Cuccinelli's attempt to turn a scientific dispute into a crime is unfortunately the logical outcome of the whole wretched politicization of the global warming issue over the last couple of decades. And the environmentally activist scientists who have worked assiduously to stifle normal scientific give and take — and even assassinate the characters and destroy the careers of those who raise legitimate questions about the supposed "scientific consensus" on global warming — bear their share of the blame. A milestone on this road to hell was the reprehensibly thuggish vendetta in 2001 against the Danish researcher Bjørn Lomborg, who dared to suggest in his now-famous book The Skeptical Environmentalist that polluted drinking water, indoor air pollution from open fires, and malaria were far more serious environmental threats to the well-being of most people in the world than theoretical projections of future climate change or other exaggerated and alarmist claims routinely given currency by the environmental movement.Liberals (in the peculiar American sense of the word) only stand up to the totalitarian and authoritarian mindsets of their political opponents. If you sincerely oppose totalitarian and authoritarian mindsets then liberals are the wrong team for you since they are, and always have been, the staunchest of totalitarian and authoritarian believers. You'd even be better off with the conservatives, though not by much.]]>Environmental scientists responded with a determination to stamp out this heresy that would have done Torquemada or Khomeini proud. A dozen scientists served Cambridge University Press with a demand that it cease printing the book, fire the editor who oversaw it, and "convene a tribunal" to investigate the book's "errors." Nature ran a truly egregious review by the scientists Stuart Pimm and Jeffrey Harvey attributing to Lomborg ridiculous statements that he never even remotely made in the book or anywhere else. And Pimm and Harvey along with other members of the environmental goon squad lodged a complaint with the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty — a legal body of the state — alleging that Lomborg had committed "scientific misconduct" for having reached conclusions that Pimm and Harvey did not like.
This attempt to criminalize intellectual disagreement ought to have chilled the hearts of all scientists. It also ought to have chilled the hearts of all liberals, because this is exactly the kind of totalitarian and authoritarian mindset that liberals have always proudly stood up to.
The previous generations had been in love with big projects: Woodie Guthrie even wrote a famous folksong about the Grand Coulee Dam, hailing the power of grand engineering projects to tame the ‘wild and wasted’ Columbia River, and celebrating the mines and the factories that the dam’s power made possible. Mid-twentieth-century America was intoxicated with social and environmental engineering of all kinds. As the costs of those projects became more clear, and as a generation that had never known, say, what life had been like in rural Alabama before the Tennessee Valley Authority, focused on the drawbacks rather than the advantages of big engineering projects, the public fell out of love with Big Science and Big Engineering. . .This is a misreading of history, a false narrative constructed by selective use of evidence. Environmentalists - and the political groups in which they were embedded - didn't lose faith in experts or authority, they believed and obeyed one of the many expert and authoritarian narratives on offer and rejected others. It's more like a religious conversion than a loss of religion. The were born again and had the zeal of converts.Experts lost their mystique. The guys in the white coats were no longer deemed all-knowing and all-wise. A better educated and more skeptical public opinion was no longer prepared to defer to technocrats, experts and government bureaucrats who said they knew best. The experts said nuclear power was safe; environmentalists doubted it. The experts said genetically modified food was safe; environmentalists thought that was hooey. The experts said bovine growth hormone and pesticides posed no dangers; environmentalists thought that was stark raving bonkers and built the organic food industry in opposition. . .
More, on issues the public follows closely, the scientific consensus keeps changing. Margarine was introduced as the healthy alternative to butter; now experts tell us that the transfats in many types of margarine are the worst things you can eat. Should you eat no fat or the right fat? All carbs, no carbs or good carbs? How much vitamin E should you take? How much sun should you get? How much fish oil should you swallow? How should you divide your time between aerobic and non-aerobic exercise? On these and many other subjects, expert opinion keeps changing. Perhaps the current consensus will last; quite possibly, it won’t — but the experts can’t tell you what will happen.
The rise of the environmental movement reflected the increasing independence of thought and judgment of a public that was becoming less and less impressed with credentials and degrees. The public wanted to take power back from experts and appointed government agencies and put up new obstacles in the way of technocratic engineers with big projects in mind.
But when it comes to global warming, the shoe is on the other foot. Now it is suddenly the environmentalists — who’ve often spent lifetimes raging against experts and scientists who debunk organic food and insist that GMOs and nuclear power plants are safe — who are the pious advocates of science and experts. Suddenly, it’s a sin to question the wisdom of the Scientific Consensus. Scientists are, after all, experts; their work is peer-reviewed and we uneducated rubes must sit back and shut up when the experts tell us what’s right.
The rise of the environmental movement reflected the increasing independence of thought and judgment of a public that was becoming less and less impressed with credentials and degrees. The public wanted to take power back from experts and appointed government agencies and put up new obstacles in the way of technocratic engineers with big projects in mind.
But when it comes to global warming, the shoe is on the other foot. Now it is suddenly the environmentalists — who’ve often spent lifetimes raging against experts and scientists who debunk organic food and insist that GMOs and nuclear power plants are safe — who are the pious advocates of science and experts. Suddenly, it’s a sin to question the wisdom of the Scientific Consensus. Scientists are, after all, experts; their work is peer-reviewed and we uneducated rubes must sit back and shut up when the experts tell us what’s right. . .Precisely.More, environmentalists have found a big and simple fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap. One big problem, one big fix. It is not just wrong to doubt that a fix is needed, it is wrong to doubt that the Chosen Fix will work. Never mind that the leading green political strategy (to stop global warming by a treaty that gains unanimous consent among 190 plus countries and is then ratified by 67 votes in a Senate that rejected Kyoto 95-0) is and always has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane. The experts decree; we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey.
