Michael Specter Nyr

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geo engr nate m, SRI

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/14/the-climate-fixers

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long art on Oz:

n October 17th, Oz broadcast a program titled “GMO Foods: Are They Dangerous to Your Health?” Oz was not subtle. “You’re probably eating them right now and don’t even know,” he began, darkly invoking “the brave new world of food. Are they safe?” Oz then introduced Jeffrey Smith, the author of “Genetic Roulette,” who says that engineered foods may cause many serious diseases, including colitis, asthma, and cancer. Smith has also made a film version of the book; Oz, for the sake of full disclosure, noted that “my wife, Lisa, was a narrator in Jeffrey’s film.” He added that no scientists were willing to share the stage with Smith. “So today we are doing something we have never done before,” Oz said. “After Jeffrey makes his points, he has to leave the stage before we can speak with the scientists in favor of genetically modified foods.” Other than to say that Smith was controversial, Oz did not indicate why no scientists would appear with him.

When I asked Lisa about her involvement, she said that Smith presented a point of view that needed to be heard, and that the safety of genetically modified foods has not been proved. “I think Mehmet and I both feel, in general, that our mission is to empower the viewer or reader,” she said. “To give them the most information and the greatest number of tools they can use to make their own choices.”

On the show, Oz identified Smith as a scientist, but Smith has no experience in genetics or agriculture, and has no scientific degree from any institution. He studied business at the Maharishi International University, founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Before the show aired, Bruce Chassy, a noted molecular biologist, wrote to Oz; he is a founder of Academics Review, a group of researchers who often debunk popular scientific claims. Chassy is professor emeritus in the department of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois. “As a public-sector scientist, researcher, and academic administrator with more than forty years’ experience, I am appalled that any medical professional would give a platform to the likes of Mr. Jeffrey Smith to impart health information to the public,” Chassy wrote. “His only professional experience prior to taking up his crusade against biotechnology is as a ballroom-dance teacher, yogic flying instructor, and political candidate for the Maharishi cult’s natural-law party.”

Graphic images of rats covered in tumors appeared on a monitor; the images were taken from a study, published in September, contending that the tumors were caused by genetically modified corn. The study was publicized widely throughout the world, but it was denounced by the European Union Food Safety Authority, rejected in a rare joint statement by the six French national scientific academies, and ridiculed by scores of scientists. None of that deterred Smith, who attacked the Food and Drug Administration for “ignoring” these problems. On the show, Oz never challenged him, although agricultural biotechnology has been under review by the F.D.A. for decades, and no agency, in the United States or anywhere else, has found evidence that genetically modified foods are metabolized by the body any differently from any other type of food.

There are many legitimate and articulate opponents of genetically modified products and, for that matter, of conventional medicine itself. But Oz has consistently chosen guests with dubious authority to argue those positions. Joseph Mercola, an osteopath, runs mercola.com, one of the most popular alternative-health Web sites in the country. Oz has described Mercola as a “pioneer in holistic treatments,” and as a man “your doctor doesn’t want you to listen to.” This is undoubtedly true, since Mercola has promoted such alleged experts as Tullio Simoncini, who claims that cancer is a fungus that can be cured with baking soda. Mercola has long argued that vaccines are dangerous and that they even cause AIDS. When Oz says that Mercola is “challenging everything you think you know about traditional medicine and prescription drugs,” it’s hard to argue. “I’m usually earnestly honest and modest about what I think we’ve accomplished,” Oz told me when we discussed his choice of guests. “If I don’t have Mercola on my show, I have thrown away the biggest opportunity that I have been given.”

I had no idea what he meant. How was it Oz’s “biggest opportunity” to introduce a guest who explicitly rejects the tenets of science? “The fact that I am a professor—one of the youngest professors ever—at Columbia, and that I earned my stripes writing hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals,” Oz began. “I know the system. I’ve been on those panels. I’m one of those guys who could talk about Mercola and not lose everybody. And so if I don’t talk to him I have abdicated my responsibility, because the currency that I deal in is trust, and it is trust that has been given to me by Oprah and by Columbia University, and by an audience that has watched over six hundred shows.”

