Hacking Planet Earth
Blogger responses to the National Academy of Sciences’ two voluminous new reports on geoengineering–the reports want to change that name to “climate intervention,” but what it means is hacking the Earth in hopes of beating back global warming–fall generally into two camps. Some reject geoengineering after thoughtful consideration, and others reject it for being, as one of the report authors said at Slate, “wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad.”
Department of Thoughtful Consideration Rejection
Tim McDonnell has a temperate overview at Grist. He explains the two main geoengineering proposals, each discussed in a single report: carbon sequestration (pulling carbon from the atmosphere and burying it) and albedo modification (seeding the atmosphere with particles that would reflect sunlight.) Both reports are available as free PDFs.
McDonnell’s summary: “The reports offered a fairly damning critique of geoengineering and found that while there could be value in continuing to research the technology, it will never be a panacea for climate change, and we’re definitely not ready to start using it yet.”
Since I’m fair and balanced, I will quote Eric Worrall, guest posting at the climate “skeptic” site Watts Up With That? He analyzed the reports’ conventional call for more research thus: “The National Academy of Science [sic] has demanded that scientists from disciplines other than climate modelling get a fair turn at the grant trough.”
Geoengineering/climate intervention: the issues
Says John Timmer at Ars Technica: “If carbon removal is expensive but relatively low-risk, albedo modification is its evil twin: cheap but with tremendous risks.”
And both are strategies for dealing with warming after the fact. Neither one addresses the root cause of warming–the buildup of greenhouse gases due to energy-intensive human activity–nor acts to prevent it.
Most viewing with alarm focuses on cheap and relatively easy albedo modification. That might encourage individual actions that the rest of us would be powerless to stop. The fear is that (as David Biello puts it at SciAm’s Observations) “some random billionaire” could underwrite modified jets spewing reflective sulfuric acid that could haze the skies over the Arctic–perhaps as soon as 2020.
Gulp. Brad Plumer does an in-depth job of explaining all this at Vox, although he’s fairly horror-stricken too.
A new label for chronic fatigue syndrome, and perhaps new respectability too
Another controversial report this week, and from the same venue: an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, or maybe a leg: the Institute of Medicine. The 235-page report on what may no longer be called chronic fatigue syndrome is a free PDF too.
IOM wants everybody to acknowledge that chronic fatigue syndrome is a real disease. Chronic fatigue’s sufferers have long languished under the suspicion that it was all in their heads, which meant a dearth of legitimate treatment options. Research into its mysteries and possible causes and cures has languished too, according to Jon Cohen at ScienceInsider.
To that end, IOM wants to change chronic fatigue’s simple, familiar, descriptive name to what seems to me an awkward and obfuscatory and hard-to-remember one: systemic exertion intolerance disease. This relabeling has nothing at all to recommend it, including its uncatchy and unpronounceable acronym. I guess the committee thought a new label would help chronic fatigue to be taken more seriously by the medical profession, especially since the report outlined defining symptoms.
Wrangles over the name, described by David Tuller at Well and Miriam Tucker at Shots, are of long standing. Some patients are said to prefer “myalgic encephalomyelitis” because it anchors CF in bodily manifestations, labeling it as physical and therefore real. But, in addition to being a mouthful, myalgic encephalomyelitis is also an incomplete description of what sufferers suffer.
The report also offered a list of defining symptoms, described by Kris Newby at Scope and elsewhere. They are topped, of course, by “deep fatigue” and much-reduced ability to engage in activities that used to be normal, along with unrefreshing sleep. Symptoms must also get worse after any kind of exertion, including mental stress, and must have persisted for at least 6 months. And the patient must also experience either cognitive impairment or orthostatic intolerance, which you will want to know means the inability to remain upright.
Once more, those herbal supplements with missing herbs
In last week’s post here at On Science Blogs (Feb. 6) I examined the New York State Attorney General’s finding that various store-brand herbal supplements from major retailers–Walmart, Target, GNC, and Walgreen’s–usually lacked the herbs on their labels.
I also mentioned a possible snag: the project used DNA barcoding to look for the herbs, and some critics were saying that DNA barcoding was not the right test to use.
I pursued that point in my regular column for the Genetic Literacy Project, which appeared on Tuesday (Feb 10.) And I regret to report that it’s possible, maybe even likely, that the critics were right.
As a follow-up I consulted Pieter Cohen, a prof at Harvard Medical School and a doc at the Cambridge Health Alliance, who is an outspoken critic of the supplement industry; see his blast on dangerous supplements last year in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Cohen told me in an email that DNA barcoding would probably not find DNA even in perfectly kosher herbal supplements if they involved herbal extracts rather than the herb itself. Making an herbal extract involves heavy processing, and any DNA would likely be destroyed.
DNA barcoding could also explain why the New York project found an array of seemingly extraneous plant matter in the supplements, ranging from rice and wheat to houseplant DNA. Barcoding is super-sensitive, grabbing even small fragments of DNA when they’re present, as they might be in fillers and contaminants. Small amounts of such foreign plant matter are legally permissible in supplements and don’t even have to be listed on the labels, Cohen told me.
What the AG’s office should have done before issuing cease-and-desist orders to the retailers, he said, was to follow up the DNA barcoding with traditional testing methods that detect plant compounds, such as chromatography. That didn’t happen, but you can be damn sure that the supplement industry is doing it.
This news has filled me with dread. If the retailers and supplement makers have right on their side in this case, that will be a huge setback for the forces of supplement virtue, and a huge win for supplement peddlers.
It will also pretty much guarantee that the $13-billion-a-year supplement industry will be able to continue to easily resist any pressure to show that their products are not only safe, but that they actually do what they claim to do.