Essentially, the core environmentalist argument against big projects and big development is the same argument that libertarians use against economic regulations and state planning. The ‘economic ecology’ of a healthy free market system is so complex, libertarians argue, that bureaucratic interventions, however well intentioned and however thoroughly supported by peer reviewed science of various kinds, will produce unintended consequences — and in any case the interventions and regulations are too crude and too simple to provide an adequate substitute for the marvelously complex economic order that develops from free competition. Environmentalists turned this logic against Big Science projects like dams and more generally built a case that humanity should work to have a light footprint in the world. Natural systems are so complicated, so interlinked in non-obvious ways, that any human intervention in nature has unanticipated costs. The less we intervene, the better.This is deeply confused. There was a libertarian minority among those who marched against what was then the dominant narrative, but the majority favored different bureaucratic interventions and even tighter authoritarian control rather than any sort of invisible hand of mother nature.
Ridley demonstrates the confusion.
Walter Russell Mead has a powerful essay in the American Interest online about how the environmental movement suddenly turned into the establishment. Have you noticed the irony of being told to shut up and trust the experts by the likes of Greenpeace? Nothing is quite so amusing about the modern environmental movement as its sudden volte-face on the argument from authority: from `don’t believe the experts' to `do as you are told'. . .The environemntal movement has always been an argument from authority. It's a movement after all, a bunch of thoughtless people marching around with their fists in the air, intent on hijacking the machinery of authority to enforce their narrow preferences. That's why it was so easy for Gaylord Nelson to hitch them to the wagon of his political party and ride them to power.Back in the 1970s, I hugely enjoyed the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang by the eco-activist Edward Abbey. In that book, four unlikely comrades come together in a common cause – to blow up billboards, sabotage bulldozers and destroy dams to save nature. If you were to rewrite that book today (and I have to admit I am tempted) the comrades will be blowing up wind turbines, sabotaging biofuel plants and putting up placards at organic farms about their wasteful use of land.
In my book I argue that expertise, innovation and intelligence are bottom-up phenomena, dispersed through society and shared among many brains. The `cloud’ is only the latest and strongest example of this. The top-down environmental establishment is on the wrong side of history.
Nothing has changed. It is still useful to argue against authoritarian systems by explaining the nature of complex systems and the function of distributed expertise and intelligence in those systems. It doesn't matter which authority seizes power. Any authority will degrade the system. The idea that is worth supporting is that humanity can improve itself by maturing and practicing restraint. It is a natural tendency for a group of humans to morph into a mob when they feel threatened and excited but it is that tendency to dispense with critical thought and give into the dark side of consensus that leads to ruin. It may have had some evolutionary advantage in the past when smaller groups literally fought for survival and the ability to turn into a savage and mindless mob both felt good and served the needs of war or other extreme threats, but it's time for childhood's end.]]>
Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.Lomborg has had a lot of good company in that claim that climate change was a threat but that the UN style focus on emissions reduction was laughable. However, almost none of them have questioned the base assumption: "If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate . . ." All they are arguing about is who to rob and how to divide up the loot.But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.
Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere.
In a Guardian interview, he said he would finance investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effect of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare. . .
Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. "The point I've always been making is it's not the end of the world," he told the Guardian. "That's why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well."
But he said the crucial turning point in his argument was the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of economists were asked to consider how best to spend $50bn. The first results, in 2004, put global warming near the bottom of the list, arguing instead for policies such as fighting malaria and HIV/Aids. But a repeat analysis in 2008 included new ideas for reducing the temperature rise, some of which emerged about halfway up the ranking. Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, "so it wouldn't end up at the bottom".
The difference was made by examining not just the dominant international policy to cut carbon emissions, but also seven other "solutions" including more investment in technology, climate engineering, and planting more trees and reducing soot and methane, also significant contributors to climate change, said Lomborg.
"If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate, where could you get the most bang for your buck?" was the question posed, he added. . . Current policies to cut carbon emissions through taxes - of which Lomborg has long been critical - were ranked largely at the bottom of four of the lists. At the top were more direct public investment in research and development rather than spending money on low carbon energy now, and climate engineering.
If there is any merit to the claim that "pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere" are effective then why aren't they being done already? There is so much money sloshing around in the world's governments already that funding such efforts out of existing revenues would be easy.
Carbon taxes are not about climate, they are just another revenue stream for governments. Climate is the excuse used to jack up taxes again so that the political class can live in luxury and have expensive toys to play with. They are organized crime groups looking for ways to grow their businesses and don't give a fig about abstractions like the climate 100 years from now. They care about right now, and what's in it for them.]]>
Today twenty-one groups . . . expressed their dismay at an article by leading biochar advocates, published in the science magazine Nature Communications, which proposes that an area larger than the land mass of India could be turned into charcoal plantations in the name of climate change mitigation.[1] The paper’s own figures contradict the authors’ claims that biochar will not lead to large-scale land grabbing in the global South. . .This isn't about biochar, climate change, or any other environmental issue, it is about money. The biochar advocates want subsidies and a carbon market - which is in effect a derivatives market which could be very lucrative - and their opponents are a rag tag collection of rent seeker NGOs and others in the development exploitation business who wish to maintain their current rents and gain increases. Biochar rents are a threat to their existing business.Although the authors claim that this could be done without the conversion of natural habitats and agricultural lands, the figures and forecasts used as a basis for their calculations tell a very different story, implying land-conversion on an unprecedented scale. . .
Co-authors Johannes Lehmann and Stephen Joseph are Chair and Vice-Chair of the International Biochar Initiative, which lobbies for carbon credits and subsidies for biochar. . .
