I seldom find much of worth in the views of any expert, yet I do find worth in a diverse group of experts. The key bit is diversity - heuristic diversity - since they aren't all simply clones of one another with the same blind spots and irrational tics. I seek out dissenting views almost in self defense since it is an article of faith that consensus always is wrong. The dissenters may well be wrong too, so you just have to give up on the idea of accepting authority, and when the situation requires action just take your best shot with the information you have.

Said another, better way:

"I grant that you've seen a lot of evidence that I haven't. But here's my question for you: If I saw and read everything that you've seen and read, what would I conclude?"

Of course, the other guy could respond, "You'd agree with me," but he rarely does. When you frame the question as I have, it's often pretty clear that even though the disputants are not on a level playing field, that isn't the real reason why they hold different views.

One nice feature of my heuristic: It actually makes disagreement more informative. Suppose you have a well-informed friend who heavily disagrees with you. Nine times out of ten, he admits that if you knew what he knows, you'd still disagree. But one time out of ten, he insists that if you knew what he knows, you'd change your mind. As long as you trust your friend, such a statement makes it reasonable to immediately adjust your belief.

It's not that you need to reject expert advice in all cases, but you must always make the decision yourself. Sometimes the expert advice will be compelling and so you can make it your own. Seldom isn't the same as never.

Update: Toothless

I'd like to say Bryan bites a bullet here, but alas he just gums it, as he doesn't engage the hard questions: what exactly is his better-origin scenario/story, and what evidence supports that story over less-flattering stories? That is, how could Caplan tell the difference between a situation where his prior was good and mine bad, vs. a situation where his prior was bad and mine good? If he grants that a reasonable person, long before our births, would have thought these two situations equally likely, what later evidence could have convinced this reasonable person that Bryan's prior turned out better?

He can't. But that's the problem with expertise. It is insufficient. In most subjects, for most issues, knowing everything that is known is not enough to make a certain judgement. There are no reliable authorities, it is always a gamble. The best you can do is to eliminate some of the bad bets. What Caplan's system does is to help eliminate some bad bets without having comprehensive knowledge. Asking good questions is often as useful as getting good answers. Cutting through clouds of inky obfuscation is a neat trick.

Interesting news for older chocolate lovers.

Cocoa flavanols, the unique compounds found naturally in cocoa, may increase blood flow to the brain, according to new research published in the Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment journal. The researchers suggest that long-term improvements in brain blood flow could impact cognitive behavior, offering future potential for debilitating brain conditions including dementia and stroke. . .

the researchers found both short and long-term benefits of cocoa flavanols for brain blood flow, offering future potential for the one in seven older Americans currently living with dementia. When the flow of blood to the brain slows over time, the result may be structural damage and dementia. Scientists speculate that maintaining an increased blood flow to the brain could slow this cognitive decline. . .

Contrary to statements often made in the popular media, the collective research demonstrates that the vascular effects of cocoa flavanols are independent of general "antioxidant" effects that cocoa flavanols exhibit in a test tube, outside of the body. While research aimed at studying the potential role of cocoa flavanols in the context of blood vessel and circulatory function continues, a number of previously published studies already suggest that the consumption of cocoa flavanols can have important beneficial effects on the function of the body's network of blood vessels. The body of research not only suggests that cocoa flavanols may provide a dietary approach to maintaining cardiovascular function and health, but also points at new possibilities for cocoa flavanol-based interventions for vascular complications associated with cognitive performance, skin health and age-related blood vessel dysfunction.

Chocolate lovers: young at heart . . . and mind.

Update: More brain flow news

"We'd eventually like to try to prevent the physical and cognitive decline associated with aging, with a focus on people with Alzheimer's disease. One of the key aspects of Alzheimer's disease is mitochondrial dysfunction, specifically complex IV dysfunction, which methylene blue improves. Our findings indicate that methylene blue, by enhancing mitochondrial function, expands the mitochondrial reserve of the brain. Adequate mitochondrial reserve is essential for preventing age-related disorders such as Alzheimer's disease."

Also impressed is one of Dr. Atamna's co-authors, Bruce Ames, PhD, a senior scientist at Children's and world-renowned expert in nutrition and aging "What we potentially have is a wonder drug." said Dr. Ames. "To find that such a common and inexpensive drug can be used to increase and prolong the quality of life by treating such serious diseases is truly exciting."

Methylene blue, first discovered in 1891, is now used to treat methemoglobinemia, a blood disorder. But because high concentrations of methylene blue were known to damage the brain, no one thought to experiment with low concentrations. Also, drugs such as methylene blue do not easily reach the brain.

Dr. Atamna's research is the first to show that low concentrations of the drug have the ability to slow cellular aging in cultured cells in the laboratory and in live mice. He believes methylene blue has the potential to become another commonplace low-cost treatment like aspirin, prescribed as a blood thinner for people with heart disorders.

Cocoa, aspirin and methylene blue: cheap and seemingly effective.

You cannot make financial markets idiot-proof, because they'll just build a better idiot.

And disease.

As developing countries confront the first global food crisis since the 1970s as well as unprecedented water scarcity, a new 53-city survey conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) indicates that most of those studied (80 percent) are using untreated or partially treated wastewater for agriculture. In over 70 percent of the cities studied, more than half of urban agricultural land is irrigated with wastewater that is either raw or diluted in streams. . .

"Irrigating with wastewater isn't a rare practice limited to a few of the poorest countries," said IWMI researcher Liqa Raschid-Sally and lead author of a report on survey results. "It's a widespread phenomenon, occurring on 20 million hectares across the developing world, especially in Asian countries, like China, India and Vietnam, but also around nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa and in many Latin American cities as well."

Wastewater is most commonly used to produce vegetables and cereals (especially rice), according to this and other IWMI reports, raising concerns about health risks for consumers, particularly of vegetables that are consumed uncooked. But at the same time, wastewater agriculture contributes importantly to urban food supplies and helps provide a livelihood for the urban poor, especially women, and recent migrants from the countryside. . .

Accra, Ghana's capital city (with an urban population of nearly 2 million), illustrates those tradeoffs particularly well. An estimated 200,000 of the city's inhabitants daily purchase vegetables produced on just 100 hectares of urban agricultural land irrigated with wastewater, says the IWMI report. "That gives you an idea," remarked Raschid-Sally, "of the large potential of wastewater agriculture for both helping and hurting great numbers of urban consumers."

"And it isn't just affluent consumers of exotic vegetables whose welfare is at stake," she added. "Poor consumers of inexpensive street food also depend on urban agriculture." Moreover, in Asia, rice-based farming systems, irrigated mainly with wastewater, figure importantly in urban food production, Raschid-Sally explained. . .

Survey results on the forces driving wastewater use in urban agriculture suggest that it is not only widespread but practically inevitable. As long as developing countries lack suitable transport for delivering large quantities of perishable produce to urban areas, vegetable production in urban agriculture will remain important. And in the face of water scarcity generally and a lack of access to clean water, urban farmers will have no alternative except to use diluted or untreated wastewater or polluted river water.

Consumers across the 53 cities said they would prefer to avoid wastewater produce. But most of the time, they have no way of knowing the origin of the products they buy. Farmers too are aware that irrigating with wastewater may pose health risks both for themselves and the consumers of their produce, but they simply have little choice, since safe groundwater is seldom an accessible alternative . . .

Charles The Dim is pleased since the produce is organic.

This seems to be a third system for producing solar hydrogen.

"A manganese cluster is central to a plant's ability to use water, carbon dioxide and sunlight to make carbohydrates and oxygen. Man-made mimics of this cluster were developed by Professor Charles Dismukes some time ago, and we've taken it a step further, harnessing the ability of these molecules to convert water into its component elements, oxygen and hydrogen," Professor Spiccia said.

"The breakthrough came when we coated a proton conductor, called Nafion, onto an anode to form a polymer membrane just a few micrometres thick, which acts as a host for the manganese clusters."

"Normally insoluble in water, when we bound the catalyst within the pores of the Nafion membrane, it was stabilised against decomposition and, importantly, water could reach the catalyst where it was oxidised on exposure to light."

This process of "oxidizing" water generates protons and electrons, which can be converted into hydrogen gas instead of carbohydrates as in plants. . .

Professor Spiccia said the efficiency of the system needed to be improved, but this breakthrough had huge potential.

