organic farming is something that's still in it's infancy, but it is certainly better than regular, industrial farming.
Wait... what? You admit, then, that organic farming uses dangerous chemicals. And they use more of them, too. But it's "certainly better than regular, industrial farming"? Something tells me you're experiencing a little cognitive dissonance.
Meanwhile, Atrazine is already banned in the EU and there are calls to ban it elsewhere, so that's a non-issue, IMHO.
In fact, of your cited source, Picloram is the only one that looks nasty for the environment. That said, there's little evidence it's harmful to humans. But I will concede your point on that particular chemical.
you quite happily ignore the fact that those poisons CAN'T be broken down by nature, and ergo
ROFL. You rail against pesticides, then cite DDT, a pesticide that's been banned in the western world specifically because it isn't biodegradable? Please.
Read that whole article. Modern pesticides are biodegradable. Meanwhile, organic farms require up to 7 times *more* "organic" pesticides to do the job, which means *more* toxic chemicals sprayed on your food and into the soil.
Oh, and by the way, in that article I cited, he tackles the pesticide myth. My favorite quote is this:
Some supporters of organic growing claim that the danger of non-organic food lies in the residues of chemical pesticides. This claim is even more ridiculous: Since the organic pesticides and fungicides are less efficient than their modern synthetic counterparts, up to seven times as much of it must be used. Organic pesticides include rotenone, which has been shown to cause the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease and is a natural poison used in hunting by some native tribes; pyrethrum, which is carcinogenic; sabadilla, which is highly toxic to honeybees; and fermented urine, which I don't want on my food whether it causes any diseases or not.
Yup... *way* better than traditional farming techniques.:rollseyes:
Doh, you're absolutely right, my mistake (ironic, too, since I've been taking others to task for conflating the two). Here, try this one. To quote:
Organic methods require about twice the acreage to produce the same crop, thus directly resulting in the destruction of undeveloped land. During a recent Girl Scout field trip to Tanaka Farms in Irvine, California, one of the owners told us his dirty little secret that contradicts what you'll find on his web site. Market conditions compelled them to switch to organic a few years ago, and he absolutely hates it. The per-acre yield has been slashed. Organic farming produces less food, and requires more acreage.
More acreage == less efficient.
and what about the Poisons?
Uhh... to quote a sage I read once: "clean your food". Ignoring the fact that I have yet to see a citation that actually links disease to pesticide contamination, something you'd think would be relatively easy given how hot a topic that must be.
Uhuh. So you missed my point entirely, well done. Maybe I should just repeat myself. You said:
Tastes better, too.
I said:
What does that have to do with "organic" food? You're simply experiencing the advantages of food that went quickly from farm to table.
Now do you understand? The improved flavour you're detecting probably has *nothing at all to do with the farming method*, and instead has everything to do with the fact that your food didn't sit in a shipping container or the grocery store shelf for a week before hitting your table.
In short, you're most likely attributing an advantage to "organic" farming what should rightfully be attributed to the practice of buying locally grown food.
I have had organic carrots that taste like other carrots too: large scale prepackaged ones, typically. Maybe it's a freshness issue.
And now you get to the rub. In all probability, it's exactly that. The problem with supermarket carrots is that they probably haven't been picked and packed when the carrot is perfectly ripe. Then, it sits in a container, and ultimately the store shelf, for quite some time before hitting your table. Big surprise that that carrot doesn't taste as good as a carrot that was grown and picked locally.
So what you claim is an advantage of organic produce is, in fact, an advantage of locally grown produce, a completely orthogonal topic.
The other thing authors like Michael Pollan have been busy pointing out is that we don't know all the micro-nutrients in whole foods, so we actually can't know whether the contents of, say, organic lettuce, actually matches the contents of a conventionally grown lettuce
So, wait, let me get this straight: This Pollan fellow claims that there are magical "micro-nutrients" that we don't know anything about, that may or may not be in foods, and may or may not be present in greater or lesser quantities in organic versus traditionally farmed food.
Well, that's a fascinating and completely unsubstantiated claim. Frankly, it sounds like my mother talking about flushing out "toxins" with special herbal "remedies" from her local "holistic doctor".
