no, seriously, hank - tell us what you really think ;-)

Yep, right, fad, again, fad fad fad, that's the word, blimey! Not that you are wrong, but you miss the point once more, so that you are wrong, and so much it's just annoying discussing the short-cuts of yours, and it just plainly doesn't matter.

You know what, Hank Campbell, as it turns out, the way you conceive of "science" is right just in the middle of the spot where we write "Myths" on it, bingo!

Oh and you can bark the hell of a bell of your misunderstanding of every and each thing below that line, never mind I guess, I hate to jump at that conclusion but I now understand that it's probably more than anything else the way you are an American that leaves you short of many subtleties.

Go cast your vote for Romney, he's the right choice for your kind indeed!

Well, I am not sure I should even start discussing anything...

You live in a country where something like anti-science seem to exist, jolly well, you are right to fight this and we all share a certain hope for reason to get over fear. But you don't see this problem does not exist elsewhere, in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, there is no such thing as an anti-science ideology. From any other place in the world than America, (except in the Middle East maybe where an ideology is fighting reason as well) then, the equations are not simplistic like you describe them, and hence the solutions not so easy and manichean. People may be misinformed, undereducated, but they don't share beliefs about creationism or climato-scepticism, and they try to figure out what are the realities out there, and how to face the difficulties. In this process, it seems to be a growing evidence that the past 50 or 100 years of engineered agriculture may pose problems so that it might be preferred to switch to another development model.

The main problem is to meet various criteria for the intensive agriculture to stop, among other things, devastating the land and ruining the poorest populations : producing food to be local (lowering shipping logistics), organic (lowering the chemical threat), green (lowering the water and soils pollution), economically sustainable (so that the food is affordable for the people - remember 1 billion human beings are more or less starving right now, 6 millions dying every year because of food deprivation, it's more cadavers than your backyard can contain if you want to see it boldly), safe (so that it doesn't cause epidemics.)

When you mix these criteria, you see there are difficulties to hold them all together, and the solution you provide to enhance the food production is not a viable solution for the developing world to come, because the scale to which it is supposed to be applied would likely destroy the climate completely, and lead sooner or later to a series of changes in the societies themselves that we would not like to have to face within our lifetime.

Your various assumptions that science solved all problems in the past and will in the future, that there is no water crisis to come, that all previous forecast were abusive, that poor countries benefit intensive engineered agriculture the most, that we only have an energy crisis and not a food issue, that GM will solve all problems, these assumptions are problematic because not only do they tend to support a very conservative political choice (where the world should work as it always did - this is exactly the basis of the climato-scepticism lobbying), but also they should be discussed and documented more precisely relatively to the local cases and areas where they apply to be asserted or nuanced. It depends on a variety of factors, among which generally speaking the development models that will be promoted to address these issues, be they simple risks right now.

It's not that simple, and depending on the attitude you promote, various scenarios are in line at the 2050 horizon, some of which are really freaky. Your idea is promoting the worst of these scenarios, and my hypothesis is that you don't feel the lights have turned because you live in a country that is partially but violently blind and deaf to the realities of the rest of the world. That's the second time in a week I read such a short minded article from you in a week, and the picture is quite exasperating.

I hope for you that you work for a GM industry that pays you very well, because if you don't, I'm really worried about that caricature science/anti-science debate taking place in the US..

To end with a point of method in your argumentation, if I may, I have doubts about your use of examples to refute a general concern. In any way an example can be accounted for a general idea, at most an example can instantiate a general matter, but most commonly an example illustrate an idea. Argument "A" illustrated by example "a", or Reality "b" instantiating General Idea "B", fine, but "a" proving "A", or "B" disproved by "b", no go. Unless you want to write a journalistic paper or a political discourse, you can't do that, and you hardly can call it reasonable if you do.

No, the majority of the people in Europe are not anti-science at all, and this is because they are not strong believers at all, they don't have the faith it takes to reject science with ideology. Their faith is more of a private affair, and there are no major religious political forces to impose an outdated vision of the world there, although the political populism is well spread. Anti-science crusade or public discourses are extremely rare out of the USA (and the Middle-East maybe and for entirely different causes.) They are misinformed maybe because the scholar system and the population itself is ageing, but as soon as there is a debate, people get the information they need, and you can see real true occurrences there of what you can call direct democracy, which to my knowledge doesn't happen in the USA.

Optimism and GM agriculture... it depends on whether you are on the side of the big GM companies selling expansive sterile material causing eventually ecological mayhem as it is nowadays, or if you are on the side of the developing agricultural needs that would indeed make a fair use of GM material to increase productivity and help balance food safety inequity around the world. It is certainly irresponsible to praise the current model, for all it leads to is security zoning of populations at the 2050 horizon, and some kind of demographic pressure between the sides of the segregated areas. Since this is exactly what you are denouncing, we have a problem here because what you see as a solution is the source of the problem according to me.