The other systems noted recently had some similarities but focused on either cobalt or metal hydride rather than manganese. There seems to be a lot of ways to split water with sunlight to get hydrogen and/or oxygen.

Nick "I’m damned if I can see an alternative to despair" Cohen takes Charles The Dim to task for apocalyptic predictions of catastrophe.

Marie Antoinette never said: 'Let them eat cake' to the poor of her day, but Prince Charles was adamant that today's poor should eat organic. Despite all I have read by him over the years, it was still a shock to listen to the recording of the interview he gave the Daily Telegraph. This raging man, who searched for apocalyptic predictions of catastrophe, was not a street preacher at Hyde Park Corner, but our next head of state.

'Millions of small farmers all over the world are being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness,' he cried. Soon we will face 'the absolute destruction of everything'.

Of everything, your highness?

Yes, and another thing! If agribusinesses think they are going to prevent absolute destruction by using 'one form of clever genetic engineering after another', they will cause 'the biggest disaster environmentally of all time'.

Perhaps despairing Nick has some justification for his sorrow, given that the next head of state for his nation is such a fool. But, he's a fashionable fool.

After that, Julie Burchill felt like sweet reason. In Not in my Name, her and Chas Newkey-Burden's spirited attack on modern hypocrisy, she declared: 'Green is the first sociopolitical movement in which every single leader and spokesperson is filthy rich - they make the Conservative party look like the Jarrow marchers.'

With Lord Melchett, the Right Honourable Jonathon Porritt, George Monbiot and Zac Goldsmith, as well as Prince Charles, all holding prominent positions, the green movement is indeed where the concerned children of the upper class fled when the power of the House of Lords diminished.

Well, it isn't real concern, it's just a pose.

It's too early to be sure, but can we now at least agree that there is a fair chance that Europe's panic about GM foods will be seen by historians as an explosion of irrationality as foolish as the manias about the MMR vaccine and millennium bug?

The Royal Society investigated in 2003 and found GM foods posed no greater threat to human health than other foods. The society has just begun a second inquiry, but no one expects its scientists to alter their conclusions. True, some GM crops may damage the environment, but as the Royal Society points out, others could help it by requiring fewer dosings of pesticides.

I suspect the society is wasting its time because rich Europeans will not be convinced by evidence. Their objections are not rational but visceral. GM foods offend Europe's cult of the authentic, which is as strong now as in Marie Antoinette's day.

Cohen began the article by mocking Marie Antoinette's sincere pseudo-naturalism, part of the late 18th century revolt against science expressed by Rousseau among others. The cult survives and still denies all things scientific unless they happen to support cultish views. It isn't just Europeans who have this mental disorder, America has pockets of infection too.

We are a tolerant society, people have all manner of unscientific beliefs. A Euro style cult of the authentic, however demented, would not be a concern except:

Europe's prejudices wouldn't matter if the world's population weren't shooting up, taking food prices with it. The only solutions are a global socialist revolution to redistribute wealth (unlikely) or farmers using new technologies to grow more food.

Redistributing wealth would make things worse rather than better, but this is despairing Nick clinging to his own sort of pseudo-naturalism. The problem isn't the price of food. Price is a symptom, not a cause. The problem is food shortage. It's scarce, that's why the price has risen. It can be argued that there would be enough if we didn't make biofuels, or if we didn't feed animals, but this doesn't solve the true problem of insufficient production given that population is still rising. It's just cutting rations rather than growing more food, an approach that can at best delay collapse.

As ugly and stupid as this Euro-trash nonsense is, I find some cause for optimism. They were free to hold their silly beliefs so long as it didn't matter, and that is no longer the case. This is a growth opportunity, a chance for increased maturity. Some other mania will take its place, but food mania is ever more difficult to practice.

A similar argument can be made about energy, which on closer examination is inextricably bound with food. In both cases there is increasing pressure to abandon cult beliefs and face reality. The price of mania is rising too. In the end only the wealthy will be able to afford it, and that's of increasingly less importance.

The days are getting shorter - it's dark in the morning now - and the first acorns have begun to fall. Intimations of mortality and decline creep around the periphery of thought. It's time to start preparing: winter is coming. I've already started cutting fire wood, though it's still so hot that the labor is killing and seems inappropriate.

Last year I did some investigation of the oak Mast Cycle in an attempt to resolve some folk myths about the prescience of trees. For much of American history the mast cycle was less important than now because of that marvelous species the American Chestnut.

Ecologists have long bemoaned the destruction of the American chestnut, but the general public has been far less aware of the magnitude of the blight's effects. As Freinkel appropriately points out, nearly everyone noticed the downfall of the American elm, because it was an urban shade tree, whereas the loss of the chestnut was most acutely felt by rural Americans whose histories were oral rather than written. The nuts were an important cash crop for them, and they found many uses for its timber and bark. . .

The American chestnut had valuable traits that made it superior in a number of ways both to the closely related Chinese chestnut species and to some Eastern forest species. For one thing, it was aggressive and could compete more effectively with other types of trees. Also, by most accounts American chestnuts were more flavorful than their Chinese cousins. And unlike many other large-seeded species—hickory and oak, for example—which have good production of mast (the nuts that accumulate on the forest floor) one year and poor production the next, the American chestnut produced a great deal of mast fairly consistently, making it a reliable source of food for wildlife.

In addition, wood from the tree was easy to work and resistant to rot—in the southern Appalachians it is still possible to find cabins and barns made of chestnut wood. The American chestnut could also regenerate rapidly from cut stumps and grow high-quality wood in the process. At one point the trees provided about two thirds of the tannic acid (used in the leather-tanning industry) produced in the United States.

Most of them were dead before I was born. I only know them from stories, songs, poems, books about woodworking and an occasional rustic piece of antique furniture. But they aren't extinct.

One approach to restoration has been to introduce genes for resistance to the fungus by crossbreeding American chestnuts with the resistant Chinese species. The first step is to backcross resistant hybrids and genetically pure American chestnuts for three generations (a process that takes decades), producing a tree that is fifteen-­sixteenths American. Ideally, that tree will have the rapid growth in height and straight trunk of the American chestnut and will take from the Chinese species only the two or three genes known to confer resistance. However, meiotic recombinations make targeting specific genes an arduous business. Chestnuts have thousands of genes, and even the one-­sixteenth of these that would have come from the Chinese species could confer numerous undesirable traits. The likely result will be the creation of trees that are lacking some of the genes required to restore the American chestnut to its former sylvan dominance.

Another restoration strategy involves inoculating trees with a weakened form of the blighting fungus. This idea arose after chestnut populations in several places were discovered to be recovering from blight; investigation revealed that the fungus on those trees had been infected with a hypovirus. The idea of using the hypovirulent fungus to inoculate trees seemed promising, but it hasn't worked very well in practice. Complicating matters are the genetic differences between individual trees and the fact that there are hundreds of strains of the blight fungus and four variants of the hypovirus.

Yet another approach, one that has encountered opposition, has been to use transgene technology to place genes from plants such as wheat into American chestnuts to enhance resistance to the fungus. Blight-resistant transgenic chestnut trees may someday shade our descendants, but at this point only a few transgenic chestnut treelets exist, and no one knows yet whether their ability to resist blight will be adequate.

Finally, there is always the possibility that somewhere in the American chestnut tree's native range, there are trees capable of resisting the blight just long enough to reproduce; I have twice seen in the wild American chestnuts with burs containing seeds, indicating that reproduction had occurred. Perhaps mutation and natural selection can yet produce a truly blight-resistant American chestnut.

I'd welcome transgenic American Chestnut trees that were as much like those of yore as possible, except for being able to survive chestnut blight. I'm always amazed to hear that some wanker opposes such things due to some sort of thoughtless transgenic taboo. Why do we listen to these people? Why do their silly ideas garner support from anyone? In this, as in so many things, environmentalists are a threat to the environment.

Again. I've written on this before, more than once. I think it's a huge issue and is a key part of my disgust with the gaggle of political and cultural thugs in the left/Democrat/environmentalist organized crime syndicate.

Long-time observers of public debates about environmental threats know that skeptics about such matters tend to move, over time, through three stages. First, they tell you you’re wrong and they can prove it. (In this case, “Climate isn’t changing in unusual ways or, if it is, human activities are not the cause.”) Then they tell you you’re right but it doesn’t matter. (”OK, it’s changing and humans are playing a role, but it won’t do much harm.”) Finally, they tell you it matters but it’s too late to do anything about it. (”Yes, climate disruption is going to do some real damage, but it’s too late, too difficult, or too costly to avoid that, so we’ll just have to hunker down and suffer.”)