I was still puzzled. “Either data works or it doesn’t,” I said. “Science is supposed to answer, or at least address, those questions. Surely you don’t think that all information is created equal?”

Oz sighed. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” he said. “I have my religion and you have yours. It becomes difficult for us to agree on what we think works, since so much of it is in the eye of the beholder. Data is rarely clean.” All facts come with a point of view. But his spin on it—that one can simply choose those which make sense, rather than data that happen to be true—was chilling. “You find the arguments that support your data,” he said, “and it’s my fact versus your fact.”

crit

just label it

By Emily Cassidy

Only a die-hard defender of genetically modified crops could brush off a scientific finding that Monsanto’s powerful weed killer glyphosate probably causes cancer – and use Monsanto’s own research to do so.

But that’s exactly what New Yorker columnist Michael Specter did when he dismissed the findings of cancer experts at the World Health Organization.

After reviewing relevant research, including industry studies, a panel of 17 experts from 11 countries deemed glyphosate a “probable human carcinogen.”

But Specter saw no reason to worry

He wrote that “the data are, again, clear: after nearly forty years of use, no study has demonstrated a link between glyphosate and cancer in humans.”

The support for his claim? Incredibly, Specter cites a study whose lead author is David Saltmiras, Ph.D., a toxicologist whose biography, posted on GMOAnswers.com, a website sponsored by Monsanto and other biotechnology companies, is “Science Fellow and Toxicology Manager of the Novel Chemistry and Microbials Product platform at the Monsanto Company.”

Not surprisingly, this study, which aims to debunk independent scientific research linking glyphosate to disease, is posted prominently on the Monsanto website.

Independent research tells a completely different – and much darker — story.

Scientists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, writing in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last year, found a link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in eight peer-reviewed independent studies. They concluded that exposure to this ubiquitous weed killer doubled the risk of developing the disease.

Why would Specter dismiss the risks posed by glyphosate?

We don’t know. We do know this: the use of glyphosate across the United States has exploded as more farmers have planted GMO corn and soybeans designed to survive blasts of the herbicide. America’s farmers applied more than 280 million pounds of glyphosate to cropland in 2012 – up from 16 million pounds in 1992.  It’s hard to find an American who has not been exposed to Monsanto’s popular, and, for the company, lucrative herbicide.

he ref: http://www.monsanto.com/glyphosate/pages/glyphosate-and-non-carcinogenicity.aspx

gmo answers

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roundip and risk assess

2015?

Wouldn’t it be a relief to discover that we could lower the risk of developing many types of cancer simply by banning a product that has for decades been sprayed on crops throughout the world? By many recent accounts, then, it’s time to rejoice. Late last month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, issued a report that classified glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, as a “probable” cause of cancer. Glyphosate is the most heavily used herbicide on earth. In 2012, at least 283.5 million pounds were sprayed on American farmlands, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Although the patent has now expired, Roundup was developed in 1974 by Monsanto and is often used in conjunction with crops like corn and soybeans that the company genetically modified to resist it. This allows farmers to kill weeds but not their crops. Although the herbicide has many other uses, its association with G.M.O.s has caused food activists to condemn it for years. Even so, farmers, biologists, and home gardeners throughout the world use glyphosate.

The I.A.R.C. report should change none of that. The panel of seventeen scientists from around the world concluded that glyphosate could be dangerous. The organization evaluates data collected for previously published peer-reviewed studies—which is a valuable service—but it does not conduct its own research. “ ‘Probable’ means that there was enough evidence to say it is more than possible, but not enough evidence to say it is a carcinogen,” Aaron Blair, a lead researcher on the I.A.R.C.’s study, said. Blair, a scientist emeritus at the National Cancer Institute, has studied the effects of pesticides for years. “It means you ought to be a little concerned about” glyphosate, he said.

