Until recently, the fight over Roundup has mostly focused on its active ingredient, glyphosate. But mounting evidence, including one study published in February, shows it’s not only glyphosate that’s dangerous, but also chemicals listed as “inert ingredients” in some formulations of Roundup and other glyphosate-based weed killers. Though they have been in herbicides — and our environment — for decades, these chemicals have evaded scientific scrutiny and regulation in large part because the companies that make and use them have concealed their identity as trade secrets.
Remember the infamous interview where the Monsanto lobbyist, Patrick Moore, claimed that Roundup was safe to drink but then refused to actually drink any? May be he knew about this. And no your argument about coal doesn't hold water here. There's really no point to claiming that something's safe because other things are more dangerous. In addition, Roundup is far more dangerous than radioactivity from coal. Then the point about Roundup users tasting it? You don't think that they may inhale it while spraying it from backpacks, tractors, and mobile spray tanks, do you?
Let's start with you suggesting an alternative. Of all the chemicals farmers use to control weeds on their farms, round-up is far and away the safest. If you are truly concerned for the farmers out there applying it, what is their alternative? They either don't spray anything to control weeds, or they use MORE dangerous chemicals than round-up.
Let's also have some perspective on 'danger' here. I'm having trouble pulling up the human LD50 for round-up. That's likely because they lack test cases of anybody actually dying that way to reference. Regardless, let's list the ld50 for round up and some other substances, shall we? LD50 in rats: Aspirin 200mg/kg Vitamin A 2000mg/kg Table Salt 3000mg/kg Round-up 5000mg/kg Alcohol 7060mg/kg Sugar 30,000mg/kg
So when sampling Aspirin, Salt,Vitamin A, Alcohol, Sugar and Round-up, only TWO of those substances are less toxic than round-up. Maybe a little less fear and uncertainty is warranted. Particularly given that nobody is advocating incorporating glyphosate into our diets. We are talking about glyphosate being used to control weeds in crops, and in such a way that the amount that ever traces it's way off the farm is minuscule.
Taking a case of 'extreme' glyophsate concentrations from the first alarmist source I could find cited 9mg/kg of glyphosate in Norwegian Soy GE crops. Takign the average daily food intake for people at 2kg and assuming we force feed a subject exclusively this 'extreme' contaminated soy bean, we get a daily intake of 18mg of glyphosate. Now, that's an utterly extreme case, and not realistic, but let's examine that worst of worst cases closer. The average human weighs in at 80kg and it's inexact, but the best we've got to say the LD50 is like rats at 5000mg/kg, meaning that a lethal dose for our average subject is 400,000mg. Working out the math our extremely contaminated GE soybeans are inflicting 0.000045% of a lethal dose.
Let's give more reference, the average daily salt intake for our regular joe we just victimized is 3400mg. Again weighing in at 80kg and with a LD50 for salt at 3000mg/kg we have a lethal dose of salt weighing 240,000mg. Doing the math again, our victim regularly consumes 0.014% of a lethal dose of salt daily all by themselves.
The difference between medicine and poison is dosage, and in the case of gylphosate our food is nowhere near the dangerous stage all the fear mongers want to promote.
Fuck off, there is always a reason for population movements.
And yet somehow the correlation between massive crop failure due to drought leading to starvation somehow correlates strongly to dictatorships.
Like it did for Stalin. Like it did for Mao. Like it did for Kim.
Maybe the causation goes the other way and having a dictator crushing all independence that leads to a failed ability to properly plan and run agriculture and be prepared for droughts too. You know, on account of most of the time droughts don't impact the dictator anymore than losing some peasants, and if the peasants get unruly, losing some soldiers that are needed to kill of the unruly peasants.
Actually the Syria situation was initiated by an unprecedented multi-year drought. This depopulated hundreds of rural villages, which destabilized the regime. The Assads have been ruthlessly crushing Islamist uprisings for generations, but this time the cities were flooded with hungry, angry, unemployed young men. The spark for ISIS was always there, but climate refugees gave it the fuel it needed to become unquenchable.
No.
The protests in Syria, the rebellion, the rise of ISIS and everything else facing the Syrian people had NOTHING to do with 'climate'.
Let's start off with the reason for people to be angry and desperate, and that is squarely the brutal repression of the Assad family dictatorship.
Next up, what went wrong with the standard operating procedure of the Assad family of simply killing everyone involved with and related to the protests? For starters, Assad initially met the peaceful protesters with half-measures and merely used snipers to kill off some of the protesters. It would seem he estimated that would drive them off and be the end of it. He miscalculated.
Now, normally that was a mistake he could've corrected by coming in late and still killing all the protesters and their friends and relatives. The trouble for him was that Saddam no longer ruled Iraq and the Iraq/Syria border was now freely navigable instead of a quick trip from one concentration camp to another. Additionally, let's not forget the enormous wealth of resources Saudi Arabia was spending on beefing up the insurgency in Syria because they don't much like Iran's allies. With Saudi funded insurgents pouring in from the Iraq border Assad missed his window to just kill everyone and lost control of things.
Granted, the weather was a bit dry too. I think it is on the side of malicious though to twist every tragedy to boost your own personal agenda. So if you don't mind, stop it.
Stop using thousands of dead Syrians as props to promote the climate alarmism you desire. Stop abdicating the collective guilt of the monsters in Assad's regime and the ISIS insurgents.
The only solution to this micro-aggression by white cis-males is clearly to demand that media reviews have a stricter voter selection criteria. If a movie wasn't made for your gender, race, religion or orientation you have no business reviewing it.
You know, when you follow the article's logic out fully, it sounds kinda insane...
You know, the entire Gamergate movement was predicated on the notion that feminists had no business reviewing games that were geared towards men. "Let them make their own games" was the rallying cry.
The whole gamergate thing was predicated on an effort to stop the production of 'male oriented' games. Nobody really cares if reviews are poorly done, that's not exactly gonna be a new thing for entertainment media. The special affront for gamergate was nothing about reviews as you and the article claim, but instead about SJW's trying to dictate what kind of games should be made.