All three positions are represented among the climate-change skeptics who infest talk shows, Internet blogs, letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, and cocktail-party conversations. The few with credentials in climate-change science have nearly all shifted in the past few years from the first category to the second, however, and jumps from the second to the third are becoming more frequent. All three factions are wrong, but the first is the worst.

A climate scientist responds.

Holdren has created a GSM (Global Skeptic Model) that accommodates his view of the “observations” of some skeptic’s behavior and gives him a sort of comfort level to explain what he thinks he sees in a way that keeps his beliefs intact. I suppose we all have an innate drive to try and make sense of what we observe in a way that is consistent with our beliefs.

As with any model, it is over simplified, not able to account for all situations and is inconsistent with predictions (i.e. several folks have apparently announced becoming skeptical having been non-skeptics in the past).

Human behavior is too difficult to model in such a situation … humans can and will take irrational pathways. The climate is rational, but so complex, much of it is unknowable and its pathways seem chaotic anyway.

No one has eliminated natural variability as the primary cause of the temperature variations of the past 100 years.

Who am I? I’m an actively publishing climate scientist who is skeptical of the current set of climate models, having been influenced by many empirical studies of the past 20 years which test the claims of these models. These include very recent studies that show the climate system is relatively insensitive as well as studies which show much less dramatic changes in the system than those promoted in the media. Arguments from authority (i.e. consensus documents, learned society declarations, etc.) mean little to me as someone who looks into the guts of the climate system at a level few people do.

This is the first I’ve seen of the Holdren piece … I don’t consider material he writes as something on which to spend otherwise productive time.

Ouch. But the author of the silly article, "John P. Holdren, the head of Harvard’s Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy and a longtime advocate of prompt curbs in greenhouse gases", richly deserved that and much more. The problem is that climate scientists have become political activists.

Climate scientists keep testing that turbulent world between data and society — an arena far less safe than the laboratory or field camp, where a researcher becomes a potential target for both darts and laurels from those threatened or bolstered by his or her views. One new experiment is a nascent blog at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with a fresh contribution by Josh Willis, whose work on ocean temperature trends has been discussed here. Dr. Willis says those who grasp at short-term wiggles in ocean or atmospheric conditions as evidence of global warming or cooling are like gamblers seduced by a hot streak into thinking they can beat the house.

This is nonsense because there is nothing safe about real scientific publication. There are just as many darts and laurels in the noogie wars between scientists as there are when activist scientists go political and so engage with society at large. What may be different is that activist scientists lose respect as scientists. When they engage in political mud wrestling they no longer are viewed as higher beings, made men above the fray, they are just ordinary people with at least as many warts as others. They demean themselves.

As Roger Pielke Sr. notes:

His analog to gambling only fits in that he is gambling on a set of data of which he is not working on, and ignores the importance of his own accomplishments which show no upper ocean warming since mid-2004. This is hardly a wiggle!

The more appropriate analog is to a bank account. Joules must continue to be accumulated in order for global warming to occur. In the last 4 years there has been an absence of deposits. To make up for this deficit in the next 4 years, for example, the accumulation of Joules must be double the rate that occurred in the 1990s. Josh Willis is gambling, but it is in accepting the models as reality.

As John Christy noted in his response to the Holdren screed: "Arguments from authority (i.e. consensus documents, learned society declarations, etc.) mean little to me as someone who looks into the guts of the climate system . . ."

Global Skeptic Models, like global climate models, confirm the biases of some but fail to provide any useful evidence. They are scenarios that couple some observations with theories about the meaning of the observations. Observations that are not consistent with the theories are ignored, and the full complexity of reality is not addressed. Such models and scenarios can help by imposing some structure on disparate fragments of data while groping for understanding. But, they must be viewed skeptically to have this value.

The Global Skeptic Model is pure hokum, pernicious stuff from the tawdry world of antediluvian politics, the realm of the left/Democrat/environmentalist political and cultural thugs that disgust me. It is possible to find some skeptics that fit that description, but many others do not and the model has no predictive power. Its purpose is merely to smear those who have differing views, to trivialize them as humans since their arguments are too difficult to engage. If you can't beat them, psychologize and mock them.

These intellectually, ethically and aesthetically bankrupt behaviors impede the important effort to understand the climate system and adopt effective policies in response. They fail at every level and we would do well to speak out about it. Whether you find the theories compelling or not you should object strenuously to these behaviors, insisting that skeptical arguments be engaged since they advance understanding even when they prove to be wrong, and that is not always the case.

FWIW, I do find the theories to be compelling. What isn't clear is how great the effects will be, and far more importantly, what effects the proposed prescriptions can have. As I understand it, regulating CO2 and other GHGs from urban and industrial point sources in developed countries will have no significant effect on emissions despite having large effects on society. It is merely penance, and will increase risk. It is precisely the wrong thing to do if you are convinced that the threats are real and significant. If you are merely playing politics, seeking to exploit the perceived threat for gain, then this may work. And, if your real objective is to hamper society, then this is a good way to do it, though I think that you are insane to pursue this objective and constitute a greater threat than climate change.

To me, climate change is irrelevant. The real issue is the need for improved energy systems capable of satisfying demand for a fully populated and highly developed world. A related aspect is the need for improved agronomic systems capable of providing food and fiber for said world, and that requires, among other things, restoring soil carbon levels to their pre-agricultural levels, and increasing those levels beyond that natural state in many if not all cases. This is a lot of carbon and will all but drain the atmosphere if done vigorously. In the end we'll be scouring the solar system for loose carbon, mining the gas giants and asteroids, and celebrating this precious substance for what it is, the foundation of life. For me, one measure of the insanity of climate activists is their efforts to define CO2 as a pollutant. That's like calling oxygen or water pollutants. Too high a concentration of any of them can be problematical, but they are never sensibly called pollutants.

Arnold -> Robert Higgs:

If we were talking about bananas, everybody would see immediately the foolishness of seeking “banana independence.” Nobody would fall for half-baked arguments about our addiction to foreign bananas or our love affair with banana bread. It’s obviously uneconomic to grow millions of bananas in this country; it could be done, but doing it would entail much greater costs than buying them from producers in places better suited to their production (that is, places where they can be produced at lower opportunity cost).

Arnold notes:

In Oil Econ 101, I wrote,

The problem with sponsoring terrorism is not that oil revenues are the source of funds. The problem with sponsoring terrorism is that it is grossly immoral.

Whether you are an anti-war liberterian like Higgs or a xenophobe about Islamic radicals like me, the economics always comes out the same: choosing the high-cost energy path is not in the interest of American citizens.

It would be interesting to list all of the causes that sound good to politicians (and presumably to voters) but which frighten me, based on past policy proposals: the family farmer, affordable housing, energy independence...

There's a wacko nexus in the family farmer who seeks energy independence. They dream of being "off the grid" as if that was an admirable aspiration. It's not that small scale energy production is bad, it's that it should be a cash crop like any other when there is a surplus beyond local consumption. Go ahead, generate your own power, brew your own fuels, make your own fertilizers, whatever. But to have enough capacity for peak loads means that there will be too much at other times and that surplus should be sold to the grid to help your neighbors. It is unsociable to do otherwise, uncivil, contentious, destructive of community. Stupid.

As Arnold and others note, with superior economic knowledge, this homely local truth scales to the whole world. Their arguments are purely economic but it is also true that seeking to hermit up is uncivil.

Being a neighbor, part of a society, however large or small, doesn't always (ever?) go smoothly. Jerks - such as those who are, or who fund, terrorists - are ever present. They are social criminals and need to be dealt with. Withdrawing from society - local or global - is no answer.

The earlier post No Data Please referenced yet another study showing that organic foods were no better nutritionally than other foods. Many earlier posts also have talked about how they are worse from an environmental perspective when all externalities are counted. That's not to say that there are not conventional growers who produce unsatisfying foods in destructive ways, it's just that they are bozos. Some folks can screw up a wet dream.

The study referenced in that post was one of many recent articles - research and opinion - expressing doubt about, or outright debunking, fashionable food fetishes. The market speaks.

