All I can read in your response is that you don't understand what it actually means and that scares you.
No, I understand perfectly. You misunderstand the point here. It's not about whether those genes are harmless, but whether the technique involved carries with it some unexpected, unintended, unforeseen consequences. The point is a risk assessment of risks that are completely unknown and therefore not easily quantifiable.
In that context, all else being equal, any method in use for thousands of years without serious incident must be considered far safer than techniques that are novel.
And you can say that there's no reason why it would possibly be more dangerous, and I can agree with you, and then Taleb can point out various historical examples of people saying, "There's no reason why [some new thing] would be more dangerous than [the old thing it replaced]," only to find out that we misunderstood how things worked, and the new thing was actually more dangerous.
Which is an argument from pure and total ignorance. We are able to look at and manipulate the DNA of our crops and farm animals. We are able to see the random mutations we've selected for in the past, we can see the specific mutations we select for currently. From EVERYTHING we know and everything we can see the sole difference is whether we select mutations based on randomness or not, and the end results are exactly the same.
Despite having no known reason for there to be a difference, despite all current accumulated knowledge showing the working mechanisms to be absolutely identical, you want to insist that there is still much greater risk.
This is madness akin to refusing a different path to work than normal for fear of possible world shaking consequence. This is akin to fear of putting the left sock on first instead of the right. This is akin to knowing my magical rock that keeps away tigers should never be given up because so far it's always worked and we wouldn't want to risk getting eaten by a tiger.
More succinctly, your insistence is far more akin to superstition than science.
For thousands of years we have been taking on risks by selecting for genetic modifications that have arisen entirely by RANDOM CHANCE and with no knowledge of what kind of genes were changed to get the effect we selected for.
Right, and what those thousands of years have shown us is that it's relatively safe to select for genetic modifications that have arise entirely by random chance. We do not have thousands of years of experience in what happens when humans select for mutations that they themselves have created.
All I can read in your response is that you don't understand what it actually means and that scares you.
Here's the difference between the old and new. In both cases, a seed supplier wants to find a seed with round-up resistance.
The thousands of years old method: Supplier plants thousands of acres of the original seed and sprays each crop with roundup. They take the few surviving plants as seeds for the next round. After several years of this spraying and selecting process hopefully they get a seed that largely survives the round-up through some random unknown mutation.
The new method: Supplier identifies the working mechanism of round-up on a plant, and modifies ONLY the genes that are needed to survive being sprayed with round-up.
The new method will yield a plant with DNA that, line for line, has MORE in common with the original non-resistant seed than the thousands year old approach. But sure, with no evidence to back you up, we should believe that the new method is radically and dangerously different and worse than what has been safely improving our lives for thousands of years.
I didn't read the thing, so I'm just guessing, but I suspect that the problem isn't with any given genetic modification, but with the unknown factor of how those modifications will impact the environment in the context of being spread throughout the world and replacing other varieties of the same crop. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is very interested in the concept of risk, particularly regarding unforeseen outcomes and consequences.
The unknown factor with plants genetically modified in a lab is LOWER than the unknown factor with plants genetically modified by trial and error selective breeding. For thousands of years we have been taking on risks by selecting for genetic modifications that have arisen entirely by RANDOM CHANCE and with no knowledge of what kind of genes were changed to get the effect we selected for. Civilization has not only failed to collapse, but has flourished in that time. Now that we can be MORE selective and careful with our selection of which mutations to select for it's suddenly a problem? Sorry, the only new problem is technologies that people don't understand and therefore are frightened of,
Cheap mass shipping to the other side of the world will be among the first luxuries to go, meaning we will need to start to produce most of our goods locally again, starting from the basics and working up to more complicated ones.
I disagree with some of this from sheer opportunity cost. Mass shipping often uses heavy fuel, the type that we have in abundance (tar sands, etc.) And this can be supplemented with wind. It's not infeasible that a future generation of shipping will return to some type of clipper ship or even kite design to help alleviate fuel.
And refridgeration is electric heavy, something we will have in abundance still besides fuel, so shipping food will still be feasible.
And trains and trucks are still more efficient than hundreds of individual cars.
If such a thing were to pass, one of the first things to go will be suburbias. A luxury of land and wastes of driving far more than distribution shipping. Since we are talking in point of the last and most wasteful step of distribution anyway, from store to home.
Such a future may come or not, not sure. Just my way of thinking.
Now, endpoint to endpoint consumer shipping from Amazon... that may be a different story. Unless quadrocopters are involved.
We'll adopt civilian nuclear reactors on massive sea transports first. We have the existing technology to build massive ocean transports powered by uranium, that need refuelling 2-3 times per CENTURY. We just need to decide to build them. If the need arises and we do, they'll even drastically REDUCE the cost of international ocean shipping.
What we have at hands right now is the ongoing process of choosing by inaction not to create enough ways to harvest renewable energy. As the fossils run out, we will see a gradual shift away from our current global industrial world.
No.
We have enough oil to maintain the status quo usage for another 30+ years. Tesla motors though makes it clear that gas guzzling cars will be replaced by electrics in less than 30 years. Not for the sake of renewable energy or environmental conscience, but because they are cheaper, faster and all around superior. More over, I firmly believe that the next 30 years will see the advancement of some form of fusion power. Lockheed Martin has even been willing to claim, publicly, that it will have a fusion reactor ready for market in 10.
But Fusion isn't even necessary to maintain our current post-industrial path forwards. Sufficient advances in batteries and existing fission power suffice. Domestic shipping on highways by electric trucks or trains using batteries charged from fission power plants. Ocean transport either in short ranges with batteries, but more likely even larger transports powered by military style on board fission reactors actually able to REDUCE cost and increase speed of international transport of goods.
All the doomsday gloomy predictions of a future that will falter because we can't possibly solve problem X tend to fail.
Violence against one another is about the only threat to our future, we have technology of such a state that we are otherwise pretty well situated for centuries of continued growth.
