Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia scientist whose stolen emails caused the worldwide ‘climate-gate’ kerfuffle, has told The Sunday Times he contemplated killing himself. . .

Jones also told the paper he is now on beta blockers and taking sleeping pills in the aftermath of the email theft. He continues to receive death threats. . .

Meanwhile, a poll for the BBC seems to show an increase in people who don’t believe in global warming. The survey of 1,001 adults found 25% said no when asked “From what you know and have heard, do you think that the Earth’s climate is changing and global warming taking place?” This is up from 10% in November. The proportion saying yes dropped to 75%, down from 83% in November.

However, Richard Black at the BBC thinks this might just be down to the recent weather in Blighty.

“Having to dig your car out of a snowbank and sending the kids out to make a snowman would, you might think, tend to mitigate against belief in warnings of a dangerously warming world ahead,” writes the environment correspondent. “An unusually hot summer - and globally, January was the warmest on record, in case you missed it, and El Nino conditions pertain in the Pacific - and fickle opinion might turn again.”

We seem to be living in an era of mediocrity. Those who are in positions of power and authority are not particularly bright or competent. It happens. History has many examples of periods when otherwise advanced societies suffered from incompetent bureaucracies in troubled times. Standards get lax in good times and institutions get clogged with time servers of no particular competence as those who are more capable choose other types of activities, and aren't actually welcome in the ever more ossified bureaucracies in any event. The bureaucrats seek comfort, not competence. But they are not adequate when real trouble comes.

Suicide or murder aren't rational responses, but we do need to make some staff changes to raise the quality of our bureaucracies to the levels required for the current problem set.]]> Enviro-Politics back40 2010-02-08T11:53:33-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001478.html An image that keeps recurring to me is of powerful but uninformed groups that have been hunkered down in their bunkers reassuring one another that they are the best and brightest being dragged out into daylight by crowds that pulled the doors off of the bunkers. The self-regarding bunkerites stand blinking in the sunlight, confused and angry that their reveries have been disturbed. It isn't clear to me or to the bunkerites if they have been rescued, freed from confinement, or if they are about to be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.

It's the IPCC that is rapidly melting rather than Himalayan glaciers. It's the stupidity of the command and control fantasies of closeted academics and politicians that are being exposed and ridiculed rather than the pragmatic good sense of the rest of society. It isn't that there are no real problems and threats, it is that the supposed elites have proposed idiotic policies to address them and sought to stampede societies into adopting the bad policies with miserabilist narratives of impending doom.

The bunkerites have failed to grasp that the world has changed. They can't control the narrative because the broadcast age is over. We have a peer-to-peer world now. People talk to one another without intermediaries to shape and spin the stories. The result is that the stupidity of the proposed policies is observed and discussed, society is laughing at the ideas of the dullards in the bunkers, and have set about dismantling the bunkers.

It's a new set of problems. Peer-to-peer communication can have a high error rate, like the old whispering game where some phrase gets garbled as one after another person whispers the phrase to an adjacent peer. After a few iterations the words get garbled, often comically. But there are also error correction systems and feedback. The net effect is that correct communication usually occurs, but that it isn't immediate and a lot of crosstalk takes place.

It's no surprise that poodle pundits who make their livings on the scraps discarded from the high table of the elites have been speaking about the virtues of Chinese autocracy, denigrating democracy, and whining that the US has become ungovernable.

. . . In the old days, the elite media really did control the national political discourse; there were no partisan, splenetic cable news or ubiquitous talk-radio channels and no blogosphere to keep the populists riled up and make them feel the excitement of a mob. Until fifteen years ago, presidents and congressional leaders could pretty well manage the policy conversations, keep them on reasonable simmer. But the new technologies have, maybe permanently, turned up the political heat to boil.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

Both of these quotes come from Arnold's post: The Progressive Tantrum. He concludes:

The important point is that Progressives are never wrong. Top-down reform is the only way to fix the health care system. Anthropogenic global warming is scientifically proven, and its solution requires strenuous exercise of political control over individual behavior. Deficit spending is necessary and sufficient to create jobs. Technocrats can make banks too regulated to fail. Markets without technocratic control are like adolescents without adult supervision. Individual happiness can be improved by political authorities using scientific knowledge. Concentrated political power is the wave of the future, and it is good.

I am not a populist. I fear the mob. But how can I fear the Progressives any less?