But how concerned should we be, exactly? Scores of studies have been carried out over the past forty years and they have found no connection between glyphosate and cancer.Its use has been approved by regulatory agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, throughout the world. Moreover, the I.A.R.C. does not include draft analyses in its assessments because, being drafts, they are subject to change. For that reason, the group omitted the conclusions of a comprehensive new study by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. The organization reviewed hundreds of toxicological studies and nearly a thousand published reports. It found, based on available data, neither “carcinogenic or mutagenic properties of glyphosate nor that glyphosate is toxic to fertility, reproduction or embryonal/fetal development in laboratory animals.” (The one study that strongly contradicts that consensus, published by Gilles-Éric Séralini, has been retracted and subjected to intense criticism for its lack of rigor and for the ethics of his research methods.)

The lack of scientific support has hardly deterred the most strident critics of G.M.O.s from blaming glyphosate for diseases ranging from cancer to autism. The I.A.R.C. monograph, published last month in Lancet Oncology, will only be the latest weapon in the highly emotional and often irrational war against the use of G.M.O.s. After the study was released, the Times food writer Mark Bittman, in a column titled “Stop Making Us Guinea Pigs,” suggested that the herbicide should be removed from the market, at least until “Monsanto can prove” that it is safe.

But how do you prove that a substance is safe? Neither Monsanto nor anybody else will ever be able to do that, just as nobody will be able to say that your child’s next vaccination could not possibly make him sick. As with almost all cases that require complex assessments of scientific issues, to determine the risks and the benefits, we need to look at the data. And the data are, again, clear: after nearly forty years of use, no study has demonstrated a link between glyphosate and cancer in humans.

That doesn’t mean we ought to stop investigating glyphosate’s potential effects–both immediate and cumulative—on crops, farmers, humans, and animals. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we should continue to use glyphosate, or any other chemical, with complete abandon. Relying too heavily on glyphosate, as many farmers do, causes tremendous damage to the crops they are trying to grow, as well as to their immediate environment.

To understand what this report actually means, we need to look at its context. As the University of Michigan’s Andrew Maynard puts it in this excellent explanatory video, the I.A.R.C. classification “doesn’t indicate how likely” glyphosate is to cause cancer. “It is the equivalent of saying a rock could kill you but not pointing out that it probably needs to be dropped on your head from a great height first.” (This video first appeared at the end of a post about the I.A.R.C. report that was written for Grist by the highly reliable Nathanael Johnson.)

The list of potential and probable carcinogens is extremely long, and it includes things like fried foods, skewed patterns of sleep caused by working at night, burning fires, and many products we eat and use every day. Nowhere in its report does the I.A.R.C. indicate that the term “probable carcinogen” means that you will probably get cancer from using glyphosate, and nowhere does it suggest that the product ought to be withdrawn from the market. It should also be noted that people use glyphosate for good reasons. If there are risks there are also benefits: glyphosate is far less toxic than the pesticides it normally replaces, and it greatly reduces soil erosion by limiting the need to plow fields.

“There are over 60 genotoxicity studies on glyphosate with none showing results that they should cause alarm relating to any likely human exposure,’’Sir Colin Berry, an emeritus professor of pathologyat Queen Mary University of London, said when asked to comment on the recent study. “For human epidemiological studies there are 7 cohort and 14 case control studies, none of which support carcinogenicity. “

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None of that suggests we should ignore this study. Yet we also have to be aware of blindly invoking the “precautionary principle,’’ as many activists argue that we should. In theory, the principle is hard to condemn: it essentially says that we ought not to develop and use a technology unless it is considered safe. Safety is a slippery concept, though. Many people ski voluntarily—an activity with its own dangers. Although hundreds of people drown in their in their own bathtubs, we still take baths. A strict interpretation of the precautionary principle would require us to stop driving because thousands of Americans die each year on the highways. More than that, the principle would have prevented the development of antibiotics, vaccines, X-rays, elevators, airplanes, and many other signature elements of modern life.}:

One of the first maxims taught in medical school is that “the dose makes the poison.” The products we use every day, whether it’s glyphosate or the soap we use to wash our hands, always come with risks. But most of those products have benefits, too. And we need to ask ourselves what presents the greater danger: using products like glyphosate or not developing them at all.