Oh no, glyphosates(round-up) and some GMO crops in some study show a possible statistical correlation with negative health factors! We should quickly abandon all of modern agriculture to make sure we don't destroy the health of western civilization! Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
GMO foods are have been ubiquitous in the western diet for multiple generations already. How to health factors and benchmarks for those generations compare to the ones prior to them? They are radically better. GMO fruits and vegetables that have longer shelf lives alone have vastly improved the health of people across the region. That longer shelf life doesn't just mean a corporate mega supermarket chain can buy more yachts because they reduced losses to waste and increased sales. Those increased sales also mean that lowered prices and greater geographic availability of fresh fruit and vegetables improved the diets of consumers. Even as a kid in central Canada fresh fruits and berries were very limited, but today it's taken as a matter of course you can go out and buy fresh anything in the dead of winter if you're willing to brave the 10foot snow banks between you and the store.
Sorry, all the fears and studies about potential small scale impacts of GMO crops is dwarfed by the current good of the dietary improvements that GMO has brought.
I'm amazed how much objection genetically modified foods are receiving from the public. It smacks of a fear factor that exists in any new science where people don't fully understand it and there for reject it. What most people don't know, and probably should is that practically every food you buy in a store for consumption is genetically modified food. There are no wild seedless watermelon. There are no wild cows. There are no long stem roses in the wild. List all the fruits and vegetables and ask yourself is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the meats and all the foods we eat since we cultivated them. It's called artificial selection. Now that we can do it in a lab, all of a sudden you wanna complain? You like red delicious apples? We manufactured those, it's a genetic modification. The silkworm as we cultivate it has no wild counterpart because it would die in the wild. So no silk even anymore. We are creating and modifying the biology of the world to serve our needs, and I don't have a problem with that because we've been doing it for tens of thousands of years. So chill out,
Oh, before I offend you too much, that wasn't my own statement, but Neil deGrasse Tyson. A fairly widely well thought of spokesman for science within the scientific community.
I'm amazed how much objection genetically modified foods are receiving from the public. It smacks of a fear factor that exists in any new science where people don't fully understand it and there for reject it. What most people don't know, and probably should is that practically every food you buy in a store for consumption is genetically modified food. There are no wild seedless watermelon. There are no wild cows. There are no long stem roses in the wild. List all the fruits and vegetables and ask yourself is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the meats and all the foods we eat since we cultivated them. It's called artificial selection. Now that we can do it in a lab, all of a sudden you wanna complain? You like red delicious apples? We manufactured those, it's a genetic modification. The silkworm as we cultivate it has no wild counterpart because it would die in the wild. So no silk even anymore. We are creating and modifying the biology of the world to serve our needs, and I don't have a problem with that because we've been doing it for tens of thousands of years. So chill out,
Oh, before I offend you too much, that wasn't my own statement, but Neil deGrasse Tyson. A fairly widely well thought of spokesman for science within the scientific community.
In Afghanistan the Taliban are very hard on women but on the other hand in Iraq under Saddam Hussein the women were some of the most liberated in the Middle East, but much less so now under the current government.
That's some mighty narrow vision. Women's rights were marginally better under Saddam than the rest of the middle east... Saddam also committed two genocides against his own people with estimates of 2-300 thousand killed in each of them. He also initiated the Iran-Iraq war which killed over a million and extensively used chemical weapons in it, as well as in his genocide of the Kurds.
So, aside from the concentration camps, collective punishment, genocides and love for chemical weapons, Saddam was also a liberator of women...
The nuclear weapons were also never found as Iraq never had the capability.
Correction, it wasn't found because the program was destroyed during and after the first gulf war and by a unilateral bombing run from Israel earlier.
The claim by the Bush administration was that they were manufacturing more and newer chemical ones. This was never substantiated.
But that presumes the burden of proof was on Bush. Saddam was proven to have chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in the first gulf war. One of the most important conditions for allowing Saddam to remain in power and for the end of first gulf war short of his removal was the admittance and allowing of international inspectors to verify the termination of those programs. More than a decade later Saddam was still blocking inspectors. The fact was inspections had failed to confirm Saddam's compliance with ending his WMD programs. So much so that many of the inspectors, Like Scott Ritter objected to the war on the grounds that chemical weapons would be likely be deployed against allied forces. That of course didn't stop Ritter from being a cheer leader in chorus afterwards pointing out the failure to find WMDs...
I can't but shake my head at all the environmentally concerned people opposing fracking. More specifically, the ones vehemently insisting we be more considerate of the living conditions we are creating for people down the road. It strikes me as a very bad form of tunnel vision.
Fracking the oil from the American midwest makes America energy independent. Let me repeat that another way. Fracking the midwest oil means America doesn't need Middle Eastern oil.
IMHO, that ends the discussion and debate. I'm not dismissing concerns over how 'dirty' recovery of midwest oil is, I'm just of the opinion that the alternative Middle Eastern oil is even dirtier on account of all the blood spilled over it.
US doctrine on the intentional use of biological weapons of mass distruction is to respond with the only WMDs in our arsenal - that is Thermonuclear Devices. Anyone deploying such a biological would presumably kill a similarly large number of Russian, Chinese, Indian and Western European citizens, and all those governments have roughly similar doctrines, (except for the story I can't confirm that a Soviet era ambassador once claimed to his Chinese counterpart that official doctrine of the USSR was to make any language group or religion that released such a bio-weapon literally extinct, down to bayonetting individual 1 year olds). The US cold war era Project Pluto was only seriously considered as a response to some projected Bio-weapons and not just nukes, Israel was rumored to have developed cobalt jackets for a few of its warheads in response to rumors of Iranian bio-labs (although that rumor may just be something started by a Tom Clancy novel). Presumably anyone funding ISIL (or whatever they are calling themselves this week), does not want to risk every nuclear armed state in the entire world going literally ballistic.