I don't see the situation is evolving well where GM products from big GM firms are introduced without any kind of regard for the common good and the general interest, as it is the case today, and I don't think this will change in the future, but only get worse. I think this is where your mistake lies, you seem to consider industrial markets distributing scientifically engineered goods are rational, which is clearly not the case.

The question to determine if the global agriculture production would be able to sustain an access to animal proteins to every market being closely tied and limited by this speculative stock exchange irrationality, unless you take the fact seriously under critical scrutiny, is out of reach of your argumentation, so that it misses the point, how respectable may be your call for a better future.

So the GM industry will not save the world, even if the GM technology and science may have the power to do so. At the opposite, the organic food industry is trying another approach that would be to localize the productions enough to maintain a food safety area by area. While this other model is criticised by older classical global economists because it is supposed to fail at the larger scale, the current industrial model is failing on a daily basis with the surplus drawback to create astounding risks for the environment and the population. I don't think defending the current model is very rational and responsible, and I don't think trying to develop a model that would take the differential advantage of mixing the best of both models could be consider as a fad or a vegetarian nonsense per se. This is why I reaffirm my view, your view is missing the subtleties of the global food challenge to come, and it is doing so by putting forward an idealized vision of science that is not less mythological than the opposite religious or obscurantist opinion.

Well, in Europe people have difficulties understanding the federal system of the USA, they don't understand why it can happen that the federal state has less power (and the difficulty spreads to the determination of the board across which this lesser power runs or not) than the state. This is typical I think and the counterpart of that is that the American citizen find it difficult to understand Europe is not a federal state, but a collection of ancient and independent countries trying to get organised into a convenient common economical union.

Not to say one system is better than another, simply, to understand the specificity of the EU official views and public exposition, you have to remember these administrative structures are quite completely foreign to the reality of the peoples of the European countries. Citizens in Europe hardly know the name of the European top officials, but they know quite well the name and politics of the other European countries governments. You also have to remember Europe is administratively divided into two distinct institutions, the European Commission that is designed to be an intergovernmental platform destined to become a non yet born European government, and the European parliament that is the expression of the political will of the peoples themselves, and elected by them. In other words, the EU science advisor is a complete stranger to the people in Europe, he or she certainly has a lot of putative prerogatives of his or her own, but as far as it concerns the 27 countries independent and diverse own policies regarding education and science literacy, his or her role is a complete fiction I'm afraid. Not that this function is useless, it is useful to help building the European reality, and it is useful when it comes to bring the European point of view to the US.

I don't say it's a good or a bad thing, it's just the way it is, but maybe as you are used to listen in a certain way to the federal expression of the US government representative, you overestimate the word of this function that is belonging to the frame of the painting more than to the painting itself. When European people learn about the US federal state deeds, in return, they take it for the expression of the centralized omnipotent power, and in that they commit the same opposite mistake.

As for the general public mentality in Europe, there's another major difference maybe. People in the USA belong in vast majority to the middle class that used to be the main class in the country right from its foundation, and it's only quite recently during the 20th century that more marginal classes of richer and poorer people appeared. In Europe it is completely different, people are divided in classes for centuries or millennium already, and it's only for the last 50 years that they tend to agglomerate all into a middle class. What this structure does to the social world in Europe is that the cultural goods, as much material as immaterial, books and ideas, are old and even ancient possessions of the people, so that they are not born to literacy last decade or even last century, they have abandoned religiosity and faith already a century ago, welcome the scientificity in its principle at least for even longer than that, and the debates are therefore colder about all these notions. (Of course obscurantism is coming back too, but the hierarchical social structure is still stronger than this recent effect.) So, would an expert declare gravity is an illusion, they would joke at it even in the popular places - but the disadvantage of this older tradition regarding culture and knowledge, compared with the newer culture of the USA, is that the average effective precise knowledge concerning these matters, is more vague. But the culture of knowledge is strongly imprinting the social world, and you see it very often when a public debate explodes, in weeks the general public knows everything about nanotechnology, nuclear power, GM plants and so on (and forgets everything after the limelights have turned away of course...) And as to what they believe in these debates, if they're pro or anti something, depends on the more universal parameters of their conservatism or progressivism. Just as everything else, but minus the religious ideological effect that may still trick the game in the USA.

And as this ancient structure in Europe holds as many variants with local differences and specificities as the 27 countries, you have to get an insight of each and every local history to get the European picture right (the educational system does give such an insight to the citizen.) Whereas what European people often admire (and mock as well of course - opposite side of the same medal..) in the USA, it's the novelty of its structures, its freshness, the way everything is still possible there, everything being shining new, opened, enthusiastic, reinvented, re-thinkable and boldly optimistic.

As I can see, overseas the view about European people is quite made of the same symmetric confusion, but you might tell me more on that than I could guess, so sorry for this long off topic explanation, in the hope it will help you strengthening your sense of subtleties.

This 'science' site must be created by a Republican.