Boy it must suck to read news like this and realize you spent 10 or 15 years carefully abstaining from all allegedly harmful natural substances, no matter how fun ingesting them might have been, and then read about a study suggesting the stuff might not be very bad for you after all.
Into pushing a sleazy and obvious PR plant on behalf of energy companies panicked by the publicity surrounding Al Gore's movie about global air pollution. Tom Harris of High Park Group (www.highparkgroup.com) the author of the letter to the editor cited and posted, is just a PR guy from a PR firm getting paid to do PR work like this for clients his company's website will not name.
Clue No. 1: The "piece" Mr. Harris wrote is not a news story. It is a "guest column." Anyone can write and submit a "guest column" to a newspaper, even a column claiming the Earth is flat and 6,000 years old. Most get published. They are not news stories. They are nothing more than a letter to the editor that runs between 500-750 words.
Clue No. 2: Mr. Harris is not a reporter nor a journalist. He is a PR flack who works for a PR company whose sole business is promoting the objectives of their anonymous, paying clients.
Clue No. 3. Mr. Harris' letter-to-the-editor conspicuously fails to mention which corporations paid him to write and submit the piece. Mr. Harris' PR firm's website (High Park Group) fails to name any of the company's clients. Most PR companies are oozing with glee to tell you (the website visitor) whom their company represents as clients. Kool references = more business. High Park Group, in contrast, are err... quite secretive about whom they work for.
Clue No. 4: Follow the dollar. Mr. Tom Harris was paid to write and submit for publication this "guest column". Who paid him to write it? Who told him what to write in it? Who told him what not to write in it? Mr. Harris does not say. Nor does his own company's website say whom they work for.
Clue No. 5: If it smells like rotten meat, it probably isn't good to eat. This one really stinks up the joint. Yum Yum.
Global air pollution is my preferred term because it is accurate, easy to understand and hard to deny. Just look at a satellite photo of China. It's a big haze of brown gloop. That brown gloop is a huge, new source of anthropogenic SO2, nitrous oxides, CO2, soot etc. If it were coming from a volcano, people would say "Wow look at all that brown gloop spewing into the atmosphere from that volcano crater." But because the brown gloop is man-made, lots of people say... "what brown gloop?"... as if it didn't exist. Or argue whether sufficient evidence exists to conclusively show that the brown gloop actually "does anything bad." At least in the 1970s most everyone agreed that brown gloop belching out of smokestacks is air pollution and is not good. Now, 35 years later, we have to argue endlessly whether air pollution is even "pollution." The brown gloop hasn't changed in 35 years. It's just that the rhetorical spew has become gloopier than the gloop. Bloop.
Apollo astronauts mined hundreds of pounds of the moon and brought the rocks back to Earth for study. Radioactive dating of the rocks has helped put a good solid fix on the Earth's age -- about 4.5 billion years old -- a date unattainable from Earth rocks since Earth rocks have been recycled so often that none in the crust are older than 3 billion years or so (except non-Earth meteorites, of course). It's hard to imagine how any commercial "mining" operation on the Moon for elements rare on Earth and economically valuable on Earth could be done at a price cheaper than mining the same on Earth (why not just mine seawater, which has quite a bit of rare metals per cubic mile?). Prospecting on the moon for rich deposits would be a bitch. Digging a shaft or open pit would be a bitch (combustion engines don't work). Processing and refining the ore into concentrate would be a bitch (no water for flotation concentration). Heating and smelting the ore into ingots of the target metal or element would be a bitch (no oxygen for smelting and heating). Shipping the final product back would be a real bitch, especially if the return craft melted upon re-entry (oops). I can see why a for-profit mining company would love the USA taxpayers to fund the whole thing, rather than fund it themselves. If mining corporations and users of rare elements could do it and show their stockholders the venture would result in a profit, they would be doing it now without the USA govt's involvement. Insert sound of one hand clapping here.
"Getting a permanent colony on Mars would be priceless. It would teach us a lot about ourselves and our society, compell innovation and give people who hunger for a frontier a place to go, and there are always people hungry for a frontier."
Mission Control, I'm now standing on Mars. It looks just like all those pictures the rovers sent back. I'm now digging into the Martian soil. It looks just like the soil the rovers dug into. I'm now launching the organic chemistry analysis device. I'm getting the same results the devices on the rovers got. Boy I miss my wife.
Some allergies might be psychosomatic, ie. if your mother was always nagging you about getting dirty, tracking dirt in the house, having dirty hands, playing in dirt, playing in places where you might get dirty, your body rebels against all the nagging by doing goofy things like dying from peanut dust. The whole anti-bacterial soap thing, in addition to just being a scare-em marketing hype, makes you wonder how any life exists on earth since 99.9999 percent of all organisms drink "untreated" water mixed with dirt and have since life began. Caveat emptor.
