Lysenko took his cues from the ideas of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin (1855-1935), an honourable member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In a characteristically extensive academic propaganda campaign, the Soviet regime sold Michurin as the father of so-called Soviet biology, which was considered superior to the ‘capitalist’ (and accurate) theory of Mendelian genetics.

The Soviets believed that adopting Lysenko’s agricultural practices, they would be able to fight off famine and demonstrate the greatness of the Soviet social model to the world. Questioning Lysenko’s theories was seen as an act of sedition; sceptics were smeared as bourgeois fascists. This is not to say that the people behind the Soviet propaganda machine didn’t believe in Lysenkoism – most of them probably did. Today, most of Lysenko’s research is rightly considered fraudulent; junk science manufactured to support unstable and paranoid politics.

Lysenko and his Soviet comrades frequently publicly decried proponents of evidence-based biology as ‘fly-lovers’, ‘people haters’, and ‘wreckers’. Mendelian genetics was seen as an impediment to communist productivity and national progress; a pitiful manifestation of Malthusian capitalist nay-saying.

Now, the term ‘Lysenkoism‘ is used to refer to the distortion of science to support a particular political ideology.

Yesterday’s leak of thoroughly incriminating internal documents from the Heartland Institute (check out the source) got me thinking – I mean about more than the fact that nine documents contained a hell of a lot to worry about compared to the tepid contents of the thousands of emails and hundreds of documents that made up the entire ‘climategate’ package. (But that is worth pointing out.) We also already knew that climate denialism was little more than a racket.

It actually reminded me of a point that had always seemed so obvious to me, but that I rarely see discussed. It stems from the fact that anthropogenic global warming deniers will often call mainstream climate science ‘Lysenkoism’ in the media. The obvious question to ask is: who are the ones skewing science for politics? Certainly Al Gore is no central-planning socialist.

What do almost all of the AGW deniers and lukewarmists have in common? Let us list some names, and we’ll see if we can isolate a common variable:

Penn Jilette; Matt Stone; Trey Parker; Alex Jones; Alan Jones; Christopher Monckton; Andrew Bolt; S.E. Cupp; Anthony Watts; Glenn Beck; Ron Paul; Matt Ridley; Bjørn Lomborg; the staff of (the unfortunately named) media outlet Reason TV; the signatories of this letter…

The answer? An infatuation with the so-called free market. Really, check Google; or better yet, read some of their books.

Even die-hard fans of the free market know that if scientists are right about anthropogenic global warming, effective solutions will necessarily begin with top-down market intervention. Moreover, the fact of global warming also contradicts the ideal that free trade, unfettered by oversights, can only be a good thing for humanity. People who are committed to ideas – especially utopian political ideas – tend to get a bit clingy.

Former doubter Michael Shermer explicated this sentiment when he came out as accepting climate science. To wit:

Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming.

Though, later on he did add some free market caveats.

Let’s watch Chris Monckton push for an Australian Fox News:

His talk of discrediting climate science is firmly within the context of promoting the free market. Interesting, no?

And this can be found on the Heartland Institute’s About page:

Mission: Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

We can easily note a clear trend of one of humanity’s greatest achievements in science (ie, figuring out what could kill most of us before it happens) being subverted, corrupted and bastardized for political purposes. So, apparently, for many, data does not trump politics. To disseminate global warming denialism, whether knowingly or unknowingly, is the praxis of free market Lysenkoism.

Practically every single prolific climate change sceptic utilizes propaganda originating from someone who has some connection the Heartland Institute. The kind of media manipulation for dissemination of discredited theories, paying off scientists and, the cherry atop this outrageously pernicious pie, promotion of the indoctrination of school children in the discipline of junk science, all expressly advocated in the Heartland Institute’s documents, leave me wondering why anyone in their right mind could continue to take the global warming denial/dilution project seriously.

I do mean to write up my developed take on the free market in the near future, but I’m a little busy for the moment. In the meantime, I’d like to urge the free market cadre who are responsible for most of my hate mail, and the more well-spoken and intelligent free market advocates who have raised the issue of my blog in real life, to do something to quell the disturbing trend of Lysenkoism flourishing among their colleagues. It’s making you all look ridiculous.

You can read more about the Heartland leaks themselves here, here and here (especially for Australians). Nothing on any of the Australian Murdoch newspaper websites, though.

Now, I don’t claim to be smarter than Claude Allegre, J. Scott Armstrong, Jan Breslow, Roger Cohen, Edward David, William Happer, Michael Kelly, William Kininmonth, Richard Lindzen, James McGrath, Rodney Nichols, Burt Rutan, Harrison H. Schmitt, Nir Shaviv, Henk Tennekes, or Antonio Zichichi. But it seems like I know more about climate science than they do. Which is sad, because I really don’t know a hell of a lot. I’m more of a neuroscience kind of guy, and I don’t even have an undergraduate degree yet.

I think it’s important that knowledgeable people correct the misinformation on global warming percolates into the wider public consciousness. So I’m now going to wipe the floor with each of the fatuous and demonstrably false points that apparently substantiate this affront to human progress. I’ll try to quote sparingly, so if you’re interested in following along, refer to the link provided above.

This mediocre diatribe begins with an invocation of Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever’s resignation from the American Physical Society because he doesn’t accept the evidence of anthropogenic global warming. This is just an appeal to authority – in this case, a solid-state physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1973. Beginning a serious contrarian letter on such a dire issue with fallacious reasoning is not a great way to establish credibility.

Still, it’s worth pointing out that there are roughly 50,000 members of the American Physical Society, making it the world’s second largest organization of physicists. Also, I assure you, Ivar Giaever wasn’t the only Nobel laureate in the club. So who cares if he walked out over the word ‘incontrovertible’? And on that note, who cares if the number of so-called ‘heretics’ is growing? The number of scientists who accept global warming is too. Taking sides on a politicized topic like this one is a byproduct of what’s called ‘general awareness’. Not worth a mention, ladies and gentlemen?

The second claim is just embarrassing. Pathetic, even. Here’s a slice:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact here is that Kevin Trenberth was talking about modelling the climate’s short term energy budget, not a simple ‘lack of warming’, and energy budget modelling is a mite more complicated than Trenberth’s critics were prepared to even consider. The fact is that we did observe a long-term trend in warming and the hottest decade on record. (See also: my own post on the basics of global warming if this is new to you, otherwise read Tamino on the 2011 temperature data and how it fits the AGW signal.)

