me if it's gonna rain or be cloudy 5 minutes, hours, days, weeks from now...so I sure as hell don't take them seriously when they think they can model weather 5 decades from now...
Go back to your test tubes and cancer infected lab rats and find a cure for cancer, if it rains in zimbabwe 5 years from now who cares...
+----DuBBs2ooo----+
+The King of Fools+
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Superman notwithstanding, if you bring organisms into an environment utterly unlike what they're designed for they'll die, not develop super powers. It's not like introducing pigs and cats to Hawaii, where they have abundant food and no predators. If some deep-sea methanogen will do well above water, one of the billions that must bubble to the top every day would have already flourished.
You need to be careful anyway so as not to cross-contaminate one sample with another. I wouldn't worry too much beyond that.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?
Venter will bring it up anyway, as long as he can squeeze some money out of it. And then he'll name it after himself.
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
This makes me think of an oversimplification of the origin of killer bees:
Of course, what we got instead were hyper-agressive, territorial bees; not harder working honey bees. Or something like that.
So what happens when we create this super organism that eats carbon dioxide and craps out twinkies? Nothing bad, of course!
Side effects are inconceivable!
Those obedient microorganisms would never take their behavior beyond what we want. There's no way they would go on to consume too much airborn carbon, ending the greenhouse effect, and tumbling the Earth into a devastating iceage, now would they?
I'm tired of shortsighted technogeeks peddling pseudoscience that could alter the earth's entire ecosystem; never seeking to fully understand the complexity of the issue at hand. The same caution that prevented us from using nuclear bombs to create commerce in Alaska applies here.
Let's just end internal combustion and leave these undersea critters where they belong.
What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?
If they find something that Should Not Be Brought Back Up, why, obviously, most of the expedition will die horrible deaths, one at a time, or in small groups. The organism will terrorize the vessel they're travelling in, which will coincidentally be caught in a storm preventing any contact with the outside world. Rescue will also be impossible.
In the end, it will be up to the suave, dashing Hero and the Eye Candy. In a last, desperate move, they'll manage to barely defeat the organism, saving humanity. And then the storm will clear, and a Coast Guard ship will be on the horizon...
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
What we need is a Human Instrumentality project.
Google search: "human instrumentality
25-30 years ago, everyone was in an uproar over the environment changing as well. Only, it wasn't global warming that was the threat to Life As We Know It, it was global cooling.
Generally, if you s/warming/cooling/g, you end up with all of the arguments from the 1970s about that particular environmental scourge.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Exactly :-)
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
"What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?" "
Like the balrog in Kazhadum? the srawves dug deeper and deeper for gold (profit), but it was their own undoing..
> What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?
You mean, like, Cthulhu?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is kind of offtopic, but I just read a book called Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing Our World. It talks about Venter's interesting background. Other scientists mentioned:
Susan Greenfield,
Geoffrey Marcy,
Polly Matzinger,
Saul Perlmutter,
Gretchen Daily, and
Carl Woese.
If models created to predict global warming didn't predict it that would be news. Or would it? I read again and again that the models cannot predict current conditions given past data without manipulation.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
So in other words, because our climate model has changed over the years, no climate model can ever be correct? Our climate will never change, QED?
This has got to be one the lamest arguments I keep hearing against the current theories of global warning.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
If we can breed something to counter our lust for fossil fuel, and it doesn't end up eating us, or our artifacts -- hell, even if it has a serious downside -- it would be better than our attempt to venuform Earth with our SUVs.
Such as this one: http://bovik.org/co2.gif
Have a look at the r^2 value. The four-variable signoid curve predicts more than 98% of the observed variation.
Before 1700, the variation stayed within fairly tight bounds, going back until before the last ice age, and actually, about 800,000 years since the last really big volcano or whatever it was that had a global impact, and even that was less than half what we've managed since year 1900.
That's one scenerio. Screwing with the ocean foodchains could also displace CO2 fixing lifeforms, causing a negative effect. Venter should play in his tub and not the world's oceans. But I'm not too concerned. The day he starts playing loose-cannon, mad scientist, with the oceans, there will be a dozen countries lining up to string him up by his balls.
When carbon dioxide concentration can be predicted with 98% accuracy using a four-variable sigmoid curve you know you had better at least look in to alternatives.
The upside is that if these bacteria can be engineered to also make a nutritious snack, then we can solve both global warming and the hunger problem at the same time.
Go green plants! Go genetic biologists! The ice shelf, like our time here, is wasting away.
I didn't read it as an argument for/against global warming. I read it as an indictment of the credibility of the chicken littles of the world.
An alarmist might think that this would produce large amounts of oxygen from large amounts of carbon dioxide. If these buggers ran amok and produced far too much oxygen, we'd suffer from a different type of Global Warming...
Maybe it's too radical a notion, but we seem to already have life forms on the planet that get rid of carbon dioxide. Plants. Maybe this fellow hasn't heard of them, though.
In reading the article, I noticed that the
bacteria Venter was looking at turned CO2 into
methane. My understanding is that CH4 is a more
powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. If the methane
is collected, rather than being vented into the
atmosphere, what do we do with it? Burn it, and
get the same amount of CO2 back?
Just think of all the methane being produced by all them cud chewing, gas expulsing cows.
why don't we encourage people like this to experiment on other, lifeless planets before messing up this one?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I don't know if it's ego or simply taking intelligent advantage of opportunity.
My son's genetic mix could conceivably contain sequences predisposing him to Alzheimer's and cancer of many types, or dooming him to Lou Gehrig's disease. All these occur in his direct ancestry. If I could get my company to pay for mapping his genes, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Would that be wrong? I don't think so. Everyone involved could profit, and nobody would be harmed. If I didn't have offspring, the same logic would apply to my own genome.
Bravo, your entire post demonstrates an unfamiliarity with the issues that is simply staggering. You have reached troll nirvana!
Isn't methane as bad or worse a greenhouse effect agent as C02 (c.f. cow farts vs. automotive exhaust as greenhouse effect causes)?
Frying pan, fire, what?
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