Saying "genetically modified foods are bad for health" does show epistemic closure

I'll disagree with John Quiggin on this one.  He seems to think the statement, GMO foods are unhealthy, is too broad to be refutable, and therefore people who believe the statement aren't showing epistemic closure.  The problem is that AFAIK there's no evidence to support the statement, so people who are convinced of it in the absence of evidence are showing a certain close-mindedness that's evidence of epistemic closure.  I guess I should hasten to add that I'm no close follower of the field, and I do vaguely recall concerns that gene transfer from allergenic species to non-allergenic species could be dangerous to some people, but there's almost nothing to back up the statement.

There are more valid reasons to be concerned about GMO foods, especially contamination of wild varietals, but the health issue isn't a good one.  Nothing like the level of closure that we see on the right, but it's still there.

UPDATE:  See the comments - John says we may not be in disagreement on the broader allegation over whether GMO foods are unhealthy.

Keep the homophobic climate weirdo on the oil spill team

A bozo physicist, Jonathan Katz, who apparently thinks creatively but has zero quality control, has been kicked off one of the oil spill teams because he is/was homophobic and believes some of the nonsense he reads on climate denialist websites like Greenland "formerly" being green in medieval times.

I don't care, as long as he's not involved in anything dealing with homosexuality (or being in charge of anybody, including students) or with climate change. Just let him come up with some ideas to control the oil spill and let other people be in charge of figuring out whether they're any good.

His nonsense on climate hardly needs to be dealt with, except for psychological analyses. I'm guessing he's one of those political conservatives who can't deny physics, so he just accepts what he maximally can accept without having to change his policy positions, and skates over the rest.

On homophobia, he says "The human body was not designed to share hypodermic needles, it was not designed to be promiscuous, and it was not designed to engage in homosexual acts." The guy must be outraged by bonobos, but I don't see much difference between their design and ours that makes promiscuity and homosexuality okay for them and problematic for us. Generally he seems like a cranky old man who's used to saying whatever he wants to say.

I think he very well may not be qualified to grade and mentor students, many of whom are gay, but he should be able to serve on the spill team.

Do the skeptics have a point about a 300-year typo in the IPCC?

(Welcome, Just One Minute readers. I appreciate Tom's link, but I'd also encourage you to look at my proposed bets with people who dispute anthropogenic global warming. With a few honorable exceptions, the loudest skeptics have been very uninterested in putting their money where there mouths are.)

Skeptics say:

According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!

I tried to run down the truth in a comment thread:

Let's go p. 493, shall we?

"Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other
part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate
continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035
and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at
the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present
500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005)."

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter10.pdf

The WWF cite:

"WWF (WorldWildlife Fund), 2005:An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and
subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China.WorldWildlife Fund, Nepal Programme,
79 pp."

On to the WWF:

In 1999, a report by the Working

Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG) of the International Commission for Snow and Ice

(ICSI) stated: “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world

and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very

high”.

The ISCI is where I run out of direct online sources. But I did find this ref, also from 1999:

"The glacier will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates. Its total area will shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square km by the year 2035," says formerICSI president V M Kotlyakov in the report Variations of snow and ice in the past and present on a global and regional scale.

This is a problem. Back to Kotlyakov's report (p. 66):

The degradation of the extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be apparent in rising ocean level already by the year 2050, and there will be a drastic rise of the ocean thereafter caused by the deglaciation-derived runoff (see Table 11 ). This period will last from 200 to 300 years. The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates— its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350.

If the IPCC's chain of citations does indeed reach back to and rely on Kotlyakov 1996 alone - and I'm not sure that it does - then the skeptics have a point. Worth noting that Kotlyakov assumed linear changes in warmth, which is optimistic under business-as-usual scenarios, but that won't erase a 300-year difference.

UPDATE: Skeptic Tom Maguire gets a little further than me, but no real results. So far it's looking like sloppy work, although the sloppiness isn't with the IPCC but the predecessor citations. Maybe someone else can get a better answer than Tom or me.

Talking Points Memo readers demand more stenography, less journalism

There's a disheartening comments section attached to a Talking Points Memo story. The story summary: a reporter for the conservative Weekly Standard is trying to nail down whether a moderate Republican running in a special election might switch parties if in the next subsequent election, she loses the Republican primary. The candidate's spokesman fails to answer the question, and instead just keeps repeating that she "is a vote" for the Republicans.

The reporter writes a story about the evasiveness and potential implications of a future switch. Suddenly the spokesman calls in a clarification stating she won't switch.

All this sounds like good journalism to me - not taking an evasive answer on face value, but the TPM comment section is full of attacks on the journalist for not being "objective" and simply reporting the answer. There are a few who defend the journalist, but it generally reads just like something you'd see on a rightwing website (maybe better grammar though).

The left can have as much trouble as the right with seeing past their own biases.

More on the Mackey/Whole Foods boycott

I'll start by noting that in contrast to my usual blogging subjects here, I actually have a fair amount of direct personal experience with boycott campaigns. I played a somewhat central role in the successful boycotts that got Columbia Sportswear and Pepsi out of Burma,* was heavily involved in the mostly-unsuccessful boycott of Unocal for its travesties in Burma, and I studied the successful tuna-dolphin boycotts before starting my own activism.

Some thoughts:

1. If Mackey owned Whole Foods instead of working for it, I'd have no problem with a boycott and might have to join it myself.

2. Part of a successful boycott strategy is a coherent goal - so what's the goal here, when the boycott target, Whole Foods, has done nothing wrong? Get it to fire Mackey for his political opinions expressed on his own time? Is that ethical?

3. The ever-nuanced Jonathan Zasloff says what he wants from Mackey is intelligent disagreement, and not to shut him up. Fine, but the demand isn't being made of Mackey, it's being made of Whole Foods.

4. Matt Yglesias says shutting down CEOs from prominence in the public media isn't that bad/unethical anyway as they get undeserved attention to spout off on issues unrelated to their business. So do other people though, like Hollywood liberals. That's life. Anyway, it's Whole Foods that's being punished for something Whole Foods didn't do.

5. Somewhere in the Yglesias comment thread, someone says this isn't about ethics, it's about political maneuvering, and objectors like myself should get off our high horses. Interesting point, but Your "Ends Justifies the Means" Mileage May Vary (maybe I can invent a new Internet acronym, YEJMMMV).

6. Boycotts need both favorable sentiment and an organizer. A "Boycott Whole Foods" group has sprung up, but what they want is unclear. They call for a boycott, but don't say what they want Whole Foods to do. I think a successful boycott requires that the target company know exactly what it needs to do in order to make the problem go away.

7. Boycotts succeed not by turning customers away, but by affecting brand image and taking the time of important people. That's the sole advantage I see here for a boycott, in that Whole Foods relies heavily on its image.

8. The boycott may not be about Whole Foods or Mackey at all, but rather about health reform. That might make it more logical, but I'm not sure if it makes it the right thing to do.

9. Given his past, Mackey seems dumb enough to pull stunts like this again in the future. I remember hearing somewhere that company board members never want to see the company name in the newspaper, unless it's to report on record profits. Either he's really good at what his actual work entails, or the guy will eventually have to go.


*I should qualify these as "tactically" successful. We got the companies to withdraw, but have obviously failed on the broader strategic goal of forcing Burma's dictators to change.