Whole Foods Market Inc. -- or, as it's become better known recently, No. 48 in the bestselling book "Stuff White People Like" -- has problems. Chiefly, there are fewer people, white or otherwise, interested in paying a premium for its ethically-cultivated, fair-trade, organic gourmet fare. . .

Consumers didn't have to shell out a lot of dough for organic plum tomatoes lovingly cultivated in volcanic soils. They did so because they could. And because this choice, while economically perplexing, allowed them to bolster a view of themselves as opposing rapacious mega-corporations that peddled genetically modified products grown in vast fields rendered toxic by industrial fertilizers and pesticides. It was political action, practiced at the dinner table, energized by books like "Fast Food Nation" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma." . . .

Whole Foods boomed alongside this national trend and was handsomely rewarded. But sticker shock was always an issue; the grocer earned the derisive tag "Whole Paycheck" because even free-spending customers with a jones for wild-caught salmon were taken aback when the contents of a single reusable shopping bag ran them $100. . .

Any form of "virtuous inflation" quickly vanishes in the face of the real thing. I'll probably be just as healthy if I eat the plain old non-organic apple, even though it may have been sprayed with pesticides. I'll certainly be less stressed about my bottom line. Ultimately, this is a strength: Under duress, many Americans focus on the fundamentals and defer gratification on the indulgences. . .

A scientist would point out that the body doesn't care what you're feeding it, so long as it's nourishing. When times are tough, that means the value-pack bag of frozen chicken thighs wins and the vegetarian-fed, free-range whole fryer does not. Virtue is a funny thing: It has a hard time competing with an empty stomach. Or an empty wallet.

We need higher virtue, true virtue rather than merely fashion. There's nothing virtuous about buying and eating foods that are all symbolism. The food isn't better and it's not better for the environment. It's all packaging and hype, presentation and flattery, a way for money to be separated from the gullible.

Real virtue might be better understood as making informed judgements that could be emulated by those with less time, energy and other resources to investigate and make good decisions. Real analysis and prescription should be done rather than half-baked mumbo-jumbo like you get in Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma".

Journalists and academics could help with this instead of perpetrating hoaxes like Pollan, who is both an academic and a journalist. For example, he claims that the beef and chicken raised by Joel Salatin is done without fertilizer. In truth he imports fertility in the form of corn - non-organic corn - which he feeds to chickens for 90% of their diet. The residue of that corn, chicken manure, is deposited on pastures growing grasses for beef.

He also excitedly reports that the chickens eat bugs that breed in dung pats, and so pesticides are not needed. In real life wild birds do that anyway and the busted dung pats are scavenged by beetles and other soil macroorganisms. If you have no wild birds and no soil macroorganisms then that is the problem you should be worrying about. Ravens, wild turkeys and beetles do the job for me, and they are smart enough to know when the dung pats are "ripe", rather than me having to haul chicken tractors around on my pastures. It's rare that I find an unmolested dung pat.

Some organic practices, as noted in that recent post, are good agronomic practice that every grower can and usually should use. Some of the things that Salatin does and that Pollan reports are also good. The hoax comes from paying lip service to fashionable nonsense instead of doing incisive analysis to expose the empty gestures, outright lies and ineffective practices in service of various taboos and myths.

For example, the beef raised by Salatin on pasture with no grain fed to the cattle (just to chickens) is in fact more nutritious than grain fed cattle. This would also be true if fertilizers were used directly instead of the chicken ruse which runs fertilized corn through chickens, indirectly applying the fertilizer used to grow corn, to the pastures. From an environmental perspective fertilizing directly would be better since no corn would be needed at all. Pastures use less fertilizer than corn and are polycultures that support greater biodiversity, require no herbicides or pesticides, and sequester carbon rather than emitting carbon gases (CO2, methane etc.) as cultivated corn fields do.

Good science and agronomic practice is what should be celebrated and rewarded. If virtuous consumption is what people want, and think elevates their status, then they need the real thing. If this was the case then when the unwashed masses follow the lead of early adopters they would in fact be doing themselves and the planet good.

Sometimes Norm seems to be one of the very few who make sensible blog posts.

It recalls Trotsky on the dialectic and, following Trotsky, Michael Walzer on war ('You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you'). The world we live in is, pervasively, political. Whether you like it or not, politics will therefore involve you - directly or indirectly. . .

Involvement in something does sometimes generate an interest in it, but it doesn't have to; not everyone has a keen interest in the technology they depend upon in their daily lives or in food distribution systems. And while it is prudent to take an interest in what might come to affect you adversely, there is much about politics that can lead to a disinclination for following it too closely. Where individuals set the line between taking an interest in politics and not doing so, and how they apportion their attention to the different aspects of the world and its contents (some of these more and some less political, some perhaps more inspiring or elevating than politics) is a matter of legitimate choice on their part - so long as they have the choice to make and politics (or war) does not engulf them. It isn't obvious that the best way of living one's life is by being buried in the political to the same extent that those who choose to be do choose to be. It isn't obvious that people who find the pursuit of other interests more rewarding are lacking in either intelligence or virtue.

He's gently disputing the assumptions and implications of statements by Johann Hari, but Norm's bit stands alone and could have been posted without reference to anything else.

I'm not interested in politics but I'm well aware that it is interested in me, like war, but more so. And, like war, we would do well to have less of it. They may both be inescapable, but that does not mean that we are improved by wallowing in them.

As I see it, politics and war are entertainments, things we do to occupy ourselves while life proceeds. I don't mean that they are irrelevant - both can, after all, disrupt or even end the proceedings. I mean that they are not creative, can not contribute to the proceedings in any constructive way. Politicians and warriors are like class clowns, sitting in the back, talking and launching spit balls, failing to learn lessons or advance understanding.

Seen from a distance it is the advance of knowledge and understanding that matters, that determines the trend lines, while war and politics are excursions from the trend line. They may sometimes be large amplitude excursions, but are none the less sideshows to the main events.

Not everyone is satisfied with such long term and large scale perspectives, arguing that much mischief can be done during those excursions and that we would do well to work to dampen them, or something. Human life spans are too short to get much satisfaction from such long and large perspectives.

True enough. But I think that we need to examine the idea that close attention can dampen the amplitude of excursions. It may be, as I think, that this just increases the energy in the system and so makes things oscillate faster and further. The harder you try to damp things down the worse things get.

There's a lot to be said for boredom, and a lot to be said against interesting times.

Several earlier posts have discussed the questionable data yielded by unrealistic experiments that slam some environmental change into an ecosystem in a bottle rather than phasing anticipated changes in at a more realistic pace. More on that.

They found that the rate of manmade climate change will not exceed background climate variability over the next few decades. What’s more, the predicted rates of change are too subtle to be mimicked experimentally at present.

The team says this is because phytoplankton need time to respond, and therefore adapt, to any change in climate. "For adaptation to change to occur, the change must be sustained," explained Boyd.

Most studies to date into the effects of climate change on organisms either use results from global model simulations or perform experiments in which the environmental properties of seawater containing phytoplankton are altered rapidly. . .

"We have to reassess our current way of doing experiments to look at climate change – where we alter, overnight, all the environmental properties in seawater to which phytoplankton has been added," said Boyd. "This tells us little about how cells might respond to gradual change due to climate change."

Instead, determining the resilience of different species or groups to an envelope of conditions is a better technique, he added. There are even clues in geological records that could help, and these could be linked with better-designed contemporary experiments.

It's a general problem. Systems - from sea ecologies to human societies - have a suite of responses for coping with natural variability. It is only when change exceeds natural variability and is sustained that those existing coping mechanisms will be challenged, and might then result in adaptation.

Experimental design needs to somehow deal with this truth to yield useful data. Easier said than done.

We are bathed in energy and everything we do spews more energy into our surroundings, often as heat. Waste heat it is called, meaning that it isn't wanted where it is and we don't have a way to use it effectively for something else. Not often at any rate. If we had an efficient way to capture such heat - infrared radiation - it would be very useful.

traditional solar cells can only use visible light, rendering them idle after dark. Infrared radiation is an especially rich energy source because it also is generated by industrial processes such as coal-fired plants.

"Every process in our industrial world creates waste heat," says INL physicist Steven Novack. "It's energy that we just throw away." . . .

researchers studied the behavior of various materials -- including gold, manganese and copper -- under infrared rays and used the resulting data to build computer models of nanoantennas. They found that with the right materials, shape and size, the simulated nanoantennas could harvest up to 92 percent of the energy at infrared wavelengths.