You just have to look at the outpouring of rage from whiny-ass MRA manbabies regarding the re-boot of Ghostbusters with an all-female cast to see how this mechanism plays out. If it's targeted at men, then men believe they should be the ones to review. If it's targeted at women, then men believe they should be the ones the review. And god forbid a woman should offer an opinion because, "IT'S NOT MEANT FOR YOU". Hell, these embarrassing needledicks have been overwhelming the reviews of Ghostbuster and it hasn't even come out yet.
Fuck these losers. If they got out and met a few human girls in person, they might not be so skeevy that they have time to carpet bomb any show or movie that has women in it. Remember the outrage over the latest Star Wars? How the MRAs were going to boycott? They degrade all of masculinity with their incessant whining.
Sob, sob, other people have different opinions of games and movies than I do and they are expressing those opinions. Stop caring about what other people think and just watch what you enjoy, problem solved. You don't need to go enforcing things on others to get over this first world problem.
I am not going to read through 150 cases because _you_ are lazy and want to claim a single generalization fits for all 150 cases. You know of one case, and are so content in your delusion that you refuse to do the work. Sucks to be you.
Wrong, I've gone through dozens of them, and never found any that match the claims made by clowns like you. If you wanna convince me otherwise provide one piece of evidence. You guys never have to I'm getting more confident there isn't any and I've got an accurate assessment of this,
Thanks for the attention, I hope your masters pay you well for being a liar.
For the innocent bystander, this is more propaganda. Law suits about "stealing seed" relate to what farmers call "bleed" where plants grow on areas of land which are not farmed and not maintained. At least one of those cases was brought about by the farmer suing Monsanto because their seed started creeping into their land, and Monsanto successfully sued them for patent infringement in retaliation.
There is a very well known revolving door between the highest Federal offices and Big Business, Agriculture is a part of this cronyism.
When businesses behave altruistically they can be treated as such, and I would defend them and their altruism. They don't, so I don't.
Give me a single solitary example and I'll admit I'm wrong.
Percy Schmeiser is the most commonly cited example. He admitted in court he took his own seeded Canola that bordered his neighbours's Monsanto round-up ready crop. He then sprayed his own seed crop with round up, and then took the few surviving plants and used this to grow his own Monsanto seed. That's not 'bleed' over, it's a concerted effort to acquire Monsanto's seed.
BTW, here's an example of what often happens when someone does actually publish evidence against Monsanto's interests: http://www.nature.com/news/wid...
You are seeing objections to the claims of round up causing cancer because it's false. The studies showing cancer in mice and rats was when exposing them round up used high doses. In practice, that means that eating round-up is probably carcinogenic, as reported. The trick is, in ag practice, people don't taste test chemical before putting them in a sprayer. After spraying round-up on a crop, it breaks down within days. By the time any crop hits the market, it's nearly impossible to find any trace of it, and that's looking at ppb. The cancer in rats quantity was many, many times higher. For reference, we might wanna measure radioactive isotopes on produce near coal plants too, it's probably at equally worrying levels as round up. That's proper scope of the 'problem'.
Such a small fragment of truth you should have at least tried to verity. From a quick Google search the number is more than 140 lawsuits filed by one company (Monsanto) against farmers. This does not include any of the other companies performing genetic modification or licensed by Monsanto to use their seeds and their lawsuits.
The fragment of truth is that one lawsuit made it to the Supreme Court who upheld Monsanto's rights to sue.
The second tiny fragment of truth is that one patent expired. There are hundreds of thousands of seeds on patent.
All that said, when Monsanto goes after a specific farmer even if the patent is expired the claim generally puts farmers out of business.
The problem is not GMO as much as shit business practices who ensure that consumers get fucked because competition does not exist. A pox on all the people modding down anything that can possibly be perceived as anti-GMO.
Have you looked at the suits? The only guys Monsanto has brought cases against are those that were using Monsanto seeds without buying them from Monsanto. The very simple problem farmers face is choosing to buy seeds from Monsanto and using Monsanto seeds, or to not use Monsanto seeds. In both those cases, Monsanto is never gonna darken their door with any legal action. The only time Monsanto comes after farmers is when they attempt to use Monstanto seed without buying it from Monsanto.
You're free to disagree with Monstanto's right to do that if you wish, but don't misrepresent the situation by projecting your own biases, Farmers are making their own choices and if they aren't make the choice you think is the right one it's really none of your business.
Australia briefly introduced a carbon tax, some of which went to the poor and elderly whose portion of daily living costs towards energy was so significant that their quality of live would be significantly effected. Carbon emissions went down and the economy was stimulated by R&D in high-tech renewable energy - solar, wind, nuclear, etc.
The situation, of course, did not last long. Rupert Murdoch and his friends went hard against it in the media. When laws forced them to provide balanced points of view, social engineering was used - flooding the comments section with "anonymous" contrarian opinions and "misinformed" data. They got their preferred oil-interest backed party back into power, who, it seems, successfully argued that wind-mills are utterly offensive while coal is as good for humanity today, as it was at the start of the industrial revolution.
Carbon taxes are similar to other 'sin' taxes on things like tobacco and alcohol. The major difference being that EVERYBODY gets hit by a carbon tax. Everything from the cost of shipping food to your grocery store, to the cost of getting yourself to the store and back again to the cost of keeping your lights on and house cool/warm.
Sure, increasing the cost on something will lower usage. Let's also be honest though, governments around the world have almost zero interest in the curbing of emissions. The carrot for them is another means of taxing their people which means another level of wealth redistribution that they control and it's that control which has everyone lining up to support this 'solution'.
I have now read the entire paper. It is true that it does not ever directly attribute the sea level rise in the Solomon Islands to AGW. (The linked ABC news article does though - surely the scientists will be publicly denouncing the media's gross distortion of their claims any minute now... ?)
On the other hand, the premise of the paper is that sea level rise is responsible for significant loss of land area in the Solomon Islands (and the authors worked very hard to connect sea level rise to AGW at every opportunity, even though they didn't quite come out and say that AGW has actually caused any sea level rise yet).