And those micro-nutrients make a big difference, as well as making the food taste much better.
Wait. So, we don't know anything about these "micro-nutrients". We don't even know how to detect them, apparently. But they make a "big difference" and make food "taste much better"? Really?
Funny, you state that, and then you fail to support it. Instead, you just change the topic.
So, let's get back to the original claim. The claim is that organic farming, per acre, is less efficient. You claim this is a fallacy. As far as I can tell, that is not the case. Feel free to try and rebut it, but I suspect you'll fail.
Now, you can certainly try to work around that fact by banning meat, thus freeing up more land for you to farm inefficiently, but given that meat is an extremely important source of calories, not to mention key vitamins, minerals, and proteins, for a very large portion of the world, something tells me you won't get very far. And even if you succeeded, that doesn't change the very simple fact that organic farming is still less efficient than current methods.
What does that have to do with "organic" food? You're simply experiencing the advantages of food that went quickly from farm to table. And in the case of vegetables, because of the lack of a need for extended shelf life, the advantages of produce picked at optimum ripeness.
In the UK at least, you won't find antibiotics in milk. It's illegal to sell milk with antibiotic residues, and many farmers not only follow medicinal guidelines, but have their own on-farm antibiotic test kits. It's expensive if you get fined for it, as contaminating a vat at the processing plant may leave you liable for the whole vat, not just your proportion of it.
The same is true of Canada (growth hormones are also similarly restricted, here). Frankly, I think the US is generally behind the developed world in this regard.
Yes. As I pointed out in my original message, antibiotic resistance is a real problem when they are used to promote growth rather than to fight disease. The use in agriculture is implicated in resistance in human pathogens too.
Agreed. Now what does that have to do with organic farming? Because there *is* another alternative: traditional farming while banning the overuse of antibiotics and hormones.
As for pollution, is dumping tons of manure over a larger area (thanks to lower densities) *really* better than chemical fertilizers? Not to mention increased odds of salmonella contamination, among other things.
The placebo effect can be *very* powerful. Unless people are conducting double-blind taste tests, I'll remain highly skeptical of any perceived differences between supermarket and "organic" vegetables and produce.
Here's the really fun part: the waste, of which it produces very little, becomes exponentially less radioactive over time, becoming safe to handle with bare hands in about 300 years -- not hundreds of thousands of years.
Uhuh... did you miss this part of my post, or did you just choose to ignore it?
And breeder reactors don't solve the waste problem, they just transmute it to more energetic isotopes that decay faster. In the end, you still have material to dispose of, and there's just no fool-proof way to do that, aside from squirrelling it away and hoping it stays put until it decays sufficiently.
Look, at the Hanford site the US government couldn't safely store nuclear waste for *50* years, let alone 300. Are breeders better than traditional reactors? Yes, in that the waste they produce doesn't need to be stored for as long. *But*, the waste they do produce is *highly* radioactive (which is why it decays so fast), and *still* needs to be stored for *generations*.
Breeders are *not* a panacea. Quit pretending they are.
If we give up nuclear power now we're never going to find a solution. With no nuclear reactors there isn't going to be any incentive.
Okay, while I disagree to some degree with the GP, this assertion is absurd. If we give up nuclear today, with the caveat that we won't pick it up again until there's a solution to the waste problem, that creates a *massive incentive* to solve the waste problem, as the first one to do so could then patent the invention, get a monopoly, and proceed to make millions licensing it to all the energy companies interested in building plants.
Yucca mountain and breeder reactors are both solutions
Well, no, Yucca mountain isn't a "solution". It's a hack. And a poor one at that, given the US track record for maintaining nuclear dump sites. And breeder reactors don't solve the waste problem, they just transmute it to more energetic isotopes that decay faster. In the end, you still have material to dispose of, and there's just no fool-proof way to do that, aside from squirrelling it away and hoping it stays put until it decays sufficiently.
And, again, that's a bullshit cop-out. At minimum, we have had solar output data from satellites for decades, now, which is more than enough to determine if there's a correlation between the observed increase in global mean temperature and solar output. The answer, which is hardly surprising, is that there is no such correlation.