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Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology. His Profile subjects have included Dr. Oz, Peter Singer, Larry Kramer, and Richard Branson, along with Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, Manolo Blahnik, and Miuccia Prada. Previously, he worked at the New YorkTimes as its senior foreign correspondent, based in Rome; from 1995 to 1998, he served as the paper’s Moscow bureau chief. Before joining the Times, he served as the Washington Post’s national science reporter and, later, as its New York bureau chief. In 1996, he received an Overseas Press Club citation for his reporting on the war in Chechnya. He has twice received the Global Health Council’s annual Excellence in Media Award: in 2002, for “India’s Plague,” and  in 2005, for “The Devastation,” about the ethics of testing H.I.V. vaccines in Africa. His article “Rethinking the Brain” received the 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Award. He is the author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives,” which, in 2010, received the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking. His piece “Against the Grain” won a 2015 James Beard Award in the Food and Health category.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/22/gunning-for-vandana-shiva/

Perhaps nothing symbolizes the decline of the New Yorker magazine more than the hatchet job on Vandana Shiva that appears in the latest issue. Written by Michael Specter, the author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress”, the article is a meretricious defense of genetically modified organisms (GMO) relying on one dodgy source after another. This is the same magazine whose reputation was at its apex when Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking articles on DDT appeared in 1962. If DDT was once a symbol of the destructive power of chemicals on the environment, GMO amounts to one of the biggest threats to food production today. It threatens to enrich powerful multinational corporations while turning farmers into indentured servants through the use of patented seeds. Furthermore, it threatens to unleash potentially calamitous results in farmlands through unintended mutations.

Specter represents himself as a defender of science against irrational thinking. Since many activists regard Vandana Shiva as grounded in science, it is essential that he discredit her. For example, he mentions a book jacket that refers to her as “one of India’s leading physicists”. But when he asked her if she ever worked as a physicist, she invited him to “search for the answer on Google”. He asserts that he found nothing and furthermore that no such position was listed in her biography. Not that I would ever take an inflated publicity blurb that seriously to begin with (having read one too many of those for Slavoj Žižek), I wondered what being a physicist would have to do with GMO in the first place. Is a degree in particle physics necessary for understanding the transformation of vast portions of the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone because of fertilizer-enriched algae?

Specter is a defender of the Green Revolution, a technology-based approach to farming that Norman Borlaug developed in the 1940s and that serves as one of the pillars of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Like Specter, the Gates Foundation sees GMO as the latest and greatest tool for carrying the Green Revolution forward.

To buttress his case for the Green Revolution, Specter calls upon a couple of witnesses to testify. They are a husband and wife team consisting of Raoul Adamchack, the former president of California Certified Organic Farmers, and Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant genetics at UC Davis. Without the Green Revolution, the planet would be “smaller, poorer, and far more agrarian”, according to Adamchack. Hmm. That’s the first time I ever heard “agrarian” used as a swear word but let’s leave that aside for the moment.

Maybe Specter thought that New Yorker magazine readers’ eyes would glaze over the reference to Ronald’s work in “plant genetics”, which could conceivably be conventional in nature, and settle upon her husband’s “organic” credentials. But not mine. I have learned to become a careful reader over the years, especially when it comes to the neoliberal New Yorker magazine. As it turns out, Pamela Ronald is one of the most fanatical supporters of GMO in the USA and hardly a neutral judge on chemistry in agriculture. It is like someone treating Bjorn Lomborg as a disinterested expert on global warming.

Furthermore, Pamela Ronald would be far less credible as a scientific expert than Vandana Shiva in light of her multiple gaffes in peer-reviewed journals. As CounterPunch contributor Jonathan Latham pointed out, she was forced to retract two papers and possibly a third that constituted the core of her pro-GMO research.

A while back Ronald excoriated Mark Bittman for urging that GM food be labeled (in another article in the same issue of the New Yorker, Specter denigrates that demand). She dubbed him “a scourge on science” who “couches his nutty views in reasonable-sounding verbiage”. I think I will stick with Bittman, one of the few reasons to read the New York Times.

Specter assures us that scientists have crossbred plants long before Monsanto came along, so what’s the big deal? He writes, “Nearly all the plants we cultivate—corn, wheat, rice, roses, Christmas trees—have been genetically modified through breeding to last longer, look better, taste sweeter, or grow more vigorously in arid soil.” Leaving aside Christmas trees (taste sweeter?), the other crops are associated with the type of monoculture that has led to one environmental disaster after another. If genetic modification allows corn production to be doubled, what would that mean for a farming system that is groaning under the weight of a crop that is despoiling the ecosphere and hastening the onset of one illness or another through corn syrup, including diabetes?

