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RE: Black Hole eats sun
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Ricardo
Posts: 13955
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana The issue with global warming or global climate change is not that it is not real and happening, the argument is over whether or not is it man made. 95% plus researchers who publish in peer reviewed science journals agree that is caused or accelerated by humans. Of the members of congress that deny as part of their parties official platform more than half will admit it off the record in interviews. The main body of deniers are small community of non professionals, meaning non professional scientists who are backed financially by industry captains who are trying to protect personal interests. Conservative American media outlets broadcast misinformation and put on talking heads who don't know shiet from shinola. A lot of what you wrote is how I used to think about it too, as a lay person, and this guys' video series above opened my eyes in a way I have to take issue with some of what you wrote. It seems it's absolutely NOT the arguement about whether or not humans are the cause, it seems 100% clear, not 95%. What IS the issue is the general people's lack of understanding of basic physics, how this thing works. THAT is the issue. If folks simply understood more about it there would not be this problem or arguement at all. The "main body of deniers" is absolutely NOT a small commmunity, it is a huge group of "skeptics" that listen to the WRONG people regarding the actual facts. I am talking family and friends that are quite intelligent and see through Al Gore and other political BS exaggerations and miss info that does more harm than good at making this thing a divisive issue which it should NOT be at all. It's not about opinions and beliefs it's about basic physics plain and simple. There are no conspiracies going on with either side really, except some rare cases a need for cherry picking data for business or political reasons, as is done with EVERY issue in the world, hardly a dark secret. Anyway that guy that made those videos I linked took a lot of time and effort to hit almost every point about the issue that people perpetuate online constantly, both for deniers and alarmists, with direct references to the scientific literature. That's what people need that "don't have time for BS conspiracies" or time to read the actual papers.
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CD's and transcriptions available here: www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date Aug. 22 2017 14:25:12
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3418
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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By suggesting that a metaphorical Black Hole ate the sun during the total eclipse, I didn't mean to rekindle a scientific argument about global warming, but in any case allow me to join the fray. There is no debate about global warming. It is a scientific fact with sufficient evidence to quell any of the arguments on the other side: the annual increase in average temperatures, the accellerated melting of the polar ice caps, and a dozen other phenomena point to global warming. Stephen was correct in that the only question is the extent that global warming is anthropogenically caused and the extent that we may be going through a warming phase that appears to occur every 300 or so years. The accellerated nature of the increase in warming, though, leaves little doubt that much of it, if not all, is caused by human activity. The amount of ignorance among those who reject science today, even among so-called "intelligent" people, is appalling. Take the "anti-vaxxer" crowd who are convinced, with no evidence whatsoever, that the MMR vaccine causes autism in children. The greatest concentration of these science-deniers are found in the wealthy, educated enclave of Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. The anti-vaxxers can point to no sound scientific, statistical, or historical evidence to support their position. Their arguments are always anecdotal which, at best, may suggest a correlation, say, between vaccines and autism (e.g., "My friend has an autistic child who was vaccinated.") They fail to distinguish between correlation and causation and commit the logical fallacy "Post hoc ergo prompter hoc," i.e., since event A was followed by event B, event A must have caused event B. Their argument makes as much sense as noting that the cock crows every morning followed by the sun's rise. Therefore, the cock's crow must cause the sun to rise. The anti-vaxxers' case is not helped by the fact that there are a significant number of conspiracy theorists among them who believe the U.S. Government and "Big Pharma" are conspiring to "peddle" vaccines at the expense of children. This, too, is nonsense. Of course pharmaceutical companies make money off vaccines. But vaccines go through a rigorous testing regime before they are put on the market. Most people are capable of detecting a conspiracy theorist's argument as lacking credibility. Ironically, it was Andrew Wakefield, the thoroughly discredited British physician whose fraudulent study started the whole anti-vaxxer movement, who accepted a considerable amount of money from a law firm who had planned to sue pharmaceutical companies over vaccines using Wakefield's now discredited study. And yet many among the anti-vaxxers still consider Wakefield credible. Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East." --Rudyard Kipling