Move along, there's nothing to see here.]]>
Grass does most of its growing invisibly, underground, the result of an intricate root system designed to retain water. For me, cutting grass involves a kind of invisible growth. Ironically, the very routine of grass cutting, its essential mindlessness, clears mental space to fill with intentional, task-unrelated thoughts. I call it “the mull.” I experience regrets; weigh alternatives and make choices; plan upcoming events; sing songs I find meaningful, which almost always means songs from the 1960s; make up poems or recite poems from memory; analyze books, movies, TV shows, and ads; wax nostalgic, sentimental, skeptical, or cynical about something or other, and then wonder why I feel that way; examine assumptions; ponder love, justice, free will, God, or the best recipe for pasta primavera; and wonder at string theory, quantum physics, and Mel Gibson’s proclivity for behavioral meltdowns. It could be that “the mull” is a mind-body thing; after all, cutting grass is a walk. Kierkegaard claimed “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” Rousseau asserted “my mind works only with my legs.” Thoreau called walking “a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us,” to reclaim the holy land of deliberation and imagination. Less romantically, Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, speculates that such a churn of cognitive activity has an evolutionary advantage as a “reminder mechanism:” in resisting the gravitational pull of one preoccupying task, individuals are more vigilant because, Klinger says, they keep their “larger agenda fresher in mind.”]]>But I find there’s another, less volitional mental activity that occurs while cutting grass, one that seemingly lowers a hook to snag things lurking beneath the surface of consciousness. Experts would call it “the incubation effect.” Most would call it “zoning out.” I call it “the dream-drift.” The mind wanders. Stray images and unkempt thoughts slipstream in from some far away cognitive Pacific. It’s strange, uncanny, pleasant, and just a bit unnerving, a kind of letting go which, for me, takes the form of a surrender to a mental whateverism, a kind of watching, one step removed, the products of unwilled mental activity, products broken free of any establishing context. It’s a being willing, not a willing — a willingness to be open, not a willed effort to establish a goal against which to measure myself. . .
It spooks me that the syntax of our minds is so complex, so capable of recursivity. It spooks me that the texture of our mental experience is so embodied, that our bodies and minds greet each other in mutual recognition and do not, as Descartes would have it, pass each other with an indifferent look. It didn’t spook Emerson, though; he knew that “under every deep, another deep opens.” All I know is that, sometimes, while cutting grass, what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens” happens. I am in time, on the beat. My “I” meets my “me.” We have a beer afterward. Maybe two.
From only 200,000 hectares of arable land in 1955, the Cerrado had well over 40 million hectares in cultivation by the year 2005. The phenomenal achievement of transforming the infertile Cerrado region into highly productive land over a span of fifty years, the world’s single largest increase in farmland since the settlement of the U.S. Midwest, has been hailed as a far-reaching milestone in agricultural science.And that's on 1/3 of the land available. A recent article highlights the cerrado with a focus on its contrarian approach.The Cerrado is an arid brush savanna stretching over 120 million hectares across central Brazil from the western plains to the northeastern coast. With soils characterized by high acidity and aluminum levels that are toxic to most crops, Brazilian farmers had long referred to the area as campos cerrados – “closed land,” with little promise for sustaining production. . .
The Cerrado region now provides 54 percent of all soybeans harvested in Brazil, 28 percent of the country’s corn, and 59 percent of its coffee. Cerrado agriculture has also diversified to include rice, cotton, cassava, and sugar. For all crops, average yields in the Cerrado are higher than in other areas, with harvests reaching 4.8 tons per hectare of soybeans and 11 tons per hectare of corn. In addition, the Cerrado supports 55 percent of Brazil’s beef industry.
The increase in Brazil’s farm production has been stunning. Between 1996 and 2006 the total value of the country’s crops rose from 23 billion reais ($23 billion) to 108 billion reais, or 365%. Brazil increased its beef exports tenfold in a decade, overtaking Australia as the world’s largest exporter. It has the world’s largest cattle herd after India’s. It is also the world’s largest exporter of poultry, sugar cane and ethanol (see chart 2). Since 1990 its soyabean output has risen from barely 15m tonnes to over 60m. Brazil accounts for about a third of world soyabean exports, second only to America. In 1994 Brazil’s soyabean exports were one-seventh of America’s; now they are six-sevenths. Moreover, Brazil supplies a quarter of the world’s soyabean trade on just 6% of the country’s arable land.Embrapa is even more fashion forward than that.No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for 5.7% of total farm income in Brazil during 2005-07. That compares with 12% in America, 26% for the OECD average and 29% in the European Union. And Brazil has done it without deforesting the Amazon (though that has happened for other reasons). The great expansion of farmland has taken place 1,000km from the jungle. . .
Embrapa is short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. It is a public company set up in 1973, in an unusual fit of farsightedness by the country’s then ruling generals. At the time the quadrupling of oil prices was making Brazil’s high levels of agricultural subsidy unaffordable. Mauro Lopes, who supervised the subsidy regime, says he urged the government to give $20 to Embrapa for every $50 it saved by cutting subsidies. It didn’t, but Embrapa did receive enough money to turn itself into the world’s leading tropical-research institution. It does everything from breeding new seeds and cattle, to creating ultra-thin edible wrapping paper for foodstuffs that changes colour when the food goes off, to running a nanotechnology laboratory creating biodegradable ultra-strong fabrics and wound dressings. Its main achievement, however, has been to turn the cerrado green. . .
When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.
First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. . .Embrapa scientists also bred varieties of rhizobium, a bacterium that helps fix nitrogen in legumes and which works especially well in the soil of the cerrado, reducing the need for fertilisers. . .
Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. . . Thirty years ago it took Brazil four years to raise a bull for slaughter. Now the average time is 18-20 months. . .
Third, and most important, Embrapa turned soyabeans into a tropical crop. . .Embrapa also created varieties of soya that are more tolerant than usual of acid soils (even after the vast application of lime, the cerrado is still somewhat acidic). And it speeded up the plants’ growing period, cutting between eight and 12 weeks off the usual life cycle. These “short cycle” plants have made it possible to grow two crops a year, revolutionising the operation of farms. . .
Lastly, Embrapa has pioneered and encouraged new operational farm techniques. Brazilian farmers pioneered “no-till” agriculture, in which the soil is not ploughed nor the crop harvested at ground level. Rather, it is cut high on the stalk and the remains of the plant are left to rot into a mat of organic material. Next year’s crop is then planted directly into the mat, retaining more nutrients in the soil. In 1990 Brazilian farmers used no-till farming for 2.6% of their grains; today it is over 50%.