Next up as a prosecution witness is Mark Lynas, who Specter describes as a repentant ex-opponent of biotechnology. Speaking before the Oxford Farming Conference a while back, he said, “For the record, here and up front, I apologize for having spent several years ripping up G.M. crops. I am also sorry that I . . . assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.”

Before his conversion, Lynas was identified by EuropeBio as a leading candidate for a campaign they were mounting in defense of GM crops. This is an industry coalition that includes Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, BASF, Eli Lilly, and Dupont—a rogue’s gallery of biotechnology. Lynas claims that they never made contact with him but at least they figured out that he was their kind of guy. To give you an idea of his other credentials on Green issues, he is a fan of nuclear power. Lyman was a featured interviewee on the British Channel 4’s documentary “What the Green Movement Got Wrong” that aired in 2010. He told Telegraph readers where he was coming from: “The documentary follows me as I visit Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, and discover that wildlife in the area is thriving, and that the effects of the radioactive contamination on people are much less serious than previously thought.” If this guy is speaking in the name of the Greens, we have to find another color—rapidly.

Specter cannot understand why Shiva is so recalcitrant. Not only does she hold the Gates Foundation in contempt, she dismisses government agencies that are responsible for regulating GM products including the FDA, the EPA and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). When I read this, I wondered if Specter was trying to cover two bases with one article: science and humor. The trust in such agencies was a bigger hoot than any Woody Allen piece I had read there in ages.

As I pointed out in a review of “Food Inc.”, a very fine documentary on industrial farming, USDA boss Tom Vilsack is committed to GMO. I cited the Organic Consumers Organization:

–The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He was also the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership.

–When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child of economic development potential was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.

–Vilsack was the origin of the seed pre-emption bill in 2005, which many people here in Iowa fought because it took away local government’s possibility of ever having a regulation on seeds- where GE would be grown, having GE-free buffers, banning pharma corn locally, etc. Representative Sandy Greiner, the Republican sponsor of the bill, bragged on the House Floor that Vilsack put her up to it right after his state of the state address.

Specter makes sure to put in a good word for glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsansto’s herbicide Roundup, since it is two hundred and thirty times less toxic than atrazine. It is a little hard to make sense of this since I don’t know what that ratio is meant to prove. For example, arsenic might be two hundred and thirty times less poisonous than cyanide but I don’t have plans to sprinkle either over apple pie any time soon.

One would hope that Scientific American passes Specter’s stringent standards for accuracy. If so, the verdict on glyphosate is guilty as charged. In an article titled “Weed-Whacking Herbicide Proves Deadly to Human Cells”, Crystal Gammon points out:

Until now, most health studies have focused on the safety of glyphosate, rather than the mixture of ingredients found in Roundup. But in the new study, scientists found that Roundup’s inert ingredients amplified the toxic effect on human cells—even at concentrations much more diluted than those used on farms and lawns.

One specific inert ingredient, polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself – a finding the researchers call “astonishing.”

“This clearly confirms that the [inert ingredients] in Roundup formulations are not inert,” wrote the study authors from France’s University of Caen. “Moreover, the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even death [at the] residual levels” found on Roundup-treated crops, such as soybeans, alfalfa and corn, or lawns and gardens.

Once again resorting to dodgy ratios, Specter tries to turn the peasant suicide epidemic in India into an urban legend by assuring readers that it is “comparable” to those in France. If your image of the French countryside is that of a plump, prosperous and happy petite-bourgeoisie smiling at overflowing cornucopias of sunflower seeds and artichokes, then maybe this makes sense. But the truth is that France is suffering as well. Between 2007 and 2009, male farmers were 20 percent more likely to commit suicide than in other professions. Indeed, a farmer killed himself every two days, in nearly all instances because of economic ruin—the same problem that is driving Indian farmers to kill themselves.

