Tag Archives: Science / Environment

Monsanto’s GMO Corn Linked To Organ Failure, Study Reveals

In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto’s GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.

. . . .

Monsanto gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however. (Read more from huffingtonpost.com)

This story is interesting because of how different political ideologies interpret it. The socialists call ‘corruption’ and say we need stricter enforcement, righteous people working at the FDA, severe punishments, and in general, more government.

Libertarians like me agree that this is corruption, but point out that corruption is inevitable when government has a monopoly on approving foods. More liberty is the answer. Here are some suggestions:

· Make it legal for milk producers to label their milk rBGH-free, or artificial-hormone free, etc. The consumers will ultimately decide.

· Do NOT pass the “food safety” legislation for which Monsanto is so vigorously lobbying. All it will do is cut down on competition.

· Legalize competition with the FDA. Dozens of private food approval organizations will arise. For example the Organic Foods Consumer Association, would resume certifying food as organic. Food producers will strive to get approval of the most trusted ones. The consumer will ultimately decide.

The righteousness of government bureaucrats will fail us every time. Freedom works best.

Why expensive running shoes might be worse than useless

Western runners, of whom 90 per cent suffer injuries every year, would be better off leaving their sneakers at home, and running barefoot.

Science and sceptical runners are catching up with something the Tarahumara Indians have known for ever: your naked feet are fine on their own. According to a growing body of clinical research, those expensive running shoes you’ve been relying on may be worse than useless: they could be causing the very injuries they’re supposed to prevent.

Perhaps the best research in the field has been going on for hundreds of years in a maze of canyons in northern Mexico. There, the reclusive Tarahumara tribe routinely engage in races of 150 miles or more, the equivalent of running the London Marathon six times in the same day. Despite this extreme mileage, as I learnt during several treks into the canyons, the Tarahumara are somehow immune to the injuries that plague the rest of the running world. (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)

UN climate body admits ‘mistake’ on Himalayan glaciers

The vice-chairman of the UN’s climate science panel admits that it made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included the date in its 2007 assessment of climate impacts.

A number of scientists have recently disputed the 2035 figure, and Jean-Pascal van Ypersele told BBC News that it was an error and would be reviewed.

But he said it did not change the broad picture of man-made climate change.

The issue, which BBC News first reported on 05 December, has reverberated around climate websites in recent days.

Some commentators maintain that taken together with the contents of e-mails stolen last year from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, it undermines the credibility of climate science.

. . . .

Meanwhile, in an interview with the news agency AFP, Georg Kaser from the University of Innsbruck in Austria – who led a different portion of the AR4 process – said he had warned that the 2035 figure was wrong in 2006, before AR4’s publication.

“It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing,” he told AFP in an interview.

NASA Stonewalling Stokes Fears of ‘U.S. Climategate’

Climategate may be just the tip of the global-warming iceberg according to the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says the next weather-science scandal may erupt right here in the United States.

For nearly three years CEI, a free-market, public-interest organization, has pursued a series of Freedom of Information Act Requests intended to force NASA’s climate-science division to hand over e-mails it says could reflect the same sort of pro-warming bias seen in the recent e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University.

One reason NASA’s unresponsiveness is drawing attention: For years, the CRU stonewalled a request filed through the British information-act process, before information was “hacked” and posted on the Internet in November.

“They have resisted and haven’t wanted to turn anything over,” CEI Energy and Global Warming Policy Director Myron Ebell says of NASA. “. . . So this looks like climategate all over again to us.” (Read more from newsmax.com)

Awash in Unwanted Ethanol

Two years ago, Congress ordered the nation’s gasoline refiners to do something that is turning out to be mathematically impossible.

To please the farm lobby and to help wean the nation off oil, Congress mandated that refiners blend a rising volume of ethanol and other biofuels into gasoline. They are supposed to use at least 15 billion gallons of biofuels by 2012, up from less than seven billion gallons in 2007.
(Read more from nytimes.com)

Text book case of the failures of central planning.

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Response from my teacher, Austrian Economist, Patrick Barron.

Dear Sirs:
There are several fallacious concepts that drove the ethanol mandates. Number one is that it is in the best interest of the U.S. to become more energy independent. There is no reason, either economic or otherwise, that requires that the U.S. government deny its citizens access to the cheapest form of energy available anywhere in the world, which includes, of course, many unexploited regions within our own borders. Furthermore, it is unconscionable that the government so blatantly penalize the vast majority of its citizens for the undeserved benefit of the farm lobby by using its power of compulsion and coercion to force us to use an inferior (ethanol delivers only three-fourths of the energy value of gasoline) and harmful fuel (as explained by Mr. Wald in his informative article). Scrap the ethanol mandates, allow drilling and refining anywhere in the U.S., and you will find that the so-called energy problem goes away.

Climate change: the worst scientific scandal of our generation

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)