Embrapa’s laboratory in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon, has also been studying ways to make carbon sequestration more efficient. Scientists have been examining what are known as “Amazonian dark earth soils,” small, fertile islands that were built up by pre-Columbian Indian tribes and that have especially high concentrations of phosphorous.There's nothing surprising to me about their success since they are doing sensible things, but I can see why they are both celebrated and vilified since they don't follow the script for developing world ag.“We don’t know why that should be, but we are trying to understand and reproduce that phenomenon so that we can benefit from it now,” said Wenceslau Teixeira, a soil scientist who is in charge of the effort. “These islands have especially stable levels of carbon, which helps retain nutrients and is thus both quite useful and hard to find in tropical soils.”
THE world is planting a vigorous new crop: “agro-pessimism”, or fear that mankind will not be able to feed itself except by wrecking the environment. The current harvest of this variety of whine will be a bumper one. Natural disasters—fire in Russia and flood in Pakistan, which are the world’s fifth- and eighth-largest wheat producers respectively—have added a Biblical colouring to an unfolding fear of famine. By 2050 world grain output will have to rise by half and meat production must double to meet demand. And that cannot easily happen because growth in grain yields is flattening out, there is little extra farmland and renewable water is running short.I understand that it is necessary to continue to pound on the agro-pessimists. Their visions are dark and destructive, their development prescriptions are genocidal, and they are repulsive in word and deed. I've done some the of work to whack them as they deserve, but the Embrapa style agro-economic system is a more interesting subject. It is more truly scientific and so wildly successful.The world has been here before. In 1967 Paul Ehrlich, a Malthusian, wrote that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over… In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Five years later, in “The Limits to Growth”, the Club of Rome (a group of business people and academics) argued that the world was running out of raw materials and that societies would probably collapse in the 21st century. . .
Brazil has followed more or less the opposite of the agro-pessimists’ prescription. For them, sustainability is the greatest virtue and is best achieved by encouraging small farms and organic practices. They frown on monocultures and chemical fertilisers. They like agricultural research but loathe genetically modified (GM) plants. They think it is more important for food to be sold on local than on international markets. Brazil’s farms are sustainable, too, thanks to abundant land and water. But they are many times the size even of American ones. Farmers buy inputs and sell crops on a scale that makes sense only if there are world markets for them. And they depend critically on new technology. As the briefing explains, Brazil’s progress has been underpinned by the state agricultural-research company and pushed forward by GM crops. Brazil represents a clear alternative to the growing belief that, in farming, small and organic are beautiful.
That alternative commands respect for three reasons. First, it is magnificently productive. It is not too much to talk about a miracle, and one that has been achieved without the huge state subsidies that prop up farmers in Europe and America. Second, the Brazilian way of farming is more likely to do good in the poorest countries of Africa and Asia. Brazil’s climate is tropical, like theirs. Its success was built partly on improving grasses from Africa and cattle from India. Of course there are myriad reasons why its way of farming will not translate easily, notably that its success was achieved at a time when the climate was relatively stable whereas now uncertainty looms. Still, the basic ingredients of Brazil’s success—agricultural research, capital-intensive large farms, openness to trade and to new farming techniques—should work elsewhere.
One subject worth a narrow focus is the methods of nitrogen management. As noted above they have had the simple good sense to breed varieties of rhizobium adapted to local conditions, and so greatly increased microbial nitrogen fixation, an important issue for growers of legumes like soya. Their soil amendments to raise PH have a large effect on microbial populations and soil nutrient retention and availability. The study of “Amazonian dark earth soils”, aka Terra Preta or biochar, will make further contributions to this effort. Of particular interest to me is their work with the African grass Brachiaria humidicola.
as well as being highly nutritious and palatable to ruminants, brachiaria inhibits nitrification. Livestock have been almost universally vilified in climate change debates, but this capacity could see the grass take centre stage in the push to significantly reduce the GHG footprint not just of livestock production, but arable farming too. . .I linked an interesting paper on the subject last year.CIAT scientists had known for more than 30 years that brachiaria grass could suppress soil nitrification, but they only recently found out how its biological nitrification inhibition (BNI) capacity works. In October 2009, in collaboration with scientists from the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS), and Japan's National Food Research Institute (NFRI), they discovered and characterised brachialactone, a chemical compound in the plant's roots which is released into the soil and acts as a biological nitrification inhibitor, in turn reducing GHG emissions from brachiaria-based livestock systems.
Here, we report the discovery of an effective nitrification inhibitor in the root-exudates of the tropical forage grass Brachiaria humidicola (Rendle) Schweick. Named ‘‘brachialactone,’’ this inhibitor is a recently discovered cyclic diterpene with a unique 5-8-5-membered ring system and a -lactone ring. It contributed 60–90% of the inhibitory activity released from the roots of this tropical grass. Unlike nitrapyrin (a synthetic nitrification inhibitor), which affects only the ammonia monooxygenase (AMO) pathway, brachialactone appears to block both AMO and hydroxylamine oxidoreductase enzymatic pathways in Nitrosomonas. Release of this inhibitor is a regulated plant function, triggered and sustained by the availability of ammonium (NH4+) in the root environment. Brachialactone release is restricted to those roots that are directly exposed to NH4+. Within 3 years of establishment, Brachiaria pastures have suppressed soil nitrifier populations (determined as amoA genes; ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and ammonia-oxidizing archaea), along with nitrification and nitrous oxide emissions. These findings provide direct evidence for the existence and active regulation of a nitrification inhibitor (or inhibitors) release from tropical pasture root systems. Exploiting the BNI [biological nitrification inhibition] function could become a powerful strategy toward the development of low-nitrifying agronomic systems, benefiting both agriculture and the environment.I'll repeat comments that I made at that time.