That's a problem, because nowhere in their paper (that I could find, anyway) do they actually offer any evidence that the local sea level rise experienced by the Solomon Islands contributed meaningfully to the loss. They point out several other factors that likely dominated, one of which was erosion by wave action. They then attempt to connect this back to AGW with the following statement:
Wave energy can interact synergistically with localised sea-level rise (through changing wave refraction dynamics and more wave energy propagating across reef crest onto the coast) to exacerbate coastal erosion (Storlazzi et al 2015) and thus may be a key driver of the rapid coastal recession in the Solomon Islands. Further work is required to determine the relative importance of extreme wave events or incremental changes in incident wave energy and their interactions with sea-level on shoreline dynamics of islands.
Notice the operative words there: "can", "may be", and "further work is required". They don't actually have anything to say on the subject - that is, on the causal connection between sea level rise and increased wave erosion - other than "maybe you should read these other guys' papers" and "give us money and we'll write something too". But, they decided to name their paper after it anyway, and the media ran with it.
The main actual content of the study - once all of the background material and discussion is filtered out - is basically just:
1) Some statistics about the rates of erosion and accretion on various islands in the Central Pacific, including the Solomon Islands.
2) More statistics about the atmospheric and oceanic conditions over time around those islands - much of which was extrapolated, not measured.
3) A few anecdotes about communities that need to relocate - all of whom, from the sound of it, were in poor locations to begin with.
As someone else pointed out, the last graph clearly shows (if you know how to read the axes, anyway), that there was a net increase in land area for the islands chains studied; the authors simply chose to focus upon a specific few tiny islands that shrank.
That's how grant applications work these days. Mentioning a connection to AGW means more publicity and more potential grants and other research funds. Academia has been biased for a long time towards whatever topics will garner research grant dollars. That's not saying academics are selling out and falsifying their research, but that they have been pushed towards selecting paper topics that will get grant money which often does mean stretching to connect research with popular topics like AGW.
'safety concerns' is one word for completely unfounded and irrational fear mongering. If politicians play to those baseless fears that can translate into a real cost though. It'd be a shame to see France dragged down by the same luddites that have held the American power infrastructure back in the seventies.
Hold on there buddy. You claimed nuclear power was the most expensive form of generation. You where informed the only reason for that was ridiculous regulatory expenses, and in other places it was very profitable. You basically said only dictators can pull that off and only for a limited time. I pointed out that Électricité de France is providing most of Europe with power primarily from nuclear plants and making a pretty penny while doing so.
France has been producing power with nukes since the 70s and sits with one of the lowest electricity rates in Europe. The fact that fear mongers like yourself have some traction in trying to get nukes shutdown does nothing to prove they aren't safe and profitable.
Do you have turrets? Are we at the point of spouting random gibberish at each other now?
A nuclear plant that was cleanly operated for more than 3 decades before being shut down because fear monger regulation had made profitability impossible hardly shows a wilful malice on the part of the operating company. Go be crazy and incoherent some place else.
And you'd be wrong. It is Entergy we are talking about here.
Right, because potentially losing a reactor to a known issue is only a legal concern for them, not the cost of repairs to the reactor. Even a purely selfish, greedy and evil minded corporation cares about keeping a multi-million dollar reactor from failing and costing them more money than the repairs they know it requires to stay functioning. Your argument only holds if Entergy would gladly LOSE money just to put their reactor and possibly people working on site at risk.
Read your own posts. The shut down for refuelling and regular maintenance was performed at the scheduled time. The Environmental unit AG of NY had been hounding on MANY different additional inspections they wanted. None of those cases had yet come into effect. As per your own article, both the shut down and the inspection of the bolts were voluntarily undertaken by Entergy. You might choose to believe, as the AG and the article claim that it was the legal hounding that encouraged this inspection. I would posit instead that the fact that similar wear and damage to bolts had been a known and observed issue in similar nuclear plants already might have motivated Entergy more strongly...
Nope, the AG forced them into it, and the reactor is still closed.
Maybe you should read my link to the NRC report, or any number of other newspaper articles leading up to then. It was a scheduled shutdown for refuelling and maintenance. I guess it was the AG that determined the refuelling schedule or something?
It was shutdown in March 2016 to dump in something like $60 million worth of inspections and maintenance. I don't quite think the plan was to have that all completed and spun back up already. I'd have thought the anti-nuke guys would be more angry if the company DID have the reactor up in less than month or two for something like that.
It's still more expensive, it is just that command economies can ignore market realities for a while until they topple.
Électricité de France runs a profit line of a couple billion dollars providing over 120GW of power to Europe, and 85% of that is through nuclear power.
Take your FUD and lies elsewhere. Nukes are very profitable anywhere the NIMBY hippies don't try and destroy it out of ignorance and fear.
Much like Vermont Yankee, Entergy is running Indian Point into the ground. The AG also forced new safety inspections an those showed Entergy had let a known problem slide past any other reactor known to date. http://www.lohud.com/story/new...
Who upvotes this FUD?
The very article linked above references the actual report from the NRC. Far from letting a known problem slide past any known to date, NRC article notes that the Indian Point reactor in question was shutdown for routine maintenance. A new check of bolts that had been known to wear from experience revealed that a great many of them needed replacement, so they were replaced before the reactor was brought back online.
The other way to spin the NRC report is that routine and standard maintenance procedures at Indian Point have allowed it to continue it's operating record of zero work place fatalities, zero emissions and zero radiation escaping the plant. How many coal plants can claim ANY of those points let alone all of them?
Seriously, the anti-nuclear crowd is leaping on standard maintenance as proof of 'problems' looks an awful lot like those declaring even more missing links in evolution every time a new link is posted.
I think the better term for this is Mercantilism, which is pretty much what Adam Smith argued against in The Wealth of Nations. The government makes laws & regulations which appear to be for the purpose of protecting consumers, but actually make it more difficult for other actors to enter the market, thereby reducing freedom of economic choices.
The problem is a lot worse than simply government corruption in support of the corporate status quo. Look to the minimum wage laws put in place by governments in LA, San Fran, Chicago and San Jose. The unions(nominally the little guy) lobbied hard to raise minimum wage and the government listened. The unions then lobbied hard to make exceptions to the minimum wage for union employees. So now the unions are nominally the ones lobbying hard to see their own people paid less than minimum wage. Why do that? It means more unionized work places because businesses will now get to lower wages by going through the union.
The overall problem is that all the rights we fight to gain for workers don't just help workers, they can also hinder employers. All too often, the smallest employers are hit the hardest by this too, meaning it makes it harder to start your own business and get out of the worker pool.
