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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.
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...
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
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
As a geologist and paleontologist, who happens to work in a department where a significant amount of research goes into both "ground truthing" climate models, I find the image of lab rats and cancer the usual confusion between experimental science and historical science. Historical science is largely a case of examining trends and variation around mean values. The fact that the UK Met office simulations do a very good job encourages us to take modelling seriously. The fact that all of the IPCC models agree the mean annual global tempertature will increase is fairly convincing evidence that an upward trend is on the cards. The comment by on the other reply to the thread is a good one, and I would add that weather forecasting has become much better than it used to be. Doppler radar WILL tell you if it going to rain in the next 5 mins. As a scientist who works in a (notional) democracy I don't think it should be up to scientists to make public policy, but I hope the voters are more informed on the issues than this post would suggest.
"Hope is a duty from which paleontologists are exempt." David Quammen
"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..
> 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...
I don't suppose you've ever seen the plots of CO2 content vs. time derived from many thousands of years of annual ice packs then, have you.
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.
> Historical science? You weren't there...the scientific method can not be applied, you can not prove something you didn't yourself see
How come I'm not surprised to see effect-of-pollution deniers invoking the same lame arguments that evolution deniers invoke?
There are lots of ways of knowing what the earth was like in both the recent and distant past. The "Were you there?" argument is simply a desperate strategem for people who want to assert their beliefs in the face of the evidence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Chaotic systems are strongly dependant on initial conditions, meaning that you can't know a system's behaviour to the second, but larger patterns can still be observed and predicted. A system where this is not true is random (and the weather is not random). Your case with all the houseflies on the planet doing the same thing at the same time is a quetion of statistics - as the sum of the data becomes more meaningful, freak occurances will become more common (the more times you flip a coin, the more likely you are to at some point land twenty heads in a row, and the closer your heads/tails ratio will be to one). About your last point, we can know alot about long term weather from plants (trees especially) for example...
...and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'
Well hey, I was there, and I created life while I was at it.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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.
until you can measure the precise effect of a house fly beating its wings one way as opposed to another on global weather then you can't produce a truly accurate model,
;).. but what you're saying only applies to a perfect model.. a model which is usefully likely[1] to be true can be derived from average starting conditions and average/aggregate expectations.
Er.. for an over-simplified counterpoint.. I don't even know where most of the molecules in my baseball are, nor exactly how they affect each other... but I'm fairly sure if I drop a baseball most of it will go down at 9.81m/ss. Now, it'll wobble a bit (on a micrometre scale
You benefit from said models every day.. (stocks, traffic control algorithms, heck.. even your body's DNA is replicated on a probably-works basis.. with some error checking, of course) Gavin