Next, they take aim at the predictions made by the IPCC over the last 22 years. I don’t know why they’d even bother. This is kind of like trying to construct a smart phone based on patents registered in the ’60s. The 2007 report is much better and it draws on a great deal more research. The predictions made most recently in IPCC reports have – for the most part – held up.

The next claim is that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. In itself, CO₂ is not a pollutant. But it is a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer by radiating more heat through the atmosphere. This doesn’t mean that CO₂ molecules literally suck up heat (which is energetic molecular motion for those of us who slept through physics, and this is roughly what Trenberth was referring to).

The atoms that make up CO₂ molecules are readily excited by energy in the form of thermal radiation from the sun. Excited molecules are highly mobile. This sets off a chain reaction; excited molecules excite other excitable molecules by colliding with them. Because energy is conserved, elevated levels of greenhouse gases diffuse more heat through the totality of molecules that make up the atmosphere. Basically: the more greenhouse gas molecules there are in the atmosphere, the more solar energy goes into the planet’s climate energy budget (the aforementioned subject of Trenberth’s study); ergo, high atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will cause the atmosphere to retain more heat than it would otherwise. By far the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution has been human activity.

Any scientist – or any high school student – should know that without the greenhouse effect, the Earth’s effective temperature would be too low to support an ecosystem like our own.

Our special sixteen then raise the point that CO₂ is exhaled by humans. Here we have lame spin, the implication being that if those Green socialists are to be believed, breathing is bad for the environment, man! Humans do exhale CO₂, but by doing so we do not increase the concentration of CO₂ on the planet. The CO₂ that humans exhale is converted from the oxygen we inhale. Oxygen is ‘exhaled” by plants, because plants ‘inhale’ carbon dioxide. This is a facet of that all-important planetary carbon cycle. We simply don’t add anything by breathing.

In the same paragraph, we find this:

Plants do so much better with more CO₂ that greenhouse operators often increase the CO₂ concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO₂ concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today.

This is true, but again, misleading. During the late Ordovician period, roughly 450 million years ago, the Earth’s atmospheric CO₂ concentration was around 5,600 parts per million (ppm) – but some how, glaciers managed to form during that time. This is probably the most seductive myth spread by the better read deniers, but it illustrates that they really should know better. As the title I’ve given this post might suggest, I think it’s plausible to assume that they do know better and they don’t care.

What isn’t mentioned above, or anywhere in the article, is that the output of the sun also significantly drives the climate. Without the energy from a star, the greenhouse effect cannot heat a planet. During the Ordovician period, the sun put out about 4% less energy than it does now. In order for glaciers to form on the planet during that time, CO₂ levels would need to drop below 3,000 ppm.

(For perspective: with the sun’s current energy output, CO₂ levels need to stay below 500 ppm in order for our planet to have glaciers.)

The main sources of the ridiculously high levels of CO₂ present in the atmosphere during the Ordovician were a lot of very active volcanoes. Major warming produced by volcanoes is mildly self-mitigating, because volcanoes also give off sulfate aerosols which have a mild, transient cooling effect on the climate by scattering incoming solar energy in the upper atmosphere (while wreaking havoc on the ozone layer, but that’s another story). This fact alone is not sufficient to explain how glaciers managed to form during the late Ordovician.

We know that when CO₂ reacts with water molecules, it converts them into carbonic acid. This process plays a part in producing deadly acid rain (sulfur dioxide, also spewed out by volcanoes and today, coal plants, makes acid rain much more corrosive than it would be if carbon dioxide were the only gas in the picture – thanks to yikess for pointing this out) and this process is also behind the acidification of the ocean. Calcium carbonate, or limestone, reacts to carbonic acid molecules in rain to produce yet another chemical: calcium bicarbonate, which isn’t a greenhouse gas. This is known as rock weathering – and as any architect can tell you, it can have a pretty dramatic effects even over a few decades without full-blown acid rain. So, over long periods of time, on a planet with a lot of limestone, a steady high level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, acid rain will slowly but effectively ‘react’ carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

446 million years ago, volcanic activity went into a lull, but acid rain continued to fall, and the ocean remained acidic, which weathered rocks. This lead to CO₂ concentrations dropping below 3,000 ppm long enough for glaciers to form. I know that’s not a very simple or elegant explanation, but this isn’t a simple subject. I think my explanation is well-complemented here. (This entry owes a lot to the good people at Skeptical Science.)

It should go without saying that the plants that evolved from green algae during the Ordovician period were the very different ancestors of today’s plants, and were adapted to the harsher environment of the era. Today’s plants are evolved for the modern ecosystem. And while a comfortable concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide molecules does indeed help plants grow, any more simply destroys their environment through climate destabilization via global warming. This occurs most obviously through drought, and less obviously through stronger storms (fuelled by extra energy retained by greenhouse gases) and other phenomena, like acid rain.

By the very late Ordovician period, greenhouse gas levels had dropped far below the levels necessary for glaciation, and this caused the unstable icy mass-extinction events that ended the era. In the hotter Silurian period that followed the Ordovician with the return of greenhouse gases, flora did diversify – the first vascular plants emerged – but during the Silurian period atmospheric oxygen levels were much lower and the ocean was sporadically anoxic. High levels of oxygen stresses plants. So again, the plants that were adapted to that environment would not thrive today.

The next point I’d like to undermine is this one:

In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years.

In 2003, Chris de Freitas did allow a paper that said as much to be published in Climate Research. A shitstorm did indeed ensue, and half of de Freitas’ colleagues on the editorial team promptly resigned. The paper in question was by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Review by the wider scientific community has shown to us civilians that this paper does not qualify as worthy research. And once again, perspective tells us that we’re talking about a diminutive minority. If you’re interested in the supposed case against anthropogenic global warming in the peer-reviewed literature and how it weighs up against the immense bulk of the data, I recommend starting here (then going here, then here).

Then we come to some misdirection framed by the story of an infamous insane Soviet pseudoscientist. I’ll deal with the misdirection, and then like the article, I’ll return to the Lysenko fallacy. Here’s the misdirection:

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”

Indeed. The trouble is that our sixteen sellouts (either money or politics) have to contend with the fact that tracing a credible conspiracy amongst cadres of ‘sceptics’ to distort the facts for financial gain is trivial compared to trying to implicate almost every climate scientist on the planet in one. I’m enjoying my summer break right now, so I’m on a break from journalism. I’ll leave the job of following these particular cases up to others. Further:

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Clearly the letter gets a bit vague at this point. Trofim Lysenko is invoked to contribute to the emotional, rather than the logical flow of the argument.