There's fierce competition for nitrogen and so it's not really surprising that there are plants that have found ways to do battle with soil bacteria that would otherwise contribute to loss of food for the plants. What is interesting is the indirection. The plants don't inhibit the denitrifying bacteria directly, they inhibit nitrifying bacteria that provide food for the denitrifiers, since plants can use ammonium as a nitrogen source.I think that this is important. We hear factoids about nitrogen management - such as that biochar adsorbs ammonium and so "reduces nitrous oxide emissions" - from special interest advocates such as climate wankers. Emissions are irrelevant. The issue is plant growth and that is enhanced by systems that are attuned to ammonium rather than nitrate. If we are able to develop brachialactone secreting varieties of other important grasses - including cereals as well as forage grasses - it will not only lower the fertilizer bill and increase yield, it will reduce nutrient leaching and loss to atmosphere.The paper further asserts that plants that take up nitrate emit nitrous oxides from their leaves whereas those that take up ammonium for their nitrogen source do not. Since ammonium is a cation it is less mobile in soil and doesn't leach away like nitrate. Inhibiting nitrifying bacteria would then benefit the plant even more.
Nitrate fixing bacteria that either associate with legumes or are free living bypass inhibition since they directly produce nitrate, but the majority of commercial nitrogen fertilizers and all organic nitrogen goes though an ammonium step on the way to nitrate. It's a good place to intervene in the nitrogen cycle.
Some grasses such as wild wheat can do this trick, which suggests that it might be possible to teach other food grasses such as wheat and maize to do it too.
There are also efforts to develop coatings for fertilizer prills that inhibit nitrifying bacteria, but recall that it isn't just commercial fertilizers that would benefit since all forms of nitrogen (protein) goes through an ammonium step during bacterial mineralization. It's how the nitrogen cycle works. Anything we can do to delay the return of nitrogen back to the atmosphere increases the benefit to plant life.]]>
Checking the Wikipedia article on the Gricean maxims, I find the interesting comment that:It gets more complicated when competing objectives are considered.“Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.” (Bach 2005).The maxims can thus be seen as an application of the economic approach to understanding behavior—the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the best way of achieving them. The objective is communication, the maxims describe how best to do it, and a listener dealing with potential ambiguity in speech—for example ambiguity in the meaning of “most”—can sometimes resolve it by assuming that the speaker is using the word with a meaning that achieves that objective. Where what is relevant is which candidate won an election, “most” is likely to mean a majority or even a plurality: “The party that got most votes was …”. Where what is relevant is whether there is a substantial minority for whom a statement is not true, “most” is likely to mean an overwhelming majority: “Most of my students understand English, so there is no need to provide translations of the readings into other languages.”
One can carry the argument one step further. If, instead of offering the norm violator an easy out, I loudly upbraid him, he will be less likely to quietly concede his error . But, since I will have raised the cost to him of cutting into line, he may be less likely to do it again. If my objective were the general good rather than my own private good, that might be the sensible choice, deterring future offenses against other people at some cost in current unpleasantness. In my friend’s view, the reason to be courteous was the benevolent desire to maintain social harmony. But courtesy, at least in this case, causes me to sacrifice the general good for my private good—precisely the behavior that economics predicts.Sometimes I'm for others, sometimes I'm for myself, timing matters. It seems to me that the economic way of thinking fails to deal with the complex trade-offs each person makes on nearly every decision. A person doesn't make the same decision every time even when the situations seem identical since the person's state of mind is in constant flux. This isn't an argument that economic thinking is wrong or useless, just that it has limitations. It may help explain why something happened but isn't very useful for predicting futures. It's a hindsight scope that blurs and glitches when used for foresight.]]>
"The major division in this country is no longer between parties but between political elites and the people," Mr. Rasmussen says.I had always assumed that the inanity of political polls was due to push polling: they weren't trying to find out what people thought, they were trying to alter their views. However true that may be in general it seems that there is also real confusion and misunderstanding.His recent polls show huge gaps between the two groups. While 67% of the political class believes the U.S. is moving in the right direction, a full 84% of mainstream voters believe the nation is moving in the wrong one. The political class overwhelmingly supported the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, the health-care bill, and the Justice Department's decision to sue Arizona over its new immigration law. Those in the mainstream public just as intensely opposed those moves.
The division of Americans into these groups has real significance for the way polls are conducted and how their results are interpreted, according to Mr. Rasmussen. One reason some polls offer misleading results, he says, is that the premise behind questions asked isn't always shared by those queried. "Many pollsters have asked voters whether policy makers should spend more to improve the economy or reduce spending to cut the deficit. But I found that 52% of Americans think more government spending hurts the economy and only 28% think it helps," he says. "The trade-offs pollsters offer voters often don't make sense to them. How you frame the question often obscures the results you get."
"This will be the third straight election in which people vote against the party in power," he says. "The GOP will benefit from that this year, but 75% of Republicans say their representatives in Congress are out of touch with the party base. Should they win big this November, they will have to move quickly to prove they've learned lessons from the Bush years." . . .The linked article is framed as yet another explanation for the Tea Party, but I don't think that it is necessary or useful to apply a label to the aggregate facts. It is sufficient to note that a super majority of the ruling class likes itself while an overwhelming majority of the rest of society disagrees. Nothing is added by labeling 84% of society as if they were a coherent group since they are a wildly diverse lot who agree on little else.
Update: This is old - February 18, 2010 - but is being linked lately by others and still seems relevant.
The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. . .How could a random group only do as well as the current Congress? IMV that hugely underestimates the probable benefit of a random group.]]>In his new book, In Search of Self-Governance, Scott Rasmussen observes that the American people are “united in the belief that our political system is broken, that politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers.” He adds that “the gap between Americans who want to govern themselves and the politicians who want to rule over them may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century.” . . .
Sixty percent (60%) of voters think that neither Republican political leaders nor Democratic political leaders have a good understanding of what is needed today. Thirty-five percent (35%) say Republicans and Democrats are so much alike that an entirely new political party is needed to represent the American people.