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Date Aug. 22 2017 14:42:48
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estebanana
Posts: 9030
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Ricardo)
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quote:
A lot of what you wrote is how I used to think about it too, as a lay person, and this guys' video series above opened my eyes in a way I have to take issue with some of what you wrote. It seems it's absolutely NOT the arguement about whether or not humans are the cause, it seems 100% clear, not 95%. What IS the issue is the general people's lack of understanding of basic physics, how this thing works. THAT is the issue. If folks simply understood more about it there would not be this problem or arguement at all. The "main body of deniers" is absolutely NOT a small commmunity, it is a huge group of "skeptics" that listen to the WRONG people regarding the actual facts. I am talking family and friends that are quite intelligent and see through Al Gore and other political BS exaggerations and miss info that does more harm than good at making this thing a divisive issue which it should NOT be at all. It's not about opinions and beliefs it's about basic physics plain and simple. There are no conspiracies going on with either side really, except some rare cases a need for cherry picking data for business or political reasons, as is done with EVERY issue in the world, hardly a dark secret. Anyway that guy that made those videos I linked took a lot of time and effort to hit almost every point about the issue that people perpetuate online constantly, both for deniers and alarmists, with direct references to the scientific literature. That's what people need that "don't have time for BS conspiracies" or time to read the actual papers. Yeah yeah I get it, but to ease in the skeptical denier it's ok to soft pitch it. When you hit with the facts it get rebuffed, not a bad idea to give them things to discover. I suggest a set up of the argument the way I do in order to not back them into a corner right away. I'm trying to find a way to plant a seed of intellectual curiosity with some skillful means that will get a denier to investigate more angles. Ever chat up someone convinced that chemtrails are real? You can't slam into them with facts hoping to batter a hole in their skull and pour knowledge inside their brain. You have to present something tangible for them to question and then walk away. I've been on board with the facts of global warming since I was in Micronesia in 1988 and the biology teacher explained that over the next century the outer atolls will be under water, below sea level. I frame it as Anthropogenic vs. natural climate patterns and augment the framing with anthropogenic acceleration because it piques the curiosity of deniers and perhaps prompts them to read into the anthropogenic component. Which in turn may open minds to explore. We are not trying to win the scientific community, we're trying to convince those who refuse to look at it.
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Date Aug. 22 2017 15:21:12
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3418
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Ricardo)
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quote:
There is no such argument amongst the scientifically literate community. CO2 is intrinsically tied to global warming events as shown through more thamn 500 million years of geological time. We all agree that CO2/greenhouse gas is the primary culprit, and I suggest that my statement above, "The accellerated nature of the increase in warming, though, leaves little doubt that much of it, if not all, is caused by human activity." would withstand scientific scrutiny. Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East." --Rudyard Kipling
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Date Aug. 22 2017 17:59:59
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3324
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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For quite a while it has seemed to me that there has been a change in how science is seen by the public in the USA. Lately I have come to a slightly different view. Personally I have devoted a good part of a long life to the study and application of science. For decades I have been aware every day that few people in the USA are effectively involved with science. I assume I can walk down the street in front of the Texas capitol for an hour and not meet anybody who can accurately distinguish the wave mechanics formulation of quantum mechanics from the Copenhagen version, much less say anything about matrix mechanics. I could have a conversation with my brother the M.D. about the genetic evidence for evolution, but probably not with someone I met at a bar just a block from the largest university in Texas. So what? Well, in 1955 when I enrolled in university, "science" was still telling the public stuff it liked to hear. Atomic energy was going to provide cheap electricity for everybody. While still in high school I read of Watson and Crick's determination of the double helix structure of DNA. People were beginning to grasp the outlines of how the genetic