Lysenko was a key figure of the Soviet revolutionary religion, and a symbol of the wish for the strength of the totalitarian ideology of Stalinism alone to rewrite the laws of nature. (Funny, that.) Lysenko rejected Mendel’s gene theory and claimed to have developed agrarian praxes that would quadruple crop yields for good Soviet workers. Lysenkoism was the epitome of junk science, and implying even a spurious or figurative link between modern climate science to Lysenkoism is both cretinous and disingenuous; it’s also a bit like comparing Peter Higgs with Pope John Paul II. I’m guessing that their point here is to conjure up the ghosts of the Red Menace in the minds of the American taxhaters who didn’t mind a bit of Cold War demagogy.

It isn’t surprising that no attempt to elucidate the structure of the ostensible commie conspiracy has been made. We only get the accusation, with its nature surreptitiously alluded to and left to percolate through the grey matter of any old-school Republicans who might actually be reading. Classic propaganda, in other words.

It then goes off on a tangent, which insinuates that those dreaded ‘Keynesian’ top-down efforts to de-carbonize the economy will somehow destroy society; courtesy of the projections of an economist who failed to predict the global financial crisis (unlike, say, Steve Keen). At this point, they have no credibility, so it isn’t surprising I have the distinct feeling of being fed half-truths here too, so I’m a bit reluctant to slam William Nordhaus based on what this article says about him.

It’s such a shame, really. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t wish that the world wasn’t warming. But it is, and that makes examining these bullshit articles that much more depressing.

Free reign to control every last newspaper, TV and radio station in Australia – Rupert Murdoch’s fantasy could become a frightening reality unless we stand in his way right now.

Everyone, Australians especially, should sign this Avaaz petition ASAP.

Don’t use the stock message (it sucks). You should write your own. Here’s mine:

Dear Convergence Review,

I’m a journalism student, and your recent recommendation to eliminate media ownership limits really bothers me.

Our media doesn’t stay independent when well-financed individuals with special interests – selfish or political – are allowed to annex the entire industry. Real democracy is very difficult to maintain when the noxious choirs of demonstrable propagandists are ubiquitous.

I thought our economy was capitalist, so it confuses and concerns me when this review recommends establishing an economic environment closer to social darwinism. Buying in to the deregulation pipe dream doesn’t help our economy. It ignores the fact that space – you know what I mean in this context – in Australia, and indeed the planet, is finite.

We can only have sustainable prosperity in our economy if room for prosperity is preserved. Allowing monopolies and unethical practices to flourish unchecked anywhere – in the media, resource or the financial sectors – sends the message to the Australian public that the government simply doesn’t care about workers or emerging entrepreneurs, only plutocrats.

A free media does not mean that it’s up for grabs. If it did, then what would be the point of having one? Why not just hand over the reins to the plutocrats and drop the notion of ‘freedom’ from our discourse? The point of a free media is to preserve the freedom of the people to contribute to democracy. Allowing monopolies to own virtually all the free-to-air channels and other established media distribution chains undermines the very foundation of a functioning democracy.

Such a slackening of economic standards flies in the face of that quintessential, inarguable Australian value: the “fair go”. For the sake of our democracy, economy, and the freedom of our media, the people of our nation cannot allow these recommendations to take effect.

Respectfully,
Matt Bush
Australia

Isn’t it ironic that people who don’t understand irony often labour under the delusion that ironists are merely victims prone to gratuitous exhibitions of childish ignorance?

Do you know anyone who has trouble comprehending irony? I think most people I know do.

It gets tedious to constantly hear myself ‘corrected’ – by otherwise reasonable people – whenever I’ve absurdly illustrated some point that obviously contradicts my oft-affirmed values; or worse, being ‘schooled’ when I’m obviously feigning ignorance for comic effect. (I have to wonder what goes on in the heads who don’t get it. Do they think the sarcastic tone is just a cover for ignorance or something? I have no idea.) Too often I often find myself murmuring “yeah, that’s the point I was trying to make…” into my palm. Don’t get me started on my habitual misadventures in Socratic irony.

What’s even more irritating is trying to explain to outraged (or otherwise affected) people that there’s irony afoot, and they have missed it. Once the message is communicated, then, like clockwork, I will then have to endure an exasperated “WHY IS THAT FUNNY?!” (I don’t know? Why do some people laugh at some jokes, but not others?) And if I’m lucky, “THAT’S SO OFFENSIVE!” (I’ll get to that.)

I do ‘deadpan’ as well, but that doesn’t get me in as much trouble, beyond some very confused girlfriends when it shows up at family dinners. I’d retire the irony if I could, but it’s automatic. I can’t help it. Funny or not, ironic humour is so integrated into my personality that removing it would probably require radical brain surgery and aggressive gene therapy.

I’m naturally well-versed in sarcasm. I see sarcasm as irony’s most obvious delivery system. I think of sarcasm as the dialogue, and irony as the script, speaker, the costumes, the stage and the audience. It is possible (often preferable) to be verbally ironic without using sarcasm, but we’ll take baby steps here.

Because irony-blindness is so widespread among my milieu, the subject hasn’t ever been totally absent from my mind. A perusal of various op-eds on irony (mostly revolving around Ricky Gervais’ sardonic brand) have lead me to believe that irony-blindness may very well be a distinctly American import. (Hint.)

One needs only to spend a few minutes on Fox News or MSNBC websites to get a feel for how blind much of the American electorate is to irony. The culture that spawns the archetypal hipster who describes every facet of his interactions with others as ‘ironic’ in a Los Angeles accent is – ahem – telling.

Beyond my own numbing quotidian interpersonal exposures to irony blindness, it became painfully clear to me that I was noticing a wider issue when an exceptionally simple-minded retelling of The Chaser‘s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” stunt dominated the news for a few weeks. Almost everybody was hysterically pissed off. It was like Michael Richards dropped the n-bomb all over again (which, by the way, wasn’t ironic of him – it was a stupid unfunny attempt at shock humour).

This being Australia, the then-Prime Minister even missed the point of the exercise, and he wasn’t shy about sharing. The segment in question wasn’t even funny by the Chaser’s low standards. The point they made wasn’t unique, either. It was reasonably nuanced (I won’t say ‘sophisticated’) and it did present a relevant commentary of Australian consumerist culture, but otherwise it wasn’t worthy of further comment. This being Australia, though, the Chaser boys went on to ruin an important lesson for the Australian public and discredit themselves in one fell swoop by issuing an apology.