Nearly half of all voters believe that people randomly selected from the phone book could do as good a job as the current Congress.
the definitive work on how housing policy affected mortgage lending. Pinto has access to good data. He has the institutional knowledge. He doesn't have an address at Harvard, Princeton, or Chicago, but I find facts more convincing than credentials.There will be more conversation about this work, but there is an interesting idea that has emerged in comments so far: it is government that caused the mortgage crisis by forcing banks to give credit to unqualified borrowers, and many of them turned out to be deadbeats. This fact is evaded and obscured by partisan bickering which seeks to assign blame to one party or another when it is government - under one regime or another - that is the culprit.
The issue is less that the Democrats are more guilty than the Republicans, or the reverse, it is that government under either party has become too powerful and meddlesome for the good of society. It matters less which idiot is playing with fire than that there are idiots playing with fire.]]>
Tallgrass Beef field representative Clay Nash says cattle that eventually carry the Tallgrass label are no more than 30 months of age with a carcass weight of 550-850 lbs., and a minimum live weight at time of purchase of 1,100 lbs.These guys aren't as rare as you might think. They're not the mainstream fashionable cattlemen who get whipsawed trying to follow current trends, they are crusty contrarians who have been thinking for themselves and closely observing reality all along.Tallgrass Beef requires fat cover to be ultrasound-verified at a minimum of 0.25 in. at a maximum of 50 days prior to harvest, he says, with an actual ribeye area of at least 10 in. Minimum percent intramuscular fat must be 3.5% and ribeye shape score must equal or exceed 0.30. Tenderness score must register 25 or less. . .
John Cotton in Volga, SD, is one of the rare livestock breeders with that kind of genetics.”
Cotton, in east central South Dakota, was known during the ’80s and ’90s as “the guy with the little, dinky cows,” he says.
“My herd genetics are rooted in what my dad started in the ’60s,” Cotton says. ”He believed a successful livestock producer needed efficient cows to control input costs and raise average-sized cattle. My cows average a 4.5 to 5.5 frame score. If I have anything larger than that, I sell that animal.”
One of them, Walt Hunzinger, was our local real-deal herd master. He passed this spring, and though he had always lived in the background, mostly managing herds for other people, his funeral was a major local event. Cowboys and cattlemen came from miles and miles around to pay tribute to a master.
What these fellows have always known is that performance on grass was the key to success since the cows, bulls and calves must do well there or there's no profit in ranching. Feedlot performance traits don't do them much good, even if such animals command a small premium at the sale barn on a per pound basis since there are fewer of them, tend to weigh less, and are more costly to raise when whole herd accounting is done.
Cotton’s cattle are on pasture as long as winter permits. Once home, they feed on silage raised on his cropland. Among Cotton’s profit guidelines is maintaining cows that wean calves between 42% and 50% of bodyweight. Cows average 1,380 lbs. . .This isn't a general recipe for good herd performance, it is particular to the place. Other places will have different best practices. It is the method that is general, the idea of breeding for whole herd performance in a particular environment. For example, in my comparatively benign climate the idea of putting beeves in a barn and feeding them for 100-150 days while the pasture is frozen solid makes no sense. We graze 12 months of the year but it gets a little warm in the dog days of summer. John Cotton's animals might not like it much here.Because my genetics go back so far, I base breeding decisions on records I keep for each animal. One trait I’ve selected for is short gestation. For Angus, the standard is 283 days. I’ve worked to get down between 280 and 278. I like easy sliders so I keep birth weights down, too.” . . .
In selecting bulls, Cotton looks for a “John Wayne” profile.
“You want broad shoulders, wide in front, narrow in the hip,” he says. “A quality bull also has good testicle size, a clean sheath and curly haired coat. I want a good, deep chest and masculine look. With the genetics I’ve stuck with, you won’t make big bucks overnight, but you won’t lose overnight, either.
We look for many of the same traits that Cotton likes - easy sliders make a world of sense - but some other things we look for are shorter legs and longer spines, big mouths and rumens, a calm disposition and a good work ethic. The more they work - and by that I mean eat - the earlier they mature and finish. This goes beyond just the visual selection methods since it requires a closer knowledge of animal behavior. This is possible in intensive management systems where the grazier is around the animals every day and gets to know them more than is possible on the open range.
“Many of our current economic factors make a low-input beef operation pretty attractive,” Gompert says. “Credit shortages and high interest rates are pretty likely in the near future. It’s also quite probable we’ll see extremes in input expenses for crops and livestock. Land prices could decrease significantly and added environmental and animal-care regulations could all stress the livestock industry.”Grass farming was not developed for the currently fashionable grass fed, organic, yada yada market. It was developed as smart farming that had lower costs than conventional systems and did better when times were hard. If you spend your life in farming you will face several periods when things are hard. The key to success is surviving those periods. If you do it well then you will have the cash to buy out the fashionable fellows at fire sale prices when they go bust. Want a newer tractor? Wait a bit and the guy next door will go bankrupt and you can buy his for a song.
I'm happy to sell real grass finished beef at premium prices, but even if that market becomes glutted and prices fall I'll keep doing what I'm doing since my costs are kept low. The zealots and ideological purists will go broke, but I'll still make more pounds of beef and make more on each pound, even if I have to sell it at the sale barn for commodity beef prices. It's a better way to raise livestock no matter what the current consumer fashion might be.]]>
The conservative students at Eastern elite were under no illusions that they were anything but an extreme minority -- and the institution's reputation is such that some were discouraged by friends back home from even enrolling. But almost uniformly, they were happy. They identified their professors as being liberal, but admired them nonetheless.Liberal dogma and conservative criticism of that dogma aren't the only - or even most coherent - analyses. The problem isn't just that conservatives might be uncomfortable at those ideologically narrow institutions, it is that the quality of education for all students is diminished by the lack of heuristic diversity. The experience of some of those conservatives - teaching them to examine and defend their beliefs - is an example of the dynamics of a heuristically diverse institution, though in this case it is only the conservatives who have these positive learning experiences, and even their experience would be improved by greater diversity.In fact, as Wood noted here, "they viewed the experience of being in the minority as a positive one" in teaching them to examine and defend their beliefs, and "almost every single one said that they received a better education" by being in the extreme minority, a finding "in contrast to the conservative critique."
