Even Sterile Seeds Are Better Than Natural Seeds

Here is a poor farmer who is not far off subsistance. He grows his crops, and he and his family eat most of it.  The rest is kept to seed the next growing seasons crops; it has to be protected against rot, animals scoffing it, parasites growing in it, people stealing it, weather ruining it and so on. If he’s lucky, he’s got enough left to seed the next crop, and if he’s very very lucky there’s a little bit left over to sell to supplement the diet, perhaps buy some tools, maybe some simple clothes, possibly some basic medicine.

Life is grim. But it could be better.

Some clever (but possibly quite evil) people in the richer countries have deliberately and directly modified genes in some crops to make them more productive. They are more resistant to pests, or rot, or they grow bigger and fatter, or they need less fertilizer. Some can compensate for particular environments, say defiencies in the soil. And some can compensate for defiencies in the diet, by drawing into the foodstuff certain minerals (such as iron) from the soil.

So our farmer, with perhaps a community loan or some charity, buys these better crops. Each year now he will have more left over than before, and so he can sell more and buy better tools, warmer clothes, more effictive medical treatments, wider diet, knowledge, perhaps some beasts to burden, and so improve his farming even more, and so drag himself and his family out from grinding poverty.

But Genetically Modified crops could ‘contaminate’ ‘natural’ crops (whatever they might be) just as, in fact, any crop that does better than any other might do. This is seen as a Bad Thing by some environfundamentalists, so the possibly evil (but definitely clever) people have offered to make their crops ’sterile’ by inserting a so-called ‘terminator’ gene. This means that any crop grown from these seeds cannot breed, and will just die, so not affecting the inefficient crops should the farmer feel he misses the natural environmental-friendliness, unrelenting work, pain, disease and death that comes with subsistance farming.

Now of course this means he has to go and buy a new seedstock every year. This is also seen as a Bad Thing. It makes the farmer dependant on evil grasping GM seed companies, and once they have him, they can screw him for as much money as they feel like. His independence is lost and he becomes a slave to the evil capitalist machine for ever more.

He is of course a slave just now, and in much worse conditions. Right now, he has only one choice of seed – the stuff he’s already got. And the dangers of losing that seed between growing seasons are significant, what with the rot and pests and weather, and requires effort and resources to protect. He depends on and is vulnerable to a host of unpleasantly nastiness.

Life really should be better

With a sterile Genetically Modified crop, he gets better productivity (that is, after all, what they are modified for), so he gets a better crop at the end of the year, or uses less resources on pesticides and fertilizers. This means he has more surplus to spend on medicine, books, tools and booze.

And it means he only has to keep money for buying the seed the next growing season, which is not invulnerable but is much much easier and safer to store than seed.

And when he goes back to all the GM companies he gets to select between them (within the limits of the local market); every time he gets the latest in crop seeds; every time he gets to refine his choices as to what appears to work best.

But no, your local envirofundamentalists deny him even a chance to try.

Rich people and their fads, eh?

Hippy-diagnosed Madness

The Psychological and Political Challenge of Facing Climate Change conference has the climate skeptics worried. Spiked, for example, are very concerned that the authorities are treating dissent as a disorder.

So let’s have a look. The conference blurb starts with the usual generic eco-concern:

“Man-made climate change poses an unprecedented threat to the global ecosystem and therefore to ourselves…”

and then, not understanding how to cope with ‘threat’, makes several leaps of logic – presumably using the whacky Precautionary Principle – to decide that:

“… The future depends on how proactive, imaginative and courageous we can be in dealing with our addiction to fossil fuels. “

…and the required call to action:

“The task of achieving action that is sufficiently rapid, determined and concerted faces daunting psychological and political obstacles – but we cannot afford to be daunted. We must seek out every means of co-operation, information-sharing and support at our disposal. “

But if we take a look at the meat of the conference, it looks more like a mutual hippy hugfest than some scary authority:

“By bringing together a group of people who are uniquely qualified to assess the human dimensions of this human-made problem…”

…so they can feel all special. Of course ‘unique’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘any good’, but it certainly looks like there’s no one qualified quite like this lot:

“Includes, in the main auditorium from 13.45 – 14.15, a poetry recital, Strange Sisters Say it for the Planet.”

The speakers include George Marshall and Mary-Jane Rust who make a professional living out of ’studying climate denialism’; nothing pre-assumed there obviously. The workshops include:

The Psychology of Inspired Action: “When facing issues like climate change and peak oil, what helps us respond in empowered and inspired ways?” by a self-help fan of Gaia

Eco Fascism: “Until we recognise the need to mourn the loss of an illusion: our idealised version of the American Dream, which has enticed us all, if only out of envy of the fantasy of an ever-plentiful, all-nurturing breast [Garden of Eden]“ by a ‘psychodynamic psychotherapist’ and anyone can call themselves that.

Embodying Ecopsychology: “This workshop will use simple experiential exercises to help you connect more deeply with your own embodiment, and hence with the beauty and fragility of the other-than-human world.” by a craniosacral therapist, an ‘alternative’ treatment.

Environmental Constellations: “Constellations, with the help of a trained facilitator, are a potent way of harnessing the individual and collaborative skills that are latent within a group and can lead to surprising experiences of development and healing.” Go live! No, really. It’s part of the treatment. Go live!

So. No real ‘threat’ there to rational debate in the Real World;  it’s just a bunch of academic hippies with unsupported ideals who believe they’re smarter than everyone else, and there’s nothing new about that.

In the meantime, more news about the lack of news in the Boston Globe, and journalists recover from global warming activists after pointing out the obvious.

CO2 Emissions vs Atmospheric Change

A good argument for man made fossil fuel-burning global warming is along the lines of the good match between CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 increase. If we release 5Gt of carbon in CO2 into the atmosphere, and the amount in the atmosphere increases by 5Gt, it would be a bit churlish to insist it’s only a coincidence.

So let’s have a quick look and see if this match exists, by comparing emissions with atmospheric change in gigatons of carbon. Atmospheric CO2 is from Mauna Loa and the Law Dome proxies, and is given in ppm (parts per million). CDIAC give 1 ppmv of CO2= 2.13 Gt of carbon. Human CO2 emissions are from CDIAC, I think here (they’ve moved their pages).

Which gives us this (click to enlarge):

So we have a fairly long period where CO2 levels increased faster than emissions, a ‘cross over’ around the early 20th century where emissions do actually match (ish) atmospheric increase. Then the curious 1935 collapse (ie before WW2), where CO2 increase slowed and in fact CO2 levels dropped, despite annual human CO2 emissions of over a gigaton a year.

The last rise since the war actually tails off – the increases are slowing according to a 2d polynomial fit – rather than rapidly increasing as CO2 emissions have.

The last 15 years look particularly ‘broken’.

Now of course there are other carbon sources and sinks that vary over time. Which is rather the point; assuming there is some kind of ‘equilibrium’ that humans are disturbing is to take an oversimplistic view of ‘nature’.

(Spreadsheet is available here)