"Land saved from cultivation offsets carbon emissions" Nature 465, 853 (2010)
This Nature News item reviews a paper published by Burney et al in PNAS entitled "Greenhouse gas mitigation by agricultural intensification." The article shows that agriculture today is more land-efficient than in 1960. Yet it has been interpreted to say that modern intensive industrial agriculture is better than organic. The authors should write a statement clarifying their work but they may not. The reason? The study, as written, is trivial, and only with the added implication is it interesting. But the implication is not true.
In addition to commiting the unforgivable sin of reasoning based on historical counterfactuals, the article presents a myopic and simplistic either-or argument rather than a systematic analysis of factors contributing to agricultural land use. The fact that 50% of all food produced is wasted strikes me as one area where adding efficiency could reduce the overall footprint of agriculture. Certainly the choice of which land to pave over (usually the most fertile agricultural land) and which land to convert to agriculture (eg primeval Amazonian rainforest) has been especially perverse and unnecessary. Furthermore, our society's choice of food is also not a given "quality of life" as the article assumes; rather, it is a socially constructed and contigent demand on land use. If Americans consumed more primary production (plants) and less secondary production (animals) we could vastly decrease our agricultural footprint.
Other issues could be raised, but these points show some of the many analytical failings of this article. Despite, or perhaps because of its unsupported thesis, it has also been extensively commented upon; the authoritative review of responses in here.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Metabolic profiling
I don't understand this and can't access the original article, but wanted to mention it, nonetheless, because some of the compounds in this list are the same mentioned in Dr. Watson's pioneering work on metablic imbalances:
Metabolism in Mental Illness, Psychol. Rep., 17:563-582, Oct., 1965
Natural Swimming Pools
Use of chlorine in swimming pools should be counted as the cost of not properly utilizing ecosystem services. Swimming pools can be biologically filtered for cleaner water, happier bathers, and less usage of chlorine.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
A rational scale to assess the harm of drugs.
A rational scale to assess the harm of drugs. Data source is the March 24, 2007 article: Nutt, David, Leslie A King, William Saulsbury, Colin Blakemore. "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse" The Lancet 2007; 369:1047-1053. (PMID 17382831; doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60464-4) The data was first reported in appendix 14 of "Drug classification: making a hash of it?"
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