One point in all this that few get. The researchers and theoreticians discussing a weaponized version of Ebola or Smallpox were postulating an airborne hardened virus with such lethality that they could stop saying Megadeaths and start using the Giga- prefix. Current research shows pretty clearly that such a weapon is very unlikely. Ebola isn't the type of virus that's close enough to airborne to make the jump, and getting a smallpox variant that overcomes the existing vaccinated population's resistances seems equally a very hard problem. I doubt such an attack as you're suggesting would kill more than, say 300 million, world wide, tops. Maybe the various nuclear armed nations wouldn't go to a nuclear response, or even conventional full scale war (yeah, right!) It's not like the US got all stirred up about the "mere" 2,996 casualties of 9/11, right? The only real risk of ISIL (or whatever) doing anything this totally insane is if they somehow believe the great powers would all limit themselves to careful, deliberate, reasoned responses in the face of an indescriminately inflicted act of total barbarity that killed the elderly and young disproportionately and destroyed the world's economies and afflicted every nation of that world regardless of whether they were on ISIL's enemies list or not. My own bet is the UN resolution would pass unanimously among all members not implicated, and start with "Purge the sub-human scum with cleansing nuclear fire, unto their last generation", and go to STRONG language from there. The NATO powers would jump the gun before the resolution was finalized, only to find out that Israel had already launched against everybody else in the Middle East, India had already moved against Pakistan, and the Russians had already gone to war against every adjacent "stan" they suspected of harboring ISIL sympathizers. (And the Republican party would blame all of this on Obama).
You assume that ISIL is a rational entity that doesn't believe that Allah would protect them and grant them victory in their jihad... Religious fanatics are exactly the crowd that would try and pull something like that off, because they either do not care if they would be exterminated as a result, or because their irrational beliefs honestly believe they will be protected from or win some manner of armageddon war. In fact, Armageddon is exactly the goal of all manner of religious fanatics. It's the very reason their extermination and marginalization is important to those of us who prefer life to death.
I'm pretty sure it was you that diverged from reality... The earth is getting warmer dude... The data is easy to see. It's really easy to see. You can look up satellite pics of ice coverage. A simple Wolfram Alpha search will tell you global mean temperatures, and show you the data sources so you can investigate them better.
How do you people keep insisting nothing is going on? The excuses keep changing. "It's not warming. Ok, it is, but it's solar! Ok, it's not solar, but it's not man made.... It's natural cycles! Ok, it's it's moving too fast for natural cycles, but it paused for the last few years! It's warmer, but it stopped, so it's not warming! Ok, so yeah, Arctic sea ice is dwindling, but antarctic is growing! Ok, sure, arctic is sea ice and antarctic is land ice, but.... It's scientists, just making a grab for lucrative grab for government money! Ok, so that money is shit and it's pretty obvious all the real money is in private industry, but..."
On and on you people go, changing your story. Diverging from reality, if you will.....
furthermore, it's quite obvious that several industries just don't want a drop in profits that would come with regulation. It's quite obvious they've spent a TON of money to muddy the conversation. My question is, in 30 years when we can look back on this, will you !@#$holes fess up that you were wrong the whole time? Will you admit that you all were duped and spent decades ignoring your betters? Will you finally shut up?
Don't worry, I know the answer....
I'd like the alarmists to step first and admit their error. If you look at the First Assessment Report from the IPCC in the early 90's their projections grossly overestimated temperature and sea level rise over the ~25 years through to today. Far from any admission of overstating the danger, here are guys like you doubling down on how foolish everyone else will look in another 30 years. I don't need to guess if you'll finally shut up then, the experiment was run already and the answer is nope.
Fact: Things are getting warmer. Fact: CO2 emissions contribute to warming. Fact: Humans are emitting CO2. Uncertain: What degree of impact will those human CO2 emissions have on global temperatures over the next 30 or 100 years.
Don't go advocating catastrophic changes when not all the facts for that particular position are settled, you look foolish.
Here's the projections from the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1991. You''ll find projections of future warming based on CO2 emissions remaining at 1990 levels by the best models suggested today would be warmer globally by 0.5C. More over, the scenarios with increased CO2 emissions that more closer match whats actually happened that predicted warming of over 0.5C by today. Actual measured warming though is sitting at about 0.2C warmer than 1990.
Verifying against historical and past temperatures is good, but it leaves room for bias in your corrections if you have a lot of variables and just end up matching them to the mere 100 years of instrumental record we have. Predicting future temperature trends though, hasn't been as conclusive and solid as you suggest.
Oh, the IPCC report also projected nearly a 10cm rise in sea level from 1990 to today, in reality the measured amount is less than half that.
IMO, neither party cares about public opinion on net neutrality and if you want your voting day activity to matter show up and vote for none of the above by spoiling your ballet. If you can get even 20-30% of the vote to show up as spoiled ballets then politicians selfish interests require them to take notice and try harder again to care what the public thinks in order to gain those extra votes to increase their power base.
What if it's on topic? Say, I dunno, when discussing climate change and citing a celebrity that won a noble prize for their related work?
I'll whole heartedly agree if you want to lay the failing at the feet of ever giving Gore the time of day in scientific circles, let alone a Noble prize. You'll have to forgive people for continually bringing Gore's statements on the matter forward though. His videos are showing up in schools to 'teach' kids about the important scientific research on climate change. My kids came home having watched before they were in grade 5. When the indoctrination is pushed that far out, people are NOT remiss to start pushing back.
IMO it's not much different than the situation with Islamic Jihadists and moderate Muslims. The fact some might claim common cause with a larger group doesn't make it so, but some denouncement from the greater community starts to become of importance. Regrettably, there has been little to no efforts made from the scientific community to distance itself from Gore's extreme proclamations and warnings. Yes, I know scientists don't appreciate having to come out of their research labs where they are doing actual real work to do stuff like that, but it's important. It's all the more important the more impact you believe your research has to society as a whole.
There is no hiatus, but a slowing down of warming. The warming is still happening, but at a slightly slower rate than predicted. So yeah, it's deniers who point out the hiatus, as it doesn't exist.
So deniers like the authors and editors of peer reviewed journals like The National Academy of Sciences and Geophysical Research Letters and Nature. Nature in particular publishing an article with the 'denier' skewed title of "Strengthening of ocean heat uptake efficiency associated with the recent climate hiatus".
Nothing burns me more than somebody faking as though they are all for the scientific process and defending it's 'findings' while at the same time totally ignoring the actual science. The reality as pointed out in the 3 linked articles, and many, many, many more is that since 1998 the rate of warming has dropped off heavily enough it no longer matches most predictions or modelling very well. Something in the predictions and modelling was missed that is happening in the real world, and has caused an apparent 'hiatus' in the rate of warming that was expected. Tracking, identifying and understanding that is important science, and thankfully they haven't stopped to listen to people like you who would prefer to deny that reality.