code worked. This was going to revolutionize medicine. In the late '60s the general public began to hear about the green revolution, which in fact did save billions of people from starvation, but I would probably have drawn a blank if I started in about the Haber process for nitrogen fixation whose discovery led to a previous agricultural revolution. Science was still building on its record of public benefit: electric lights and power, radio and TV, aviation...with no public perception of any drawbacks or limitations to the scientific/industrial revolution. As time went on, science started giving us some bad news. DDT may have been just the ticket for controlling malaria, but it was killing the birds and destroying biodiversity. Chlordane was great for killing bugs on cotton crops, but you didn't want to plant vegetables on the same land to harvest in the winter time. What were you going to do with the depleted fuel from nuclear power plants? What was that about the Three Mile Island plant blowing up, or something? In 1951 Los Angeles was still paradise in large part, but by 1975 my pal whom I took with me on a business trip went out on his morning run for eight miles or so, and was sick for two days from the smog he inhaled. Science had started to give us some bad news. Significantly, it was telling us we couldn't have everything we wanted, at no cost. There had always been a sizable population of deniers of science in the U.S.A. Evolution? Preposterous blasphemy! People got away with this attitude because the framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that religious belief could be impervious to reason. What Jefferson, Madison, Monroe et al never imagined was that when science started telling us to limit the appeasement of our appetites, people could be just as impervious to that scientific reasoning as they would be to evolution. The Koch brothers aren't stupid. It is conceivable to me that they actually believe much of the climate change denial bullsh1t that they finance, despite being really smart guys. Maybe, maybe not. But about 40% of the U.S. population find the bullsh1t easy to swallow, because they imagine that some distant authority is trying to tell them what to do, just because the power hungry bastards think they can. Interestingly enough, in Mexico, which has far fewer people with college degrees, 80% of people "believe in" anthropogenic climate change. And I mean "believe in," not "understand." I don't think a majority, or even a large minority of U.S. citizens ever actually understood science. They just used to like what they heard from it, and now a lot of people don't. RNJ
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Date Aug. 22 2017 18:35:55
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Piwin
Posts: 3479
Joined: Feb. 9 2016

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
How do you convince the person who did not have 7th grade physics? Do the experiment with them. If there is a complete mental block on science, I'll drop the science and go for the "but we shouldn't waste anyways, right?" argument. This won't convince them of the reality of climate change, won't convince them to petition their congressman to invest more in renewable energy, but it might convince them to not reject off the bat some of the things proposed to regular citizens to mitigate climate change. There's considerable overlap between what citizens are told they can do at their own level to mitigate global warming and what is just sensible unwasteful living. And if they don't see the inherent problem of waste, I'll go for the jugular and bring up finances since a lot of these things save money and most people care about their money (except a few luthiers out there who are proud of working at a loss). If it's nice out and you have a yard, save money by not using the dryer for once. The grocery store is two blocks away, come on let's just walk and save up on gas. You're cold and you want me to turn up the heat? OK, but could you at least try putting on some pants and a sweater first and then we'll talk? You're throwing away your plastic bag from the grocery store? Why not keep it and use it as a trash bag so you don't have to buy any of those? Do you really need the lights on when you're not in the room? Do you really need to have a steak every single day? How about bringing it down to 5 times a week for starters and see how it goes. You'll save money and it just might be healthier for you. etc. If they're religious, I'll try to point out whatever part of their scripture highlights the need to take care of their environment. Pretty much every religious book out there has something in it about that. I used to think that climate change denial in the US was related to religion. The idea being that the particularly strands of Protestantism that are big in the US are also those that tend to preach that the end times are near. And if you believe the world is going to end during your lifetime, why bother with a problem who won't effect you that much but will be devastating only to the next generations? Then there are those who alter their trucks to make them pollute more just to show that they don't care. Their way of telling the world to f*** off I guess. There's no reasoning with them, but I doubt, or at least I hope, that these are just a handful of people and most people who don't believe in climate change wouldn't act that way or even condone it.
