Mother Jones
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Another day, another video hit job on Planned Parenthood. Apparently the strategy here is to release new videos every three or four days and hope that mere repetition is enough to convince people that something—something—must be wrong here. Over at National Review, Ian Tuttle is disturbed:
At the 10:22 mark of the Center for Medical Progress’s latest video, released today, there is a picture of a hand. By the curve of the thumb and the articulation of the fingers, one can see that it is a right hand. It was formerly the right hand of an 11.6-week-old fetus; it is now part of the various organic odds and ends being sifted through on a plate in the pathology lab of a Planned Parenthood clinic.
….I keep calling it a hand. Maybe I shouldn’t….But I see a hand — five fingers and lines across the joints, like you learn to sketch in art class. I see a hand in form no different from my own. Or no different from Horowitz’s hands, or Edison’s, or Michelangelo’s.
The most famous image Michelangelo painted was of hands: God’s hand extended to Adam’s….The sculptor Auguste Rodin spent much of his life fashioning hands….Rodin prefigured Heidegger’s observation: “My hand . . . is not a piece of me. I myself am entirely in each gesture of the hand, every single time.”….Galen of Pergamon, the great Greek physician, in his treatise On the Use of the Various Parts of the Body, noted that to man alone had the Creator chosen to give the hand, the only instrument “applicable to every art and occasion”:
….The gods, the arts, survival, history — all that we are has required, literally, many hands. In the hand, the whole man, and in the man, the whole cosmos.
Now, in a pie dish, for sale.
That’s very poetic, but like the video itself, tells us nothing. Yes, Planned Parenthood donates fetal tissue to medical research facilities. They charge enough to cover their costs, nothing more. Among the tissue they donate are hands. And this is not a sinister “black market,” as the video claims: It’s done in the open with the permission of the mother, and the tissue is transferred only to qualified researchers.
The idea behind the video, of course, is that it’s supposed to automatically trigger disgust in us. And it does. After all, most of us felt a little disgusted when we dissected frogs in 9th grade biology. It’s just part of human nature, and the Planned Parenthood haters are smart to take advantage of it.
But you know what? I’m an organ donor. I’m not sure my organs are actually safe for harvesting anymore, but if they are, then my body will be chopped up and used for its best and highest purpose when I’m dead. Some organs will be used for transplants, I hope. Some will be given to research laboratories. Some may end up as the raw materials for other stuff. If I were alive and watching, I’d probably feel pretty queasy. And yet, no one really blinks an eye at the routine job of harvesting organs and tissue from dead people who have given their permission.
This is no different. It’s every bit as altruistic and admirable as harvesting useful tissue from adults. Period.
So far, the worst anyone has come up with from these videos is that some of the Planned Parenthood folks caught on tape used a “tone” that was unfortunate. Give me a break. This is the way any doctor talks among other health care professionals. They’re experienced enough to talk plainly about their work in private, and they make jokes about it like any normal person. It’s simply wrong to pretend that this is anything ominous.
And that hand on the pie dish? Who knows? It might save someone’s life someday.
POSTSCRIPT: And I’ll repeat what I said before. If you think abortion is murder, then of course you object to the use of organs and tissue from aborted fetuses. If you don’t, then you think it’s fine. There’s nothing new going on here. It’s just a slightly different twist on the same fight between pro-lifers and pro-choicers that’s been going on for decades
Original article:
There’s a New Planned Parenthood Video, But There’s Just Nothing There
Spoiler Alert
By Clayton Aldernon 21 Jul 2015commentsShare
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, fossil fuel emissions are here to prove you otherwise. Today’s victim: carbon dating.
A new paper by Heather Graven of Imperial College London suggests that rising greenhouse gas emissions will limit scientists’ ability to date artifacts using radioactive carbon. The carbon dating technique relies on measuring the concentration of radiocarbon to non-radiocarbon in old organic material — the less radiocarbon, the older the object. It’s a slick technique that scientists have been using for decades. But now, fossil fuels are mucking everything up by putting a bunch of extra non-radioactive carbon into the atmosphere, thus meddling with the ratio. Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts, where greenhouse gas emissions and anthropogenic climate change upend our hopes and dreams.
The study looked at the likely carbon emissions pathways over the next century and suggested that the increases in non-radioactive carbon by 2020 could start to impact the dating technique.