I’d argue that the stunt itself wasn’t especially ironic, the irony manifested itself in the length and intensity of the media’s mindless responses to what was plainly satire. Some people I knew did actually get the point of the stunt, and thought the media coverage was as absurd as I did. But then, I’ve observed those same people frequently finding themselves baited into pointless battles from every direction.

I’ve wised up and I know not to mention certain things around those people, because I know I’ll inadvertently offend their sensibilities. As I said, they’re good, smart people – just not in on irony.

(An aside: Political talking heads blind to irony are a priori blind to the irony of ‘political correctness’. That is, they don’t realize that by tiptoeing around some minority’s designated sore spots, they are communicating a total lack of awareness  of how incredibly condescending they are being. This works both ways – the liberals who hold it as sacrosanct are just as ridiculous as the conservatives who complain of it being prone to madness. If I may: ‘political correctness’ an intellectually bankrupt concept. Far better to treat all people the same to begin with and then as individuals on their own terms – not least because some of individuals are indeed prone to irony, and we know the PC crowd might miss that.)

Irony isn’t the secret handshake of some elite club, it’s just a style of humour; a subtle one I assume certain people immersed in certain cultures miss when they haven’t been exposed to it very frequently or in a wide enough range of contexts.

I say ‘contexts’ because I have some friends who have gotten used to my habitual, almost unconscious use of irony as a rhetorical device, but will totally miss it when someone else indulges. The same can be said for American Liberal reactionaries who find themselves offended by virtually all satire that isn’t delivered by Stephen Colbert. (See above.)

So what makes me, a self-described consummate ironist (cough), separate from a hefty chunk of my compatriots? Briefly: I was raised by a Brit with a British sense of humour, and with a deadpan British extended family with a working class background. The need to make light of pretty much everything was reinforced into my cortex from as soon as I could point at the moon and say “curtains!”, then giggle. British humour is typically on the dark side and irony-laden (genetic, apparently). Here’s an outline of what underlies generic British humour (courtesy of Theo Tebbe paper The funny side of the United Kingdom):

[T]he British sense of black humour seems to be even darker. It generally juxtaposes cruel and or awful elements with comical ones that underscore the senselessness or futility of life. The Britons often use low comedy to make clear that individuals are helpless victims of fate and character. Using black humour and irony is a good way to escape serious social forces … [t]herefore irony became popular in Britain since the 18th century and was used to decentre their life and thus to start an inner distancing process.

See also:

Thank God that Ricky Gervais is an atheist. I mentioned him before – he’s very, very popular in Britain. Jeremy Clarkson is quite popular too. Clarkson is currently in hot water among middle class leftists for making an unfunny joke about strikers that from Stephen Colbert wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

To those cursed with purely literal minds, Clarkson is a noisy simpleton (he describes himself as ‘big and bombastic’) worth more scorn than critical thought. But to the majority of Brits, he’s either funny or he’s not, but in either case, it’s painfully obvious that he’s not serious. Was he being insensitive? Not really. The strikers have more to worry about than what a professional adolescent says on a television show about toys.

How far are the pushers of any cause going to get if they’re twitchy about what an entertainer says? What disarms a verbal sparring partner more than genuine indifference? My dictionary assures me that ‘iron’ and ‘irony’ have distinct roots (‘irony’ from Greek and Latin, ‘iron’ from Middle English), but I think there is something to be said for their similarity.

The ironist’s attitude to life would be self-defeating if the ironist can dish out but can’t take in turn. Well, we can take it. We positively eat it up. A deep desire for an acutely aware, relaxed world populated by self-secure people is probably the subconscious source of the ironist’s sense of humour. I immediately recognize someone capable of apology when they think they have managed to offend me as someone I need to tread lightly around.

A joke that communicates something incongruent with the speaker’s attitudes is simply not offensive. Actions are offensive, and indeed certain asocial attitudes can be offensive, but words are not. I’ve heard before the worry expressed that a comment like Jeremy’s might galvanize the hatred of some genuinely offensive specimens. But so what? Is that really worth the costs of free expression and the erection of some new cultural idol for worship? Does Jeremy Clarkson‘s caricature of hate really empower the hateful, or does it simply draw a certain kind of attention to them?

I don’t expect this entry to make much of a difference in my personal life. I’m certainly not looking for sympathy. It would be fun, though, to live in a world full of people cognizant of speakers rather than mere words. I’d also argue that nobody unmasks hatred as brazenly or efficiently as the professional ironist. If you’re old enough to remember LSD, recall Bill Hicks’ ‘lesbians are cool, gays are vile’ routine. Ultimately, I think an awareness of irony forces us to recognize that people do more than just excrete packages of verbs and nouns for the insensate and unimaginative to pick at.

It’s just more fun when everyone gets ‘it’.

Anyway, I’m supposed to be working on a book about science and philosophy. No, that’s not –

EDIT: This.

Format: Amazon Kindle
Release Date: Febuary 2012

In an age retarded by the fundamentally anti-intellectual and multifarious scourge of cognitive relativism, Why Science Matters draws on the rich literature of classical and contemporary philosophy (including Plato, Russell, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, Popper, Lakatos and Gödel, among others) to make a stand for the primacy of science. I argue in Why Science Matters that an adherence to science’s underlying ethos (moreso than any particular method) uniquely furnishes humanity with the powerful ability to generate accurate and reliable knowledge about life, the universe and everything.

-

Apologies for the lack of posts this month; as you may have surmised, I’ve been busy.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011)

On paper, Christopher Hitchens was a first-rate journalist and an incisive, brilliant polemicist. In reality, he was so much more. A lot has been written on his life already, so I’ll keep it short and personal.

Hitch was one of those rare individuals who not only refused to mince words, he refused to mince facts. His opinion was always his opinion, invariably built on the most compelling facts he could unearth. His opinions on specific issues might have echoed those of figures as diverse as Leon Trotsky and George Bush Jr., but with Hitch it was always clear such overlaps were merely happenstance. He was the anti-stereotype; he never played into partisan lines.

His debating partners knew him as a staggeringly erudite, witty juggernaut. Hitch never compromised, but he rarely counted his ideological opposites among his foes. Even so, he had the unique ability to profoundly respect the individual, while vehemently declaiming whatever loathesome ideas came out of their mouth. Though he was a ferocious contrarian (despite his ironic discontent with the label) and an unrivalled rhetorician, by all accounts, he was also a gracious and affable gentleman.