Anyway, it's clear you're unwilling to listen to actual reason, so I'm done here. Hopefully anyone reading this thread will see how disjoint and irrational the arguments of some of the anti-AGW folks really are.
Wow, you just don't get it. Look up the definition of the word "correlated". Then look at the solar output over the last 50 years. Then look at the global mean temperature for the last 50 years, and the rate of change of the global mean temperature over the last 50 years. Then apply the aforementioned definition to those data sets. You might discover, much to your surprise, that there is *no correlation* between the increase in global mean temperature and the change in solar output over the last 50 years.
Furthermore, in case you miss it while looking up the aforementioned definition, while correlation does not imply caustion, correlation is *required* for causation. If two variables are not correlated, then one *cannot be causing the other*. In this case, solar variability *cannot explain away global warming*.
Honestly, at this point I'm beginning to wonder if I'm just getting trolled. That or we're simply talking past each other. As far as I can tell, you are implying that solar variation explains global warming. As I've explained, that's false. Rather than rebutting my position, you've chosen to ignore the argument entirely. So either you're *not* implying that solar variation explains global warming, or your reading comprehension is sorely lacking.
And unless you can provide evidence that said flux has shown an increasing trend over the last 50 years (okay, let's say the last 20 or so, since we've had reliable satellite data), your supposition that those bands are linked to GW is baseless.
In case you don't understand this argument, let me rephrase: The global mean temperature has been markedly increasing (and the rate of increase has been increasing) for at least the last 50 years. Whatever mechanism you claim is linked to GW must, therefore, show a corresponding change over the same time period. Certainly solar output, as typically measured, does not follow this trend, and therefore cannot be the cause for GW. Thus far, you have *not* provided evidence that flux in the UV or other bands has increased over the last 50 years, and thus so far, you have failed to provide evidence for your theory (and have, in fact, done the exact opposite, in my opinion).
Imagine the solar output doubles. What do you figure will happen to the mean global temperature? Assume it halves. What will happen? In what way is that not a correlation?
Yes, my point exactly. And since solar output has a predictable variation, and that variation *does not correlate with global mean temperature*, the link between solar output and global warming is tenuous at best.
The variations are definitely correlated to the solar cycle which is not surprising
Oh FFS, so you admit, then, that the variations in these other bands are linked to the solar cycle.
Meanwhile, the rise in global temperatures which we call "global warming", which has been on an extreme upward slope for at *least* the last 50 years does *not* correlate to the solar cycle, which runs on a roughly 11-year cycle.
So with your very own data, you've managed to discredit your own theory. Nice work!
I disagree. At least on x86-64 there's almost a doubling of the number of registers (twice the number of general purpose and SIMD FP registers).
And also a doubling of the size of every pointer, meaning an inflation in the size of every instruction, causing an increase in the number of cache misses and an increase in the size of application binaries which means greater memory usage.
64-bit is *not* a panacea. It's better in some cases, worse in others, and which is better, 32-or 64-bit, depends entirely on workload.
As an aside, I'm not sure it was intentional, but you've done a very good job of citing an article which illustrates the dangers of cherrypicking data to suit your own agenda. I mean, honestly, selecting the last 5 years and using that to pick out a temperature trend. It's absolutely absurd. And it's well known that El Nino was responsible for the spike in global temperature in the mid-90s. The real point is that the long term trend is still upward, even if the short-term trend has been flatter.
Don't be stupid. As any child knows, the sun heats the earth so there is obviously a correlation between solar output and earth temperature.
How ironic. You accuse me of stupidity while, apparently, not understanding the term "mean global temperature".
No correlations of global temperature with ground-based or narrow-band solar flux measurements are to be expected.
Bullshit. We've had satellites studying the sun for decades.
You're basically suggesting some sort of solar output measurement that's been growing, and no one has noticed because, here on earth, we are unable to observe it. It's certainly an interesting idea, but unless you can provide relevant evidence or citations demonstrating that such bands are experiencing independent increases in output separate from the regular solar cycle, I would politely suggest that your extraordinary theory is based on nothing but hot air.