In the chapter titled “The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent” in volume 3 of Capital, Karl Marx wrote about problems that continue to this day:

Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil.

Every advance in agriculture based on chemicals creates new contradictions that will in turn require a new chemical solution. The answer to the food crisis is not more chemicals but a reorganization of society that eliminates the profit motive and that overcomes the breach between city and countryside, a key demand of the Communist Manifesto. When animals such as cows, chickens and pigs provide the fertilizer for crops—as was the case for millennia—the natural balance will be restored.

The problem with Vandana Shiva is not a lack of scientific clarity. It is rather a lack of political clarity. As is the case with so many environmental activists, the inability to get to the heart of the crisis undermines its ultimate resolution. In India there is no solution for hunger that is possible without the overall solution of the economic problem.

Like Thomas Friedman on one of his frequent junkets to a third world country, Michael Specter visits Maharashtra to get a handle on what the natives are thinking. He visits a dozen farmers in Dhoksal who were supposedly in tune with the globalization that is transforming the world. A local petty official tells Specter that he waved to a cotton farmer riding into town on an elephant but he did not respond because he was too busy talking on his cell phone.

But not all is well in Maharashtra. Every farmer Specter met told him that they knew of a farmer who had taken his or her life. Why? Because there was almost no available credit, no social security, and no meaningful crop-insurance program. One farmer told him: “We want to live better. We want to buy equipment. But when the crop fails we cannot pay.” In other words, there are suicides because of capitalist insecurity, a global epidemic growing worse day by day. Ultimately, the environmental crisis will be resolved when there is a resolution of the capitalist crisis. Eliminating private property and producing for human need rather than private profit is the precondition for health and happiness, notwithstanding the New Yorker magazine’s blatant defense of corporate farming and, more generally, the capitalist system.

Louis Proyectblogs at http://louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.

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In the late 18th century, Edward Gibbon fretted about getting into trouble for his blunt take on the early Christians. Short summary: their intolerance and stupidity unwittingly helped bring down Rome. In the above-quoted passage of his Decline and Fall,Gibbon tried to prepare the gentle reader for his coming exposé of early-church idiocy.

grist 2009 philpt

Like the great institutions of European Christianity, modern science has amassed tremendous power–and not always lived up to its founding creeds. Science needs a Gibbon–someone who appreciates its intellectual grandeur and potential, but who also can train a cold eye on the “inevitable mixture of error and corruption” that has accompanied its tenure since the Enlightenment.

That Gibbon is not Michael Specter, a New Yorker staff writer and author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives.His book purports to defend science from its philistine critics–people who, in Specter’s view, reflexively deny the validity of the scientific process.

In his intro, Specter sets up the defining focus of the book. He contrasts the “rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science” with “the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment” (i.e., “denialism”). Already, we’re on thin intellectual ice; Specter evidently believes in a pure science, one that exists completely apart from ideology. In Gibbon’s phrasing, he’s defending a science as “she descended from Heaven [read: the Enlightenment], arrayed in her native purity.”

According to Denialism, organic farming threatens millions in Africa. According to the UN, not so much. But science doesn’t exist in an ideal state. Like the arts, it lives on its patrons–and their interests shape its contours. Here in the United States, public funding for universities and research has plummeted since the Reagan era. Into that void have stepped monied interests–corporations more inclined to finance the generation of proprietary knowledge than the sort of pure science Specter so values.

Does this factor automatically invalidate the scientific enterprise? Of course not. But anyone who takes on the topic of modern science has to account for it–or risk playing the fool. Specter blithely ignores the political economy of science as it is practiced. That oversight severely limits the value of his book.

But there’s another, even more glaring oversight at work here. In a book devoted to “denialism,” and “how irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives,” there is almost no discussion of the most powerful and successful of all the denier cliques: those who insist human-induced climate change is a hoax.

So what do we find in these pages? We get a chapter defending the pharmaceutical industry against critics who question its wares–an industry with nearly $300 billion in sales in the U.S. alone, and fast-growing markets overseas. Specter’s defense aside, Big Pharma typically vies with“oil and mining” and “commercial banks” for the title of most profitable industry in the United States.