I never had the privilege to meet Christopher. I knew him through his writing. Discovering his work was a pivotal thing for me. The genesis of this blog can be traced back to 2009, when reading Hitch for the first time rekindled my passion for writing, which ultimately got me out of a deep, dark hole I’d found myself in, plagued with poorly-managed depression and self-loathing. He spoke to what was left of me. Here was a writer none could categorize; who wrote passionately and selflessly, and who wrought beautiful prose. Here was someone for me to look up to; not slavishly, of course (he would have hated that), but as a mentor. And he delivered.

Listening to Hitch speak sparked a revolution in my mind. I had long considered myself an atheist and a freethinker; the former position was facile for me to adopt (‘atheism’ merely gave a name to a pre-existing conviction), but before Hitch I plainly failed at the latter; I was comfortable in my 21st century Green-voting inner-east Melbourne ideological mould. Hitch taught me to pull back the curtain, to always ask the hardest questions and to always demand answers.

Hitch also taught me that one should change one’s mind when the facts demand it. His constant struggle against the one answer, the divine plan, the totalitarian final word, is one we are obliged to continue. And most crucially, nothing he did was ever boring.

He was brave on and off the page; he once openly defacing a sign sporting fascist propaganda in Beirut. Following the subsequent assault he endured at the hands of a pack of far-right thugs, he remarked to his colleague Michael Totten: “I think a swastika poster is partly fair game and partly an obligation. You don’t really have the right to leave one alone.”

There’s very little that flowed from Hitch’s pen that I didn’t find enlightening, but I particularly relished the things I disagreed with. It felt like an achievement to have independently conceived a carefully-considered position contrary to his. One couldn’t simply go to his critics, because they were too often right for the wrong reasons; it was rare that Hitch didn’t anticipate and demolish such (generally obvious) arguments head on. As such, disagreeing with Hitch was hard work.

Now I always look for a glimmer of Hitch’s daring when I assess the work of other writers. He plainly set the benchmark high, and precious few will ever make the cut. I’m not ashamed to admit I aim to cultivate Hitch’s remarkable lucidity, flare and audacity in my own prose. (It must be acknowledged that his trademark style is inimitable and all attempts to replicate it will fail, so I won’t be doing that.) I don’t feel I will ever do his influence on me justice, but I’ll sure as shit try.

Hitch had no need for a superstitious afterlife; his prodigious oeuvre had long ago cemented his immortality. I have no doubt his books will be devoured by independent thinkers for many generations to come.

Thank you Christopher. Thanks for showing me the courage to write exactly what’s on my mind. Thanks for cajoling me into standing up for what I think is right. Thanks for the laughs, the serious stuff and the life lessons. You will never be forgotten, and you are sorely missed.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

—Christopher Hitchens

Click here for Slate’s compendium of Hitch’s greatest hits.

I’m consistently frustrated and perplexed by persistent assertions from the denier camp that those of us who recognize the benefits of science apparently relish the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Not so, and no one should need to spell it out like that.

I’ll grant that the Greenpeace crowd seem to, but they’re an unsophisticated minority and many of us find them tedious. I think Greenpeace are insane. I believe that most of their positions are catastrophically counterproductive, not just politically, but also environmentally.

(Libertarian) writers like Matt Ridley and Michael Shermer have indicated that while they accept the basic science of global warming, they don’t believe it will lead to the nightmare scenario that the – well, let’s just call them ‘leftists’ – have been making noises about. (Call Ridley and ilk ‘lukewarmists’, they hate that.) According to a recent article in New Scientist, some of these more sophisticated ‘sceptic’ cadres may not be totally disappointed. If so, I couldn’t be happier for them.

A study lead by Andreas Schmittner (of Oregon State University) has indicated that the global climate might be slightly less sensitive to atmospheric CO₂ concentrations than what previous data bore out. The authors of the actual paper, published in the journal Science, have themselves described many of their study’s limitations. And, for the sake of the more stupid elements in the media, stressed that atmospheric CO₂ levels still do contribute significantly to warming.

The paper described efforts to probe climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO₂ concentrations using model calculations based on temperature reconstructions of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) ice age, which occurred around 20,000 years ago.

A major pitfall in this study was that it only used one climate model to calculate the data. For these findings to affect consensus, they would need to be replicated in several other models used by climatologists. The model used, UVic (of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, or CCCMA) has been criticized before by scientists for being overly simplistic. In 2010, Tamino found that CCCMA models were failing to reproduce 20th century temperatures. I also noted that the paper didn’t cover the more complicated ancillary factors like ocean acidification.

Another shortcoming of the study that struck me (elucidated in Skeptical Science’s very detailed commentary) was that the mean temperatures assigned to the LGM for the purpose of the study was significantly higher than most paleoclimate estimates.

According to the study, the average global temperature during the LGM was only 2.6 Kelvin cooler than the current global temperature. Mainstream estimates of mean LGM temperature, based on temperature reconstruction data indicate that the period was roughly 4-7K cooler than the current global temperature. Notably, climatologist Gavin Schmidt told New Scientist:

A different model would give a cooler Last Glacial Maximum, and thus a larger sensitivity.

According to Skeptical Science: if this study holds up, it not only constrains the more terrifying predictions of other models, it also constrains many of the deniers’ staple hypotheses such as low climate CO₂ sensitivity and negligible warming. New Scientist quotes Schmittner:

Very small changes in temperature cause huge changes in certain regions, so even if we get a smaller temperature rise than we expected, the knock-on effects would still be severe.

If you are interested in the finer points of the paper, check out the commentary on Skeptical Science, linked above. Much of what I’m discussing here is covered in much greater detail there.

In the paper, the authors described a number of their own caveats, then added:

Until the above questions are resolved, it’s premature to conclude that we have disproven high climate sensitivities, just because our statistical analysis assigns them low probabilities.

As usual, different news sources have framed the findings in different ways. A Google News search for “Andreas Schmittner” yielded the following:

• CO2 sensitivity possibly less than most extreme projections (Los Angeles Times)
• Global warming much less serious than thought – new science (Register - the URL contains the similarly optimistic character string ‘runaway_warming_unlikely’)
• Carbon dioxide doubling impact has limit (USA Today)
• New global warming estimate (Sydney Morning Herald)

The last one is my favourite. After yesterday’s sojourn with bullshit, I’ll try to keep the meta-journalism to a minimum.