In the case of AGW those scales are a) global, and b) range from a couple centuries, to several My depending on which line of evidence you're looking at. It was unusually cold in New England this winter. That's weather. But overall, this winter was still one of the 5 warmest on record. That's climate.
Which is the source of a huge part of my skepticism regarding the severity of the 'problem'.
1. Our climate is warming, period. We have almost 125 years of instrumental data to prove it. The but is that, 125 years is not enough data points for phenomena that as you pointed out span centuries and even millenia. 2. CO2 is a GHG and contributes to warming, and we are dumping significant quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. What severity of impact is that causing though? We have just barely been dumping that CO2 for a century, and our best data points don't give us much reference of the 'before' trend.
What pushes me past skepticism though and into outright rejection is graphs like the IPCC published Mann et el graph showing temperature over the last 2k or more years. The work and principle of looking at older proxy records to get a longer reference of climate is vitally important, and a way to extend what we know and can use to improve prediction. The principal is good. The published articles are pure hack jobs though. Data points projected by proxy prior to 1900 are posted and attached to current instrumental records and show an alarming and sudden upward trend in temperature starting at 1900. Now, any sane, skeptical mind would point out the change in data sources as the first and most important cause. Instead, Mann et al claimed a eureka moment, as human CO2 emissions also roughly coincide with that time, so clearly human activity is the cause.
That isn't just bad science, IMO it is deliberately and intentionally bad science. The fact is further proven and demonstrated if you take Mann's oldest and original graphs and just map out what 2014 and 2020 aught to look like if his observed 'trend' is real.
I like to class myself in the rational crowd, and I think a major blind spot between sides is regarding the degree of warming. The following are further facts I think we can agree must be recognized if someone wants to be taken seriously: 1. The instrumental record over the last 125 years clearly shows things are warming. 2. CO2 in the atmosphere acts as a GHG and causes warming. 3. Human activity is dumping sizable quantities of CO2 into the environment and measurable amounts are accumulating in the atmosphere.
These are all well documented, measured and verifiable facts, not part of any honest debate.
That said, I STILL count myself a skeptic of the 'degree' or 'rate' of warming that we should be anticipating over the next decades. Having all the hottest years on record occurring in the last decade or two doesn't alarm me over much. We only have 100 some years of data, and the trend in it is a relatively linear warming from start to finish.
The point of contention is the question of whether or not we are facing 'catastrophic' change or not. Plenty of reconstructions and climate models argue for exponential warming. Such predictions go back to the very first IPCC report, which current global average temps are nearly cooler than the coolest error bars of predictions from back then. More recent estimates start the 'curve' later and later which has served to keep predictions consistent with measured reality. Despite this though, the best models all still DO recognize the absence of accelerated warming in recent years as a problem. They didn't predict it.
If anyone is still reading and thinks I'm missing important reasons to still anticipate catastrophic results, please let me know, but in all my searching of journals and actual, honest research I am just NOT finding any strong evidence or suggestion that it's time to 'panic'.
It's not 'deniers' pointing out the hiatus, but actual peer reviewed scientists. They point out that the hiatus DOES matter because it's getting close to falling outside the error bars that were meant to take into account the 'statistical noise' you want to claim as excuse for inaccuracy. Surely you realize the stupidity in claiming, essentially, conflicting data doesn't contradict method X, after all, the data the method was based on is far too noisy to expect good results. Seems like your admitting to knowing too little, which is presumably what you mean to be arguing against,
Current estimates are that we are dumping 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year, for a total of about 550 billion tons since 1870.
If we are just going to through out facts devoid of context, the IPCC fourth assessment pegs annual NATURAL CO2 emissions at 430 billion tonnes. Or worked backwards to 1870, about 62 trillion tonnes.
a) What hiatus? The hiatus only appears when you use incomplete data. citation [slate.com]
It's cute using something like Slate as a citation to demonstrate the state of scientific research. Regrettably for your argument, actual scientific journal articles like these ones in Nature, IOPScience and Science all contradict your statement. These articles all note "Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century" with multiple citations to yet other scientific journal articles that demonstrated this.
... and that's assuming any positive feedback loops don't override it (look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).
And that's assuming any negative feedback loops don't override it (look at the Iris hypothesis for an example of what could happen).
The global mean temperature trend for the last decade has fallen outside the error bars of the climate model projections gathered by the first IPCC assessment. Go ahead and deny that all you like, but the actual scientists are looking at the why and trying to sort out what they got wrong, in articles like those I've linked above.
No model, in any branch of science or engineering, is complete and perfect; that doesn't mean they're useless [arstechnica.com].
Agreed, but how good are the climate models is a very important question. Plenty of people are pushing very, very hard for sweeping large scale economic and political level reforms based on the results of these models. Global CO2 emissions are tightly locked to economic development, particularly in developing nations like China, and significantly cutting those means significant economic fallout.
Look at the IPCC assessments and you can see what their current assessment of climate model reliability is. They rank it to be quite high. At the exact same time, they also note that climate models are NOT well agreed on what SIGN to place on the impact of cloud feedback. Apologies if it makes me sound like I'm cherry picking my data. Clouds contribute significantly more to the greenhouse effect than CO2, and models are uncertain what SIGN to place on clouds? I DO NOT believe the certainty the models can give on CO2 impact is all that powerful while there remains disagreement on the sign to attribute to clouds. Most importantly to all of us stuck on this rock, it certainly seems insufficient to advocate massive global political and economic reforms.
Well, save for the collapse of the world's ice sheets by 2100. You know, the most shocking and pinnacle of Gore's movie... But other than the parts he exaggerated, he was in keeping with the IPCC. Just like George W. Bush was a genius except for the times that he wasn't...
science will be used in politics. you need to make peace with that. this notion you have that it somehow shouldn't may be a nice platitude, but that wish of yours will never be reality
given that i accept that ugly truth, my point of view is the correct one: policy derived from science, no matter the flaws, is superior to policy derived in opposition to science
now you can continue to wish for the impossibility of science not intersecting with politics. or you can accept that it will, and make a choice as to which policy you support. you don't have the luxury of not choosing, unless you wish to choose to be irrelevant in the discussion
Policy derived from science is superior to policy derived from opposition to science.
Agreed.
You are just restating our differences. I'm trying to tell you, the policy Al Gore is pushing for is NOT derived from science, but is in fact derived in it's absence.