“If we did any current measurements on new products, they will end up having the same fraction of radiocarbon to total carbon as something that’s lost it over time due to decay,” said Dr Graven.
Fossil fuels are old: They’ve had millions of years to let their radioactive carbon decay, which is why they’re such good sources of non-radioactive carbon. As more and more of the non-radioactive carbon ends up in our atmosphere, the more the atmosphere will look as if it has “aged.” The ultimate effect will likely be an inability to reference artifacts to a standard atmospheric touchstone.
Here’s more from the BBC:
At current rates of emissions increase, according to the research, a new piece of clothing in 2050 would have the same carbon date as a robe worn by William the Conqueror 1,000 years earlier.
“It really depends on how much emissions increase or decrease over the next century, in terms of how strong this dilution effect gets,” said Dr Graven.
“If we reduce emissions rapidly we might stay around a carbon age of 100 years in the atmosphere but if we strongly increase emissions we could get to an age of 1,000 years by 2050 and around 2,000 years by 2100.”
Which would leave the atmosphere a bit like Tom Hanks in Big — only instead of waking up 20 years older and getting a job at a toy factory, the atmosphere wakes up 2,000 years older, ruins a fundamental plot device of Discovery Channel documentaries, and goes on to turn everything we know and love into a tinderbox.
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Emissions from fossil fuels may limit carbon dating
, BBC.
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All Dogs Go to Kevin – Jessica Vogelsang
ALL DOGS GO TO KEVIN is a humorous and touching memoir that will appeal to anyone who has ever loved an animal or lost hours in James Herriot’s classic veterinary stories. You can’t always count on people, but you can always count on your dog. No one knows that better than veterinarian Jessica Vogelsang. With […]
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White Dwarf Issue 77: 18th July 2015 – White Dwarf
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Perfect Puppy In 7 Days – Dr. Sophia Yin, DVM, MS
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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis – Instaread
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Mother Jones
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This story was originally published by Grist.
Should we eat meat? That’s the big question, which—for this series—I’m asking three different ways: in terms of environmental sustainability, morality, and practicality.
Today, to begin: Can meat be sustainable?
In any comparison of the environmental impact of meat eaters and plant eaters, we have to start by noting that plant eaters have a powerful ally on their side: physics. Every time energy moves from one state to another, a little is lost along the way. Flip on an incandescent bulb and only 8 percent of the electric energy turns into visible light—the majority of energy is lost as infrared light and heat. Convert the calories in corn into meat by feeding a chicken, and you’ve got the same problem.
In even the most efficient, high-tech farms, it takes a pound and a half of grain to grow a pound of chicken—because that chicken is constantly radiating heat and burning energy to move around. The picture gets worse if you just look at the parts of the chicken that people like to eat. The scientist Vaclav Smil, who has a reputation for objective number-crunching, considered this basic issue of thermodynamics in his book, Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory, and came up with this table:
LW = live weight, EW = edible weight, MJ = mega joules of energy Vaclav Smil
According to Smil’s calculations, you need 3.3 pounds of feed to get a pound of chicken meat, 9.4 pounds of feed for a pound of pork, and 25 pounds of feed for a pound of beef. It’s simply more efficient to eat plants than to feed those plants to animals and eat meat.
This efficiency problem puts meat eaters way behind from the beginning, and it extends from energy to every other resource. Look at water use, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, land-use footprints, and just about anything else, and it’s always going to make more sense to grow grains for people to eat rather than for animals to eat. To take just one example, scientists looked at the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that flows into rivers and creates dead zones in oceans: They calculated that a kilogram of red meat put an average of 150 grams of nitrogen equivalent (in various fertilizers) into waterways, versus 50 grams per kilogram of chicken and less than 3 grams per kilogram of grain.
This idea, that meat is environmentally unfriendly, has been the conventional wisdom since 2006, when the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization published a report called Livestock’s Long Shadow. Which is why I was surprised when Frank Mitloehner, a UC-Davis animal science professor who is leading an update of the FAO’s livestock assessment, told me that the idea of eliminating animals from our food system was ridiculous and, actually, unsustainable.
“Agriculture cannot be sustainable without animal agriculture,” he said. “That is something I’m sure of.”
There are two key points to consider, Mitloehner said. First, most of the feed that livestock eat is not edible by humans. Globally, just 18 percent of animal feed is made up of grains or other crops that people might otherwise eat. The rest is crop residues, grass, and waste from milling grain and other food processing. And so, despite the inefficiency of converting calories to meat, animals are able to give humans access to energy that they wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise.