My least favourite article dealing with these findings was posted on Anthony Watts’ popular internet AGW denier den Watts Up With That? The post is entitled “New study in Science shows climate sensitivity overestimated”. To wit:

Their estimate is 2.4C for a doubling of CO2 (sic), which is still higher than Spencer and others have estimated but significantly lower than IPCC’s projections.

Skeptical Science keep a modest catalogue of rebuttals specific to Watts and a more meaty one for his pal Roy Spencer. It always amuses me to read prolific deniers cherry-picking from a vast and exponentially accruing pile of scientific papers on climate change and justifying their selections with diminutive preambles. Once again, consider the bottom of the barrel clean.

Most scientists believe that a temperature rise of more than 2K is too dangerous to allow, because it risks runaway feedback-activated global warming. This experiment predicts that if carbon-intensive power generation and infrastructure continues to emit unchecked, we can still expect more than 2K warming.

As Schmittner himself told Science Daily:

Hence, drastic changes over land can be expected. However, our study implies that we still have time to prevent that from happening, if we make a concerted effort to change course soon.

So it could fairly be said I exaggerated when I said that this study potentially brings good news. Maybe we’re merely dealing with potentially less-bad news. If  any good news comes out of this, it will be that, if true, we might have more than five years to prevent a global disaster (to put it mildly); but obviously that depends on us.

Over the last couple of days, we’ve been graced with the news that 5,000 personal emails exchanged by climate scientists have been leaked to the public. These aren’t recent emails, mind you, these emails cover the same time span as those released in the last ‘shattering’ leak. So hack journalists and parties with vested interests are forcing us to discuss yesterday’s news today.

The mass media is once again doing the public a gross disservice through an unbridled flexing of staggering incompetence. Many reporters are defiantly refusing to even look beyond the now infamous text file (itself consisting almost entirely of shamelessly mined quotes) when writing their stories. What makes this myopia so damning is that in most cases, a fucking glance at the actual email the mined soundbite came from will lay the context bare – effectively refuting the entire article.

There are countless examples of such vacuous hype on Google News. No doubt you’ve already seen some. If you haven’t, you can start with this gem (shared courtesy of none other than Rupert Murdoch’s own glorified histrionic soap box). All we have here are the veritable peacocks of mindless dogmatism splaying dazzling shows of confirmation biases in defence of their stock holdings.

Even the better articles succumb to the deluded trap of giving ‘the opposition’ a voice on matters of science. If high school science was taught the same way, it would sound something like this: “That’s chemistry for today, class; now don’t be late for alchemy after the break!”

You have to stand in awe at the scandalous behaviour of these so-called ‘journalists’. I would love to see a dump of their leaked email exchanges. This is intellectual suicide at its most intrepid.

What can’t be disputed is that the the biggest sceptics of man-made global warming appear to be the scientists themselves, and that’s the way it should be. This is how science is done. We wouldn’t know that the planet is warming if no one tried to disprove it. Thankfully the scientists attack the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis at every angle, and they do so thoroughly; and to our collective despair, AGW has repeatedly proven itself bulletproof.

Frankly, it warms my heart to read about scientists critiquing their colleagues’ work ruthlessly. I like my scientists second-guessing themselves. I also like them doing what they can to stamp out any interference in their research by the militantly ignorant.

Only a public horribly ignorant of the methods of science could possibly be taken in by such a travesty of lazy, biased reporting.

The timing of the leaks is obviously calculated to disrupt the upcoming UN climate change conference in Durban. Representatives of developing countries already affected by global warming are considering ‘occupying’ the talks to try to push for an international action plan. That this isn’t getting more coverage alongside the leaks is another media scandal.

With each new piece of data in the public sphere, I find myself even more dumbstruck by the sheer selfishness of the denier project. Irresponsible reporting makes journalists part of the problem. It’s no wonder that journalists are the least trusted group of professionals in Australia.

That a few people seem to think climate scientist Phil Jones is an incompetent dick is hardly newsworthy, and it says a lot less about the validity of climate science as a whole. Phil Jones has already responded to the latest leaks.

Have the media already forgotten that massive independent study – funded by deniers – that was published last month and showed unequivocally that the planet is inarguably warming? Earlier this month, more data was released indicating that we only have another five years to drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions if we want to avert catastrophic global warming.

The current fixation on what was happening in the world of climate science last decade is also plainly ridiculous. Science isn’t static. Anyone who thinks it is simply doesn’t know anything about science, and therefore isn’t qualified to make credible comments on the work of scientists.

It’s also interesting to note that the contents of the dump totalled at around 5,000 emails. Perhaps the most brazen demonstration of the stupidity of the leakers isn’t that they intentionally quote-mined emails they released alongside the original emails, but that they added this little nugget to their maliciously deficient little text file:

The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons.
We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase.

Why the fuck not? I’m sceptical; I want to know these ‘various reasons’. They saw fit to include emails containing little more than holiday greetings and similar banalities. How do these disingenuous tools decide on which emails to withhold? 220,000 emails is an awful lot to withhold.

Even the worst of the so-called deceptions alleged to have been perpetrated by the scientists at the centre of the current propaganda campaign are nothing on those perpetrated by their denialist detractors. I covered some of these demonstrable crimes in my defence of the science behind anthropogenic global warming, which you can read here.

Urgh.

I invite you to look through the emails themselves here. There is a remarkable preponderance of no absolutely evidence of scientists trying to mislead the public. In fact, they appear to have been making every effort to not mislead the public. I know, right?

You can read some worthy coverage here and here.

Update: Check out the RealClimate team’s responses to this whole drama here. (Link thanks to the amazing Tamino.)

Nature owes you nothing. Conversely, you owe Nature absolutely everything. Out of respect, you should be doing everything you possibly can to get the fuck out of Nature’s way. Nature is impersonal and indifferent. It’s time to divorce our deluded romance with all things ‘natural’.

Nature is awesome, but Nature is deadly. It’s easy for us to feel as though we’re blessed by Nature. The Earth seems so amenable to our kind of life; so atavistically idyllic, especially when you visit a rainforest. But we’re not blessed. We could never have evolved in any other environment. As far as we can see, we’re basically alone in the cosmos. We can be certain that we’re a rarity, and we’re an ephemeral one in extremis. We’re not blessed, we’re stupifyingly lucky. The distinction between blessedness and luck is an important one.