There’s a chapter decrying those who question the necessity of vaccinations–even as global child vaccine rates continue to rise. (Indeed, according to a recent report, the main factor holding vaccines back isn’t denialism, but rather their heightened cost.)

We get a chapter lambasting what Specter calls the “organic fetish”–even though organic food sales remain less than 5 percent of the U.S. market (as Specter acknowledges). But really, this chapter (more on which below) amounts to a ringing defense of genetically modified organisms–which can now be found in 75 percent+ of the offerings on supermarket shelves.

Another chapter blasts theherbal remedy and supplement market–substantial at $23 billion in sales per year (according to this report), but still a fraction of the pharma market’s size.

In other words, Specter mainly trains his sights on unsuccessful or marginally empowered “deniers,” such as those challenging the pharma behemoth or vaccines for children.

But what about the successful deniers–the ones who have managed to block any meaningful response to climate change from the federal government, and are even nowfouling up the effort to pass an effective climatebill? These folks, part of a loosely concerted movement funded largely by the oil and coal industries, get barely a mention in Denialism; they certainly don’t rate a chapter.

The book’s index has no entry for “climate change.” The entry for “Global warming” cites just one page–a reference to genetically modified foods as a “solution” to global warming.

Does this mean that Specter thinks Monsanto’s critics–of whom I am one–pose more of threat to humanity than the likes of Sen. James Inhofe, who airs his views not in a blog but on the floor of the U.S. Senate? Monsanto has certainly shaken off its deniers; it now dominates the U.S. corn, soy, and cotton seed markets. The movement to mitigate climate change hasn’t been so lucky.

Specter’s failure to consider this most successful foray into denialism just astounds me. Did an author really just publish a book about “denialism”–and forget to address climate-change deniers? It’s like writing a book about the British invasion of the 1960s, and neglecting to mention the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

OK, so what’s in Specter’s chapter on organics and GMOs? Astonishingly, not very much science. Two major assumptions underlie it: organic agriculture delivers frightfully low yields, and GMO agriculture delivers reassuringly high yields. He doesn’t deliver data to back up either of those claims. Here are two studies, both of which came out in time for consideration in Denialism, that Specter really should have grappled with: 1) a 2009 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists showing that after decades of research, transgenic seeds have yet to deliver yield increases; and 2) a 2005 study in Bioscience (summary here) showing that yields of organically grown corn and soy match those of their conventional counterparts–with dramatically lower energy inputs.

Straddling his two wobbly, undefended givens about GMO and organic yields, Specter leaps to the conclusion that proponents of organic agriculture are dooming millions to starvation. Or as he puts it:

An organic universe sounds delightful, but it would consign millions in Africa and in much of Asia to malnutrition and death.

To hear Specter tell it, the only thing standing between the African continent and a future marked by widespread famine is a complete surrender to GMO technology. But in declaring that vision, he’s brazenly denying the conclusions of the largest and most comprehensive study on the future of agriculture in the global south, theInternational Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).

Under the auspices of the United Nations, World Bank, WHO, and other institutions, the IAASTD gathered 400 scientists and development experts from dozens of nations to assess the very problems that concern Specter. A three-year project, it has been called the IPCC of agriculture. Its conclusion: agroecological practices–including the very organic-farming techniques Specter finds so frightful–are at least as important as biotechnology in terms of “feeding the world” in the decades to come.

The study [PDF] is at best lukewarm on GMOs. It openly doubts whether GMOs actually increase yields; and deplores the patent regime that now governs them. The IAASTD states:

In developing countries especially, instruments such as patents may drive up costs, restrict experimentation by the individual farmers or public researchers while also potentially undermining local practices that enhance food security and economic sustainability. In this regard, there is particular concern about present IPR instruments eventually inhibiting seed-saving, exchange, sale and access to proprietary materials necessary for the independent research community to conduct analyses and long term experimentation on impacts. Farmers face new liabilities: GM farmers may become liable for adventitious presence if it causes loss of market certification and income to neighboring organic farmers, and conventional farmers may become liable to GM seed producers if transgenes are detected in their crops.

The IAASTD turned out to be so unenthusiastic about GMOs, in fact, that Croplife International, the trade group for the globe’s dominant GMO/agrichemical purveyors, angrily pulled out of participation shortly before its release.