Since when was it possible for 156 million mostly penniless people to move elsewhere?
Right, the most important thing those penniless people need is a carbon tax making the basic necessities they can already barely afford more expensive. As an added bonus, the corrupt and oppressive government helping hold them back gains even more control over them too through the extra revenues.
The fastest way to bring millions out of poverty is cheap energy through things like coal and oil. Increasing their ag production and ability to feed themselves for less money requires cheap fertilizers. This all amounts to more CO2 being dumped out, and yes, it contributes to a future for them with more flooding. I think it's a bit presumptuous to assume they all want to choose cutting emissions versus getting out of poverty,
Since when was the sea level predicted to rise so fast people would drown from it?
Sea levels rise, storm floods now start flooding areas that were previously farther from the coast and relatively safe, people cannot afford to just abandon their property and buy new land and build a new hose/farm in a safer place elsewhere because they are so poor they can hardly afford food, the government is to corrupt/apathetic/incompetent or just plain too poor to build flood defences which in many cases may even be a futile effort... result? Lots of people drown in storm floods in places like Bangladesh.
Let me rank the problems facing these people you are so worried about by some manner of importance to the quality of their lives: 1.So poor they can hardly afford food 2.Corrupt/incompetent government 3.today's storms and floods 4.The increased severity and spread of floods after decades of warming
If we are going to propose the solution to these people's problems is cutting CO2 emissions sufficiently to stave off problem number 4, don't ignore problems 1 through 3. Cheap power for their homes via coal and cheap fertilizer and gasoline for agriculture are what they need to afford food and get past their poverty. Placing a carbon tax on those commodities makes food and basic living more expensive for those poor people that can already barely afford food. Worse yet, that carbon tax is being collected and returned to the hands of the corrupt government that's also causing them problems, strengthening it's control over those people.
When we propose solutions to global problems like climate change, we've absolutely got to keep a global focus on what things like a carbon tax mean to different peoples of the world. There is a whole lot more to the challenges in people's lives than sea level and temperature.
I get that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it seems like nearly all of the "society ought to do X" suggestions for combating climate change equate to "reduce CO2 emissions." However, CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas; methane is barely mentioned except in reference to livestock emissions, particularly from ruminants; and water vapor is practically ignored. Why isn't anyone suggesting interfering with the water cycle? Water vapor is a major greenhouse gas. Alternatively, since clouds cause global cooling, why not a plan to increase cloud formation? It's known that decreased albedo in the poles will lead to them getting warmer, why not a plan to artificially increase albedo? White paint or whatever. When it comes to "plans that require decades, cooperation between most of the world, and trillions of dollars", why are we so laser-focused on this one plan to decrease CO2 emissions?* It seems to me that big problems tend to be solved with dozens of smaller solutions, rather than one big "hurray, it worked!" solution; true, there are many ways of producing energy aside from burning carbonaceous materials, but as I've mentioned above that's just attacking the issue from one angle.
*I imagine a big part of the reason is "don't spend $billions on that, spend $billions on this (which I have a stake in) instead." But that doesn't fully explain the issue either, I think the 'call to arms' to rally scientists to consensus has caused a little too much groupthink, and bluesky ideas which should be seriously considered are being dismissed out of hand.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons that CO2 is more important to climate change over time than your alternatives. Water vapor stays in the air a short time, so taking it out of the atmosphere costs a lot of energy forever on. Clouds performance for climate change is still very nuanced and our modelling on it still isn't even entirely in agreement on whether they are a net positive of negative feedback. Albedo changes are easy to go overboard on.
However, the truth is NOT that global leaders and policy advocates are looking at the nuances of science to come to any such rational decision on CO2 alone as a policy concern. The truth, IMO, is that the oil and coal industries are two of the largest pools of money in the global economy, and whomever gets to tax them stands to control mountains of money. The overwhelming emphasis on CO2 over mitigation or complementary methods for offsetting climate change is ultimately about control and the folks that hope to gain that control.
I can see your mistake. You are conflating cloud forcing with water vapour forcing.
That's true - my mistake. But in my defence, we were talking about climate forcing (the OP had asked what they should do in a number of hypothetical scenarios, one of which (3) was that CO2 was not climate forcing , which is the scenario and topic under discussion). I conflated water vapour with cloud behaviour becuase I assumed we were on topic.
I believe GP number 3 was what if recent warming was already baked into the system as natural change. I didn't read that as requiring a rejection of CO2 forcing, and in that scenario I'd call it the worst case in that we are already 1C above 1900 AND we've got a big forcing from CO2 yet to go on top of whatever else has been pushing things naturally.
In which case, can I ask what you think cloud parameterisation in GCM and ES models which are based upon the fact that CO2 is climate forcing has to do with the topic at hand?
The cloud parameters say everything about the state of our understanding. We can barely measure the energy in and out of the planet accurately enough to get the error bars smaller than the imbalance. Then when we go to model the system, we know the models run off to unrealistic energy states unless we tune poorly modelled factors like clouds by hand. CO2, clouds, water vapor and everything else in our dynamic climate system are driving the global energy imbalance. That energy imbalance in turn is the driving force of climate change. My point of emphasis is that the size of that energy imbalance is smaller than the contribution of systems we admit we don't understand properly. The range of unknowns that tune clouds between is greater than the energy imbalance. To be clear, we are right to be concerned about that energy imbalance, but we also need to acknowledge the importance of the things we don't know when stating our confidence about what is coming and the impact our actions will have on that.
Do you think that the complexity of modelling cloud behaviour somehow throws CO2 climate forcing into doubt (without reference to water vapour)?
Absolutely not. No amount of modelling can negate the fact that CO2 absorbs radiation. The complexity of modelling the climate(not just clouds) means that the unknowns in the system have a greater impact than the increased concentrations of CO2. I modestly want to suggest from that we should be cautious about overstating our confidence in future projections of impacts.
Slashdot Mirror
Until recently, the fight over Roundup has mostly focused on its active ingredient, glyphosate. But mounting evidence, including one study published in February, shows it’s not only glyphosate that’s dangerous, but also chemicals listed as “inert ingredients” in some formulations of Roundup and other glyphosate-based weed killers. Though they have been in herbicides — and our environment — for decades, these chemicals have evaded scientific scrutiny and regulation in large part because the companies that make and use them have concealed their identity as trade secrets.
