Not trusting Big Business

Trust science on global warming but not genetic engineering?:
[Via SciGuy]

The current issue of Seed magazine has a thoughtful article the delves in the views of environmentalists toward climate and genetically modified foods. Here’s the crux of the article, in which the opposition of Europeans to GM foods is characterized:…
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The plant scientists are not really bewildered. They generally have the same answer I do – Environmentalists accept the science of global warming and not of GMO because, to a large extent, the same enemy is responsible for both. That enemy is Big Business, whether Big Oil or Big Agra. Heck many of these same people do not like vaccinations or take homeopathic medicines because of their distrust of Big Pharma.

And in some ways, they have a reason to. Big Business has not shown itself very sympathetic to the same issues that environmentalists do. Monsanto wants to force farmers to buy their seed, not make the environment a better place. Profits do not often mesh well with idealism.

Unfortunately, the stories against Big Business are easier to tell and understand than those for Big Business.

The problem GMO has, which is also seen with many drugs, is that the companies and their scientists are not trusted sources of information for many people. So even when their science is right, they have large hurdles to overcome.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science, Sustainability

Denial in Australia – Updated

Senator Fielding says there has been no warming for 15 years:
[Via Deltoid]

Senator Fielding has rejected the science and now claims:

Over the last 15 years, global temperatures haven’t been going up and, therefore, there hasn’t been in the last 15 years a period of global warming,

Clearly there was never any chance of convincing someone who can look at a graph like this one and not see any increase in temperature since the mid 90s:

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[UPDATED - Be sure and read the linked article at Open Mind. It nicely demonstrates that looking at the last 40 years or so one decade at a time, there is very little apparent heating and very large error bars. But when you look at the entire period, there is definitely heating and much lower error bars. As usual deniers cherry pick data.]

Poor Australia. I’m sure glad all of our politicians are able to examine a graph. It makes it so much easier to hold an adult conversation about climate change. /snark

So many people see only what they want to see. It is like some kind of weird kind of optical illusion. From this chart, without looking at anything else, you can see that there are 20-30 year periods where the temperature goes up split by a 30 year period where it stayed the same.

It goes up but never comes down. Perhaps we are entering another period of stasis. That would only suggest that another period would follow where the temperature goes up again.

But we do look at other things, and we have an extremely good idea why things get hotter. We may not be able to explain year to year variations but it comes very close to being able to explain what we have seen in this graph and what we might expect to see in the future.

Simply saying global warming has stopped tells us nothing. It is simply kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Sustainability

A very extraordinary woman

Jerri FitzGerald, Who Treated Herself at South Pole, Dies at 57:
[Via NYT > Health]

Breast cancer recurred in Dr. FitzGerald whose treatment was guided via computer for months in 1999 until a rescue plane was able to land.

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An amazing woman whose almost spur of the moment decision in 1999 changed her life forever. Sorry she has left us.

Technorati Tags: Health

Can any review of n Elsevier now be trusted?

What’s With Those People at Elsevier, Anyway?:
[Via In the Pipeline]

Via a reader comes this article, which takes us to Elsevier’s hard-hitting textbook publishing operation. The co-authors of a psychology text for the publisher were recently taken aback to get this e-mail from a publicist at the company: “”Congratulations and…

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This has the same corrosive that payola did in radio. How can anything be trusted? If Elsevier was paying for reviews of textbooks, something it says is not outside the norm in publishing. than most likely every review online is just a paid ad from someone getting a $25 gift certificate. I wonder if we can do some checking of the reviews of Elsevier books at Amazon and figure out who was on the payroll.

Man, even if I liked one of their books, I would not leave a review now. Someone might think I was doing it just for the money. There is a word for someone who uses one’s talents for an unworthy or corrupt purpose.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media