The team then created real-life prototypes to test their computer models. First, they used conventional production methods to etch a silicon wafer with the nanoantenna pattern. The silicon-based nanoantennas matched the computer simulations, absorbing more than 80 percent of the energy over the intended wavelength range. Next, they used a stamp-and-repeat process to emboss the nanoantennas on thin sheets of plastic. While the plastic prototype is still being tested, initial experiments suggest that it also captures energy at the expected infrared wavelengths.

The nanoantennas' ability to absorb infrared radiation makes them promising cooling devices. Since objects give off heat as infrared rays, the nanoantennas could collect those rays and re-emit the energy at harmless wavelengths. Such a system could cool down buildings and computers without the external power source required by air-conditioners and fans.

But more technological advances are needed before the nanoantennas can funnel their energy into usable electricity. The infrared rays create alternating currents in the nanoantennas that oscillate trillions of times per second, requiring a component called a rectifier to convert the alternating current to direct current. Today's rectifiers can't handle such high frequencies. "We need to design nanorectifiers that go with our nanoantennas," says Kotter, noting that a nanoscale rectifier would need to be about 1,000 times smaller than current commercial devices and will require new manufacturing methods. Another possibility is to develop electrical circuitry that might slow down the current to usable frequencies.

If these technical hurdles can be overcome, nanoantennas have the potential to be a cheaper, more efficient alternative to solar cells. Traditional solar cells rely on a chemical reaction that only works for up to 20 percent of the visible light they collect. Scientists have developed more complex solar cells with higher efficiency, but these models are too expensive for widespread use.

Nanoantennas, on the other hand, can be tweaked to pick up specific wavelengths depending on their shape and size. This flexibility would make it possible to create double-sided nanoantenna sheets that harvest energy from different parts of the sun's spectrum, Novack says. The team's stamp-and-repeat process could also be extended to large-scale roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques that could print the arrays at a rate of several yards per minute. The sheets could potentially cover building roofs or form the "skin" of consumer gadgets like cell phones and iPods, providing a continuous and inexpensive source of renewable energy.

This is very promising. It has been said that the measure of a planetary civilization is how much of the radiation from its star is captured and used. But infrared radiation is everywhere and is generated in more ways. For example, the moons of gas giant planets are heated by gravitational effects. To a lesser extent, so is the earth. And, all of the planets still have heat left from their creation as materials collided and accreted. The slow decay of some radio active materials gives off heat, which on a planetary scale is a large amount. There is even a background glow to the whole universe left from its creation, the big bang, or so it is thought. The ability to turn heat into electricity is of great value since infrared radiation is everywhere and everywhen.

Thermoelectric devices do this but are inefficient. Work continues to achieve improved figures of merit but these new nanoantennas seem to be different and have much greater potential.

A few days ago Norm posted A delusion revived.

Here's a blast from the past in the present. Writing at Monthly Review, Gregory Esteven revives a perspective on the transition to socialism that used sometimes to be called 'catastrophist'. Pared down to its essentials his thesis is that the left saved capitalism. . .

But those days are now over, thinks Esteven. The good news for socialists - or should that be the bad news? - is that 'the more humane version of capitalism is irreconcilable with globalization'. It's 'not at all clear whether capitalism can continue to be reformed'; and 'it seems that the time to revive the socialist project has arrived'.

Keeping the socialist project alive is fine by me, but this isn't an attractive or compelling way of doing it (leave aside the fact that the inability of capitalism to change and adapt is a theme long past its sell-by date). For it does rather look as if it's predicated on the hypothesis that the worse things go for people, the better it will be for a would-be socialist movement. That's not quite the same as saying that you want things to go badly for them but it comes pretty close. It has always been a politics of delusion. . . the idea that what comes out of capitalist crisis is likely to be political change of a positive kind is an idea you might have thought had been rendered problematic in the light of historical experience.

It's devastating in an understated way, especially when you apply it to the current leftist redoubt: environmentalism - especially climate change. Nearly all leftists are catastrophists, even those who are a bit less deluded.

As every serious writer knows, the legitimacy of the dictatorship rests on its ability to deliver ever-rising living standards now that its Marxism is dead. Environmental concerns will always be trumped by the party’s survival instinct. Thus, President Hu Jintao reverses a programme to close coal mines. He has to, an official tells Der Spiegel, because China’s inefficient industries ‘need seven times the resources of Japan, almost six times the resources of the US and almost three times the resources used by India’. Thus, when the leaders of the G8 announce a wish to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Hu and India’s leaders see a plot by the rich West to handicap Asian rivals and refuse to accept the target.

Because the communism of Stalin and Mao is dead, however, the scale of the catastrophe need not be a secret circulated only in samizdat pamphlets. There are voices within China free to argue that the country is ignoring her own as well as the world’s long-term interests. Pan Yue, minister of the environment, warned in 2005 that the economic miracle ‘will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace’, and he had the evidence to back up his claim. . .

The gullible admire dictatorships because they think the great leader and his politburo can cut through objections and force the recalcitrant to obey orders, and we have had no shortage of fantasies about the better China that would come if only the party embraced greenery. . .

Solzhenitsyn’s Mrs R [presumably, Roosevelt] was incapable of believing the worst and preferred to live in a daydream. Stalin’s goons did not need to fool her because she had already fooled herself. Today it is just about possible to imagine rich, post-industrial societies switching to renewable energy and nuclear power, although optimists should note the Republicans’ success in using Obama’s refusal to allow offshore oil drilling against him. But it is inconceivable that the emerging powers of China and India will abandon fossil fuels when there are no cheap options.

Rather than despair, not only the International Olympic Committee and Greenpeace but also Western governments and the European Union pretend that the Potemkin Olympic village in Beijing heralds a new China, and miss the blackened rivers and skies beyond.

As the planet warms, I’m damned if I can see an alternative to despair, but I do know that wishful thinking isn’t it.

He's a dour catastrophist shorn of delusions.

Others are still mining fossil ideology as well as fossil fuel.

Sustainable development thinking got environmental issues onto the agenda but it may now be stopping us from taking serious action on climate change and other crucial planetary issues, argues John Foster, a freelance writer and teacher and honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK in his new book "The Sustainability Mirage: Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change."

Sustainable development's attempted deal between present and future will always collapse under the pressure of 'now' because the needs of the present always win out, he says. Inevitably, this means movable targets and action that will always fall short of what we need. Ultimately, sustainable development is the pursuit of a mirage, the politics of never getting there.

To escape the illusion, he states that society must break through to a new way of understanding sustainability by focusing on the deep needs of the present, not slippery obligations to the future. That means rising to the carbon challenge now, not trying to micro-manage the longer-term, and looking to science for orders of magnitude and direction, not a game-plan. . .

Obviously there is the same disconnect all these plans by environmental activists have; namely in insisting that business is evil and only governments can promote responsible environmental policy but then insisting that the short-term dynamics of capitalism will lead to solutions that don't involve the Nihilism of condemning all new people and especially developing countries to never having any energy.

Science and capitalism both work best unfettered by politics, that much has been obvious for a century, but stating the obvious won't sell a lot of books.

I think that this is a key. The left may be temperamentally predisposed to being catastophist, pessimistic and delusional but it is the marketing angle that keeps them in that rut. You not only won't sell many books by talking sense, you won't sell much ideology either. The sale is everything to the left. They have no workable ideas for governance but want to seize power anyway to thwart those who do have workable ideas that are not leftist.

And so, we have leftist critiques that dwell on the defects of present reality, but no plausible alternative proposals. It's like mutineers on a ship who intend to seize control and then go down with the ship, as they have convinced themselves is inevitable. They have no ideas for averting catastrophe, they just want to wear the captain's cap while the ship sinks. Which is, of course, utterly insane.

In truth, the ship is a leaky old tub that cannot be made tight, but it doesn't have to sink. The bilge pumps must be manned endlessly. It's a dirty job with no end in sight but that is not reason for despair. We've never had a ship that didn't leak and don't yet know how to make one. This one leaks less than those of the past. Things have improved. It is only ignorance of that past, and false narratives by hustlers looking to sell snake oil ( i.e. leftists) that prevent a more informed evaluation of past, present and future prospects.