One recent study found that people who had been treated unfairly became more selfish. It’s hard to pass reform programs that depend on a sense of solidarity—like health-care reform or cap-and-trade—when voters are trying desperately to protect what they already have.

The temptation, then, is simply to abandon ambitious plans in an attempt to annoy no one. But a better approach would be to recognize that voters’ anger is less ideological than pragmatic: at heart, it’s the product of the weak economy and the poor job market. (The movement that today’s populism most closely resembles is Ross Perot’s, which arose, similarly, during a downturn.) And while that means that there’s no way to make voters happy without improving the economy, it also means that, if you start creating jobs, people will start to feel better. Obviously, small initiatives that nod to people’s concerns (like the deficit commission) can help. But what matters most is getting the economy moving again—even if doing so means handing out tax credits to businesses or magnifying voters’ frustration with government spending. It may bring some short-term political pain, but the only way out is through.

I'd like to see us move beyond the petty politicking and think deeply about the situation. There are problems that require our attention - as ever - but the policies championed by the Progressives - who are not actually progressive, just as the Conservatives are not conservative and the Liberals are not liberal - are just silly. They won't do squat about the problems though they will be hugely oppressive and expensive. They should be embarrassed that they have advocated such nonsense. We should name names, point and laugh, and seek to shame them into doing better work. Oh wait, that's what we are doing.

Never mind. Talk among yourselves.]]> politics back40 2010-02-08T10:33:57-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001477.html I noted a few posts ago that I write this journal for my own benefit, a way to note things of interest and my thoughts about them, so that I can refer to them again at a later date when something new comes up that is related, or simply as a memory aid. Usually this means searching my archives to find an earlier reference, but I also pay attention to what other people search for here, and check out what they are reading.

This post from almost 5 years ago is getting hits lately.

There’s been a lot of fuzzy thinking about what we mean when we talk about collective intelligence, network, and interaction. I want to parse these distinctions.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, I wrote about the power of groups under certain circumstances to be remarkably intelligent. A model of collective intelligence: a large group of people reflecting diverse opinions offering judgments independently with some mechanism to aggregate the judgments, collectively ending up with an intelligent outcome. . .

The wisdom of crowds works well when there is a true answer, and as long as some choices are better than others. The key is that people are mostly working on their private information, which may not be good, may be fragmented, but it is diverse. Collective wisdom does not emerge out of consensus. The goal is not to get everyone to agree – it’s to tap into people who disagree, into the diverse information everybody has. It works best when people are not paying too much attention to what everyone else is doing. They have some sense – like feedback in the form of odds at the racetrack – but there isn’t a lot of personal interaction. . .

Human beings are not ants.

If there is too much interaction among human beings, groups end up being less intelligent than they would otherwise be. The more we talk to each other the dumber it is possible for us to become. The book has quite a bit about small groups. Put a bunch of smart people into a room and they emerge dumber than when they went in. . . The question for all of us is, how can you have interaction without information cascades, without losing the independence that’s such a key factor in group intelligence? I’m not going to come to a final answer. But there are a few things worth thinking about. First one: the best thing to do is to keep your ties loose. You’re better off, and the group is better off, if the ties are looser, because loose ties minimize the influence of those around you. I don’t think Duncan Watts’ model of the information cascade is quite true. I don’t think people are as subject to the influences around them as Duncan thinks. But we are clearly shaped by those influences. One way around that: limit the power of the influences.

Second, keep yourself exposed to as much information as possible. Injecting some level of randomness into the system is a good thing. Diversity is a good thing. In computer science experiments at the University of Michigan, a researcher, Scott Page, had his agents compete until they differentiated into three groups, Dumb, Intelligent, and Random. Then he had them solve problem as groups. The Intelligent group outperforms the Dumb group, but not by very much. But the Random group almost always outperforms the Intelligent group. Page’s theory is that the reason for this is that even if the less intelligent groups know less, what they know is different.

This has important implications for the way decision making works inside organizations. Make groups that range across hierarchies. The conclusion is that you actually can be too connected, if the connections are of the wrong kind and if they’re reinforcing your existing prejudices rather than altering them. You can pay to much attention to those around you, even if they’re really smart. The flip side of Pascal’s isolation is the cacophony you find on the net; it bombards you with many voices. Isolation and cacophony, interestingly, allow you to arrive at the same place: independence.