The second, issue, Mitloehner said, is that what I’d been thinking of as the “waste products” of animal agriculture are actually valuable resources. The manure animals produce is vital for agriculture (especially organic agriculture). “If we were to reduce the fertilizer animals produce by 100 percent, we would have to double or triple the amount of chemical fertilizer we apply, and we just don’t have that,” Mitloehner said.
In addition, every part of the animal that we don’t eat as meat—the skin, bones, sinew, organs, and fat—is used in some way. The artist Christien Meindertsma demonstrated this beautifully with her book Pig 05049, in which she followed every part of a slaughtered pig to its final use. Extract from pig hairs are used in baking bread, bone ash is a key part in train brakes, gelatin is used to filter your beer, elements from blood are used as edible food glue—Meindertsma found 185 products in total. If we were to eliminate animal agriculture, we’d have to find new supply chains for these things, and each would come with its own environmental footprint.
Livestock is especially important to poor farmers. Animals are often a key part of the agro-ecological system and provide high-quality nutrients to the people most likely to go hungry—more frequently in the form of dairy than meat. In some of the poorest areas of the world, people need cattle because manure is their only source of fuel. In his book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?, Gordon Conway lays out the benefits of livestock animals, which can be easy to forget when you’re rich and comfortable:
Contribute 40 percent of global value of agricultural output
Support livelihoods and food security of almost 1 billion people
Provide food and incomes and consume non-human-edible food
Contribute 15 percent of total food energy and 25 percent of dietary protein
Provide essential micronutrients (e.g. iron, calcium) that are more readily available in meat, milk, and eggs than in plant-based foods
Are a valuable asset, serving as a store of wealth, collateral for credit, and an essential safety net during times of crisis
Are central to mixed farming systems, consume agricultural waste products, help control insects and weeds, produce manure and waste for cooking, and provide draft power for transport
Provide employment, in some cases especially for women
Have a cultural significance, as the basis for religious ceremonies
But anyone reading this probably is relatively rich and comfortable—at least rich enough that it may be a bit mindboggling to think you might need a cow so you could burn its dung for energy. For those of us living with easy access to energy and cheap calories, would it make ecological sense to reduce our meat consumption? Probably.
I called up Rattan Lal, one of the world’s leading soil scientists, to ask him what he thought about meat eating. I wanted to talk to him because there’s been a lot of excitement about the idea that cattle grazing on grassland could actually be carbon negative—that is, we might need more animals, not less, to combat climate change.
Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, had told Washington Post journalist Tamar Haspel that we shouldn’t expect cows to save the world. Haspel wrote:
He says one metric ton per hectare is a reasonable estimate of the maximum carbon that grazing can sequester in a place like Ohio, where growing conditions generally are favorable, and a half-ton would be more realistic in drier areas. He supports grass-fed beef but says carbon sequestration “can’t completely compensate for the greenhouse gases in beef production.”
I wanted to double check—was there anything else? Some way that animals are crucial for soil health? When I spoke to Lal, he said it just came down to basic logistics. “In the next 40 years, there are 2.3 billion people coming to dinner. We have invited them—they haven’t made the choice to come. It is our moral duty to insure that they are well fed. The luxury of having so much meat as we do in the U.S. will become less and less feasible as population grows.”
Animals are a key part of the agricultural system, but the people who eat the most meat—the rich of the world—almost certainly need to eat less to make the global food system sustainable, especially as billions rise out of poverty and begin demanding their share.
Smil came to the same conclusion. He says that we should aim for an average of 33-66 pounds of meat per year. The French eat 35 pounds a year, while Americans eat 270 pounds of meat. If we got down to the French level, Smil’s calculations suggest that everyone around the world could have their share of meat, and we could still reduce the farmland used to grow feed from 33 percent of all cropland to 10 percent—with huge environmental benefits.
So can meat be sustainable? The answer, based on the evidence I was able to assemble, seems to be: Yes, but only in moderation. And because we are currently eating so much meat, those who give it up altogether are probably making the most environmentally friendly choice of all.
Next, I’ll tackle the morality of meat eating. And then I’ll turn to what’s probably the most important question of all: It’s fun to debate what we should do, but it’s more important to figure out what we can do, realistically. So after looking at morality, I’ll look at the most pragmatic ways to improve meat production.