Source: "New Evidence About the Dangers of Monsanto’s Roundup" https://theintercept.com/2016/...
Remember the infamous interview where the Monsanto lobbyist, Patrick Moore, claimed that Roundup was safe to drink but then refused to actually drink any? May be he knew about this. And no your argument about coal doesn't hold water here. There's really no point to claiming that something's safe because other things are more dangerous. In addition, Roundup is far more dangerous than radioactivity from coal. Then the point about Roundup users tasting it? You don't think that they may inhale it while spraying it from backpacks, tractors, and mobile spray tanks, do you?
Let's start with you suggesting an alternative. Of all the chemicals farmers use to control weeds on their farms, round-up is far and away the safest. If you are truly concerned for the farmers out there applying it, what is their alternative? They either don't spray anything to control weeds, or they use MORE dangerous chemicals than round-up.
Let's also have some perspective on 'danger' here. I'm having trouble pulling up the human LD50 for round-up. That's likely because they lack test cases of anybody actually dying that way to reference. Regardless, let's list the ld50 for round up and some other substances, shall we?
LD50 in rats:
Aspirin 200mg/kg
Vitamin A 2000mg/kg
Table Salt 3000mg/kg
Round-up 5000mg/kg
Alcohol 7060mg/kg
Sugar 30,000mg/kg
So when sampling Aspirin, Salt,Vitamin A, Alcohol, Sugar and Round-up, only TWO of those substances are less toxic than round-up. Maybe a little less fear and uncertainty is warranted. Particularly given that nobody is advocating incorporating glyphosate into our diets. We are talking about glyphosate being used to control weeds in crops, and in such a way that the amount that ever traces it's way off the farm is minuscule.
Taking a case of 'extreme' glyophsate concentrations from the first alarmist source I could find cited 9mg/kg of glyphosate in Norwegian Soy GE crops. Takign the average daily food intake for people at 2kg and assuming we force feed a subject exclusively this 'extreme' contaminated soy bean, we get a daily intake of 18mg of glyphosate. Now, that's an utterly extreme case, and not realistic, but let's examine that worst of worst cases closer. The average human weighs in at 80kg and it's inexact, but the best we've got to say the LD50 is like rats at 5000mg/kg, meaning that a lethal dose for our average subject is 400,000mg. Working out the math our extremely contaminated GE soybeans are inflicting 0.000045% of a lethal dose.
Let's give more reference, the average daily salt intake for our regular joe we just victimized is 3400mg. Again weighing in at 80kg and with a LD50 for salt at 3000mg/kg we have a lethal dose of salt weighing 240,000mg. Doing the math again, our victim regularly consumes 0.014% of a lethal dose of salt daily all by themselves.
The difference between medicine and poison is dosage, and in the case of gylphosate our food is nowhere near the dangerous stage all the fear mongers want to promote.
Fuck off, there is always a reason for population movements.
And yet somehow the correlation between massive crop failure due to drought leading to starvation somehow correlates strongly to dictatorships.
Like it did for Stalin.
Like it did for Mao.
Like it did for Kim.
Maybe the causation goes the other way and having a dictator crushing all independence that leads to a failed ability to properly plan and run agriculture and be prepared for droughts too. You know, on account of most of the time droughts don't impact the dictator anymore than losing some peasants, and if the peasants get unruly, losing some soldiers that are needed to kill of the unruly peasants.
Actually the Syria situation was initiated by an unprecedented multi-year drought. This depopulated hundreds of rural villages, which destabilized the regime. The Assads have been ruthlessly crushing Islamist uprisings for generations, but this time the cities were flooded with hungry, angry, unemployed young men. The spark for ISIS was always there, but climate refugees gave it the fuel it needed to become unquenchable.
No.
The protests in Syria, the rebellion, the rise of ISIS and everything else facing the Syrian people had NOTHING to do with 'climate'.
Let's start off with the reason for people to be angry and desperate, and that is squarely the brutal repression of the Assad family dictatorship.
Next up, what went wrong with the standard operating procedure of the Assad family of simply killing everyone involved with and related to the protests? For starters, Assad initially met the peaceful protesters with half-measures and merely used snipers to kill off some of the protesters. It would seem he estimated that would drive them off and be the end of it. He miscalculated.
Now, normally that was a mistake he could've corrected by coming in late and still killing all the protesters and their friends and relatives. The trouble for him was that Saddam no longer ruled Iraq and the Iraq/Syria border was now freely navigable instead of a quick trip from one concentration camp to another. Additionally, let's not forget the enormous wealth of resources Saudi Arabia was spending on beefing up the insurgency in Syria because they don't much like Iran's allies. With Saudi funded insurgents pouring in from the Iraq border Assad missed his window to just kill everyone and lost control of things.
Granted, the weather was a bit dry too. I think it is on the side of malicious though to twist every tragedy to boost your own personal agenda. So if you don't mind, stop it.
Stop using thousands of dead Syrians as props to promote the climate alarmism you desire.
Stop abdicating the collective guilt of the monsters in Assad's regime and the ISIS insurgents.
Please just stop.
The only solution to this micro-aggression by white cis-males is clearly to demand that media reviews have a stricter voter selection criteria. If a movie wasn't made for your gender, race, religion or orientation you have no business reviewing it.
You know, when you follow the article's logic out fully, it sounds kinda insane...
You know, the entire Gamergate movement was predicated on the notion that feminists had no business reviewing games that were geared towards men. "Let them make their own games" was the rallying cry.
The whole gamergate thing was predicated on an effort to stop the production of 'male oriented' games. Nobody really cares if reviews are poorly done, that's not exactly gonna be a new thing for entertainment media. The special affront for gamergate was nothing about reviews as you and the article claim, but instead
about SJW's trying to dictate what kind of games should be made.