This is why I like the Tea Party thing. It's a confused cacophony that drives the rigid minded pundits crazy. They can't easily label it, denigrate it, refute it or even understand it since it is such a diverse thing. The Tea People don't agree with each other or anyone else, they are thinking for themselves to the best of their abilities. They can perhaps be better understood as one of Page's Random groups that almost always outperforms the Intelligent group, but even if they are one of his Dumb groups they are all but a match for the Intelligent group and easily pull ahead when you also consider their intimate knowledge of their own values and preferences.

The trick is to find some mechanism to aggregate the independent judgments. It isn't consensus, and it isn't an average or a median. And it isn't that this will find The Answer, since there isn't a single true answer. What is clear is that it is essential that we dispense with the old fashioned ideas of consensus and narrow minded large scale visions. Though we can't know what is right, we can know that this is wrong.]]> cognition back40 2010-02-06T19:32:19-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001476.html It improves with age.

scientists at Baycrest's world-renowned Rotman Research Institute have demonstrated that when older adults "hyper-encode" extraneous information – and they typically do this without even knowing they're doing it – they have the unique ability to "hyper-bind" the information; essentially tie it to other information that is appearing at the same time. . .

"We found that older brains are not only less likely to suppress irrelevant information than younger brains, but they can link the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together and implicitly transfer this knowledge to subsequent memory tasks," . . .

"This could be a silver lining to aging and distraction," said Dr. Hasher, senior scientist on the study. "Older adults with reduced attentional regulation seem to display greater knowledge of seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment than younger adults. As this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision- making, older adults may be the wiser decision-makers compared to younger adults because they have picked up so much more information."

Dr. Martinez and colleagues found that increased social status and increased social support correlated with the density of dopamine D2/D3 receptors in the striatum, a region of the brain that plays a central role in reward and motivation, where dopamine plays a critical role in both of these behavioral processes. . .

"We showed that low levels of dopamine receptors were associated with low social status and that high levels of dopamine receptors were associated with higher social status. . .

"These data shed interesting light into the drive to achieve social status, a basic social process. It would make sense that people who had higher levels of D2 receptors, i.e., were more highly motivated and engaged by social situations, would be high achievers and would have higher levels of social support."

These data also may have implications for understanding the vulnerability to alcohol and substance abuse, as the work of Dr. Nora Volkow, the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and colleagues suggests that low levels of D2/D3 receptors may contribute to the risk for alcoholism among individuals who have family members who abuse alcohol. The current data suggest that vulnerable individuals with low D2/D3 receptors may be vulnerable to lower social status and social supports, and these social factors have previously been suggested as contributors to the risk for alcohol and substance use.

These findings are particularly exciting because they put human neurobiology into a social context, and we humans are fundamentally social creatures. It is in these social contexts that the biological effects on behavior obtain their real meaning.

Models describing the origin of ADHD tend to emphasise the relevance of attention processes and of the cognitive functions which guide our mental processes in achieving proposed objectives. Nevertheless, recent research has focused on neural gratification/pleasure circuits, which can be found in what is known as the brain's reward system, with the nucleus accumbens as the central part of this system.

The nucleus accumbens is in charge of maintaining levels of motivation when commencing a task and continues to do so until reaching what experts name the "reinforcement", the proposed objective. This motivation can be maintained throughout time, even when the gratification obtained is not immediate. However, in children with ADHD motivational levels seem to drop rapidly and there is a need for immediate reinforcements to continue persisting in their efforts. . .

Differences in the structure of the ventral striatum - particularly on the right-hand side - could be seen between those with ADHD and those without the disorder. Children with ADHD exhibited reduced volumes in this region. These differences were associated with symptoms of hyperactivity and impulsiveness.

The obtained data corroborate results from previous studies carried out with animals: the importance of the reward system, as well as the relation between nucleus accumbens, impulsive behaviour and the development of motor hyperactivity. This leads researchers to consider that ADHD is not only caused by brain alterations affecting cognitive processes, but also by anomalies which cause motivational deficiencies. This would explain the imbalance in levels of attention and hyperactivity in a child with ADHD depending on his or her motivation when engaged in a specific task and the immediacy of the gratification/pleasure while carrying it out.

"Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."

Special proteins called light-harvesting complexes are used in photosynthesis to capture sunlight and funnel its energy to nature's solar cells – other proteins known as reaction centres. Scholes and his colleagues isolated light-harvesting complexes from two different species of marine algae and studied their function under natural temperature conditions using a sophisticated laser experiment known as two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy.