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All I can read in your response is that you don't understand what it actually means and that scares you.
No, I understand perfectly. You misunderstand the point here. It's not about whether those genes are harmless, but whether the technique involved carries with it some unexpected, unintended, unforeseen consequences. The point is a risk assessment of risks that are completely unknown and therefore not easily quantifiable.
In that context, all else being equal, any method in use for thousands of years without serious incident must be considered far safer than techniques that are novel.
And you can say that there's no reason why it would possibly be more dangerous, and I can agree with you, and then Taleb can point out various historical examples of people saying, "There's no reason why [some new thing] would be more dangerous than [the old thing it replaced]," only to find out that we misunderstood how things worked, and the new thing was actually more dangerous.
Which is an argument from pure and total ignorance. We are able to look at and manipulate the DNA of our crops and farm animals. We are able to see the random mutations we've selected for in the past, we can see the specific mutations we select for currently. From EVERYTHING we know and everything we can see the sole difference is whether we select mutations based on randomness or not, and the end results are exactly the same.
Despite having no known reason for there to be a difference, despite all current accumulated knowledge showing the working mechanisms to be absolutely identical, you want to insist that there is still much greater risk.
This is madness akin to refusing a different path to work than normal for fear of possible world shaking consequence. This is akin to fear of putting the left sock on first instead of the right. This is akin to knowing my magical rock that keeps away tigers should never be given up because so far it's always worked and we wouldn't want to risk getting eaten by a tiger.
More succinctly, your insistence is far more akin to superstition than science.
For thousands of years we have been taking on risks by selecting for genetic modifications that have arisen entirely by RANDOM CHANCE and with no knowledge of what kind of genes were changed to get the effect we selected for.
Right, and what those thousands of years have shown us is that it's relatively safe to select for genetic modifications that have arise entirely by random chance. We do not have thousands of years of experience in what happens when humans select for mutations that they themselves have created.
All I can read in your response is that you don't understand what it actually means and that scares you.
Here's the difference between the old and new. In both cases, a seed supplier wants to find a seed with round-up resistance.
The thousands of years old method: Supplier plants thousands of acres of the original seed and sprays each crop with roundup. They take the few surviving plants as seeds for the next round. After several years of this spraying and selecting process hopefully they get a seed that largely survives the round-up through some random unknown mutation.
The new method: Supplier identifies the working mechanism of round-up on a plant, and modifies ONLY the genes that are needed to survive being sprayed with round-up.
The new method will yield a plant with DNA that, line for line, has MORE in common with the original non-resistant seed than the thousands year old approach. But sure, with no evidence to back you up, we should believe that the new method is radically and dangerously different and worse than what has been safely improving our lives for thousands of years.
I didn't read the thing, so I'm just guessing, but I suspect that the problem isn't with any given genetic modification, but with the unknown factor of how those modifications will impact the environment in the context of being spread throughout the world and replacing other varieties of the same crop. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is very interested in the concept of risk, particularly regarding unforeseen outcomes and consequences.
The unknown factor with plants genetically modified in a lab is LOWER than the unknown factor with plants genetically modified by trial and error selective breeding. For thousands of years we have been taking on risks by selecting for genetic modifications that have arisen entirely by RANDOM CHANCE and with no knowledge of what kind of genes were changed to get the effect we selected for. Civilization has not only failed to collapse, but has flourished in that time. Now that we can be MORE selective and careful with our selection of which mutations to select for it's suddenly a problem? Sorry, the only new problem is technologies that people don't understand and therefore are frightened of,
I disagree with some of this from sheer opportunity cost. Mass shipping often uses heavy fuel, the type that we have in abundance (tar sands, etc.) And this can be supplemented with wind. It's not infeasible that a future generation of shipping will return to some type of clipper ship or even kite design to help alleviate fuel.
And refridgeration is electric heavy, something we will have in abundance still besides fuel, so shipping food will still be feasible.
And trains and trucks are still more efficient than hundreds of individual cars.
If such a thing were to pass, one of the first things to go will be suburbias. A luxury of land and wastes of driving far more than distribution shipping. Since we are talking in point of the last and most wasteful step of distribution anyway, from store to home.
Such a future may come or not, not sure. Just my way of thinking.
Now, endpoint to endpoint consumer shipping from Amazon... that may be a different story. Unless quadrocopters are involved.
We'll adopt civilian nuclear reactors on massive sea transports first. We have the existing technology to build massive ocean transports powered by uranium, that need refuelling 2-3 times per CENTURY. We just need to decide to build them. If the need arises and we do, they'll even drastically REDUCE the cost of international ocean shipping.
What we have at hands right now is the ongoing process of choosing by inaction not to create enough ways to harvest renewable energy. As the fossils run out, we will see a gradual shift away from our current global industrial world.
No.
We have enough oil to maintain the status quo usage for another 30+ years. Tesla motors though makes it clear that gas guzzling cars will be replaced by electrics in less than 30 years. Not for the sake of renewable energy or environmental conscience, but because they are cheaper, faster and all around superior. More over, I firmly believe that the next 30 years will see the advancement of some form of fusion power. Lockheed Martin has even been willing to claim, publicly, that it will have a fusion reactor ready for market in 10.
But Fusion isn't even necessary to maintain our current post-industrial path forwards. Sufficient advances in batteries and existing fission power suffice. Domestic shipping on highways by electric trucks or trains using batteries charged from fission power plants. Ocean transport either in short ranges with batteries, but more likely even larger transports powered by military style on board fission reactors actually able to REDUCE cost and increase speed of international transport of goods.
All the doomsday gloomy predictions of a future that will falter because we can't possibly solve problem X tend to fail.
Violence against one another is about the only threat to our future, we have technology of such a state that we are otherwise pretty well situated for centuries of continued growth.
Oh no, glyphosates(round-up) and some GMO crops in some study show a possible statistical correlation with negative health factors! We should quickly abandon all of modern agriculture to make sure we don't destroy the health of western civilization! Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
GMO foods are have been ubiquitous in the western diet for multiple generations already. How to health factors and benchmarks for those generations compare to the ones prior to them? They are radically better. GMO fruits and vegetables that have longer shelf lives alone have vastly improved the health of people across the region. That longer shelf life doesn't just mean a corporate mega supermarket chain can buy more yachts because they reduced losses to waste and increased sales. Those increased sales also mean that lowered prices and greater geographic availability of fresh fruit and vegetables improved the diets of consumers. Even as a kid in central Canada fresh fruits and berries were very limited, but today it's taken as a matter of course you can go out and buy fresh anything in the dead of winter if you're willing to brave the 10foot snow banks between you and the store.