Those who find both the illiberal and the conservative views to be lacking may be the most uncomfortable, but also the best educated if they have the resources to endure such a stultifying environment.]]>
Congress and President Obama since his election in 2008 made the main mistakes after the crisis hit. Instead of concentrating mainly on fighting the recession and promoting faster economic growth, the Congress elected in 2008 believed they had a mandate to radically remake the American economy. Aside from repeated attacks on American business, especially banks-some of them deserved- they not only passed various stimulus packages (that did not stimulate much), but also tried to promote a vast legislative program that had nothing to do with fighting the recession. This program was aimed at reengineering the American economy. It included radical changes in the health care system, proposed taxes on carbon emissions by companies, much larger subsidies to alternative sources of energy, such as wind power, proposals to raise taxes on higher income individuals and on corporate profits, and to raise the taxes on capital gains and corporate dividends. It also includes a movement to make anti-trust laws less pro-consumer and more protective of competitors from aggressive and innovative companies. It has as its centerpiece a financial reform bill that was a complicated and a politically driven mixture of sensible reforms, and senseless changes that had little to do with stabilizing the financial architecture, or correcting what was defective in prior regulations.That's what seemed to me to be happening too. It was as if the vandals that we inadvertently elected sought to take advantage of a wounded country to attack it while it was defenseless, kick it while it was down. They perhaps thought that they were improving the country by hacking off its limbs and damaging its sensory organs, though that doesn't say anything complimentary about their idea of improvement.
Smart people would have assessed the situation and moved first to get the country back on its feet before proceeding with their desire to cripple it. It would have been harder to do such grave harm to a country in better shape, but they just seem like cruel bullies now. Their incompetence looks like meanness and stupidity.
Government spending rose a lot during the last year of the Bush administration, and rose even more so during the year and one half of the Obama administration. Instead of introducing additional stimulus packages and further raising the cost of doing business, Congress and the President should try to create an environment where companies, both large and small, and entrepreneurs are recognized as crucial forces in a dynamic economy. Their activities can help the American economy not only grow out of the economic slowdown, but also raise its economic growth in the future that will greatly improve the well being of future generations, and help meet a dangerous future debt burden.Obviously. The government isn't about the government, it's about the rest of society. Our institutions have been hijacked by the bureaucrats hired and elected to staff them. They have abandoned the missions of those institutions to serve society, and adopted the new mission of serving themselves. The education system serves teachers and administrators rather than students, the national government seeks only to enrich its elected and appointed staff, and reward its important supporters.
Apart from the fact that this is vile behavior it can't be continued without collapse.
Update: As an idea, neo-Keynesianism is dead. (As public policy, of course, it will live forever.)
When the credit unwind started, the papers, the TV and the newsweaklies declared capitalism dead in just a little less time than it took for Kent Brockman to declare his loyalty to the Space Ants. Less than two years later, you can't buy good press for the stimulus; the economy is frozen solid in August; the nation is rediscovering -- despite the herniated efforts of local, state and federal government -- the virtues of thrift; and if you search for Keynes on the interwebs, all you turn up are headlines like "How Dr. Keynes killed the patient." . . .With only two years’ distance the TARP and the ARRA stimulus (and all the already forgotten lesser stimuli like the $400 billion Federal Housing Finance Regulatory Reform Act of June 2008) can be seen as one of the great public tragedies of our time.
Update: Pauly Krugnuts.
“Things have gotten so slow that Wall Street traders are giving up coke for pot. Note that, according to the White House itself, we have already enjoyed most of the benefits of the $787 billion ARRA Stimulus. These benefits seem to have consisted of making signs to tell people about the stimulus.”]]>
In his new book, “Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy,” Gentilcore traces the tomato from its origins in the New World, where it was domesticated by the Maya, then cultivated by the Aztecs. It likely entered Europe via Spain, after conquistador Hernan Cortes’s conquest of Mexico. When it arrived on the scene in Italy, it was strictly a curiosity for those who studied plants — not something anyone faint of heart would consider eating. In 1628, Paduan physician Giovanni Domenico Sala called tomatoes “strange and horrible things” in a discussion that included the consumption of locusts, crickets, and worms. When people ate tomatoes, it was as a novelty. “People were curious about new foods, the way gourmets are today with new combinations and new uses of high technology in preparation,” Gentilcore said. Yesterday’s tomato is today’s molecular gastronomy. . .You can't sell tomatoes at our local farmer's market since everyone grows them at home. At best you can trade your tomatoes for a different variety, but everyone is trying to get rid of their excess. ]]>You can’t imagine Italian food without it. And yet most of these dishes, such as pasta al pomodoro, are fairly recent — from the 1870s or ’80s. Italian immigrants arriving in New York City or Boston were the first generation to eat these dishes as daily things. Making a rich meat sauce with maybe the addition of tomato paste, that Sunday gravy style, is something that happens only in the 20th century. . .
The tomato was associated with the eggplant, which was regarded with suspicion. It’s a vine. Anything that grows along the ground was seen as a plant of low status, something you only give to peasants. . .
The medical advice was to stay away from these things. In some cases, it made them all the more attractive. Truffles, for example. For the elites who could afford them, that was part of their attraction. Practically all fruits and vegetables were considered harmful. Melons in particular were really dangerous. The only way to eat something cold and moist like melon was to wrap it in prosciutto or ham, which is hot and dry. It was a way of balancing the food. . .
Tomatoes took off in Italy because they became an industry, mostly for export. Italians were too poor to buy such things. Most of the country’s processed tomatoes are exported. In Italy, up until the 1950s, there was a large part of the country, even where they produce tomatoes, where they wouldn’t eat the stuff.