You just have to look at the outpouring of rage from whiny-ass MRA manbabies regarding the re-boot of Ghostbusters with an all-female cast to see how this mechanism plays out. If it's targeted at men, then men believe they should be the ones to review. If it's targeted at women, then men believe they should be the ones the review. And god forbid a woman should offer an opinion because, "IT'S NOT MEANT FOR YOU". Hell, these embarrassing needledicks have been overwhelming the reviews of Ghostbuster and it hasn't even come out yet.
Fuck these losers. If they got out and met a few human girls in person, they might not be so skeevy that they have time to carpet bomb any show or movie that has women in it. Remember the outrage over the latest Star Wars? How the MRAs were going to boycott? They degrade all of masculinity with their incessant whining.
Sob, sob, other people have different opinions of games and movies than I do and they are expressing those opinions. Stop caring about what other people think and just watch what you enjoy, problem solved. You don't need to go enforcing things on others to get over this first world problem.
I am not going to read through 150 cases because _you_ are lazy and want to claim a single generalization fits for all 150 cases. You know of one case, and are so content in your delusion that you refuse to do the work. Sucks to be you.
Wrong, I've gone through dozens of them, and never found any that match the claims made by clowns like you. If you wanna convince me otherwise provide one piece of evidence. You guys never have to I'm getting more confident there isn't any and I've got an accurate assessment of this,
Thanks for the attention, I hope your masters pay you well for being a liar.
For the innocent bystander, this is more propaganda. Law suits about "stealing seed" relate to what farmers call "bleed" where plants grow on areas of land which are not farmed and not maintained. At least one of those cases was brought about by the farmer suing Monsanto because their seed started creeping into their land, and Monsanto successfully sued them for patent infringement in retaliation.
There is a very well known revolving door between the highest Federal offices and Big Business, Agriculture is a part of this cronyism.
When businesses behave altruistically they can be treated as such, and I would defend them and their altruism. They don't, so I don't.
Give me a single solitary example and I'll admit I'm wrong.
Percy Schmeiser is the most commonly cited example. He admitted in court he took his own seeded Canola that bordered his neighbours's Monsanto round-up ready crop. He then sprayed his own seed crop with round up, and then took the few surviving plants and used this to grow his own Monsanto seed. That's not 'bleed' over, it's a concerted effort to acquire Monsanto's seed.
BTW, here's an example of what often happens when someone does actually publish evidence against Monsanto's interests: http://www.nature.com/news/wid...
You are seeing objections to the claims of round up causing cancer because it's false. The studies showing cancer in mice and rats was when exposing them round up used high doses. In practice, that means that eating round-up is probably carcinogenic, as reported. The trick is, in ag practice, people don't taste test chemical before putting them in a sprayer. After spraying round-up on a crop, it breaks down within days. By the time any crop hits the market, it's nearly impossible to find any trace of it, and that's looking at ppb. The cancer in rats quantity was many, many times higher. For reference, we might wanna measure radioactive isotopes on produce near coal plants too, it's probably at equally worrying levels as round up. That's proper scope of the 'problem'.
Such a small fragment of truth you should have at least tried to verity. From a quick Google search the number is more than 140 lawsuits filed by one company (Monsanto) against farmers. This does not include any of the other companies performing genetic modification or licensed by Monsanto to use their seeds and their lawsuits.
The fragment of truth is that one lawsuit made it to the Supreme Court who upheld Monsanto's rights to sue.
The second tiny fragment of truth is that one patent expired. There are hundreds of thousands of seeds on patent.
All that said, when Monsanto goes after a specific farmer even if the patent is expired the claim generally puts farmers out of business.
The problem is not GMO as much as shit business practices who ensure that consumers get fucked because competition does not exist. A pox on all the people modding down anything that can possibly be perceived as anti-GMO.
Have you looked at the suits? The only guys Monsanto has brought cases against are those that were using Monsanto seeds without buying them from Monsanto. The very simple problem farmers face is choosing to buy seeds from Monsanto and using Monsanto seeds, or to not use Monsanto seeds. In both those cases, Monsanto is never gonna darken their door with any legal action. The only time Monsanto comes after farmers is when they attempt to use Monstanto seed without buying it from Monsanto.
You're free to disagree with Monstanto's right to do that if you wish, but don't misrepresent the situation by projecting your own biases, Farmers are making their own choices and if they aren't make the choice you think is the right one it's really none of your business.
Australia briefly introduced a carbon tax, some of which went to the poor and elderly whose portion of daily living costs towards energy was so significant that their quality of live would be significantly effected. Carbon emissions went down and the economy was stimulated by R&D in high-tech renewable energy - solar, wind, nuclear, etc.
The situation, of course, did not last long. Rupert Murdoch and his friends went hard against it in the media. When laws forced them to provide balanced points of view, social engineering was used - flooding the comments section with "anonymous" contrarian opinions and "misinformed" data. They got their preferred oil-interest backed party back into power, who, it seems, successfully argued that wind-mills are utterly offensive while coal is as good for humanity today, as it was at the start of the industrial revolution.
Carbon taxes are similar to other 'sin' taxes on things like tobacco and alcohol. The major difference being that EVERYBODY gets hit by a carbon tax. Everything from the cost of shipping food to your grocery store, to the cost of getting yourself to the store and back again to the cost of keeping your lights on and house cool/warm.
Sure, increasing the cost on something will lower usage. Let's also be honest though, governments around the world have almost zero interest in the curbing of emissions. The carrot for them is another means of taxing their people which means another level of wealth redistribution that they control and it's that control which has everyone lining up to support this 'solution'.
I have now read the entire paper. It is true that it does not ever directly attribute the sea level rise in the Solomon Islands to AGW. (The linked ABC news article does though - surely the scientists will be publicly denouncing the media's gross distortion of their claims any minute now... ?)
On the other hand, the premise of the paper is that sea level rise is responsible for significant loss of land area in the Solomon Islands (and the authors worked very hard to connect sea level rise to AGW at every opportunity, even though they didn't quite come out and say that AGW has actually caused any sea level rise yet).
That's a problem, because nowhere in their paper (that I could find, anyway) do they actually offer any evidence that the local sea level rise experienced by the Solomon Islands contributed meaningfully to the loss. They point out several other factors that likely dominated, one of which was erosion by wave action. They then attempt to connect this back to AGW with the following statement:
Wave energy can interact synergistically with localised sea-level rise (through changing wave refraction dynamics and more wave energy propagating across reef crest onto the coast) to exacerbate coastal erosion (Storlazzi et al 2015) and thus may be a key driver of the rapid coastal recession in the Solomon Islands. Further work is required to determine the relative importance of extreme wave events or incremental changes in incident wave energy and their interactions with sea-level on shoreline dynamics of islands.
