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Insects As Weapons
An anonymous reader writes "Timothy Paine, an entomologist at the University of California-Riverside, recently 'committed to the scientific record the idea that California's eucalyptus trees may have been biologically sabotaged, publishing an article [in the Journal of Economic Entomology] raising the possibility of bioterrorism.' Specifically, Paine argues that foreign insect pests have been deliberately introduced in the Golden State, in hopes of decimating the state's population of eucalyptus (especially the two species regarded as invasive, which 'are particularly susceptible to the pests.') In California's Bioterror Mystery, Paine (and scientists who are skeptical) make their arguments. What isn't in dispute is that the insect pests have already inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, making the story a cautionary tale about what might happen if a food or crop were intentionally targeted."
I won't miss eucalyptus trees. The condo complex over my back fence had one. It was constantly dropping branches in my back yard, some of them quite large. They're also a nightmare if they catch on fire. They also tend to kill vegetation that grows under them due to the oil which drips from the leaves. They're considered an invasive species in California.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
If the eucalyptus trees go, then California's koala bear population will also be decimated. This is dreadful news.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
does this mean cough drops will get more expensive?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
..what might happen if a food or crop were intentionally targeted.
The Israelites go free?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I'll just leave this here...
It seems like every time I go to Australia to bring back a control insect, there's another insect that's not affected by the control that appears on the loose. Almost like there's a fly on the wall in my strategy meetings. Or a bug in my luggage.
From the article, it doesn't sound like they looked at other possibilities; suppliers which typically travel from Australia to LA, and maybe declining quality standards there. Maybe these other pests were dying off because of competition from the first set of pests and once the controls are introduced, the old set of pests (continuously arriving through incompetent shippers) are able to reestablish.
But I think it's an issue well worth talking about.
TFA appears to be trolling for search engine hits with the use of "terror" or "terrorism" in the article and the title itself (California's Bioterror Mystery). Really, terrorism should be something that at the very least causes you to have qualms, if not outright fear, about your safety.
For example, you might have second thoughts about riding an airplane because of some extremist hijacking it and blowing it up. Ditto for visiting the mall or drinking tap water because somebody might have laced the water supply. But this one? The only terror I see is of the trees falling over and crushing the poor pedestrian standing right next to it. I'm not a koala, so I'm not going to be losing sleep over the loss of my favorite supply of mint.
To be sure, the title of the scientific paper on which the article is based sounds less sensationalistic (unfortunately, a subscription is necessary to read the paper itself):
Brazil's production of cocoa was greatly reduced after an epidemic of witch's broom in the early 1990s. Rumors spoke of sabotage by foreign producers, until a left-wing militant confessed bringing fungus-infected branches from Rondônia to Bahia to destroy the political power of the "cocoa barons".
Circumcision is child abuse.
Man, tell me about it. Here in Chicago we've got the Japanese Longhorn beetle, Asian carp and zebra mussels wreaking havoc on our ecosystem.
People think you can do any goddamn thing you want to nature and the world's always going to be hospitable to humans.
The hundreds of thousands of people dealing with unprecedented wildfires in Colorado and the hundreds of thousands without power in 110 degree heat on the East Coast thanks to some unprecedented storms might have something to say about that. I've been alive since the Eisenhower administration and I've never seen >95 degree heat in March before this year. 100 mph winds yesterday right here and 100,000 people without power here in Chicago in 100 degree heat. I'm not saying that these anecdotes are evidence of global warming, but something definitely seems a little haywire.
I'm not even saying that Al Gore is right about anything, but the people who have been having such a great time ridiculing him for the last 10 years maybe owe him a little humble apology, just for being assholes. Right or wrong, if somebody says, "You're house might be on fire," you really at least ought to see if there are any flames and smoke before saying, "Oh, that's bullshit."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Best thing for the invasive Eucalypts is to cut them down and use them for firewood. In my experience they make the best firewood in the world, especially for outdoors dutch oven cooking and BBQs. The wood doesn't turn instantly into ash when burnt, instead they tend to form solid hot coals for a while and give an even heat. After moving to the Solomon Islands from Australia, one thing I miss is Eucalypt firewood.
You've got japanese beetles?
We've got this natural predator of the japanese beetle here in Australia, called the Cane Toad. Let us know if you want a few million or so.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Already have them in Florida. Why would we want cane toads that try to drink all our beer?
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Timothy Paine, an entomologist at the University of California-Riverside, recently 'committed to the scientific record the idea that California's eucalyptus trees may have been biologically sabotaged, publishing an article [in the Journal of Economic Entomology] raising the possibility of bioterrorism.'
Must every act of aggression be labeled as some form of terrorism? The term certainly has lost it's potency since 9/11.
^^vv<><>BA
So when the U.S. government introduces an invasive species to control another invasive species, it's called progress, but if it happens accidentally, it's called bioterrorism?? Invasive insects are introduced to the U.S. through shipping on a daily basis, thanks to NAFTA and other free-trade treaties gutting the import inspection requirements. But no one complains about that for some reason. Probably because too many people are making obscene amounts of money thanks to the relaxed regulations, and conveniently you can blame 'ecoterrorists' for the introduced bugs, so why worry?