I'm comfortable with the fact that we are all lack-wits and bumblers, and comfortable with continuing none the less to pursue immediate objectives that seem to be worthwhile given current circustances and understandings. Our current errors will be revealed shortly, though our general condition will be unchanged by those revealations. Good cheer and a sense of humor are useful as salve for our embarrassment and wounds.
Though I disagree with them - and have often posted about specific objections - I would, if I had the funds for such entertainments, buy books by John Gray and Roger Scruton since they disagree with one another while rooting around points of view that are not as mistaken as those of others.
Evangelical progressives, evangelical conservatives, even evangelicals, set out their stalls in the marketplace of ideas, with many an intellectual trinket to tempt the jaded passer-by. . .Opposition to the zealotry of the unscrupulous optimists - left, right and other - does not seem like pessimism to me. It isn't, as the various definitions of the word claim, a feeling that things always turn out badly or a general disposition to look on the dark side and to expect the worst in all things. Opposing zealotry is the simple good sense of Feynman that recognizes the reality of ignorance. None are more ignorant than zealots. It takes a kind of militant ignorance to indulge in utopian thoughts, a steely determination to avert one's gaze from reality in order to maintain an ecstatic state of mind until it is too late to avoid a deeply desired disaster.Not all intellectuals, needless to say. Many are deeply uncomfortable with this sort of large-scale visionary thinking and some have set themselves against it with a determination bordering on the fanatical.
Of these, John Gray has been the most vocal and, in my view, the most frustrating, determined to rain on even the smallest parade of those who would seek to advance humanity. But there is no denying his central insight, which is that such parades, if left unchecked, can turn quickly into military marches. Institutions progress but human beings don't, and their capacity for cruelty and violence is infinite.
A pessimistic thought, to be sure. But British philosopher Roger Scruton is rather optimistic about pessimism. Indeed, in The Uses of Pessimism he prescribes "a dose" of that very tendency as the tonic for the kind of utopian thinking indulged in by thinkers such as Badiou and Zizek. We should respond to their irrational exuberance and "unscrupulous optimism", he suggests, through respect for custom and tradition; the "we" of unruffled compromise and gradual mutuality. . .
Scruton identifies seven fallacies that he sees as underwriting false hope. Put briefly, these translate into a tendency to always look on the bright side, a belief that freedom is hampered by law, an unwillingness to countenance refutation, a belief that failure in one human quarter is directly connected to success in another, an inclination to impose solutions rather than letting them evolve over time, the idea that human history has an endpoint, and the tendency to assume agreeable concepts such as liberty and equality are mutually reinforcing. . .
There is a lot to be said for Scruton's argument, especially when it comes to the ill-effects of top-down thinking in the political sphere. For he is surely right to say that in the area of human rights, for example, the British model of slow negotiation between competing interests was greatly preferable to Robespierre's "despotism of liberty". . .
Zealotry is elaborate suicide as well as homicide.]]>
In the mid-1960's, when about 42 percent of the total beef and dairy cattle slaughter was grass-fed, Bill Helming, veteran and respected agricultural economist and agribusiness consultant came to a startling and contrarian prediction.A couple of decades ago when far flung graziers began talking with one another using ICT a common dollop of conventional wisdom was that the key to profitability was burger since it was so much of the carcass yield. It wasn't that you made a profit on the burger, it was that you had to get rid of it at break even prices so that you could profit on the steaks sold at high prices. Everyone wants a steak. That has never been my experience for one simple reason: grass fed burger is so very good. I have always had the opposite problem of not having enough burger to satisfy demand. Sometimes it was necessary to burger a whole carcass to supplement normal burger yield.Rather than continue ticking along to established industry rhythms and mores, Helming forecast that looming economic changes and evolving consumer demand would significantly reduce the tonnage of grass-fed beef in favor of more full-fed, grain-fed beef. At the time he shared his views in a paper aptly titled, The U.S. Hamburger Society-Part 1.
History obviously proves Helming a prescient prognosticator. If his most recent prediction is also correct, the industry is poised to come full-circle, with economics and consumer demand forcing a significant shift to more grass-fed and half-fed cattle, at the expense of the grain-fed market. . .
“Today, very close to 55 percent of the total beef tonnage sold to and consumed by the American consumer is ground beef in one form or another. It's easy to see the day coming within the next 10-15 years when 65-70 percent of the total U.S. beef tonnage produced and consumed in the U.S. will be ground beef.” . . .
However the future pans out, it's no secret that the traditionally lower-value, higher-volume part of the beef carcass—the Chuck and Round—have propped up carcass values as the nation's economy has struggled. Until the last 18 months, it was higher-priced, lower-volume middle meats—the Loin and Rib—that primarily determined carcass value.
Based on Cattle-Fax data, middle meat primal values declined 8-10 percent from March of 2008 to April of this year, while the value of the Chuck and Round increased 11-17 percent.
“The net result moving forward is the Hamburger Society—Part Two,” says Helming. “This will represent a major and fundamental change and opportunity for the U.S. beef cattle industry. It will also be positive overall for the U.S. beef cattle industry moving forward on a longer-term basis.”
For the purposes of this article, grass-fed is synonymous to non-fed. Full-fed means the traditional system of the past four decades of feeding cattle a high-concentrate grain ration for at least 120 to 160 days. Half-fed implies cattle fed a low-concentrate grain, high-roughage diet for no more than 70-90 days, to a live slaughter weight of approximately 950-1,050 lbs.The article ignores real grass finishing. It's currently a low single digit percentage of the market so that makes some sense, but we are talking about the future. A steer well finished on grass is much like a full-fed steer in weight and carcass characteristics. The difference is in the nutritional content of the beef, and its flavor and tenderness. Grass finished beef has a superior fatty acid profile as well as extra vitamins, its flavor is a matter of taste of course but many find it to be excellent, and it is necessarily a bit less tender since the animals are more active and muscular as opposed to fat and flaccid.
My view is that the grass finished market will continue to grow even though it will command a price premium, but I agree with Helming that burger will be in even greater demand. Success depends on good burger. Get it right or else.]]>