I think it smacks of intrepid hubris to be against ‘artificial’ things because they’re ‘not natural’. This is tantamount to giddily expostulating “nature cares about us!” No it doesn’t. It never has. Never will. Doesn’t even know we’re here. Doesn’t give a shit about what we eat or how we generate power. Probably doesn’t even give a shit about the fact that oxygen exists. Definitely doesn’t give a shit whether or not we extinguish life on this planet. Such insipidly narcissistic presumptions are all too human.

Why would Nature care about us? We live on such an infinitesimal, insignificant speck somewhere in the visible matter pollution that makes up 1% of this big dead cosmos. Everywhere we know about in spacetime with the exception of the Earth will kill trespassing humans instantly.

We owe Nature our respect, but we shouldn’t for a moment think Nature respects us, our hopes and dreams or our children. Nature isn’t going to add nitrates to soils all over the planet of its own volition just so we can farm enough organic food to accommodate the needs of the 7 billion people who live here. There isn’t even enough space on the planet for enough organic agriculture to feed a fraction of the world’s population – even if you’re happy to clear a lot of land. That wouldn’t be good for biodiversity or the travel industry.

If you like organic food, eat organic. Go for it; it’s tasty stuff, and why waste food? Just don’t expect organic farming to feed anywhere near as many people as GMO technology already can, and should already be doing. (Thanks for that, by the way.)

And global warming? That’s Nature doing what Nature does on terrestrial planets when an ‘intelligent’ species (or an earthquake that releases trapped underground methane, whatever) unwittingly increases the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Things die. Big deal. Global warming isn’t some karmic cockpunch – we’re products of Nature, and there is no reward or punishment in Nature; there is just Nature. Death and entropy are perennial parts in the Nature deal.

So many parochial humans miss the fact that Nature will snuff out all life on Earth without batting a proverbial eyelash. It has almost happened here before. You can bet all the bottom dollars you want that it has happened on other planets. Shit, it probably just happened somewhere else in our neck of the galactic filaments while you read that last sentence. The conditions for any life at all in the cosmos will only exist for such a small percentage of its whole lifespan that I simply don’t have the space to post it here without screwing up the formatting of this entry. That figure works if you assume an infinite undifferentiated entropic expanse cooling down to absolute zero marks the end of the universe. Yeah, that’s why they call it heat death.

Forget fluke arrangements of amino acids like us and whatever lives under our fingernails, not even heavy elements like carbon are the stars of the show. (Stars almost totally consist of hydrogen and helium – and they make up, that’s right, a very small fraction of the current mass of the cosmos, so not even stars are the stars of the show.)

Our Sun, a middle-aged G2V spectral-type yellow dwarf star, will, upon its inevitable demise, consume our planet, utterly erasing all traces of life that might remain. That’s total annihilation at the molecular level.

That’s Nature: sunlight; gravitation; thermal radiation; the arrow of time; mass extinction; thermodynamics; the laws of chemistry. We’re freaks of Nature, not pinnacles. We aren’t the Platonic apples of Nature’s multifarious eyes. And neither, for that matter, are the whales, or the shrews. Or the fucking lions. We care about that stuff, Nature doesn’t. If Nature cares about anything, Nature cares about Dark Flow – which could be a different Nature cutting in on our Nature’s action. But Nature doesn’t care because Nature just is. And so apparently is Dark Flow.

Respecting Nature simply means not gearing the laws of Nature up to kill us. That’s pretty easy to do, because the laws of Nature that apply to life on this planet are reasonably well understood. Nature isn’t an entity, or an intelligence – it’s just a set of laws that work on space and matter. You can’t reason with it. You certainly can’t appeal to its ‘humanity’. You need to shut up and pay attention; because if you don’t, you’ll die – and if there’s no one left to remember you, it will be as if you never existed. Nature will not remember you, or any of us.

Nature doesn’t care if we want to genetically modify foods to feed starving children in Africa. Volcanoes will erupt when they’re good and ready regardless of what gene sequences we put where. Gene sequences are not sacred – we think they are because we happen to be gene sequences. Nowhere in Nature will you find the Vitruvian genome.

Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: “What’s going on between our legs? It’s like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system! No engineer would ever design that, ever.”

There plainly is no design in Nature; just ask anyone who has suffered appendicitis. Or just wait until medical genome sequencing becomes cheap and mainstream; then you can ask your doctor how long you’ve got to live with yearly bouts of hay fever before malignant tumours have you pissing blood while they ravage your reproductive system, requiring major surgery and weekly intravenous doses of emetic etiolating poisons to keep the rogue cells at bay before they inexorably attack your brain through your spinal cord to finally, painfully kill you. Top design, that.

Again, what Nature consists of is coincidences. Not design.

Being against advances in agricultural biotechnology seems to be logically analogous to harbouring genocidal tendancies. Logically, it’s pretentious, elitist and heartless. The whole notion grounded in the baseless delusion that natural selection does a better job at dictating our diets than we do. It misses the point that practically everything we eat has been the product of ten thousand years of artificial selection by us humans. But the people who are against it are well-intentioned and illogical, so you can’t impute elitism and heartlessness onto them – but you can call a lot of them out on wilful ignorance and dogmatism.

Nature doesn’t even care if we give baby gorillas yellowcake uranium dust to finger paint with – we do. And we should. We should care more about feeding children than regressing to pre-germ theory pagan superstitions, and we should know better than poisoning gorillas for artwork to sell on eBay. Nature doesn’t know or care. Nature made yellowcake uranium radioactive, evolved most humans stupid and rendered Africa mostly arid.

This natural organic bullshit is just dualism for the cosmopolitan generation. We are not separate from anything. Nature isn’t some sky daddy, it’s what makes up reality by definition. This ‘return to nature’ crap is a delusion, and a delusion perhaps as dangerous for us as a species than any fairy tale propagated by any holy book. We should not be ‘embracing’ Nature; again, we should be learning how to get the fuck out of its way. We should never ascribe anything to Nature borne of our misguided human hubris.

I’ve discussed Chernobyl here before – in America especially, how egregiously that incident was distorted reflected the hippy movement’s anxiety with anything big with a logo and shareholders. It had nothing to do with the environment. That myth was born of human selfishness and stupidity.

I actually wish hell existed just for the disgusting arseholes who singled out those Ukrainian children who suffered birth deformities (not because of the Chernobyl accident, just because birth deformities happen) to exploit for the anti-nuclear agenda. The real victims of Chernobyl were the locals who were marked by the media as ‘exposed’ and left in far too many cases irreparably psychologically scarred.