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Date Aug. 22 2017 20:15:26
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3418
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
There had always been a sizable population of deniers of science in the U.S.A. Evolution? Preposterous blasphemy! People got away with this attitude because the framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that religious belief could be impervious to reason. What Jefferson, Madison, Monroe et al never imagined was that when science started telling us to limit the appeasement of our appetites, people could be just as impervious to that scientific reasoning as they would be to evolution. I would argue that there is little difference between the denial of evolution through natural selection and the denial of anthropogenic global warming/climate change. Religious belief is no more an excuse for willful ignorance than is the desire to fill a goddamned SUV's 30-gallon gas tank. What is even harder to understand is the willful ignorance exhibited by the anti-vaxxer crowd. The evidence is clearly there that vaccines vastly reduced, in some cases eliminated, diseases such as measles and listeria. Measles had been totally eradicated in the US by 2000. It is now making a strong comeback because of the anti-vaxxers. This is not a case of seeming to reap a benefit by not vaccinating a child. All evidence points to the benefit being on the other side. Yet the anti-vaxxer crowd is impervious to reason. Another case of belief completely unsupported by science is the anti-GMO crowd. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) have been shown to be immune to pests and in some cases can produce far more per acre than regular grains or produce. Like vaccines and autism, in study after study there has been no, absolutely no, scientific evidence that GMOs are harmful to humans. Yet the anti-GMO crowd refuses to believe the science. In fact, if anything Europeans are far more anti-GMO than are Americans who are bad enough. I will finish this screed with an anecdote that still leaves me speechless. For many years now I have played squash regularly with a woman who has a degree in physics. As a woman, a degree in physics set her apart from the usual suspects. Yet she is a staunch anti-vaxxer and is very much against GMOs. She cites flimsy so-called "studies" she finds on the internet, which of course are full of conspiracy theories. In fact she would be my "Exhibit No. One" that the internet is as much a hindrance to clear thinking as it is a boon in some cases. She is otherwise a very smart, charming friend. Nevertheless, and I must say it, she originally came from Marin County, CA. Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East." --Rudyard Kipling
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Date Aug. 22 2017 21:30:19
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Piwin
Posts: 3479
Joined: Feb. 9 2016

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
In fact, if anything Europeans are far more anti-GMO than are Americans who are bad enough. That is true. And there are still many who dismiss GMOs out of hand. However, at least in France, the public policy debate wasn't just about whether GM food was safe for consumption or not and there were many who were against GM crops for other reasons, ranging anywhere from freedom of choice to environmental concerns. As I see it, the scientific consensus on GMOs is the same as the consensus on drugs: to be examined on a case-by-case basis with trial runs before release. And the ethics of drug testing are an interesting issue. You obviously can't test for everything and there will always be a degree of risk when putting a drug out on the market. Nor can they test every single effect on the environment or on human consumption that a GM crop would have. But there's a difference, and not a negligible one: when a drug turns out to have unexpected dire effects, you can alway just press that recall button. Not so with GM crops. They have a nasty habit of not staying confined where you want them and they show up in the most unexpected places (there have been cases of Bt genes that were used only in a few experimental plots showing up hundreds of miles away almost a decade after the experimental plots were abandoned, cases of Bt genes for corn showing up in other crops, often by mechanisms that are not yet fully understood, all of which is fine as long as the gene in question is harmless). And if a "bad" GM crop were ever released, bad for human consumption or for the environment, good luck getting rid of it! The risk is small, but the impact of that risk if it ever materialized would be incalculable. Which is why IMO many Europeans tend to be more conservative when it comes to GM crops. @Ruphus quote:
Seeing the sheer incredible environmental polluting and destroying in Middle East, Not in the Middle-East, but I remember watching kids jumping off the peer and playing around in the ocean right behind the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca. The water was muddish brown and there were plastic bottles floating everywhere. They didn't seem to mind so much and made the best of it by using the trash as polo balls.
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Date Aug. 23 2017 0:14:10
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Piwin)
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ORIGINAL: Piwin ... Nor can they test every single effect on the environment or on human consumption that a GM crop would have. But there's a difference, and not a negligible one: when a drug turns out to have unexpected dire effects, you can alway just press that recall button. Not so with GM crops. They have a nasty habit of not staying confined where you want them and they show up in the most unexpected places (there have been cases of Bt genes that were used only in a few experimental plots showing up hundreds of miles away almost a decade after the experimental plots were abandoned, cases of Bt genes for corn showing up in other crops, often by mechanisms that are not yet fully understood, all of which is fine as long as the gene in question is harmless). And if a "bad" GM crop were ever released, bad for human consumption or for the environment, good luck getting rid of it! The risk is small, but the impact of that risk if it ever materialized would be incalculable. Which is why IMO many Europeans tend to be more conservative when it comes to GM crops. Exactly! Interfering into genetic pool is no small risk, let aside by alien manipulation, whichs ecological effects no one can predict. Long before that, simply just the results from breed mono cultures have greatly reduced variety of agrarian species. The sheet anchor being seed desposits with near extinct specimens. Often of odeuers, flavours and characteristics hardly known anymore. In Germany organic farmers are trying to recultivate such lost variety, and it certainly won´t hurt the gene pool.