.....that someone had fashioned some sort of bee gun?
Sounds a lot like a modern day version of the old "poisoned wells" tale to me. Still good for spreading paranoia, xenophobia and hatred against "disbelievers"...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Of a shotgun that fires spiders, less lethal shells use wolf spiders and the lethal shells use black widows.
*shudder!*
I think he may have been arguing that global warming and climate change might be a possible source of the record breaking heat wave and drought, and that global warming may be due to people burning fossil fuels. It is certainly a possibility though its obviously hard to prove definitively (and certain to ignite a troll fest on /. if the leftist and rightists smell the global warming blood in the water).
It is pretty well established that people did get over zealous in preventing forest fires for most of the last century and it was a really bad idea, since forests need to be burned off at regular intervals with low intensity fires. If you dont and let brush build up and trees get too dense then when they happen now they explode and are much more dangerous and destructive. Its also true that when people building houses in brush filled canyons and in dense forest they are pretty much asking for their homes to eventually burn. Putting wooden shingles on a house, also pretty much begging to lose your home to a forest fire. Not clearing trees and brush from the immediate area around your house, strike three.
The environmentalist backlash against logging has also helped contribute to forests that are too dense, especially when coupled with aggressive forest fire prevention.
I seem to recall a few months ago one researcher had a theory that the debris field in the Pacific from the tsunami from Japan was causing a significant hot spot in the Pacific and could be altering the climate this year, though that would also be hard to prove. If it were true then it would be because people built houses on a tsunami plagued coast though needless to say people don't cause tsunamis.
@de_machina
Every aspect of life is now theoretically weaponizable. The fact is that the number of people it takes to do very big damage to large numbers of people is trending down, has been trending down for centuries and will continue to trend down ever more rapidly.
Basically your freedom and privacy are inversely proportional to the number of people it takes to hurt large number of people in very bad ways. At one end of that scale is the lone nut with a doomsday weapon. In that world, your freedom and privacy go to zero because society will not permit that lone nut to act unobserved.
Getting more realistic doesn't really bring much comfort. A few people working to weaponize some bacterium in some way is not much better. Now we need to watch everyone who orders X from company Y (or worse , didn't) or who went to grad school for major Z (or worse, didn't) .
If you look at Ted Kaszinsky , he already understood that to hide his tracks, he had to make his own shit from everyday things found just everywhere. It's not like this type is so crazy they can't think straight and plan.
Here's an equation that describes the relationship between technology, terrorism and your privacy and freedom as you now know it.
loss of freedom . = the number of people they can do those bad things to ^ (the level of badness they can achieve ) / number of people needed to achieve bad things
So for instance,
virus writer:
number of bad people =1
number of people hurt =10,000,000
level of badness = inconvenience and some money
result- lose just a little freedom
Kazsinski:
number of bad people =1
number of people hurt =10
level of badness = death, dismemberment
result: lose no freedom
9-11 hijackers
number of bad people =19
number of people hurt =3000
level of badness = death
result - lose a lot of freedom
WWII
number of bad people = 18 million
number of people hurt = 60 million
level of badness = death
result - no permanent loss of freedom
So what we see is the three numbers interact strongly and it really takes all three approaching their bad poles for things to really change.
But that's where we're headed now.
Nothing that we've constructed either in law or human conduct or organizing principles for society has prepared us for this.
We have to expect that everything will be and somewhere right now, on paper at least, is being tried.
You don't like it when the phone companies turn over your records to the FBI , but that's the LEAST of what you have to get used to in the face of what progress in technology is going to deliver to your door. All private companies help the intelligence agencies any way they can because the key players understand what's happening. They understand the above even if not explicitly. It's not about enslaving hapless masses; it's about survival and how we're going to be able to achieve that as those three number race towards their respective poles.
No one wanted this, it's no one's fault and no one really knows what to do. Keep that in mind when you're reading tomorrow's headlines. We never evolve to wield the capabilities we are acquiring. It's no one's fault.
Really I only see one way out of this, and you're not going to like it any better than you like any other part of this. We need to genetically engineer people so they don't want to do bad things. We need to genetically engineer people so they are much less greedy, much less anti-social, much less religious, much less concerned with acquiring positions in dominance hierarchies for the purpose of monopolizing resources and access to female reproductive rights. That's what drives most of the world's badness now and throughout history. It's really just that simple.
Our genes evolved to compete fiercely for those limited resources - food, shelter, power and s
Talk about an impossible standard, and another moved goalpost. Once you get to "growing wheat in Greenland", it's far too late to even try to prevent it. We do know that the rate of glacial ice thaw has been increasing rapidly, more quickly than predicted.
Sure, there is a natural global climate cycle, but this acceleration of change is outside the usual range of typical climate cycles. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are twice that of any period in the last 400,000 years.
This event needs better language.