They are dead weight. It's irritating to have to carry them around because they bitch and complain continuously while free riding. It's also irritating when they claim credit for improvements, as if their whining somehow caused them when it actually hindered the efforts. But, they are still family. We can't just shoot them however richly they may seem to deserve it. But it would be nice if they didn't grab every megaphone, microphone and pulpit to spew their stinks into society. It makes the already dirty jobs even less pleasant. I used to think that the talking trades - academics, journalists etc. - could and would help. Not. They are leftists too. They have no interest in helping, it won't make the sale.

And wider.

The fertiliser industry is very large by New Zealand standards – about $2 billion now. It is also totally deregulated. Anyone can put up their shingle, call themselves an expert, and sell anything as a fertiliser or a fertiliser substitute.

And they are - Mr Morris of Agrissentials sells ground basalt rock and Mr Ewan Campbell (Probitas) sells ‘marine deposits’.

We have now all the ingredients required for an explosion in snake oil merchants and pseudo-science - after all a 1% stake in market share represents an income of about $20 million annually and rocks and marine mud carry a good margin when you pretend they are fertilisers.

So, here is my prediction: over the next few years we will see more muck and mystery products on the market or those already present will gather a larger market share.

That's New Zealand, where ag is a major part of the economy, though it's a small economy. In the US the numbers are larger but the syndrome is the same.

To make matters worse from the farmer’s perspective, the reforms since 1985 have left the pastoral sector bereft of technical consultants specialising in the important area of soil fertility and fertilisers.

There was a time when every farmer had access to an independent MAF Farm Advisor. And they were, until the bureaucratic rot set in, seen as the arbiters of good and bad. But today who does the farmer turn to for independent advice?

And it is broader that just the fertiliser industry. The impartial (i.e. independent of the sale of the product) advice on pasture cultivars and animal health remedies is similarly bedevilled. What to do?

This brings me to my hope: because fertiliser prices have and will continue to increase, I hope farmers will be rational and objective in their fertiliser practices.

Farming by fertiliser-recipe must go. No longer can farmers continue to do what they or their neighbour did last year. Pastures need 16 nutrients, animals a further two, and they must all be present at the appropriate optimal levels. And the only way to know that this is the case is to test – soil tests, plant tests and animal tests, regularly and routinely.

The cost of doing so is minimal in relation to the cost of the fertiliser investment. The costs of not doing so could be enormous.

The problem is real, but there is no such thing as an "independent advisor". This is merely code for government bureaucrat, who always have their own agendas.

For a time there were farm advisors that were better than independent, they were totally dependent. They were hired and paid by the farmers themselves. These agents were often local heroes, fellows who had a record of farming success over time, a reputation for results and the respect of their peers. They had passed the test over a lifetime of trials and in their senior years they worked to teach what they knew to youngsters and lesser farmers.

But, they were not scholars, not scientists and were replaced by university trained outsiders who were independent of the farmers but dependent on the universities, who were funded by government. They had more access to novel materials and methods, but less experience, and no skin in the game. Serious growers had more confidence in ag consultants. They may have ties to vendors of materials but they still lived and died on their reputations, and so were more accountable and more successful.

The best approach really is to get hard data. Do the tests. Lab work is cheaper than in the past and more readily available. It takes knowledge to interpret the tests, to integrate and understand the implications of the various tests of soil, forage and flesh, and so there are still opportunities for consultants, and still opportunities for grifters and charlatans. Just as in everything else. A second opinion may be required, doctor.

The more growers contribute to a public record of their actions and results the better that they and their peers will be able to do. In the information age the primary limit is in gathering and recording the information. If government bureaucrats really want to help they need to step back from their pretensions to expertise and do something useful, help get the data online. Once the data is publicly available some of the muck and mystery will be cleared up.

Organic is all hat.

Many people pay more than a third more for organic food in the belief that it has more nutritional content than food grown with pesticides and chemicals.

But the research by Dr Susanne Bügel and colleagues from the Department of Human Nutrition, University of Copenhagen, shows there is no clear evidence to back this up.

In the first study ever to look at retention of minerals and trace elements, animals were fed a diet consisting of crops grown using three different cultivation methods in two seasons.

The study looked at the following crops – carrots, kale, mature peas, apples and potatoes – staple ingredients that can be found in most families' shopping list.

The first cultivation method consisted of growing the vegetables on soil which had a low input of nutrients using animal manure and no pesticides except for one organically approved product on kale only.

The second method involved applying a low input of nutrients using animal manure, combined with use of pesticides, as much as allowed by regulation.

Finally, the third method comprised a combination of a high input of nutrients through mineral fertilisers and pesticides as legally allowed.

The crops were grown on the same or similar soil on adjacent fields at the same time and so experienced the same weather conditions. All were harvested and treated at the same time. In the case of the organically grown vegetables, all were grown on established organic soil.

After harvest, results showed that there were no differences in the levels of major and trace contents in the fruit and vegetables grown using the three different methods.

Produce from the organically and conventionally grown crops were then fed to animals over a two year period and intake and excretion of various minerals and trace elements were measured. Once again, the results showed there was no difference in retention of the elements regardless of how the crops were grown.

Dr Bügel says: 'No systematic differences between cultivation systems representing organic and conventional production methods were found across the five crops so the study does not support the belief that organically grown foodstuffs generally contain more major and trace elements than conventionally grown foodstuffs.'

Dr Alan Baylis, honorary secretary of SCI's Bioresources Group, adds: 'Modern crop protection chemicals to control weeds, pests and diseases are extensively tested and stringently regulated, and once in the soil, mineral nutrients from natural or artificial fertilisers are chemically identical. Organic crops are often lower yielding and eating them is a lifestyle choice for those who can afford it.'

Obviously. Organic mumbo-jumbo is a pose, a status signal - high or low depending on the viewer.

It's a shame that agriculture is afflicted with this nonsense rather than focusing on effective growing methods. Balanced fertility in healthy soils growing improved crop cultivars gives the best nutrition and taste while continuously improving soil.

There are good practices that are approved by organic regulators but they are good practices in any agronomic system. Maintaining soil organic matter by using green and brown manures, no-till cultivation, leaving crop trash in place, cover cropping and intercropping is just good practice. Attention to soil micro and macro organisms is also good practice.

But, the effective use of manufactured fertilizers is one of the best ways to increase soil organic matter and achieve balanced fertility. The use of some GMOs makes perfect sense though not all. The effective use of some pesticides and herbicides in an integrated pest management system makes perfect sense.

We need to move beyond these lack wit notions and support good growers without fussy taboos that defy scientific evidence and reason. Though food and fiber production have always been central civilized behaviors of critical importance it is growing ever more so as population rises, arable land and water become more scarce, and costs rise. This is especially true in developing countries where misguided romantics try to preserve peasant systems.

I get on real well with kids, dogs, and animals of all sorts. Mothers complain that their babies would rather have me hold them, put them to bed and get them up again after nap time. Actually, they fall asleep in my arms with their ears pressed against my chest above my heart, which beats very slowly when I'm at rest, probably because of a life of hard physical activity that makes it beat so fast and hard much of the time.

But that can't be the whole story since I get on just as well with wild critters that never sleep in my arms. My theory about them is that I'm alert and respectful. I notice them at a distance, hear their small sounds, and react with deference. They have as much right to their space as I have to mine.

Wild turkeys nest nearby. They sun themselves, and take the shade, sitting on the board fence by the kitchen window. Mothers bring their chicks into the yard to scratch and peck. They make soft cries when I come around, not in alarm but as a sort of greeting that means something like "we're here in case you didn't notice, and need about 20 feet of free space between us to feel comfy".

The normal varmints are much the same. Deer browse in the yard, bobcats and coyotes mouse around, redtail hawks and owls perch in the trees, skunks and possum slink around at night, rabbits and squirrels only move aside so that I don't step on them by accident, and today a bear is hanging around.

It's berry season so they come down off the mountain to gorge themselves. They like peaches and apples too, but the black berries are abundant and not guarded. Thing is, they usually come around at night since people shoot them. Even old timers are surprised to hear that they come here in the daytime and pay me no mind.

I get a lot of practice socializing with animals since I raise them. There's a fussy little dance we do that tells intention and attitude. The way you move and hold yourself is like talk to them, and I have learned it as a second language. I'm sure I speak it poorly by their standards, but they get my meaning and I get some of theirs.

I talk every day with my steers since I do managed grazing. I walk among them to see how they are and how well they did on their current paddock - what they ate, what they refused, the quality of their dung, etc. - and roam all over the pasture picking out the paddock that most needs their attention today. Then I open it up, walk an alley back to their old paddock, open it up, give them a double cheek click and walk back to the new paddock with them following right behind.