Sorry, all the fears and studies about potential small scale impacts of GMO crops is dwarfed by the current good of the dietary improvements that GMO has brought.
I'm amazed how much objection genetically modified foods are receiving from the public. It smacks of a fear factor that exists in any new science where people don't fully understand it and there for reject it. What most people don't know, and probably should is that practically every food you buy in a store for consumption is genetically modified food. There are no wild seedless watermelon. There are no wild cows. There are no long stem roses in the wild. List all the fruits and vegetables and ask yourself is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the meats and all the foods we eat since we cultivated them. It's called artificial selection. Now that we can do it in a lab, all of a sudden you wanna complain? You like red delicious apples? We manufactured those, it's a genetic modification. The silkworm as we cultivate it has no wild counterpart because it would die in the wild. So no silk even anymore. We are creating and modifying the biology of the world to serve our needs, and I don't have a problem with that because we've been doing it for tens of thousands of years. So chill out,
Oh, before I offend you too much, that wasn't my own statement, but Neil deGrasse Tyson. A fairly widely well thought of spokesman for science within the scientific community.
I'm amazed how much objection genetically modified foods are receiving from the public. It smacks of a fear factor that exists in any new science where people don't fully understand it and there for reject it. What most people don't know, and probably should is that practically every food you buy in a store for consumption is genetically modified food. There are no wild seedless watermelon. There are no wild cows. There are no long stem roses in the wild. List all the fruits and vegetables and ask yourself is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the meats and all the foods we eat since we cultivated them. It's called artificial selection. Now that we can do it in a lab, all of a sudden you wanna complain? You like red delicious apples? We manufactured those, it's a genetic modification. The silkworm as we cultivate it has no wild counterpart because it would die in the wild. So no silk even anymore. We are creating and modifying the biology of the world to serve our needs, and I don't have a problem with that because we've been doing it for tens of thousands of years. So chill out,
Oh, before I offend you too much, that wasn't my own statement, but Neil deGrasse Tyson. A fairly widely well thought of spokesman for science within the scientific community.
In Afghanistan the Taliban are very hard on women but on the other hand in Iraq under Saddam Hussein the women were some of the most liberated in the Middle East, but much less so now under the current government.
That's some mighty narrow vision. Women's rights were marginally better under Saddam than the rest of the middle east... Saddam also committed two genocides against his own people with estimates of 2-300 thousand killed in each of them. He also initiated the Iran-Iraq war which killed over a million and extensively used chemical weapons in it, as well as in his genocide of the Kurds.
So, aside from the concentration camps, collective punishment, genocides and love for chemical weapons, Saddam was also a liberator of women...
The nuclear weapons were also never found as Iraq never had the capability.
Correction, it wasn't found because the program was destroyed during and after the first gulf war and by a unilateral bombing run from Israel earlier.
The claim by the Bush administration was that they were manufacturing more and newer chemical ones. This was never substantiated.
But that presumes the burden of proof was on Bush. Saddam was proven to have chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in the first gulf war. One of the most important conditions for allowing Saddam to remain in power and for the end of first gulf war short of his removal was the admittance and allowing of international inspectors to verify the termination of those programs. More than a decade later Saddam was still blocking inspectors. The fact was inspections had failed to confirm Saddam's compliance with ending his WMD programs. So much so that many of the inspectors, Like Scott Ritter objected to the war on the grounds that chemical weapons would be likely be deployed against allied forces. That of course didn't stop Ritter from being a cheer leader in chorus afterwards pointing out the failure to find WMDs...
I can't but shake my head at all the environmentally concerned people opposing fracking. More specifically, the ones vehemently insisting we be more considerate of the living conditions we are creating for people down the road. It strikes me as a very bad form of tunnel vision.
Fracking the oil from the American midwest makes America energy independent. Let me repeat that another way. Fracking the midwest oil means America doesn't need Middle Eastern oil.
IMHO, that ends the discussion and debate. I'm not dismissing concerns over how 'dirty' recovery of midwest oil is, I'm just of the opinion that the alternative Middle Eastern oil is even dirtier on account of all the blood spilled over it.
US doctrine on the intentional use of biological weapons of mass distruction is to respond with the only WMDs in our arsenal - that is Thermonuclear Devices. Anyone deploying such a biological would presumably kill a similarly large number of Russian, Chinese, Indian and Western European citizens, and all those governments have roughly similar doctrines, (except for the story I can't confirm that a Soviet era ambassador once claimed to his Chinese counterpart that official doctrine of the USSR was to make any language group or religion that released such a bio-weapon literally extinct, down to bayonetting individual 1 year olds). The US cold war era Project Pluto was only seriously considered as a response to some projected Bio-weapons and not just nukes, Israel was rumored to have developed cobalt jackets for a few of its warheads in response to rumors of Iranian bio-labs (although that rumor may just be something started by a Tom Clancy novel). Presumably anyone funding ISIL (or whatever they are calling themselves this week), does not want to risk every nuclear armed state in the entire world going literally ballistic.
One point in all this that few get. The researchers and theoreticians discussing a weaponized version of Ebola or Smallpox were postulating an airborne hardened virus with such lethality that they could stop saying Megadeaths and start using the Giga- prefix. Current research shows pretty clearly that such a weapon is very unlikely. Ebola isn't the type of virus that's close enough to airborne to make the jump, and getting a smallpox variant that overcomes the existing vaccinated population's resistances seems equally a very hard problem. I doubt such an attack as you're suggesting would kill more than, say 300 million, world wide, tops. Maybe the various nuclear armed nations wouldn't go to a nuclear response, or even conventional full scale war (yeah, right!) It's not like the US got all stirred up about the "mere" 2,996 casualties of 9/11, right? The only real risk of ISIL (or whatever) doing anything this totally insane is if they somehow believe the great powers would all limit themselves to careful, deliberate, reasoned responses in the face of an indescriminately inflicted act of total barbarity that killed the elderly and young disproportionately and destroyed the world's economies and afflicted every nation of that world regardless of whether they were on ISIL's enemies list or not. My own bet is the UN resolution would pass unanimously among all members not implicated, and start with "Purge the sub-human scum with cleansing nuclear fire, unto their last generation", and go to STRONG language from there. The NATO powers would jump the gun before the resolution was finalized, only to find out that Israel had already launched against everybody else in the Middle East, India had already moved against Pakistan, and the Russians had already gone to war against every adjacent "stan" they suspected of harboring ISIL sympathizers. (And the Republican party would blame all of this on Obama).