Nature was responsible for evolving pattern-seeking, tool-using primates on this little blue oblate spheroid. Nature has no agency, obviously, but we did evolve to proliferate on this planet in a certain way. Not the right way, just a certain way. Unfortunately we also evolved to be superstitious, guilt-ridden conservative idiots.

This has little to do with politics – the superstitious, guilt-ridden conservative idiots on the right blush when you say a naughty word, but the ones on the left yell and scream when you put on a lab coat. (Well, the ones on the right do too when there’s no way to convert the lab results into capital, but I think my point is obvious.)

Nature gave us measles, mumps and rubella; science gave us a vaccine – then Nature hit back with Jenny McCarthy (another person I’d hope to see in hell).

The thing I’d like to point out about the deaths caused by withholding vaccines from children is that not all victims were themselves victims of their parents’ credulousness. Many of them were victims of the credulousness of other parents. Those victims contracted these terrible diseases before they were booked in to be vaccinated. Vaccines only eradicate diseases when everybody plays along. Withholding vaccines now sounds an awful lot like biological terrorism, without actually being biological terrorism; it’s really just a tragic manifestation of ignorance.

Nature gave Africa inarable land; agricultural biotechnologists gave us drought-resistant crops – and Nature gave us hordes of superstitious conservative idiots, legally incorporated as Greenpeace. “Greens” worry about Gaia, progressive people worry about Nature. We humans transpose genetic information for a purpose, Nature does it blindly. Nature will eventually kill every single organism that will ever exist anyway. The important thing to notice is that transposing genetic material only works if you play by Nature’s rules. If you don’t, the new genome will be unstable. If it isn’t natural, it won’t work. Nature didn’t design anything for us. But by some stroke of fortune, we’ve been able to develop the skills to design things for ourselves – provided we accept that Nature has the final word.

Science is what Nature blindly evolved us to do for our own survival. We ignore that at our peril. It’s amazing how many people against nuclear anything will gladly accept chemotherapy for carcinomas. Guess what? Chemo drugs don’t grow ready to inject safely in the Amazon. We synthesize that shit in a lab.

Thanks to breeder reactor technology, nuclear power is now safe, affordable and it basically cleans itself up. Do you know what it means when Malcolm Turnbull says Australia needs nuclear power, while Bob Brown calls modern nuclear power technology evil? It means the conservatives think more progressively on some very dire issues than the progressives do. There’s nothing progressive about stultifying progress. I suppose I naïvely assumed ‘progressive’ wasn’t a synonym for that particularly insidious manifestation of misanthropy.

Bob Brown strikes me as someone who wrote off nuclear power decades ago and hasn’t bothered to look at it since. He’s a religious person, really. If he cared more about mitigating global warming than ‘sticking to his environmentalist principles’, he’d be campaigning for a breeder reactor program in Australia and promoting the technology to the rest of the world. Until then, or until something else comes along, Bob Brown is simply another well-intentioned part of the problem. Thanks for helping to facilitate Australia’s continued fossil fuel dependency, Bob.

And guess what? Atoms, nuclear reactions and energy are natural. The demarcation between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial is an erroneous one, dreamt up by scared hairless apes. Hairless apes that evolved naturally. Getting the fuck out of Nature’s way means using our faculties to work in harmony with what Nature actually is, not what we think it should be. If we don’t want Nature to kill us, we should play by Nature’s rules.

It’s our business if we want to protect all the organisms we like and depend on. Nature won’t do that. We are close to engineering meat in a lab, which will do away with the need for livestock. We should not reject this because labs scare and confuse us. We’ve been engineering food for millennia through artificial selection. There’s nothing wrong with progress, especially if it reduces the suffering we inflict on our animal cousins. Real sustainable sources of nutrition should have as little to do with the biosphere as possible. For land use alone, a lab is far better than a paddock or a crop field. If we think biodiversity is important, we should use science to learn how to stop interfering with it.

(An aside: that’s not to say that we shouldn’t use geoengineering if we need to – we know that geoengineering will cool the planet because volcanoes have done all the experiments for us. That isn’t controlling Nature, that’s playing by Nature’s rules – rules uncovered by science.)

I’d like to close by saying that I’m not against idealism in principle. I’m against pinning hope on some psychadelic ignis fatuus that reflects nothing more than the fevered collective human ego.

The world’s preeminent spinal cord injury researchers are speaking at a conference in Melbourne at the end of this month. Many of the scientists believe a cure for chronic spinal cord injuries is within reach.

The StepAhead Annual Scientific Conference will be held at St Vincent’s Hospital from November 30 through December 1.

“We’re ready to go,” StepAhead organizer Barbara Owen said, “our research fellows will be treating injured dogs in Thailand – 500 dogs a year get injured over there and the king and queen have constructed a $20 million research facility that we will use.”

“Dog spinal cords are anatomically very similar to human spinal cords,” she added. Previous studies using rodent models have been extremely successful.

StepAhead Australia is a leading international body based in Australia that coordinates and contributes funds to much of the research done into curing chronic spinal cord injuries.

“I’d rate our conference the best in the world,” Mrs Owen said, “we are very selective about who speaks – we only get the leading researchers in their respective fields.”

“We believe that a multicomponent approach is the best way to treat spinal cord injuries.”

Research into the most promising treatments has been unable to proceed to human trials due to pressure from religious groups who oppose the medical use of embryonic stem cells.

Glial precursor-derived astrocytes, nicknamed “star cells” due to their distinctive shape, cultured from embryonic tissue are thought to offer the best hope.

According University of Rochester researcher Prof. Mark Noble, who spoke at last year’s conference, the precursor cells can be cultured from embryos that have been naturally terminated.

Tissue from one embryo can provide enough cells to treat up to 150 patients.

Stem cells would need to be administered alongside a treatment that mitigates scar tissue, a toothpaste-like substance that builds up in the spinal cord at the injury site and stifles cell repair, to be successful.

Treatments discussed at last year’s StepAhead Annual Conference included the use of decorin, a protein that breaks down scar tissue; and engineering micro-scaffolding at the injury site.

Approximately 20,000 Australians are affected by chronic spinal cord injuries.

Most patients with chronic spinal cord injuries suffer loss of sensation below the injury site; as well as loss of motor function and loss of bladder, bowel and sexual functioning. Many also experience debilitating neuropathic pain.

The conference is sponsored by the Australian Government’s Department of Health and Ageing and the benefactors of StepAhead Australia.