I go to the sweetest spot in the paddock and bend over to pull any weeds that grow there. It makes a sound much like they make ripping off tufts of grass to eat. Maybe they think that I'm grazing in my weird way. So, they come right there and graze with me for a while. And I do know how to pick the sweet spots, so it pays to come with me and do as I do.

I mention this since another theory I have about why the wild critters don't fear me is that they think that I'm some sort of odd, deformed steer and of no account in the red-in-tooth-and-claw continuum. I'm just another critter making a living in the field. Live and let live. I'm civil by their lights, and so trustworthy.

Maybe there's a general truth in this that applies as much to babies and domestic pets as to the wild critters. The comfortable handling that might seem to explain the relationship with familiars isn't the primary factor, it's the same body language and social attitude that applies to wild as well as domestic critters. Babies, after all, are still more wild than grown people, more like other animals, and may be wired to speak that language in their way.

Whatever. I don't have a burning need to explain it. It would be useful from time to time to be able to tell grown people what's going on, since few of them seem to have any idea that anything is even being discussed unless words are involved. It's like dog whistles to them. They don't hear the sounds. What is important to me is the conversation. Having a small chat with a bear that consists of almost imperceptible gestures and glances gives me a sense of worth and well being that I seldom get in other ways.

I'm easily amused.

Update:

John e'd me about this article

The wireless headset, called the "Ear-A-Round," has stereo earphones that transmit sounds directly into the cow's ears to guide its movement. Powered by a small solar energy panel, the unit contains a GPS device to monitor a cow's location and movement. . .

"It has the potential to give farmers a much finer control of pastures, finer management of where animals are and a better use of the land," . . .

The device works by using sound to keep an animal within a "virtual paddock" through GPS technology . . .

Rus said it's important to first understand cow behavior to achieve the best results. Because cows tend to follow leaders, Anderson is working to identify herd leaders and outfit them with the device for the field test.

"If you try to get them to move from point A to point B and you don't understand their behavior, you're less likely to have success," . . .

Anderson has sung his song during training exercises to get the animals to move. If they pause for longer than a few seconds, he will use the song cue to get them moving again.

If the sound cues fail, the headset can give a small electrical shock to move unresponsive cows.

Rus and Anderson also plan to test other sounds as possible cues, including naturally repulsive sounds for cows such as barking dogs and hissing snakes.

Any cue will do so long as you are consistent, so long as that sound is only ever used to mean one thing. I've trained different mobs to various cues over the years. For a while I carried a pitch pipe like musicians use to tune their axes, and blew middle C whenever I wanted them to come or follow me. One year I pretended that I was a restaurant host and ran this long spiel about how their table was ready and what was on the menu - same words every day. They all work the same.

However, they only do what you want when they want to do what you want. You are asking them to do what they would do anyway if they could. All you are doing is picking the time and place. That's important to grasp since you won't get good results if you ask them to do something dumb. If they already have a perfectly nice paddock it won't make any sense to them if you want them to move anyway. Then response is slow at best. And if you ask them to move when they need to loaf - nap and chew their cuds - results will be bad. Their brains sort of go offline at those times and if you force them back online they'll be crabby. If you push them they'll get lathered and throw a tantrum. Can't blame them really. You're the one who is supposed to be smart. . . or at least trained. Hmmm, maybe the steers have trained me?

Tyler quotes Will

(a) energy is not scarce . . .

(b) a well-functioning price system will shift energy consumption to (cleaner) alternative energy sources . . .

(c) the initial high price of alternative energy will temporarily slow growth, but competition and technological progress will eventually push prices below the historical trend . . .

(d) environmental quality is a global public good, but;

(e) this is most likely to be secured as a consequence of growth

Ho Hum. Nothing novel or insightful here, just common sense, but common sense isn't as common as one could wish.

There are bad points to this good sense. In Tyler's words:

What worries me is that first sentence: "energy is not scarce" -- it also could have been written "destructive energy is not scarce." A world where we solve our energy and environmental problems is also a world where small groups or lone individuals have great power to destroy.

Bad, but also not novel. It has always been so. Over time the size of groups able to do great destruction have decreased, and the destruction they can do has increased. It's another way to say that human productivity has risen due to technology.

It might be worth reviewing the life of Alfred Nobel, who had the same sort of concerns and felt some personal responsibility. His worries seem trivial today, as will ours tomorrow.

That's cold comfort since the stakes keep getting higher along with everything else, but the alternative seems far worse and could only be achieved by staggeringly huge costs. The cure for life is worse than the disease.

Again. But this seems to be a different technology.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity — whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source — runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis. The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up . . .

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a "giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

It may be that these technologies work together. The work of Stanford Ovshinsky, the inventor of the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) technology used for building batteries for countless portable electronic gadgets and now hybrid gas-electric cars, seems to have as much or more to do with hydrogen storage and release in solid hydrides.

by storing hydrogen reversibly in disordered solids, this solves the problems of storage, kinetics (speed of uptake and release) and cycle life. To this end, Ovshinsky and his colleagues have created a family of hydride compounds capable of real-world applications. Underpinning this is the vast catalytic surface area found in these materials, which means that when fabricated into thin film, continuous web, multi-junction devices, they can use the entire spectrum of sunlight to break up water to generate hydrogen, which is stored within the material ready for later use.

But, even if they are competing technologies it's all good. What isn't good is the way some wish to apply the technologies.

Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

How uncivil. How stupid. I suppose their computers should also be off the network. What these fools fail to grasp are the principles of peer networking. The electricity you draw from and supply to the network isn't centralized, it is distributed. The power goes to and comes from your neighbors just as your blog posts go to and come from your peers, loosely speaking.

Other considerations include the many, many uses for hydrogen besides as fuel. It is the chief ingredient in standard ammonia synthesis for fertilizers, coolants and industrial use. It may be that this system is also a solution to the need for fresh water since it is, in effect, electrolysis that can produce pure water when the isolated hydrogen and oxygen are recombined (burned, in effect). That depends on how pure the inputs need to be in the first place. If they can use sea water as the feedstock, for example, we may get multiple benefits.

Are the wheels coming off the global warming bandwagon?

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of its food production.

Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.

I have little or no confidence in the IPCC since it is so politicized. Their estimates are instrumental rather than predictive but that doesn't seem to be the worst of it.

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh's landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually. . .

"Satellite images dating back to 1973 and old maps earlier than that show some 1,000 square kilometres of land have risen from the sea," Sarker said.

"A rise in sea level will offset this and slow the gains made by new territories, but there will still be an increase in land. We think that in the next 50 years we may get another 1,000 square kilometres of land." . .

"For almost a decade we have heard experts saying Bangladesh will be under water, but so far our data has shown nothing like this," he said.

"Natural accretion has been going on here for hundreds of years along the estuaries and all our models show it will go on for decades or centuries into the future."

Dams built along the country's southern coast in the 1950s and 1960s had helped reclaim a lot of land and he believed with the use of new technology, Bangladesh could speed up the accretion process, he said.

"The land Bangladesh has lost so far has been caused by river erosion, which has always happened in this country. Natural accretion due to sedimentation and dams have more than compensated this loss," Rahman said.

Bangladesh, a country of 140 million people, has built a series of dykes to prevent flooding.

"If we build more dams using superior technology, we may be able to reclaim 4,000 to 5,000 square kilometres in the near future," Rahman said.

Perhaps they can steal a page from the European low country book and aggressively make land, especially since they seem to have a steady supply of sediment.

New Orleans in the US needs to do some of this too. Mismanagement of Mississippi river sediment has caused loss of land as the delta sinks and erodes due to thoughtless misdirection of sediment. There are some issues on the east and west coasts of the US too - beach erosion and offshore islands sinking - due to disruption of river sediment flows.

Climate science seems to be an immature science and its practitioners seem too narrow. So many natural systems are involved that the models seem sparse and untrustworthy, and the predictions of net effects are just SWAGs. The worst bit, though, is that it is all so politicized that the "scientists" cease to be scientists. They are not truth tellers.

I read the other day that it is becoming fashionable to mock greens for their excesses, and that there is rising support for oil exploration and exploitation, even among those who started the whole anti-offshore drilling thing years ago. There seems to be increasing support for nuclear power too. People seem to be better informed about the true state of global emissions - their rapid increase in developing countries - and that the overwhelming majority of people in the world have no intention of stifling development.