"We stimulated the proteins with femtosecond laser pulses to mimic the absorption of sunlight," explains Scholes. "This enabled us to monitor the subsequent processes, including the movement of energy between special molecules bound in the protein, against a stop-clock. We were astonished to find clear evidence of long-lived quantum mechanical states involved in moving the energy. Our result suggests that the energy of absorbed light resides in two places at once – a quantum superposition state, or coherence – and such a state lies at the heart of quantum mechanical theory."

"This and other recent discoveries have captured the attention of researchers for several reasons," says Scholes. "First, it means that quantum mechanical probability laws can prevail over the classical laws of kinetics in this complex biological system, even at normal temperatures. The energy can thereby flow efficiently by—counter intuitively—traversing several alternative paths through the antenna proteins simultaneously. It also raises some other potentially fascinating questions, such as, have these organisms developed quantum-mechanical strategies for light-harvesting to gain an evolutionary advantage? It suggests that algae knew about quantum mechanics nearly two billion years before humans," says Scholes.

Some of the team's current research into barley enzymes follows up on studies they reported several years ago. In one investigation, Schmitt found that enzymes called serine-class proteases, which break down proteins in the sprouting grain, can also break down beta-amylase, an important enzyme for converting carbs to simple sugars.

The study, a scientific first, was reported in a 2008 issue of the Journal of Cereal Science. The finding might help explain one of the patterns found in an earlier study, published in a 2007 issue of the journal Cereal Chemistry. In that analysis of more than 2,000 North American malting barleys, Schmitt and Budde found that high levels of a desirable, beta-amylase-associated attribute in the barleys correlated to low levels of the serine-class proteases.

What Miller called the informational bottleneck has been recognized as a profound constraint on human cognition. Crudely speaking, there are two ways to manage its effects. One is to "chunk" information so that you can, in effect, pack more material into one of those seven units. As Miller put it, "A man just beginning to learn radiotelegraphic code hears each dit and dash as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters, and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves as words, which are still larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases." That sort of process is obviously central to many kinds of learning.

The second method for managing the bottleneck—and the one that concerns us here—is to manage attention so that unwanted stimuli do not crowd the working memory. That might sound simple. But as the Swedish neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg explains in his recent book The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory (Oxford University Press), scholars are far from agreement about how to describe the relationship between attention and working memory. Does a poor attention system cause poor working-memory performance, or does the causation sometimes work in the other direction?

One common metaphor is that controlled attention acts as a "nightclub bouncer," preventing irrelevant stuff from getting into working memory. A few years ago, Klingberg and a colleague conducted brain-imaging experiments that suggested that a region known as the globus pallidus seems to be highly active when people successfully fend off distraction.

"Why is it that some people seem to reason well and others don't?" asks Michael J. Kane, an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "Variability in working-memory capacity accounts for about half the variability in novel reasoning and reading comprehension. There's disagreement about what to make of that relationship. But there are a number of mechanisms that seem to be candidates for part of the story."

One of those seems to be attentional, Kane says. "The view that my colleagues and I are putting forward is that part of the reason that people who differ in working-memory capacity differ in other things is that higher-working-memory-capacity people are simply better able to control their attention."

In other words—to borrow a metaphor from other scholars—people with strong working-memory capacities don't have a larger nightclub in their brains. They just have better bouncers working the velvet rope outside. Strong attentional abilities produce stronger fluid intelligence, Kane and others believe.

The liquid glass spray (technically termed “SiO2 ultra-thin layering”) consists of almost pure silicon dioxide (silica, the normal compound in glass) extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of the quantum forces involved. According to the manufacturers, liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.

The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.

In a proof-of-principle study published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers have identified an antiviral small molecule that is effective against numerous viruses, including HIV-1, influenza A, filoviruses, poxviruses, arenaviruses, bunyaviruses, paramyxoviruses and flaviviruses. These viruses cause some of the world's deadliest diseases, such as AIDS, Nipah virus encephalitis, Ebola, hemorrhagic fever and Rift Valley fever.

Even better, the compound — a rhodanine derivative that the researchers have dubbed LJ001 — could be effective against new, yet-to-be discovered enveloped viruses. . .