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By Suzanne Jacobson 15 Jul 2015commentsShare
So let’s say we massively botch this save-humanity-from-imminent-doom thing and end up on an irreversible path toward a planet that warms by more than 2 degrees Celsius (that terrifying point beyond which we all spontaneously combust, or something). Hell, maybe we’re already on that path. Or maybe 2 degrees is actually too high to be safe. Or maybe this is all just too depressing to think about. Regardless, wouldn’t it be nice to have some way to just reach up and grab some of that CO2 right out of the atmosphere — just to be safe?
That’s the motivation behind a growing number of startups working on direct carbon capture and sequestration technology, but according to The Guardian, these companies aren’t getting much love from government officials:
Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat and Climeworks all sprung up during the mid-to-late-2000s, when it looked as if the world’s governments might take aggressive action to curb climate change. Mostly, they haven’t. Since then, the three startups have been refining their technology, raising capital and very gradually bringing CO2 capture closer to a commercial reality. …
But until governments are willing to pay for carbon removal and storage, the three air-capture startups will need commercial customers that can keep them afloat in case they are needed, potentially decades from now, as a climate solution. All are aiming to make low-carbon fuels, using recycled CO2 and renewable energy to power the process.
With government funding, the scientists behind these technologies could, in theory, just start burying CO2 in the oceans or underground (after making sure it’s safe to do so, of course). But right now they have to rely on the free market, for better or worse:
The open question for all three startups is whether any can raise enough money – and sustain enough cashflow – in the short term for their efforts to matter in the long term.
The CEO of Warner Music has been Global Thermostat’s biggest bankroller so far, The Guardian reports, but the company is about to announce a multimillion dollar investment from a U.S. energy company. Carbon Engineering, led by Harvard geoengineering researcher David Keith, has so far received funding from Bill Gates, and Climeworks has done some early work with Audi on a “zero-carbon e-diesel.”
But what if that cashflow runs dry? The U.S. government acknowledged in February that direct air capture and sequestration is worth investigating, so maybe they should just pony up the cash. Sure, funding the science of the future has never been easy (except maybe for Elon Musk), but this never-ending struggle between what works in the short term and what’s best in the long term is getting old.
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Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
, The Guardian.
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Grapes of Wrath
By Clayton Aldernon 15 Jul 2015commentsShare
In what should come as a surprise to nobody, the first bottles of Scottish wine have been hailed as fundamentally “undrinkable” by sommeliers.
Hopeful winemakers in Scotland have cited climate change as the impetus for their vineyards: Warming temperatures should mean more favorable grape conditions. Unfortunately, Scotland is not yet Italy, and the climate necessary for a successful vintage is not expected to descend upon the Scots for a number of decades.
Christopher Trotter, from Aberdeen, hoped global warming would make his part of Fife hot enough to grow fine wine.
However, he was disappointed to hear his first batch of “Chateau Largo”, grown on the slopes of the Upper Largo valley, was not the fine vintage he had hoped for.
But he said he is convinced a few more years of soaring summer temperatures will enable him to produce something better than cheap plonk.
The grapes, “harvested from a sloping vineyard in Upper Largo on the south coast of Fife, just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh,” — ostensibly in Scotland and not Middle Earth — are mostly a cheeky variant called Solaris. Solaris, a white grape, is a hybrid of Merzling and the exoplanet-sounding Gm 6493. Given its ancestry, the grape should grow best in a temperate, warm climate like that of Alsace, France.
What will it take for the south coast of Fife to look like Alsace? A back of the wine coaster calculation taking the difference in average monthly temperature between Edinburgh and Alsace gives us a required yearly temperature hike of about 5.3°F. Recall that we’re trying to avert a 3.6°F (2°C) increase in global average land temperatures in order for everything to not spontaneously combust. But hey, nobody has praised the Scots for their optimism.
Of course, temperature isn’t everything in viticulture. Other relevant variables include soil composition, surrounding geography, and precipitation levels. Trotter, however, will continue to give it a shot. “We have proved we can grow grapes in the Scottish climate,” he said. Which is a start. But you don’t get points for procuring a bag of microwave popcorn — you have to pop it, too.
Until the greenhouse effect remedies that Chateau Largo, stick to the Glenkinchie, mate.
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Scotland’s first homegrown wine declared ‘undrinkable’ by experts
, The Daily Mirror.