Since this UV/EUV/X-ray flux is a significant fraction of the solar output and varies strongly with coronal conditions, it is the most important driver of global warming/cooling.
And that's why you see a strong correlation between solar output and global mean temperature!
Except, of course, there is no such correlation. After all, as you say, "the data does not lie". Whoops!
Slashdot Mirror
organic farming is something that's still in it's infancy, but it is certainly better than regular, industrial farming.
Wait... what? You admit, then, that organic farming uses dangerous chemicals. And they use more of them, too. But it's "certainly better than regular, industrial farming"? Something tells me you're experiencing a little cognitive dissonance.
YOUR SOURCE ? another than http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/good_wood/tox_herb.htmmonsanto please ...
Very well:
Citation showing that Glyphosate breaks down. It may take a while, but it does *not* bioaccumulate. It also breaks down in water fairly rapidly.
Meanwhile, Atrazine is already banned in the EU and there are calls to ban it elsewhere, so that's a non-issue, IMHO.
In fact, of your cited source, Picloram is the only one that looks nasty for the environment. That said, there's little evidence it's harmful to humans. But I will concede your point on that particular chemical.
organic farming is NOT simply throwing other kinds of poison on our food
That's a lie, whether you realize it or not. Citation, from the very Wikipedia article you provided. Note, the pesticides listed are precisely the ones described in that article I provided.
you quite happily ignore the fact that those poisons CAN'T be broken down by nature, and ergo
ROFL. You rail against pesticides, then cite DDT, a pesticide that's been banned in the western world specifically because it isn't biodegradable? Please.
Read that whole article. Modern pesticides are biodegradable. Meanwhile, organic farms require up to 7 times *more* "organic" pesticides to do the job, which means *more* toxic chemicals sprayed on your food and into the soil.
and what about the Poisons?
Oh, and by the way, in that article I cited, he tackles the pesticide myth. My favorite quote is this:
Yup... *way* better than traditional farming techniques. :rollseyes:
"locally produced" != "organic"
Doh, you're absolutely right, my mistake (ironic, too, since I've been taking others to task for conflating the two). Here, try this one. To quote:
More acreage == less efficient.
and what about the Poisons?
Uhh... to quote a sage I read once: "clean your food". Ignoring the fact that I have yet to see a citation that actually links disease to pesticide contamination, something you'd think would be relatively easy given how hot a topic that must be.
Uhuh. So you missed my point entirely, well done. Maybe I should just repeat myself. You said:
I said:
Now do you understand? The improved flavour you're detecting probably has *nothing at all to do with the farming method*, and instead has everything to do with the fact that your food didn't sit in a shipping container or the grocery store shelf for a week before hitting your table.
In short, you're most likely attributing an advantage to "organic" farming what should rightfully be attributed to the practice of buying locally grown food.
I have had organic carrots that taste like other carrots too: large scale prepackaged ones, typically. Maybe it's a freshness issue.
And now you get to the rub. In all probability, it's exactly that. The problem with supermarket carrots is that they probably haven't been picked and packed when the carrot is perfectly ripe. Then, it sits in a container, and ultimately the store shelf, for quite some time before hitting your table. Big surprise that that carrot doesn't taste as good as a carrot that was grown and picked locally.
So what you claim is an advantage of organic produce is, in fact, an advantage of locally grown produce, a completely orthogonal topic.
The other thing authors like Michael Pollan have been busy pointing out is that we don't know all the micro-nutrients in whole foods, so we actually can't know whether the contents of, say, organic lettuce, actually matches the contents of a conventionally grown lettuce
So, wait, let me get this straight: This Pollan fellow claims that there are magical "micro-nutrients" that we don't know anything about, that may or may not be in foods, and may or may not be present in greater or lesser quantities in organic versus traditionally farmed food.
Well, that's a fascinating and completely unsubstantiated claim. Frankly, it sounds like my mother talking about flushing out "toxins" with special herbal "remedies" from her local "holistic doctor".
And those micro-nutrients make a big difference, as well as making the food taste much better.
Wait. So, we don't know anything about these "micro-nutrients". We don't even know how to detect them, apparently. But they make a "big difference" and make food "taste much better"? Really?