"We provide evidence that the small molecule binds to both cellular and viral membranes, but its preferential ability to inactivate viral membranes comes from its ability to exploit the biogenic reparative ability of metabolically active cells versus static viral membranes," he said. "That is, at antiviral concentrations, any damage it does to the cell's membrane can be repaired, while damage done to static viral membranes, which have no inherent regenerative capacity, is permanent and irreversible." . . .

While the exact mechanism of viral membrane inactivation is unknown, the researchers are pursuing some promising leads that could answer that question.

Additionally, the drug does not appear to be toxic in vitro or in animals when used at effective antiviral concentrations.

The fundamental reason why e-mails were stolen last year from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit was . . . because climate change had reached such a fever pitch of political heat, and if it becomes evident that conserving biodiversity means changing lifestyles, those working in the field must expect debate to reach similar temperatures.

With this year being declared the International Year of Biodiversity, and with the critical session of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) coming up this October, you'd expect such heated conflict to materialise this year, if at all.

After President Bill Clinton signed the convention in 1993, it went swiftly into Congress for ratification, and the first indications were that it might well pass.

But a number of interested parties began to argue against - organisations concerned with land ownership and land rights, such as the Montana Farm Bureau Federation and Grassroots for Multiple Use, allied with groups opposed in principle to extensions of government and regulation.

Concerns were expressed about possible restrictions on the unfettered access that US pharmaceutical companies had to the developing world's biological riches, and on the nascent technology of genetic engineering.

Here's a hypothetical example raised at the InterAcademy panel meeting.

Let's say you want to protect the Amazon rainforest and the rich biodiversity it contains.

One way you might look to do that is by reducing deforestation; and one of the main causes of Amazonian deforestation is clearance for cattle ranches.

So you might choose to campaign among Western consumers, or to lobby Western governments, to reduce the amount of beef consumed on Western plates; less beef equals more trees.

Does the issue look uncontroversial now?

Wouldn't it be interesting if the International Year of Biodiversity was not just the same old slime attack by the same old slimebags? The lessons of Climategate (and a variety of other recent "gates") might be motivation for journalists to begin to be journalists rather than just the PR departments for various rent seekers. Wouldn't it be interesting if the sloppy arguments of all rent seekers were challenged publicly? Nah, they're journalists and don't have either the skills or the ethics to do this.]]> Enviro-Politics back40 2010-01-29T12:06:41-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001467.html The concept isn't new but they seem to be getting closer to becoming a meaningful reality.

In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers. . .

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

“Hardware is becoming much more like software,” as MIT professor Eric von Hippel puts it. That’s not just because there’s so much software in hardware these days, with products becoming little more than intellectual property wrapped in commodity materials, whether it’s the code that drives the off-the-shelf chips in gadgets or the 3-D design files that drive manufacturing. It’s also because of the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, Web-based collaboration, and Internet distribution.

We’ve seen this picture before: It’s what happens just before monolithic industries fragment in the face of countless small entrants, from the music industry to newspapers. Lower the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in.

The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony. This change is driven by two forces. First, the explosion in cheap and powerful prototyping tools, which have become easier to use by non-engineers. And second, the economic crisis has triggered an extraordinary shift in the business practices of (mostly) Chinese factories, which have become increasingly flexible, Web-centric, and open to custom work (where the volumes are lower but the margins higher).

The result has allowed online innovation to extend to the real world. As Cory Doctorow puts it in his new book, Makers, “The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.”

A garage renaissance is spilling over into such phenomena as the booming Maker Faires and local “hackerspaces.” Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.

In short, atoms are the new bits.

Read the article for a wealth of detail and a good bit of fun as well. It may be useful to think about the issues previously discussed regarding cultural products such as audio, video and print; and the scramble by older businesses to survive the opening up of markets for creation and distribution of competing products.]]> TechnoSocial back40 2010-01-27T14:33:29-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001466.html Another example of the grass fed pushback by anti-meat miserabilists and climate wackos.

• Grass-fed beef is shown to produce more greenhouse gas than grain-fed.
• Critics point out that the pasture used to raise grass-fed beef offers a carbon sink.
• Experts point out that eating vegetarian is far better from a carbon point of view.

. . . The problem, said Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University, is that accurately quantifying how much soil carbon contributes is difficult, and it can vary dramatically from place to place -- even in locations just a few feet away. This uncertainty can swing the calculation one way or another. To Weber's knowledge, no study published in a scientific journal has come to the conclusion that grass-fed beef is better from a greenhouse gas perspective.

