CORN PANIC

The world is going corn-crazy and maize-mad . . . again. Five years ago, there was near-hysteria over "contamination" of yellow corn and products made from it-chips, tortillas, taco shells and the like-with tiny amounts of a gene-spliced variety called StarLink. Federal regulators, who had approved the variety for livestock, but not human consumption, initiated a massive recall of more than 300 perfectly safe corn products, costing StarLink's producer more than $100 million and disrupting U.S. corn exports.

History is repeating itself. In March, it was reported that between 2001 and 2004 the Swiss agribusiness company Syngenta had inadvertently mislabeled and sold to American farmers small amounts of an unapproved corn variety called Bt10, as Bt11, an approved variety. The European Union and Japan are demanding that corn imported from the United States be tested and found to be free of Bt10.

However, except when sophisticated genetic tests are employed, Bt10 is indistinguishable from another government-approved and widely planted, insect-resistant variety, Bt11; the two differ only by the presence of an antibiotic-resistance gene and by a handful of nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA) in an inert region of the newly introduced gene that confers resistance to an insect called the corn borer-far less than the differences between various commercial varieties of corn. Moreover, both StarLink and Bt10 are actually far less likely than thousands of other products on the market to cause allergic or other health problems.

Predictably, anti-biotech groups have made a meal of this mishap, blaming both Syngenta and inadequate government regulation. As usual, they've missed the point. Syngenta is certainly culpable for having sold a variety that had not yet been approved-and the company deserves to be sanctioned-but the fundamental problem with both StarLink and Bt10 lies not with the industry or its products but with the Enivronmental Protection Agency's wrong-headed regulatory policies toward gene-spliced plants. The furor over such inconsequential incidents amounts to a monumental-and terribly costly-hoax.

Why costly? Even after it was obvious that StarLink posed no harm to consumers, EPA failed to establish tolerance levels for its presence in food-which, in turn, required FDA to recall harmless but technically "adulterated" foods that contained minuscule amounts of StarLink, subjecting the producer to legal liability. Although this situation was of no more concern than the presence of tiny amounts of non-iodized salt in boxes of the iodized variety, a class-action lawsuit alleging that consumers ate food unfit for human consumption resulted in a settlement against Aventis, StarLink's producer. In other words, the distribution of crops not approved for human consumption presents the risk of legal liability even if no consumer has suffered any toxic, allergic, or other health-related harm. What ever happened to the concept of "no harm, no foul?"

These kinds of kerfuffles are the inevitable result of regulations that treat gene-spliced products as though they pose some inherent, systematic, unique risks, when it is clear that they do not. Gene-splicing is an extension, or refinement, of less precise and predictable techniques for genetically improved products with which consumers and government regulators have long familiarity and comfort.

Gene-spliced food and other products are actually safer than those made with less precise techniques, but EPA holds gene-spliced foods to a higher standard than other similar foods. For gene-spliced crop and garden plants such as corn, wheat and tomatoes that have been genetically improved for enhanced pest- or disease-resistance, regulators require hugely expensive testing that actually exceeds what is required for toxic chemical pesticides. This policy fails to recognize that there are important differences between spraying synthetic, toxic chemicals, and genetic approaches to enhancing plants' natural pest and disease resistance.

EPA's policy is so damaging and outside scientific norms that it galvanized the scientific community. A consortium of dozens of scientific societies representing more than 180,000 biologists and food professionals published a report almost a decade ago warning that unscientific regulatory policy would discourage the development of new pest-resistant crops and prolong and increase the use of synthetic chemical pesticides, increase the regulatory burden for developers of pest-resistant crops, limit the use of biotechnology to larger developers who can pay the inflated regulatory costs, and handicap American companies competing in international markets. All of these misfortunes have come to pass.

Scientists worldwide agree that adding genes to plants does not make them less safe either to the environment or for humans to eat. Even so, activists and regulators have leveled their sights on gene-splicing, which is more precise, circumscribed and predictable than other techniques and can better exploit the subtleties of plant pathology. For example, both StarLink and Syngenta's Bt10 varieties were made by splicing into corn a bacterial gene that produces a protein toxic to corn borer insects, but not to people or other mammals. The gene-spliced corn not only repels pests, but when harvested is less likely to contain Fusarium, a toxic fungus often carried into plants by insects. That, in turn, significantly reduces the levels of the fungal toxin fumonisin, which is known to cause fatal diseases in horses and swine that eat infected corn, and esophageal cancer in humans. Thus, gene-spliced, insect-resistant corn is not only cheaper to produce but is a potential boon to public health; and, by reducing the need for spraying chemical pesticides on crops, it is environmentally friendly.

Policy makers have ignored a fundamental rule of regulation: that the degree of scrutiny of a product or activity should be commensurate with the risk. Instead, for agricultural research and development the degree of oversight of gene-splicing is inversely proportional to risk, but there is virtually no impetus from any quarter for rationalizing this deplorable status quo.

Flawed regulatory policy ensures that StarLink- and Bt10-like debacles will continue to occur. American farmers, companies and consumers will all reap what government regulators have sown

Source





WARMER CLIMATE MAY INCREASE ANTARCTIC ICE (2)

On 28th. last, I mentioned a conclusion by some Scottish scientists that said that Antarctic would get more icy while the Arctic warmed up. It now seems that a group of U.S. scientists have arrived at a similar conclusion. That simplistic old GLOBAL warming theory sure is taking a beating!