Yes. That sounds *very* scientific.
This is an agribusiness fallacy.
Funny, you state that, and then you fail to support it. Instead, you just change the topic.
So, let's get back to the original claim. The claim is that organic farming, per acre, is less efficient. You claim this is a fallacy. As far as I can tell, that is not the case. Feel free to try and rebut it, but I suspect you'll fail.
Now, you can certainly try to work around that fact by banning meat, thus freeing up more land for you to farm inefficiently, but given that meat is an extremely important source of calories, not to mention key vitamins, minerals, and proteins, for a very large portion of the world, something tells me you won't get very far. And even if you succeeded, that doesn't change the very simple fact that organic farming is still less efficient than current methods.
What does that have to do with "organic" food? You're simply experiencing the advantages of food that went quickly from farm to table. And in the case of vegetables, because of the lack of a need for extended shelf life, the advantages of produce picked at optimum ripeness.
In the UK at least, you won't find antibiotics in milk. It's illegal to sell milk with antibiotic residues, and many farmers not only follow medicinal guidelines, but have their own on-farm antibiotic test kits. It's expensive if you get fined for it, as contaminating a vat at the processing plant may leave you liable for the whole vat, not just your proportion of it.
The same is true of Canada (growth hormones are also similarly restricted, here). Frankly, I think the US is generally behind the developed world in this regard.
Yes. As I pointed out in my original message, antibiotic resistance is a real problem when they are used to promote growth rather than to fight disease. The use in agriculture is implicated in resistance in human pathogens too.
Agreed. Now what does that have to do with organic farming? Because there *is* another alternative: traditional farming while banning the overuse of antibiotics and hormones.
Shamelessly stolen link from this post.
As for pollution, is dumping tons of manure over a larger area (thanks to lower densities) *really* better than chemical fertilizers? Not to mention increased odds of salmonella contamination, among other things.
The placebo effect can be *very* powerful. Unless people are conducting double-blind taste tests, I'll remain highly skeptical of any perceived differences between supermarket and "organic" vegetables and produce.
Here's the really fun part: the waste, of which it produces very little, becomes exponentially less radioactive over time, becoming safe to handle with bare hands in about 300 years -- not hundreds of thousands of years.
Uhuh... did you miss this part of my post, or did you just choose to ignore it?
Look, at the Hanford site the US government couldn't safely store nuclear waste for *50* years, let alone 300. Are breeders better than traditional reactors? Yes, in that the waste they produce doesn't need to be stored for as long. *But*, the waste they do produce is *highly* radioactive (which is why it decays so fast), and *still* needs to be stored for *generations*.
Breeders are *not* a panacea. Quit pretending they are.
If we give up nuclear power now we're never going to find a solution. With no nuclear reactors there isn't going to be any incentive.
Okay, while I disagree to some degree with the GP, this assertion is absurd. If we give up nuclear today, with the caveat that we won't pick it up again until there's a solution to the waste problem, that creates a *massive incentive* to solve the waste problem, as the first one to do so could then patent the invention, get a monopoly, and proceed to make millions licensing it to all the energy companies interested in building plants.
Yucca mountain and breeder reactors are both solutions
Well, no, Yucca mountain isn't a "solution". It's a hack. And a poor one at that, given the US track record for maintaining nuclear dump sites. And breeder reactors don't solve the waste problem, they just transmute it to more energetic isotopes that decay faster. In the end, you still have material to dispose of, and there's just no fool-proof way to do that, aside from squirrelling it away and hoping it stays put until it decays sufficiently.
That cannot be done. We do not have that data.
And, again, that's a bullshit cop-out. At minimum, we have had solar output data from satellites for decades, now, which is more than enough to determine if there's a correlation between the observed increase in global mean temperature and solar output. The answer, which is hardly surprising, is that there is no such correlation.
Anyway, it's clear you're unwilling to listen to actual reason, so I'm done here. Hopefully anyone reading this thread will see how disjoint and irrational the arguments of some of the anti-AGW folks really are.