"There's a lot of range of what the emissions are from beef, and that is real variability," agreed Rita Schenck, Executive Director of the Institute for Environmental Research & Education in Vashon, Wash., who has also studied this question.

"It is different in different places. It is different in different growing regimes. It's just different. I think the numbers are really close," she said, so the scales can tip one way or another depending on the specific circumstances.

"To some extent, all of this bickering about carbon footprint is missing the forest for the trees," Weber said. ""In terms of air pollution, water pollution and odor, concentrated feedlots are a disaster. In terms of other environmental impact, there is no question that grass fed is better. My problem is that people really play on the carbon footprint angle, when it's really not clear. "

According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

"The take-home message," Schenk said, "is that no matter how you grow the beef, eating vegetarian is substantially better from a carbon point of view."

A more intelligent take on the carbon and grazing relationship is that sophisticated pasture management can greatly increase both meat production and carbon sequestration while improving nutrient and moisture management, and providing habitat for wildlife. If you are secretly animated by some sort of naturalist vision of harmonious coexistence of humans and the rest of nature then you will be hard pressed to find any food production system that is even remotely as good. Putting our energy and resources into pasture management improvements rather than sterile pro-con slimebag debates is a far wiser choice.]]> Ag Systems back40 2010-01-27T11:46:11-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001465.html As grass fed beef became more fashionable in the past couple of years there were more and more naive articles and books written by advocates. They selected, exaggerated, speculated and did their best to be persuasive. This stung the miserabilist anti-meat crowd and the main stream meat industry. These strange bedfellows are now pushing back, repeating their old and largely discredited advocacy but scoring some hits by debunking some of the slimebag arguments of grass fed advocates.

Some of the push back is useful. It doesn't have some wacko or commercial agenda to flog, it just corrects the arguments.

On the PBS website for the muckraking documentary King Corn—a film that roundly attacks industrial agriculture—the following declaration is made: “Before WW II, most Americans had never eaten corn-fed beef.” This claim, which has become a mantra in sustainable agriculture, is more often than not dispatched to rally support for grass-fed beef—a supposedly healthier and more environmentally sound way to feed cattle—which is to say, in accordance with the rhythms of nature rather than the time clock of industry. . .

I simply want to point out that any claim to cows eating corn being a recent development is, to say the least, deeply suspect.

A more useful view sidesteps the grain vs. grass conflict to look at the general farming scenario in which both crops and livestock are produced. If it's tradition that you seek this is it. It was standard practice to feed whatever crops and crop residues that were not sold as produce to livestock. It's efficient. For example my area used to grow a fair amount of wheat and cattle were turned into the wheat fields after harvest to clean up. They fattened nicely on the crop residues, and their dung and urine benefitted the wheat fields. Their grazing and trampling also helped with weed management.

This illuminates a part of my objection to the grass fed marketing standard since its focus is on protecting a marketing claim based on a production method that isn't as sensible as one could wish. The best production standard is a flexible one suited to local circumstances. A national standard for such a huge and diverse nation is idiotic. If your objective is a rational and healthful food production system then you absolutely want crop residues and any other packing house trash that is truly nourishing and healthful to be fed to livestock, especially cattle since they can digest roughage that only bacteria can use if not fed to cattle.

The overwhelming majority of localities cannot graze fresh forage all year long. The days are too short and cold, or too long and hot, or too dry or wet to grow grass every month. Forage that was harvested and stored must be fed at those times. This is the perfect opportunity to make efficient use of whatever roughage is available, and if it has some grain in it that should not disqualify the residues as forage. Turning animals into crop fields to rummage about for standing residues, shattered seed heads on the ground or whatever is sensible general farming which benefits both the cropping and livestock operations.

Those who are concerned about the health benefits of grass fed beef sometimes object to general farming practices since it is only fresh pasture or direct cut grass silage that has the healthful fatty acids they seek in proper ratios. They argue that every bit of non-green-grass forage diminishes the value of the meat and milk. I counter that not all green grass is equally beneficial. If you really care about the precise food value of the meat and dairy then demand lab reports. They aren't that expensive and would become less expensive if they were done more often in volume. Then you would find that there is large variability. Yes, all grass fed beef is much better than grain finished beef, but some are better than others by significant amounts. And you would also find that some of the best meat and dairy is produced on general farms like those discussed above, even if the animals did eat some grain and other crop trash.]]> Ag Systems back40 2010-01-27T11:19:40-08:00