You assume that ISIL is a rational entity that doesn't believe that Allah would protect them and grant them victory in their jihad... Religious fanatics are exactly the crowd that would try and pull something like that off, because they either do not care if they would be exterminated as a result, or because their irrational beliefs honestly believe they will be protected from or win some manner of armageddon war. In fact, Armageddon is exactly the goal of all manner of religious fanatics. It's the very reason their extermination and marginalization is important to those of us who prefer life to death.
I'm pretty sure it was you that diverged from reality... The earth is getting warmer dude... The data is easy to see. It's really easy to see. You can look up satellite pics of ice coverage. A simple Wolfram Alpha search will tell you global mean temperatures, and show you the data sources so you can investigate them better.
How do you people keep insisting nothing is going on? The excuses keep changing. "It's not warming. Ok, it is, but it's solar! Ok, it's not solar, but it's not man made.... It's natural cycles! Ok, it's it's moving too fast for natural cycles, but it paused for the last few years! It's warmer, but it stopped, so it's not warming! Ok, so yeah, Arctic sea ice is dwindling, but antarctic is growing! Ok, sure, arctic is sea ice and antarctic is land ice, but.... It's scientists, just making a grab for lucrative grab for government money! Ok, so that money is shit and it's pretty obvious all the real money is in private industry, but..."
On and on you people go, changing your story. Diverging from reality, if you will.....
furthermore, it's quite obvious that several industries just don't want a drop in profits that would come with regulation. It's quite obvious they've spent a TON of money to muddy the conversation. My question is, in 30 years when we can look back on this, will you !@#$holes fess up that you were wrong the whole time? Will you admit that you all were duped and spent decades ignoring your betters? Will you finally shut up?
Don't worry, I know the answer....
I'd like the alarmists to step first and admit their error. If you look at the First Assessment Report from the IPCC in the early 90's their projections grossly overestimated temperature and sea level rise over the ~25 years through to today. Far from any admission of overstating the danger, here are guys like you doubling down on how foolish everyone else will look in another 30 years. I don't need to guess if you'll finally shut up then, the experiment was run already and the answer is nope.
Fact: Things are getting warmer.
Fact: CO2 emissions contribute to warming.
Fact: Humans are emitting CO2.
Uncertain: What degree of impact will those human CO2 emissions have on global temperatures over the next 30 or 100 years.
Don't go advocating catastrophic changes when not all the facts for that particular position are settled, you look foolish.
Your facts are not what you claim.
Here's the projections from the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1991. You''ll find projections of future warming based on CO2 emissions remaining at 1990 levels by the best models suggested today would be warmer globally by 0.5C. More over, the scenarios with increased CO2 emissions that more closer match whats actually happened that predicted warming of over 0.5C by today. Actual measured warming though is sitting at about 0.2C warmer than 1990.
Verifying against historical and past temperatures is good, but it leaves room for bias in your corrections if you have a lot of variables and just end up matching them to the mere 100 years of instrumental record we have. Predicting future temperature trends though, hasn't been as conclusive and solid as you suggest.
Oh, the IPCC report also projected nearly a 10cm rise in sea level from 1990 to today, in reality the measured amount is less than half that.
Don't blame me, I voted for for Kodos.
IMO, neither party cares about public opinion on net neutrality and if you want your voting day activity to matter show up and vote for none of the above by spoiling your ballet. If you can get even 20-30% of the vote to show up as spoiled ballets then politicians selfish interests require them to take notice and try harder again to care what the public thinks in order to gain those extra votes to increase their power base.
What if it's on topic? Say, I dunno, when discussing climate change and citing a celebrity that won a noble prize for their related work?
I'll whole heartedly agree if you want to lay the failing at the feet of ever giving Gore the time of day in scientific circles, let alone a Noble prize. You'll have to forgive people for continually bringing Gore's statements on the matter forward though. His videos are showing up in schools to 'teach' kids about the important scientific research on climate change. My kids came home having watched before they were in grade 5. When the indoctrination is pushed that far out, people are NOT remiss to start pushing back.
IMO it's not much different than the situation with Islamic Jihadists and moderate Muslims. The fact some might claim common cause with a larger group doesn't make it so, but some denouncement from the greater community starts to become of importance. Regrettably, there has been little to no efforts made from the scientific community to distance itself from Gore's extreme proclamations and warnings. Yes, I know scientists don't appreciate having to come out of their research labs where they are doing actual real work to do stuff like that, but it's important. It's all the more important the more impact you believe your research has to society as a whole.
There is no hiatus, but a slowing down of warming. The warming is still happening, but at a slightly slower rate than predicted. So yeah, it's deniers who point out the hiatus, as it doesn't exist.
So deniers like the authors and editors of peer reviewed journals like The National Academy of Sciences and Geophysical Research Letters and Nature. Nature in particular publishing an article with the 'denier' skewed title of "Strengthening of ocean heat uptake efficiency associated with the recent climate hiatus".
Nothing burns me more than somebody faking as though they are all for the scientific process and defending it's 'findings' while at the same time totally ignoring the actual science. The reality as pointed out in the 3 linked articles, and many, many, many more is that since 1998 the rate of warming has dropped off heavily enough it no longer matches most predictions or modelling very well. Something in the predictions and modelling was missed that is happening in the real world, and has caused an apparent 'hiatus' in the rate of warming that was expected. Tracking, identifying and understanding that is important science, and thankfully they haven't stopped to listen to people like you who would prefer to deny that reality.
In the case of AGW those scales are a) global, and b) range from a couple centuries, to several My depending on which line of evidence you're looking at.