I’m not blasting Specter for refusing to agree with the IAASTD’s conclusions; but I do find it inexcusable that he failed to grapple with this vast scientific undertaking. In doing so, he lurches toward a kind of denialism of his own.

Generally, he might have more fully engaged the major literature on ag development in the global south. He glancingly refers to the FAO’s 2003-’04 “State of Food and Agriculture” paper that gave tepid support for GMOs among poor farmers (while stressing that they’re “not a panacea”). Yet Specter ignores a more recent paper (this one from 2008, by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development) that’s directly relevant to the topic of his chapter: its on the potential of organic ag in Africa. The paper concludes:

Organic agriculture can increase agricultural productivity and can raise incomes with low-cost, locally available and appropriate technologies, without causing environmental damage. Furthermore, evidence shows that organic agriculture can build up natural resources, strengthen communities and improve human capacity, thus improving food security by addressing many different causal factors simultaneously … Organic and near-organic agricultural methods and technologies are ideally suited for many poor, marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa, as they require minimal or no external inputs, use locally and naturally available materials to produce high-quality products, and encourage a whole systemic approach to farming that is more diverse and resistant to stress.

Again, no need to agree with every science-based report that praises organic ag. But to pretend such papers don’t exist is poor journalism. Judging from his organic chapter, Specter spent a lot of time trolling the aisles at Whole Foods, marvelling at the simplistic comments of the shoppers. Fine. I have no doubt that he heard silly, science-denying things there. But where is the push to find the intersections between organic and science–such at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, which has for years been running a test organic farm, complete with control farm? The results of its work, often in conjunction with USDA researchers, show that innovative organic techniques have at least as much promise for mitigating and surviving climate change as some patent-protected transgenic seed cooked up in a Monsanto lab.

Scientific output is messy and full of contradictions. And that brings me back to my broader critique of this book: that Specter defends an ideal, objective science that doesn’t exist in this world. There is no greater case study of the grubbiness of real-world science than the rise of Specter’s beloved GMOs.

(I’m still marveling at this statement, from the introduction: “I wonder, as the ice sheet in Greenland disappears, the seas rise, and our sense of planetary foreboding grows, will denialists consider the genetically engineered organisms that propel our cars and sustain our factories as a continuation of what [organic champion] Lord Melchett described as a war against nature?”)

GMOs are hardly a product of the kind of pure and objective science that Specter celebrates. Indeed, the few companies involved in GMO seed production have been accorded such extraordinary intellectual property power by the U.S. government that research scientists have risen up in rebellion.

In an article published in February of this year–maybe too late for consideration by Specter–The New York Times reported that 26 corn-insect specialists signed a letter to the EPA complaining that “no truly independent research [on GMOS] can be legally conducted on many critical questions” because the patent-holding companies have so much power over research. From the Times:

The problem, the scientists say, is that farmers and other buyers of genetically engineered seeds have to sign an agreement meant to ensure that growers honor company patent rights and environmental regulations. But the agreements also prohibit growing the crops for research purposes.

Shockingly, “The researchers … withheld their names [from the EPA letter] because they feared being cut off from research by the companies.” Now there’s an example of scientists who are free to pursue the path of truth!

I’d also urge Specter to read a paper by Don Lotter, published early this year in the International Journal of the Sociology of Food and Agriculture. Lotter’s paper, provocatively titled “The Genetic Engineering of Food and The Failure of Science,” shows how the collapse of biology’s “central dogma”–the one-gene, one-trait thesis that fell apart with the mapping of the human genome–exposed GM plant breeding as a rather crude tool. He traces the rise of GMOs, convincingly arguing that political and economic power, not scientific rigor, have driven the technology’s ascent.

But political and economic power are precisely what elude Specter’s gaze. This great defender of science appears to be cursed with something that a love of science should have cured: naiveté. To be sure, the kind of know-nothing, reflexive anti-scienticism that Specter deplores certainly exists; and its adherents need a kick in the pants. Specter’s boot misses the target. Moreover, he sees deniers everywhere, except where they are actually powerful and effective: denying climate change.