I'm not sure I understand the logic that "it won't do us good" to study events hundreds or millions of light years away. By the same logic, why would it do us good to study the Moon, the Sun or Mars? They're pretty gosh-darned far away -- especially by boat.
Nor do I understand the big jones for a "manned" trip to the moon or Mars (howbout the Sun?). If robots and remote analytical gadgets can gather the same or more scientific data as humans more quickly and at a remote fraction of the cost, why is this not a good thing? Isn't one of the key purposes of technology to take people where they cannot physically go (inside your arteries, for example)?
Seems the whole "manned" expedition thing has very little to do with science and is mostly a hubris, nationalism and manifest destiny thing. If manned interplanetary visits were cheap, safe and easy, we would already be doing it. Any manned visit to another celestial body except the moon would eat up all of the $$$ for all other space projects and then some -- while producing far less usable and interesting scientific data. And we've already been to the moon a bunch of times.
The holy grail for interplanetary, manned space trips has always been to find other life. Non-manned exploration technologies are now filling that role very well. At best, Mars may support very scant and simple microbial organisms -- or just fossils of them -- and these would most likely exist at depths or locales on Mars well beyond what a first, second or seventh manned exploration could investigate. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter suspected of perhaps (maybe) harboring life have such wacky and inhospitable conditions and are so distant from Earth that manned exploration is pretty much out. So Mars is it in terms of finding and signs of life and we already know that at best we might find a few very simple microbes or fossils of them. Hubble or its replacement already gives us viewing conditions outside the Earth's atmosphere, so there's no crying need for a telescope on the moon that will do the same thing at a much higher initial and ongoing cost (think of the $$$ bill for sending a Hubble repair/upgrade flight to the moon rather than just into Earth orbit). Any other reasons?
Nothing can replace thought and opinion supported by going outside and seeing things for yourself, developing hypotheses and testing them.
I spent this afternoon picking 11,000 year old marine shells out of a bank of marine clay in a gravel pit up the street from my house in Maine. The shells were deposited when sea levels in Maine were about 300 feet higher than today due to the depression of the crust of North America under the weight of a one mile thick sheet of ice from the most recent continental glaciation event. As the ice sheet retreated toward the north, the sea followed along, creating a deep marine embayment which allowed fine grained rock flour crushed beneath the glaciers to settle out into 10-50 feet thick layers of clay minerals (mostly illite & smectite). The marine shells I found lived in the upper layers of this very fine sediment and were exposed to light and my mucky boots by the gravel pit operator.
If I told my neighbors that the rather normal looking shells in my backpack are 11,000 years old, they would probably not believe me; or that these little shells show that sea level in central Maine was 200 feet higher in the (fairly) recent past than it is today. But those little shells do offer pretty convincing physical proof if only because no other hypothesis for their presence in the gravel pit is plausible.
So that, in a marine shell, is why I have no problem with the hypothesis that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses created by human activity in the past 170 years have exerted a measurable and observable effect on climate, temperature, weather, etc. The null hypothesis would be that these gasses exert no physical effect whatsoever, which frankly makes no sense. Living organisms sequester carbon. Buried remains of living organisms sequester carbon. Oxidation of these remains via combustion (rapid oxidation) releases carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, releasing heat energy which can do useful things for people. We've done a lot of this in the past 170 years, more so than any other time in human history by orders of magnitude. Once in the atmosphere CO2 released by human combustion of hydrocarbons is no different than C02 released by a volcanic eruption (except by isotopic signature which is irrelevant in these circumstances). Skeptics of human-induced climate/atmospheric change have no problem accepting that natural (ie. non-human) forces can influence climate, in fact, they specifically cite natural phenomena as the sole source of any observed changes or trends in climate (ie. CO2 or SO2 from volcanic eruptions). This leads to a logical inconsistency since any gas released into the atmosphere behaves in the same manner regardless of sequestration source. What is important is the quantity of the release and the rate over time in which it has been released. For this reason, skeptics get forced into the conundrum of explaining how C02 released from the Earth's mantle can cause measurable and observable effects on the Earth's surface, while CO2 from human combustion of hydrocarbons somehow does not. Plumes of gasses and particulates from large volcanic eruptions can be easily seen from satellites. So can plumes of gas and particulates from industrial areas (particularly China these days). The logical endpoint of the skeptics argument is that human combustion of hydrocarbons does not release CO2 or CO into the atmosphere, which means the combustion reaction in your car's engine does not produce heat, which means your car is actually not moving down the road at 65 mph, which means if your car hits that tree you won't get the steering wheel lodged in your sternum, or if you miss the tree that you never get to work on time because you're still in the driveway.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy it must suck to read news like this and realize you spent 10 or 15 years carefully abstaining from all allegedly harmful natural substances, no matter how fun ingesting them might have been, and then read about a study suggesting the stuff might not be very bad for you after all.