Predicted increases in precipitation due to warmer air temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions may actually increase sea ice volume in the Antarctic's Southern Ocean. This finding from a new study adds evidence of potential asymmetry between the two poles and may be an indication that climate change processes may have varying impacts on different areas of the globe. "Most people have heard of climate change and how rising air temperatures are melting glaciers and sea ice in the Arctic," said Dylan C. Powell, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. "However, findings from our simulations suggest a counterintuitive phenomenon. Some of the melt in the Arctic may be balanced by increases in sea ice volume in the Antarctic."

For the first time, the authors of the paper, published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research (Oceans), used satellite observations from NASA's Special Sensor Microwave/Imager to assess snow depth on sea ice and assimilated the satellite observations into their model to improve prediction of precipitation rates. By incorporating satellite observations into this new method, the researchers say they achieved more stable and realistic precipitation data, to counter the great variability in precipitation data sets typically found in the polar regions. "On any given day, sea ice cover in the oceans of the polar regions is about the size of the U.S.," said Thorsten Markus, a co-author of the paper and a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Far-flung locations like the Arctic and Antarctic actually impact our temperature and climate where we live and work on a daily basis."

According to Markus, the deep and bottom water masses of the oceans make contact with the atmosphere only at high latitudes, near the poles. Polar processes, such as sea ice formation, are driving a huge, global, ocean heat pump, called thermohaline (or saline) circulation. To a large extent, this heat pump impacts the climate at lower latitudes. Typically, warming of the climate leads to increased melting rates of sea ice cover and also increased precipitation rates. With increased precipitation rates and consequently deeper snow, the snow load on the Antarctic sea ice becomes heavy enough that it suppresses the ice below sea level. This results in even more and even thicker sea ice when the snow refreezes as more ice.

The paper indicates that some climate processes appear to actually be counterintuitive. "We used computer-generated simulations to get this research result. I hope that in the future we'll be able to verify this result with real data through a long-term ice thickness measurement campaign," said Powell. "Our goal as scientists is to collect hard data to verify what the model is telling us. It will be critical to know for certain whether average sea ice thickness is indeed increasing in the Antarctic as our model indicates, and to determine what environmental factors are spurring this apparent phenomenon."

Achim Stoessel of Texas A&M University, the third co-author on this paper, advises that "while numerical models have improved considerably over the last two decades, seemingly minor processes like the snow-to-ice conversion still need to be better incorporated in models as they can have a significant impact on the results and therefore on climate predictions."


Reference:
Powell, D. C., T. Markus, and A. Stoessel (2005) Effects of snow depth forcing on Southern Ocean sea ice simulations, J. Geophys. Res., 110, C06001






MORE "GUARDIAN" WHOPPERS

Post lifed from NumberWatch, 1 July 2005

When a campaigning newspaper carries a red front page banner proclaiming "The truth about...", it is a pretty good bet that you are about to be told some whoppers. When the paper is the Guardian and the subject is Global Warming, betting does not come into it.

The Guardian supplement, coincidentally out just before the G8 summit, is one of the most masterful examples of mendacious propaganda you are likely to come across. There are thirty six pages featuring every technique in the book. There are barely a couple of incontestable paragraphs in the whole production (and they were contributed by Fred Singer).

A fine example of selectivity is the historical account, which seeks to provide a smooth progression from the work of Arrhenius to the modern age when "scarcely a week goes by without a major study of climate change." Unless you were looking for it, you would not notice the lacuna between the 60s and 80s, which was when environmentalists were trying to sell us the new ice age. Of course, according to believers that never happened. Pity about the printed record!

There is a whole page of graphics illustrating unsupportable predictions: Not only are we going to have both drought and floods (as if we had not had them before) but we are supposed to forget that malaria once was endemic, right up to the Arctic Circle (including Britain in the Little Ice Age)

Here is a superbly crafted example of the false comparison:

Water Vapour accounts for 60% of the natural greenhouse effect..Carbon dioxide accounts for 62% of human induced global warming.

The strange world of Moonbat et al. is revealed in all its glory. It has often seemed that George Monbiot lives on a different planet from the rest of us. Here is his view of the media attitude to the Warmers:

they broadcast furious attacks on environmentalism, such as Channel 4's series Against Nature and BBC2's Scare Stories. Most of the newspapers, with an eye on the interests of their proprietors and advertisers, followed their example.

On the back page Oliver James seems to have had a similar experience:

In the case of Anglo-Saxon peoples, for example, we live in a rose-tinted bubble of positive illusions, highly defended from reality.

Somehow that does not seem to accord with the unrelenting gloom and scaremongering that the rest of us experience, a tiny fraction of which has been reported in these pages. Note the way that the word reality is used to represent what is at best pure conjecture.

A clever move was to give Fred Singer the opening piece in a page of personal opinions and follow his sweet reason with no fewer than seven avid pieces from true believers. It made Fred look like a lone eccentric lost in a consensus. It is always notable that so many of the experts, always the first to throw about ad hominem attacks of financial interest, actually owe their living to the faith. Paid acolytes to a religion are unlikely also to be good servants of science. One could go on, but it is almost all there on the web site for your delectation.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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