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White Dwarf Issue 75: 04th July 2015 – White Dwarf
White Dwarf 75 cometh and with it Warhammer Age of Sigmar! They were the End Times. The world-that-was is gone. The Age of Myth is passed. The Mortal Realms endure an Age of Chaos and yet hope remains… That’s right, at long last, White Dwarf 75 arrives to usher in the Age of Sigmar. And […]
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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo
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White Dwarf Issue 76: 11th July 2015 – White Dwarf
The war for the Mortal Realms begins! White Dwarf 76 arrives and with it the gigantic Warhammer Age of Sigmar book, 264 pages of the new age of Warhammer laid bare. Not only that, but the Stormcast Eternals receive reinforcements in the shape of multi-part Liberators and the new Lord-Celestant, a towering hero striding into […]
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Warhammer Age of Sigmar Painting Guide (Tablet Edition) – Games Workshop
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Could this solar technology bring water abundance to thirsty California?
Mother Jones
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How hipster is kale? For $28, Urban Outfitters will sell you a kale t-shirt. To prep for a big blizzard in early 2015, residents of a trendy Brooklyn section cleaned out the kale bins of their neighborhood Whole Foods. And what would the juicing craze be without it?
But today’s kale-fixated juice-heads may doing themselves a disservice.
That’s a possibility raised by an article in Craftsmanship magazine by Todd Oppenheimer. The piece doesn’t establish a definitive link between heavy kale consumption and any health problem, but it does raise the question of whether too much of even a highly nutritious food like kale can have unhappy side effects.
The article focuses on an alt-medicine researcher and molecular biologist named Ernie Hubbard, who began to notice an odd trend among some of his clinic’s clients in California’s Marin County, a place known for its organic farms, health-food stores, and yoga studios. Extremely health-conscious people were coming into to complain of “persistent but elusive problems”: “Chronic fatigue. Skin and hair issues. Arrhythmias and other neurological disorders. Foggy thinking. Gluten sensitivity and other digestive troubles. Sometimes even the possibility of Lyme Disease.”
Hubbard began to find detectable levels of a toxic heavy metal called thallium in patients’ blood samples—at higher-than-normal leves—as well as in kale leaves from the region. Meanwhile, “over and over,” he found that patients complaining of symptoms associated with low-level thallium poisoning—fatigue, brain fog, etc.—would also be heavy eaters of kale and related vegetables, like cabbage.
And he found, in the form of this 2006 peer-reviewed paper by Czech researchers, evidence that kale is really good at taking up thallium from soil. The paper concluded that kale’s ability to accumulate soil-borne thallium is “very high and can be a serious danger for food chains.” And here’s a peer-reviewed 2013 paper from Chinese researchers finding similar results with green cabbage; a 2015 Chinese study finding green cabbage is so good at extracting thallium from soil that it can be used for “phytoremediation”—i.e., purifying soil of a toxin—and a 2001 one from a New Zealand team finding formidible thallium-scrounging powers in three other members of the brassica family: watercress, radishes, and turnips.
Now, just because kale and other brassicas can effectively take up thallium from soil doesn’t mean that they always contain thallium. The metal has to find its way into soil first. It exists at low levels in the Earth’s crust, and the main way it gets concentrated at high enough levels to cause worry is through “nearby cement plants, oil drilling, smelting, and, most of all, in the ash that results from coal burning,” Oppenheimer reports. The researcher he profiled, Hubbard, has so far not succeeded in nailing down the source of the thallium that he found in his kale samples.
And there’s also the question of quantity. One of Hubbard’s patients with heightened thallium levels in her urine and mild symptoms of thallium poisoning ate so much cabbage over the years that she called herself the “cabbage queen.” When she “cut way back” on her favorite vegetable, she tells Oppenheimer, her thallium levels dropped, and her symptoms improved.
Where does all of this evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, leave us—beyond the need of much more research on US-grown kale? There’s nothing here that makes me want to stop eating brassicas, probably my favorite vegetable genus and one undeniably loaded with many valuable nutrients.
But it does make me wary of downing brassicas daily at great quantities over extended periods, the way some people may be doing as part of the juice craze. This recipe for “mean green juice,” for example, calls for six to eight kale leaves in a single serving—much more than most of us would consume in a side dish of sautéed kale. In all great things—wine, butter, ice cream, even kale—moderation makes sense.
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