Into pushing a sleazy and obvious PR plant on behalf of energy companies panicked by the publicity surrounding Al Gore's movie about global air pollution. Tom Harris of High Park Group (www.highparkgroup.com) the author of the letter to the editor cited and posted, is just a PR guy from a PR firm getting paid to do PR work like this for clients his company's website will not name. Clue No. 1: The "piece" Mr. Harris wrote is not a news story. It is a "guest column." Anyone can write and submit a "guest column" to a newspaper, even a column claiming the Earth is flat and 6,000 years old. Most get published. They are not news stories. They are nothing more than a letter to the editor that runs between 500-750 words. Clue No. 2: Mr. Harris is not a reporter nor a journalist. He is a PR flack who works for a PR company whose sole business is promoting the objectives of their anonymous, paying clients. Clue No. 3. Mr. Harris' letter-to-the-editor conspicuously fails to mention which corporations paid him to write and submit the piece. Mr. Harris' PR firm's website (High Park Group) fails to name any of the company's clients. Most PR companies are oozing with glee to tell you (the website visitor) whom their company represents as clients. Kool references = more business. High Park Group, in contrast, are err ... quite secretive about whom they work for.
Clue No. 4: Follow the dollar. Mr. Tom Harris was paid to write and submit for publication this "guest column". Who paid him to write it? Who told him what to write in it? Who told him what not to write in it? Mr. Harris does not say. Nor does his own company's website say whom they work for.
Clue No. 5: If it smells like rotten meat, it probably isn't good to eat. This one really stinks up the joint. Yum Yum.
Global air pollution is my preferred term because it is accurate, easy to understand and hard to deny. Just look at a satellite photo of China. It's a big haze of brown gloop. That brown gloop is a huge, new source of anthropogenic SO2, nitrous oxides, CO2, soot etc. If it were coming from a volcano, people would say "Wow look at all that brown gloop spewing into the atmosphere from that volcano crater." But because the brown gloop is man-made, lots of people say ... "what brown gloop?" ... as if it didn't exist. Or argue whether sufficient evidence exists to conclusively show that the brown gloop actually "does anything bad." At least in the 1970s most everyone agreed that brown gloop belching out of smokestacks is air pollution and is not good. Now, 35 years later, we have to argue endlessly whether air pollution is even "pollution." The brown gloop hasn't changed in 35 years. It's just that the rhetorical spew has become gloopier than the gloop. Bloop.
Fire was accidentally discovered by some guy who just wanted to be chained to a rock with his liver pecked at by big ugly birds for eternity.
Apollo astronauts mined hundreds of pounds of the moon and brought the rocks back to Earth for study. Radioactive dating of the rocks has helped put a good solid fix on the Earth's age -- about 4.5 billion years old -- a date unattainable from Earth rocks since Earth rocks have been recycled so often that none in the crust are older than 3 billion years or so (except non-Earth meteorites, of course). It's hard to imagine how any commercial "mining" operation on the Moon for elements rare on Earth and economically valuable on Earth could be done at a price cheaper than mining the same on Earth (why not just mine seawater, which has quite a bit of rare metals per cubic mile?). Prospecting on the moon for rich deposits would be a bitch. Digging a shaft or open pit would be a bitch (combustion engines don't work). Processing and refining the ore into concentrate would be a bitch (no water for flotation concentration). Heating and smelting the ore into ingots of the target metal or element would be a bitch (no oxygen for smelting and heating). Shipping the final product back would be a real bitch, especially if the return craft melted upon re-entry (oops). I can see why a for-profit mining company would love the USA taxpayers to fund the whole thing, rather than fund it themselves. If mining corporations and users of rare elements could do it and show their stockholders the venture would result in a profit, they would be doing it now without the USA govt's involvement. Insert sound of one hand clapping here.
"Getting a permanent colony on Mars would be priceless. It would teach us a lot about ourselves and our society, compell innovation and give people who hunger for a frontier a place to go, and there are always people hungry for a frontier." Mission Control, I'm now standing on Mars. It looks just like all those pictures the rovers sent back. I'm now digging into the Martian soil. It looks just like the soil the rovers dug into. I'm now launching the organic chemistry analysis device. I'm getting the same results the devices on the rovers got. Boy I miss my wife.
Some allergies might be psychosomatic, ie. if your mother was always nagging you about getting dirty, tracking dirt in the house, having dirty hands, playing in dirt, playing in places where you might get dirty, your body rebels against all the nagging by doing goofy things like dying from peanut dust. The whole anti-bacterial soap thing, in addition to just being a scare-em marketing hype, makes you wonder how any life exists on earth since 99.9999 percent of all organisms drink "untreated" water mixed with dirt and have since life began. Caveat emptor.