It was unusually cold in New England this winter. That's weather. But overall, this winter was still one of the 5 warmest on record. That's climate.
Which is the source of a huge part of my skepticism regarding the severity of the 'problem'.
1. Our climate is warming, period. We have almost 125 years of instrumental data to prove it. The but is that, 125 years is not enough data points for phenomena that as you pointed out span centuries and even millenia.
2. CO2 is a GHG and contributes to warming, and we are dumping significant quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. What severity of impact is that causing though? We have just barely been dumping that CO2 for a century, and our best data points don't give us much reference of the 'before' trend.
What pushes me past skepticism though and into outright rejection is graphs like the IPCC published Mann et el graph showing temperature over the last 2k or more years. The work and principle of looking at older proxy records to get a longer reference of climate is vitally important, and a way to extend what we know and can use to improve prediction. The principal is good. The published articles are pure hack jobs though. Data points projected by proxy prior to 1900 are posted and attached to current instrumental records and show an alarming and sudden upward trend in temperature starting at 1900. Now, any sane, skeptical mind would point out the change in data sources as the first and most important cause. Instead, Mann et al claimed a eureka moment, as human CO2 emissions also roughly coincide with that time, so clearly human activity is the cause.
That isn't just bad science, IMO it is deliberately and intentionally bad science. The fact is further proven and demonstrated if you take Mann's oldest and original graphs and just map out what 2014 and 2020 aught to look like if his observed 'trend' is real.
I like to class myself in the rational crowd, and I think a major blind spot between sides is regarding the degree of warming. The following are further facts I think we can agree must be recognized if someone wants to be taken seriously:
1. The instrumental record over the last 125 years clearly shows things are warming.
2. CO2 in the atmosphere acts as a GHG and causes warming.
3. Human activity is dumping sizable quantities of CO2 into the environment and measurable amounts are accumulating in the atmosphere.
These are all well documented, measured and verifiable facts, not part of any honest debate.
That said, I STILL count myself a skeptic of the 'degree' or 'rate' of warming that we should be anticipating over the next decades. Having all the hottest years on record occurring in the last decade or two doesn't alarm me over much. We only have 100 some years of data, and the trend in it is a relatively linear warming from start to finish.
The point of contention is the question of whether or not we are facing 'catastrophic' change or not. Plenty of reconstructions and climate models argue for exponential warming. Such predictions go back to the very first IPCC report, which current global average temps are nearly cooler than the coolest error bars of predictions from back then. More recent estimates start the 'curve' later and later which has served to keep predictions consistent with measured reality. Despite this though, the best models all still DO recognize the absence of accelerated warming in recent years as a problem. They didn't predict it.
If anyone is still reading and thinks I'm missing important reasons to still anticipate catastrophic results, please let me know, but in all my searching of journals and actual, honest research I am just NOT finding any strong evidence or suggestion that it's time to 'panic'.
It's not 'deniers' pointing out the hiatus, but actual peer reviewed scientists. They point out that the hiatus DOES matter because it's getting close to falling outside the error bars that were meant to take into account the 'statistical noise' you want to claim as excuse for inaccuracy. Surely you realize the stupidity in claiming, essentially, conflicting data doesn't contradict method X, after all, the data the method was based on is far too noisy to expect good results. Seems like your admitting to knowing too little, which is presumably what you mean to be arguing against,
Current estimates are that we are dumping 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year, for a total of about 550 billion tons since 1870.
If we are just going to through out facts devoid of context, the IPCC fourth assessment pegs annual NATURAL CO2 emissions at 430 billion tonnes. Or worked backwards to 1870, about 62 trillion tonnes.
a) What hiatus? The hiatus only appears when you use incomplete data. citation [slate.com]
It's cute using something like Slate as a citation to demonstrate the state of scientific research. Regrettably for your argument, actual scientific journal articles like these ones in Nature, IOPScience and Science all contradict your statement. These articles all note "Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century" with multiple citations to yet other scientific journal articles that demonstrated this.
... and that's assuming any positive feedback loops don't override it (look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).
And that's assuming any negative feedback loops don't override it (look at the Iris hypothesis for an example of what could happen).
The global mean temperature trend for the last decade has fallen outside the error bars of the climate model projections gathered by the first IPCC assessment. Go ahead and deny that all you like, but the actual scientists are looking at the why and trying to sort out what they got wrong, in articles like those I've linked above.
No model, in any branch of science or engineering, is complete and perfect; that doesn't mean they're useless [arstechnica.com].
Agreed, but how good are the climate models is a very important question. Plenty of people are pushing very, very hard for sweeping large scale economic and political level reforms based on the results of these models. Global CO2 emissions are tightly locked to economic development, particularly in developing nations like China, and significantly cutting those means significant economic fallout.
Look at the IPCC assessments and you can see what their current assessment of climate model reliability is. They rank it to be quite high. At the exact same time, they also note that climate models are NOT well agreed on what SIGN to place on the impact of cloud feedback. Apologies if it makes me sound like I'm cherry picking my data. Clouds contribute significantly more to the greenhouse effect than CO2, and models are uncertain what SIGN to place on clouds? I DO NOT believe the certainty the models can give on CO2 impact is all that powerful while there remains disagreement on the sign to attribute to clouds. Most importantly to all of us stuck on this rock, it certainly seems insufficient to advocate massive global political and economic reforms.
Well, save for the collapse of the world's ice sheets by 2100. You know, the most shocking and pinnacle of Gore's movie... But other than the parts he exaggerated, he was in keeping with the IPCC. Just like George W. Bush was a genius except for the times that he wasn't...
science will be used in politics. you need to make peace with that. this notion you have that it somehow shouldn't may be a nice platitude, but that wish of yours will never be reality
given that i accept that ugly truth, my point of view is the correct one: policy derived from science, no matter the flaws, is superior to policy derived in opposition to science
now you can continue to wish for the impossibility of science not intersecting with politics. or you can accept that it will, and make a choice as to which policy you support. you don't have the luxury of not choosing, unless you wish to choose to be irrelevant in the discussion
Policy derived from science is superior to policy derived from opposition to science.
Agreed.
You are just restating our differences. I'm trying to tell you, the policy Al Gore is pushing for is NOT derived from science, but is in fact derived in it's absence.