Wow, you just don't get it. Look up the definition of the word "correlated". Then look at the solar output over the last 50 years. Then look at the global mean temperature for the last 50 years, and the rate of change of the global mean temperature over the last 50 years. Then apply the aforementioned definition to those data sets. You might discover, much to your surprise, that there is *no correlation* between the increase in global mean temperature and the change in solar output over the last 50 years.
Furthermore, in case you miss it while looking up the aforementioned definition, while correlation does not imply caustion, correlation is *required* for causation. If two variables are not correlated, then one *cannot be causing the other*. In this case, solar variability *cannot explain away global warming*.
Honestly, at this point I'm beginning to wonder if I'm just getting trolled. That or we're simply talking past each other. As far as I can tell, you are implying that solar variation explains global warming. As I've explained, that's false. Rather than rebutting my position, you've chosen to ignore the argument entirely. So either you're *not* implying that solar variation explains global warming, or your reading comprehension is sorely lacking.
And unless you can provide evidence that said flux has shown an increasing trend over the last 50 years (okay, let's say the last 20 or so, since we've had reliable satellite data), your supposition that those bands are linked to GW is baseless.
In case you don't understand this argument, let me rephrase: The global mean temperature has been markedly increasing (and the rate of increase has been increasing) for at least the last 50 years. Whatever mechanism you claim is linked to GW must, therefore, show a corresponding change over the same time period. Certainly solar output, as typically measured, does not follow this trend, and therefore cannot be the cause for GW. Thus far, you have *not* provided evidence that flux in the UV or other bands has increased over the last 50 years, and thus so far, you have failed to provide evidence for your theory (and have, in fact, done the exact opposite, in my opinion).
Imagine the solar output doubles. What do you figure will happen to the mean global temperature? Assume it halves. What will happen? In what way is that not a correlation?
Yes, my point exactly. And since solar output has a predictable variation, and that variation *does not correlate with global mean temperature*, the link between solar output and global warming is tenuous at best.
The variations are definitely correlated to the solar cycle which is not surprising
Oh FFS, so you admit, then, that the variations in these other bands are linked to the solar cycle.
Meanwhile, the rise in global temperatures which we call "global warming", which has been on an extreme upward slope for at *least* the last 50 years does *not* correlate to the solar cycle, which runs on a roughly 11-year cycle.
So with your very own data, you've managed to discredit your own theory. Nice work!
I disagree. At least on x86-64 there's almost a doubling of the number of registers (twice the number of general purpose and SIMD FP registers).
And also a doubling of the size of every pointer, meaning an inflation in the size of every instruction, causing an increase in the number of cache misses and an increase in the size of application binaries which means greater memory usage.
64-bit is *not* a panacea. It's better in some cases, worse in others, and which is better, 32-or 64-bit, depends entirely on workload.
For the recent trend in global temperatures, see here: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12865.
As an aside, I'm not sure it was intentional, but you've done a very good job of citing an article which illustrates the dangers of cherrypicking data to suit your own agenda. I mean, honestly, selecting the last 5 years and using that to pick out a temperature trend. It's absolutely absurd. And it's well known that El Nino was responsible for the spike in global temperature in the mid-90s. The real point is that the long term trend is still upward, even if the short-term trend has been flatter.
Don't be stupid. As any child knows, the sun heats the earth so there is obviously a correlation between solar output and earth temperature.
How ironic. You accuse me of stupidity while, apparently, not understanding the term "mean global temperature".
No correlations of global temperature with ground-based or narrow-band solar flux measurements are to be expected.
Bullshit. We've had satellites studying the sun for decades.
You're basically suggesting some sort of solar output measurement that's been growing, and no one has noticed because, here on earth, we are unable to observe it. It's certainly an interesting idea, but unless you can provide relevant evidence or citations demonstrating that such bands are experiencing independent increases in output separate from the regular solar cycle, I would politely suggest that your extraordinary theory is based on nothing but hot air.
Since this UV/EUV/X-ray flux is a significant fraction of the solar output and varies strongly with coronal conditions, it is the most important driver of global warming/cooling.
And that's why you see a strong correlation between solar output and global mean temperature!
Except, of course, there is no such correlation. After all, as you say, "the data does not lie". Whoops!