I'm not sure I understand the logic that "it won't do us good" to study events hundreds or millions of light years away. By the same logic, why would it do us good to study the Moon, the Sun or Mars? They're pretty gosh-darned far away -- especially by boat. Nor do I understand the big jones for a "manned" trip to the moon or Mars (howbout the Sun?). If robots and remote analytical gadgets can gather the same or more scientific data as humans more quickly and at a remote fraction of the cost, why is this not a good thing? Isn't one of the key purposes of technology to take people where they cannot physically go (inside your arteries, for example)? Seems the whole "manned" expedition thing has very little to do with science and is mostly a hubris, nationalism and manifest destiny thing. If manned interplanetary visits were cheap, safe and easy, we would already be doing it. Any manned visit to another celestial body except the moon would eat up all of the $$$ for all other space projects and then some -- while producing far less usable and interesting scientific data. And we've already been to the moon a bunch of times. The holy grail for interplanetary, manned space trips has always been to find other life. Non-manned exploration technologies are now filling that role very well. At best, Mars may support very scant and simple microbial organisms -- or just fossils of them -- and these would most likely exist at depths or locales on Mars well beyond what a first, second or seventh manned exploration could investigate. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter suspected of perhaps (maybe) harboring life have such wacky and inhospitable conditions and are so distant from Earth that manned exploration is pretty much out. So Mars is it in terms of finding and signs of life and we already know that at best we might find a few very simple microbes or fossils of them. Hubble or its replacement already gives us viewing conditions outside the Earth's atmosphere, so there's no crying need for a telescope on the moon that will do the same thing at a much higher initial and ongoing cost (think of the $$$ bill for sending a Hubble repair/upgrade flight to the moon rather than just into Earth orbit). Any other reasons?
Nothing can replace thought and opinion supported by going outside and seeing things for yourself, developing hypotheses and testing them. I spent this afternoon picking 11,000 year old marine shells out of a bank of marine clay in a gravel pit up the street from my house in Maine. The shells were deposited when sea levels in Maine were about 300 feet higher than today due to the depression of the crust of North America under the weight of a one mile thick sheet of ice from the most recent continental glaciation event. As the ice sheet retreated toward the north, the sea followed along, creating a deep marine embayment which allowed fine grained rock flour crushed beneath the glaciers to settle out into 10-50 feet thick layers of clay minerals (mostly illite & smectite). The marine shells I found lived in the upper layers of this very fine sediment and were exposed to light and my mucky boots by the gravel pit operator. If I told my neighbors that the rather normal looking shells in my backpack are 11,000 years old, they would probably not believe me; or that these little shells show that sea level in central Maine was 200 feet higher in the (fairly) recent past than it is today. But those little shells do offer pretty convincing physical proof if only because no other hypothesis for their presence in the gravel pit is plausible. So that, in a marine shell, is why I have no problem with the hypothesis that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses created by human activity in the past 170 years have exerted a measurable and observable effect on climate, temperature, weather, etc. The null hypothesis would be that these gasses exert no physical effect whatsoever, which frankly makes no sense. Living organisms sequester carbon. Buried remains of living organisms sequester carbon. Oxidation of these remains via combustion (rapid oxidation) releases carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, releasing heat energy which can do useful things for people. We've done a lot of this in the past 170 years, more so than any other time in human history by orders of magnitude. Once in the atmosphere CO2 released by human combustion of hydrocarbons is no different than C02 released by a volcanic eruption (except by isotopic signature which is irrelevant in these circumstances). Skeptics of human-induced climate/atmospheric change have no problem accepting that natural (ie. non-human) forces can influence climate, in fact, they specifically cite natural phenomena as the sole source of any observed changes or trends in climate (ie. CO2 or SO2 from volcanic eruptions). This leads to a logical inconsistency since any gas released into the atmosphere behaves in the same manner regardless of sequestration source. What is important is the quantity of the release and the rate over time in which it has been released. For this reason, skeptics get forced into the conundrum of explaining how C02 released from the Earth's mantle can cause measurable and observable effects on the Earth's surface, while CO2 from human combustion of hydrocarbons somehow does not. Plumes of gasses and particulates from large volcanic eruptions can be easily seen from satellites. So can plumes of gas and particulates from industrial areas (particularly China these days). The logical endpoint of the skeptics argument is that human combustion of hydrocarbons does not release CO2 or CO into the atmosphere, which means the combustion reaction in your car's engine does not produce heat, which means your car is actually not moving down the road at 65 mph, which means if your car hits that tree you won't get the steering wheel lodged in your sternum, or if you miss the tree that you never get to work on time because you're still in the driveway.