Bioterrorism does not fit because the introduction of eucalyptus pests is not the generation of fear in human beings for the purpose of starting a war or causing political instability.
Eucalyptus has become an established plant in California. The word "established" catches the idea that grown eucalyptus trees in some settings provide shade and screening benefits. They have attained the status of having a social value.
The word "antiestablishmentism" catches the idea that the introduced pests are launching another kind of destruction.
About 140 feet away from my house grow several 240 foot tall Eucalyptus trees. They are shallow rooted plants on a steam bank. Whenever we have a storm, I always worry about which way the wind is blowing. The trees also block my satellite dish, block direct sun and plug up my roof gutters.
Yeah, biological antiestablishmentism at work. Don't infect these please. Can't afford the consequences.
You should be thanking them. I would have thought that even cane toads would have turned their noses up at American beer.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Right across the channel is the town of Lyme where the first people developed a strange disorder later called "Lyme Disease." Incidentally, ticks were Trabe's favorite pet project.
That does not appear to be true.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Please don't anthropomorphise "Nature". "Nature" doesn't replace anything. (And note my sig: Tennyson in 1844 knew more about evolution than a lot of educated people do today. And yes, evolution as an idea was well established before Origin was published; Charles Darwin got some of his ideas from his grandfather Erasmus.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
So, you've got to go back to 1125 AD to find events this bad? Ayii!! We're all gonna die!!
Seriously, didn't the plague come shortly thereafter?
And those "extreme weather events" you list there are for year. We've got an extreme weather event that's lasted like a decade now.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Forget it. I've been to Australia and half the wildlife there is poisonous. Visited a friend who lives on the edge of a big national forest and we were walking along and he started telling me what to look out for.
I ended up locking myself in my room and lying in the fetal position until it was time to fly back to Chicago. I mean, Australia's a great place, great people, but until you kill off all that poisonous wildlife, forget about it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Um, it's not true. Look a little closer:
Obama became president in 2008. Most of the planes were eliminated between 2002 and 2008.
The further reductions came in 2010 when congressional Republicans cut 25% of the Forest Service's budget.
You've got to remember, Michelle Malkin is a serial liar. She's been caught so many times it's not funny. You would think at some point that she'd stop out of shame, but no.
I've got a link to a list of Malkin's greatest hits of lies. Let me know if you'd like to see it. And she NEVER updates her posts when they are proven false. Never retracts, never apologizes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't know about you, but I can't survive eating conifers, cycads and ginkgos. Therefore, the "but it worked for the dinosaurs!" argument is somewhat less than persuasive to me.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Just asking, is all crime called terrorism now?
Oh, should I have sugar-coated that?
Does it matter? Go back to 1960, get some DDT, and you won't have this problem anymore. Sure, a few people might get cancer, but damn did it ever kill those bugs.
90% of scientists from the relevant field as well as 90% of all scientists agree with anthropogenic climate change. In the world of science, this is what we call a "scientific consensus" and it's a pretty overwhelming one at that. If man is indeed affecting the climate, then at the very least we can reduce the things we are doing that affect it.
I can never get over just how fervent the climate change denialist religion is. On one side of the argument, we have 90% of all scientists, representing every conceivable nationality, set of political views, economic status, and funding source. On the other side of the argument, we have a small group of "scientists" from a single political ideology from a narrow range of customers all of whom draw their paychecks from oil companies, coal companies, and/or right wing think tanks. The most prominent, most published, most cited member of this group is someone either so incompetent he literally doesn't know degrees from radians, or is a staggeringly deceitful fraudster.
http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up/
Based on work of this quality, millions of conservolibertarians have concluded that 90% of the scientists in the world are participating in a vast and incredibly complex conspiracy to... what? Make American rightists feel bad? Conservolibertarians never seem to be very clear on the goals of this massive and complex international supposed-conspiracy.
Ah well. Once someone adopts a religious view, they will cling to it no matter what evidence is presented to them.
Here's the only important math in this problem:
100% of the reduction of the fleet of firefighting airplanes was due to Republicans.
Barack Obama did not ask for a 25% cut in the Forest Service's budget. It was put in specifically by a gentleman by the name of Mike Simpson (R-Idaho). He believed that the functions of the US Forest Service should be privatized. He is a horse's ass and people in Colorado need to learn his name.
The chairman of the budget committee who pushed the cut in Forest Service budget is named Paul Ryan (R- Wisconsin). He is owned by the Koch Brothers and believes all government services should be eliminated. Congressman Ryan is not a horse's ass. He is something the horse left behind on the road.
In the budget that President Obama presented to the House, which was voted down, he requested an increase in funding for the U.S. Forest Service specifically for improving infrastructure and emergency services.
No. The facts don't "come from someone with a biased view". Rather, the biased view comes from learning the facts. Whatever one might think of the Democratic Party, and personally I would rather see people picked at random from phone book. But whatever you think of Democrats, The Republicans are unimaginably cruel, hateful, shortsighted and destructive in a way that the Democrats could never get organized enough to be.
You are welcome on my lawn.