Notice the operative words there: "can", "may be", and "further work is required". They don't actually have anything to say on the subject - that is, on the causal connection between sea level rise and increased wave erosion - other than "maybe you should read these other guys' papers" and "give us money and we'll write something too". But, they decided to name their paper after it anyway, and the media ran with it.
The main actual content of the study - once all of the background material and discussion is filtered out - is basically just:
1) Some statistics about the rates of erosion and accretion on various islands in the Central Pacific, including the Solomon Islands.
2) More statistics about the atmospheric and oceanic conditions over time around those islands - much of which was extrapolated, not measured.
3) A few anecdotes about communities that need to relocate - all of whom, from the sound of it, were in poor locations to begin with.
As someone else pointed out, the last graph clearly shows (if you know how to read the axes, anyway), that there was a net increase in land area for the islands chains studied; the authors simply chose to focus upon a specific few tiny islands that shrank.
That's how grant applications work these days. Mentioning a connection to AGW means more publicity and more potential grants and other research funds. Academia has been biased for a long time towards whatever topics will garner research grant dollars. That's not saying academics are selling out and falsifying their research, but that they have been pushed towards selecting paper topics that will get grant money which often does mean stretching to connect research with popular topics like AGW.
France is closing reactors and cutting back because of cost and safety concerns. http://www.irishtimes.com/news...
'safety concerns' is one word for completely unfounded and irrational fear mongering. If politicians play to those baseless fears that can translate into a real cost though. It'd be a shame to see France dragged down by the same luddites that have held the American power infrastructure back in the seventies.
Huge leaks of radiation.
False.
France is reducing reliance on nuclear power.
Hold on there buddy.
You claimed nuclear power was the most expensive form of generation.
You where informed the only reason for that was ridiculous regulatory expenses, and in other places it was very profitable.
You basically said only dictators can pull that off and only for a limited time.
I pointed out that Électricité de France is providing most of Europe with power primarily from nuclear plants and making a pretty penny while doing so.
France has been producing power with nukes since the 70s and sits with one of the lowest electricity rates in Europe. The fact that fear mongers like yourself have some traction in trying to get nukes shutdown does nothing to prove they aren't safe and profitable.
Vermont Yankee....
Do you have turrets? Are we at the point of spouting random gibberish at each other now?
A nuclear plant that was cleanly operated for more than 3 decades before being shut down because fear monger regulation had made profitability impossible hardly shows a wilful malice on the part of the operating company. Go be crazy and incoherent some place else.
And you'd be wrong. It is Entergy we are talking about here.
Right, because potentially losing a reactor to a known issue is only a legal concern for them, not the cost of repairs to the reactor. Even a purely selfish, greedy and evil minded corporation cares about keeping a multi-million dollar reactor from failing and costing them more money than the repairs they know it requires to stay functioning. Your argument only holds if Entergy would gladly LOSE money just to put their reactor and possibly people working on site at risk.
Nope. It was a special inspection forced by the AG. http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry...
Read your own posts. The shut down for refuelling and regular maintenance was performed at the scheduled time. The Environmental unit AG of NY had been hounding on MANY different additional inspections they wanted. None of those cases had yet come into effect. As per your own article, both the shut down and the inspection of the bolts were voluntarily undertaken by Entergy. You might choose to believe, as the AG and the article claim that it was the legal hounding that encouraged this inspection. I would posit instead that the fact that similar wear and damage to bolts had been a known and observed issue in similar nuclear plants already might have motivated Entergy more strongly...
Nope, the AG forced them into it, and the reactor is still closed.
Maybe you should read my link to the NRC report, or any number of other newspaper articles leading up to then. It was a scheduled shutdown for refuelling and maintenance. I guess it was the AG that determined the refuelling schedule or something?
It was shutdown in March 2016 to dump in something like $60 million worth of inspections and maintenance. I don't quite think the plan was to have that all completed and spun back up already. I'd have thought the anti-nuke guys would be more angry if the company DID have the reactor up in less than month or two for something like that.
It's still more expensive, it is just that command economies can ignore market realities for a while until they topple.
Électricité de France runs a profit line of a couple billion dollars providing over 120GW of power to Europe, and 85% of that is through nuclear power.
Take your FUD and lies elsewhere. Nukes are very profitable anywhere the NIMBY hippies don't try and destroy it out of ignorance and fear.
Much like Vermont Yankee, Entergy is running Indian Point into the ground. The AG also forced new safety inspections an those showed Entergy had let a known problem slide past any other reactor known to date. http://www.lohud.com/story/new...
Who upvotes this FUD?
The very article linked above references the actual report from the NRC. Far from letting a known problem slide past any known to date, NRC article notes that the Indian Point reactor in question was shutdown for routine maintenance. A new check of bolts that had been known to wear from experience revealed that a great many of them needed replacement, so they were replaced before the reactor was brought back online.
The other way to spin the NRC report is that routine and standard maintenance procedures at Indian Point have allowed it to continue it's operating record of zero work place fatalities, zero emissions and zero radiation escaping the plant. How many coal plants can claim ANY of those points let alone all of them?
Seriously, the anti-nuclear crowd is leaping on standard maintenance as proof of 'problems' looks an awful lot like those declaring even more missing links in evolution every time a new link is posted.
What we have is corporatism, not capitalism.
I think the better term for this is Mercantilism, which is pretty much what Adam Smith argued against in The Wealth of Nations. The government makes laws & regulations which appear to be for the purpose of protecting consumers, but actually make it more difficult for other actors to enter the market, thereby reducing freedom of economic choices.
The problem is a lot worse than simply government corruption in support of the corporate status quo. Look to the minimum wage laws put in place by governments in LA, San Fran, Chicago and San Jose. The unions(nominally the little guy) lobbied hard to raise minimum wage and the government listened. The unions then lobbied hard to make exceptions to the minimum wage for union employees. So now the unions are nominally the ones lobbying hard to see their own people paid less than minimum wage. Why do that? It means more unionized work places because businesses will now get to lower wages by going through the union.