The bottom line? The politics of energy reform -- whether to better align supply/demand, to address rising costs, to enhance security, or to address climate change -- are going to be impossible if based on an approach that requires higher-priced energy. By contrast, progress toward these goals will be far simpler if accompanied by cheaper energy. How long will it take for this lesson to sink in?

The tired old politics of limits is of no value to any but the tired old countries of Europe and minorities in some other developed countries. Developing countries don't mind if others hobble themselves, though it will have little net effect on global issues, but very sensibly have no desire to limit themselves.

How can we rid ourselves of this political disease?

Update: Theatre of The Absurd

Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is one contestant in a ‘climate war game’ taking place this week in Washington, where four teams representing China, India, Europe and the United States are negotiating a new deal on curbing global greenhouse gas emissions. . .

"Today the participants woke up in the year 2015, and the outlook on global warming is significantly worse than it was just seven years earlier. ... Droughts, heavy rains, floods and other extreme weather events are on the rise. Some 250,000 refugees from Bangladesh are camped out on the border of India, two years after their country was ravaged by a typhoon." “It feels a bit like a grown-up version of Dungeons and Dragons to me, but I'm willing to give it a try,” says Tollefson.

If yesterday's roleplay scenario is anything to go by, it seems the EU and US may completely swap stances on climate policy by 2015!

Will they develop a scenario where Bangladesh accepts a flood of climate opportunist refugees seeking asylum to avoid being lynched in their home countries? They could be settled on some of the new land rising from the sea.

Biofuel hopefuls tout Miscanthus . . . again.

Miscanthus x giganteus outperforms current biofuels sources – by a lot. Using Miscanthus as a feedstock for ethanol production in the U.S. could significantly reduce the acreage dedicated to biofuels while meeting government biofuels production goals, the researchers report. . .

Using corn or switchgrass to produce enough ethanol to offset 20 percent of gasoline use – a current White House goal – would take 25 percent of current U.S. cropland out of food production, the researchers report. Getting the same amount of ethanol from Miscanthus would require only 9.3 percent of current agricultural acreage. . .

"What we've found with Miscanthus is that the amount of biomass generated each year would allow us to produce about 2 1/2 times the amount of ethanol we can produce per acre of corn" . . .

In trials across Illinois, switchgrass, a perennial grass which, like Miscanthus, requires fewer chemical and mechanical inputs than corn, produced only about as much ethanol feedstock per acre as corn . . .

"One reason why Miscanthus yields more biomass than corn is that it produces green leaves about six weeks earlier in the growing season," Long said. Miscanthus also stays green until late October in Illinois, while corn leaves wither at the end of August. . .

"Keep in mind that this Miscanthus is completely unimproved, so if we were to do the sorts of things that we've managed to do with corn, where we've increased its yield threefold over the last 50 years, then it's not unreal to think that we could use even less than 10 percent of the available agricultural land,"

It isn't explicitly noted, but the data makes no sense unless it is the whole corn plant - leaves, stalks, cobs and seed - that is being evaluated since it is about lignocellulosic feedstocks. It isn't clear if the grain is included and, if so, whether the high sugar content suitable for fermentation is properly scored. It seems to be a simple biomass comparison as if all biomass was equal.

The authors allude to improved varieties of Miscanthus that might be created, but not to improved corn or switchgrass. There are many varieties of corn now, each targeting a specific purpose. Some are grown for grain yield but some are grown as much for leaf as grain. Those varieties are used for silage. The whole plant - grain, stalk cob and all - is chopped and stored compressed in an air tight container of some sort (silo, silage clamp, etc.).

If lignocellulosic feedstocks are ever in demand I suspect that varieties of corn that meet that demand can be, and probably will be, developed. It isn't as clear that improved switchgrass varieties will be bred. The Miscanthus advantage of a longer growing season seems easily met by corn. There are already many varieties that have different growth periods. They were developed to allow flexibility for farmers since sometimes the growing season is longer than others, and if mature seed was not the objective - just biomass - then it would be far easier.

The only real advantage of Miscanthus is that it is perennial, but that is also a disadvantage since it precludes crop rotation and multi-cropping.

"One of the criticisms of using any biomass as a biofuel source is it has been claimed that plants are not very efficient – about 0.1 percent efficiency of conversion of sunlight into biomass," Long said. "What we show here is on average Miscanthus is in fact about 1 percent efficient, so about 1 percent of sunlight ends up as biomass."

"Keep in mind that when we consider our energy use, a few hours of solar energy falling on the earth are equal to all the energy that people use over a whole year, so you don't really need that high an efficiency to be able to capture that in plant material and make use of it as a biofuel source," he said.

This is still far less efficient than the worst solar cells, and that is the thrust of the argument. Biomass is a laughably poor solar energy collector, even if Miscanthus is 10 times better than some other plants. The valuable part of biomass is the form that the energy is stored in - food and fiber - since living things need to eat and like to shelter themselves.

For the US to lose a significant portion of its ag land to biofuels - as has already happened with corn for ethanol - is poor policy in a world that is short of food and growing ever more so. And, ag land in general is in poor and declining condition now due to cropping without proper attention to soil management - chiefly the replenishment of organic matter. There are no true crop wastes - no excess organic matter. It is owed to the soil it came from. The fact that we often do a poor job of recycling crop residues and manure streams now does not mean that they are up for grabs. It means that we need to do a better job as growers.

Biofuel nutters need to expand their thinking to include the whole agricultural system. Liquid fuel is not our only pressing need and our policies need to help the system as a whole rather than make it worse for a short term benefit.

Update: semi-nutty

We're working on what we call second-, third- and fourth-generation fuels. Like corn-based ethanol, a first-generation biofuel, our second- and third-generation fuels start with sugar as the feedstock. But unlike it, we're making fuels that have very high energy content, don't mix with water and have very low freezing points—well under 100 degrees below centigrade. They have the potential of working in high-altitude aircraft. . .

And the fourth-generation fuels?

We're using a unique type of algae that we've genetically engineered to turn sunlight and CO2 into C8 and C10 and larger lipids. The people that initially grew algae viewed it as farming—you know, you grow a bunch of algae and then you harvest it. But it's totally different if the algae are chemical factories. Ours continuously secrete these molecules, so we get constant production of something that can basically be used right away as biodiesel. . .

Because we actually have to feed them concentrated CO2, we can take CO2 streams from power plants, cement plants and other places. People view CO2 as a contaminant—they want to bury it in the ground or pump it into wells to hide or sequester it. We want to take all that waste product and convert it into fuel.

Only the fourth-generation fuels make any sense.

This is national security. We seem to be fighting wars at least in part over oil, we're sending most of our money to the Middle East and other places, and we're investing as a nation almost nothing in alternatives.

No, it is not a national security issue. Trade is not a threat to national security. It is not possible to be isolated, to live without trade, unless a very much lower standard of living is acceptable. That is a national security issue.

Had we followed intellectually where we were back in the Carter era, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we do today. We've had a lot of short-term thinking from administrations that basically trades off the health of the planet for economic gain for the business community—and for their own re-election. We don't reward our leaders for making long-term beneficial decisions for society. It's like the stock market—all that matters is the next quarter, not where you are 10 years from now.

We'd have different problems, not no problems. This is where those who have expertise in one area embarrass themselves when venturing outside their domain. It gets worse.

Do you think there's potential for change with the current presidential candidates?

I think either candidate would be orders of magnitude better than what we had in this administration, but I think Obama would be a few orders of magnitude better than McCain. Although McCain has been a longtime supporter of changes in the CAFE standards—trying to get higher-mileage cars—and has consistently been shouted down by his colleagues.

And the failure to develop local resources is OK? This from a fellow who makes claims about national security.

CAFE standards and biofuels other than the 4th generation continuous operation type that use CO2 as a feedstock rather than biomass are merely political and economic boondoggles. They hurt the environment without helping national security, but generate lots of political capital while splashing subsidies around.

Our smartest policy would be to develop local resources now - that means drilling and mining - while developing truly beneficial alternatives. Current biofuels and regulations are just feel good wanking and corporate welfare - just low politics. The problem is that politicians - in this case Obama and the Democrats - oppose smart policies since it would alienate their base and they would be shouted down by colleagues. Pot, meet kettle.