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Date Aug. 23 2017 13:05:41
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estebanana
Posts: 9030
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to kitarist)
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The issue with GMO's is not that there is more and more technology that enables the safe modifcations. The problems are ethical and revolve around proprietary self interest of the corporations that develop the technology. That said, I'm not against GMO development, but I believe in caution in how it is supplied and applied. The classic beef anti GMOers have is quite legitimate in someways, and not legit i others. And that is that hybridized and specially modified seed stocks, for example, are created to grow into seedless varieties. This insures the company that develops an expensive seed program that resist or eradicate regional blights, pests and other problems can sell the seed season after season and pay for the development process. On the other hand, this causes other problems in the field like forced monoculture, farmers too poor to buy seed, and the reduction of regional diverse speciation via natural or human assisted hybridization. With the right applications of GMO these problems can be mitigated. Another factor to consider is that sterile or seedless GMO products are a two edged sword; sterile varieties don't mix with regional species and create unpredictable hybridization that would compete with local species. It also means seed stocks must be purchased seasonally. The alternative is do nothing and let farmers fail when regional crop blight becomes catastrophic. Conversely profiteering on the crop failure has ethical concerns. But it's not as simple as it seems, because the trial phase of a GMO development project is not like a real estate development. If at a certain point in the trial phase a company creates a product it knows will work to kill a certain pest, the company at some point passes an ethical point of no return where it would be immoral for them not to develop the product if it could save lives. Corporations work to ensure that they develop more products that have broad application and thus will be easier to sell and tend to neglect small problems that are regionally bound to small areas. There's case to made for a moral imperative that companies serve not only the broad market, but as an ethical safeguard also spend money on projects they may not profit from. Now for some white guy in Marin to lean angrily into his $3500.00 lap top while chugging down $5.00 latte in a cafe' and rant on about GMO's is a bit much. First off, coffee is a dirty business that exploits workers, and there is really no such thing as 'Fair Trade' coffee in the sense that that concept is marketed to American's who can afford that $3.00 - $6.00 cup of coffee. Not to mention the farmers market produce that is out of reach of most Americans. When you work back to the level of farmers in underdeveloped countries, the GMO seed stocks mean different thing in different places. In some regions it means success because the GMO is engineered to beat out a kind of fungus that wipes out the cash crops, in other places GMO products cause political problems because there is a disconnect between what the local government wants farmers to use, and what the farmers themselves say is the real mandate they choose. The fallout of the political problems is local graft and dishonesty to the farmers, forced subsidies, and poorly planned transition schedules which knock some farmers down- and even cause them to commit suicide. The problems with GMO are not dangers in the large part to biological systems, but ethical and moral dangers due to corporate proprietorship. It is a tactic of the militant anti-GMO organizations to falsify information about the biological impact of GMO. It's a two way street. It's selfish and vain for people in the first world to take the focus off the problems of the farmers in underdeveloped countries, and that goes both ways. Anti-GMOers that blame and reject GMO with reasoning that it is ruining their world, live in a world of privilege, and corporate GMO developers need to be held accountable on ethics in business as it effects agriculture practice. The GMO genie is out of the bottle, we're not going back. So the grown ups in the room have to settle out the application and ethical work.
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Date Aug. 25 2017 3:13:21
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3324
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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Turns out that monopoly by corporate interests is not just a GMO problem. There's an article about strawberries in this week's New Yorker. Farmers in California and many other places buy the particular cultivars which they grow from three sources:Driscoll, or a corporation spun-off from the agriculture department of the University of California, Davis; or from U.C. Davis itself. The farmers pay a royalty to the cultivar supplier. The genome of the cultivar remains the patented intellectual property of the supplier. In other words, you can't grow the latest breed of strawberries without paying a royalty to the breeder of that strain. The royalties for U.C. Davis alone bring in $hundreds-of-millions. The strawberries that I buy every week to put on my shredded wheat for breakfast all look the same from season to season, year to year. But it turns out that even throughout a single year the growers may phase out one cultivar and phase in another, several times. The berries are evaluated for taste, appearance, resistance to disease, growing conditions, shippability, etc. etc. etc. Growing strawberries is a high tech, highly competitive business. It all seemed so simple when we lived in Alaska and strawberries grew wild and profusely in the back yard. The only problem we had was to keep the dog from eating them on a day when we had company for dinner. And those berries tasted a hell of a lot better than the ones I get in the store. RNJ
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Date Aug. 25 2017 5:33:27
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