The overall problem is that all the rights we fight to gain for workers don't just help workers, they can also hinder employers. All too often, the smallest employers are hit the hardest by this too, meaning it makes it harder to start your own business and get out of the worker pool.
Since when was it possible for 156 million mostly penniless people to move elsewhere?
Right, the most important thing those penniless people need is a carbon tax making the basic necessities they can already barely afford more expensive. As an added bonus, the corrupt and oppressive government helping hold them back gains even more control over them too through the extra revenues.
The fastest way to bring millions out of poverty is cheap energy through things like coal and oil. Increasing their ag production and ability to feed themselves for less money requires cheap fertilizers. This all amounts to more CO2 being dumped out, and yes, it contributes to a future for them with more flooding. I think it's a bit presumptuous to assume they all want to choose cutting emissions versus getting out of poverty,
Since when was the sea level predicted to rise so fast people would drown from it?
Sea levels rise, storm floods now start flooding areas that were previously farther from the coast and relatively safe, people cannot afford to just abandon their property and buy new land and build a new hose/farm in a safer place elsewhere because they are so poor they can hardly afford food, the government is to corrupt/apathetic/incompetent or just plain too poor to build flood defences which in many cases may even be a futile effort... result? Lots of people drown in storm floods in places like Bangladesh.
Let me rank the problems facing these people you are so worried about by some manner of importance to the quality of their lives:
1.So poor they can hardly afford food
2.Corrupt/incompetent government
3.today's storms and floods
4.The increased severity and spread of floods after decades of warming
If we are going to propose the solution to these people's problems is cutting CO2 emissions sufficiently to stave off problem number 4, don't ignore problems 1 through 3. Cheap power for their homes via coal and cheap fertilizer and gasoline for agriculture are what they need to afford food and get past their poverty. Placing a carbon tax on those commodities makes food and basic living more expensive for those poor people that can already barely afford food. Worse yet, that carbon tax is being collected and returned to the hands of the corrupt government that's also causing them problems, strengthening it's control over those people.
When we propose solutions to global problems like climate change, we've absolutely got to keep a global focus on what things like a carbon tax mean to different peoples of the world. There is a whole lot more to the challenges in people's lives than sea level and temperature.
I get that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it seems like nearly all of the "society ought to do X" suggestions for combating climate change equate to "reduce CO2 emissions." However, CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas; methane is barely mentioned except in reference to livestock emissions, particularly from ruminants; and water vapor is practically ignored. Why isn't anyone suggesting interfering with the water cycle? Water vapor is a major greenhouse gas. Alternatively, since clouds cause global cooling, why not a plan to increase cloud formation? It's known that decreased albedo in the poles will lead to them getting warmer, why not a plan to artificially increase albedo? White paint or whatever. When it comes to "plans that require decades, cooperation between most of the world, and trillions of dollars", why are we so laser-focused on this one plan to decrease CO2 emissions?* It seems to me that big problems tend to be solved with dozens of smaller solutions, rather than one big "hurray, it worked!" solution; true, there are many ways of producing energy aside from burning carbonaceous materials, but as I've mentioned above that's just attacking the issue from one angle.
*I imagine a big part of the reason is "don't spend $billions on that, spend $billions on this (which I have a stake in) instead." But that doesn't fully explain the issue either, I think the 'call to arms' to rally scientists to consensus has caused a little too much groupthink, and bluesky ideas which should be seriously considered are being dismissed out of hand.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons that CO2 is more important to climate change over time than your alternatives. Water vapor stays in the air a short time, so taking it out of the atmosphere costs a lot of energy forever on. Clouds performance for climate change is still very nuanced and our modelling on it still isn't even entirely in agreement on whether they are a net positive of negative feedback. Albedo changes are easy to go overboard on.
However, the truth is NOT that global leaders and policy advocates are looking at the nuances of science to come to any such rational decision on CO2 alone as a policy concern. The truth, IMO, is that the oil and coal industries are two of the largest pools of money in the global economy, and whomever gets to tax them stands to control mountains of money. The overwhelming emphasis on CO2 over mitigation or complementary methods for offsetting climate change is ultimately about control and the folks that hope to gain that control.
I can see your mistake. You are conflating cloud forcing with water vapour forcing.
That's true - my mistake. But in my defence, we were talking about climate forcing (the OP had asked what they should do in a number of hypothetical scenarios, one of which (3) was that CO2 was not climate forcing , which is the scenario and topic under discussion). I conflated water vapour with cloud behaviour becuase I assumed we were on topic.
I believe GP number 3 was what if recent warming was already baked into the system as natural change. I didn't read that as requiring a rejection of CO2 forcing, and in that scenario I'd call it the worst case in that we are already 1C above 1900 AND we've got a big forcing from CO2 yet to go on top of whatever else has been pushing things naturally.
In which case, can I ask what you think cloud parameterisation in GCM and ES models which are based upon the fact that CO2 is climate forcing has to do with the topic at hand?
The cloud parameters say everything about the state of our understanding. We can barely measure the energy in and out of the planet accurately enough to get the error bars smaller than the imbalance. Then when we go to model the system, we know the models run off to unrealistic energy states unless we tune poorly modelled factors like clouds by hand. CO2, clouds, water vapor and everything else in our dynamic climate system are driving the global energy imbalance. That energy imbalance in turn is the driving force of climate change. My point of emphasis is that the size of that energy imbalance is smaller than the contribution of systems we admit we don't understand properly. The range of unknowns that tune clouds between is greater than the energy imbalance. To be clear, we are right to be concerned about that energy imbalance, but we also need to acknowledge the importance of the things we don't know when stating our confidence about what is coming and the impact our actions will have on that.
Do you think that the complexity of modelling cloud behaviour somehow throws CO2 climate forcing into doubt (without reference to water vapour)?
Absolutely not. No amount of modelling can negate the fact that CO2 absorbs radiation. The complexity of modelling the climate(not just clouds) means that the unknowns in the system have a greater impact than the increased concentrations of CO2. I modestly want to suggest from that we should be cautious about overstating our confidence in future projections of impacts.