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Beepocamyth: Neonics Don’t Kill the Buzz

08 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environment, Risk

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Beepocalypse, Colony Collapse Disorder, Fish & Wildlife Service, Genetic Literacy Project, Glyphosate, Jon Entine, Junk Science, Kayleen Schreiber, National Wildlife Refuges, Neonicotiniods, Neonics, Nydia Velázquez, Paul Driessen, Pesticides, Sierra Club

False claims that a certain class of pesticides threaten the world’s bee populations are commonplace, and we hear the same more recently about various species of birds. The origins of the “beepocalypse” rumor were not based on scientific evidence, but on a narrative that developed among environmental activists in response to a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that began around 2006, roughly a decade after neonicotinoid pesticides (so-called neonics) replaced earlier, more toxic compounds as the pesticides of choice. But Jon Entine writes at The Genetic Literacy Project:

“What causes CCD? It still remains a mystery, in part. But researchers turned up historical examples of CCD-like bee die offs across the globe over hundreds of years, well before the introduction of pesticides, but activist groups would have none of it.”

CCD essentially tapered off by 2009, according to Entine, and the number of honeybee colonies are higher now that before the introduction of neonics. See Entine’s charts at the link showing changes in honeybee populations over time. In Australia, where the use of neonics has been especially heavy, bee populations have grown steadily and remain quite healthy.

Entine’s article provides a nice summary of the real and imagined threats to the world’s bee populations as well as distorted claims associated with normal winter die-offs. He provides a number of useful links on these subjects, and he summarizes research showing the lack of any real threat to bees from neonics:

“Over the past seven years, there have been a flood of studies about the potential impact of neonics on bees. Many small-scale, forced-feeding studies that generally overdosed bees with neonics found various negative effects; not a surprise, many entomologists have said, as they do not replicate real world impacts.

In contrast, a multitude of large-population field studies—the ‘gold-standard’ of bee research—have consistently demonstrated there are no serious adverse effects of neonic insecticides on honeybees at the colony level from field-realistic neonic exposure. …

By last year, even the Sierra Club—for years one of the leading proponents of the honeybee Armageddon narrative—was backpeddling, writing: ‘Honeybees are at no risk of dying off. While diseases, parasites and other threats are certainly real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen 45% over the last half century.'”

Then Entine turns his attention to another front in the war on pesticides: a Canadian study in which white-crowned sparrows were force-fed a mixture of seeds and pesticide via gavage — ie, through a tube:

“Only sparrows force-fed the highest dosage were affected, and then only temporarily. They stopped eating, quickly lost body weight and fat, became disoriented and paused their migratory flight—all after tube full of chemicals was forced down their throat and into their stomach. … That said, within a few days of what was likely a trauma-inducing experience, all recovered completely and continued their migration normally.”

Yet the authors reported that the very existence of some wild birds is threatened by neonics, and the media, always eager to report a crisis, ran with it.

Paul Driessen also describes the junk science underlying misleading narratives regarding pesticide use. It is a driving force behind legislation in the House and Senate that would ban the use of neonics in National Wildlife Refuges, where the Fish & Wildlife Service permits farmers to grow various crops. Driessen has some advice for Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), a sponsor of the legislation:

“She should also recognize potentially serious threats to bees, wildlife, soils, waters and plants in refuges from sources that she, her colleagues and their environmentalist and media allies routinely ignore: solar panels, for instance. Not only do they blanket many thousands of acres, allowing little to grow beneath or between them. They can also leach cadmium and other metals into soils and waters. They should no longer be built near wildlife refuges.

Finally, it’s not just bees. It’s also birds, and bats – which are already being killed and even eradicated in many areas by America’s 56,000 wind turbines. Imagine what Green New Deal turbine numbers would do.”

More perspective is offered in this excellent six-part (and growing?) “Pesticides and Food” series (all at the link) by Kayleen Schreiber:

  1. Has pesticide use decreased? Yes, dramatically in per capita and per unit of output.
  2. Have pesticides improved?  Yes, with dramatically lower toxicity, improved biodegradability, and lower use rates.
  3. How dangerous is glyphosate (a herbicide)? Not very. Covered in my last post. Glyphosate is only 1/10th as toxic as caffeine.
  4. How do organic pesticides compare to synthetic pesticides? It’s a mixed bag, with great variability across both classes. Organics are more toxic in some applications, and synthetics are more toxic in others.
  5. Soil health: Are synthetic pesticides more sustainable than “natural” organics?  Organics require more tillage, which creates sustainability problems.
  6. Pesticide residues — Something to worry about? The USDA finds little residue in its testing, with extremely low detection rates for both organics and synthetics.

 

 

Knocking Noxious Weeds Down on the Farm

06 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Agriculture, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"Natural" Herbicides, Active Ingredient, Ag Daily, CO2, Crop Yields, EPA, Exposure, Glyphosate, Hazard, Herbicides, Methane, Michelle Miller, Nitrous Oxide, Organics, Risk, Roundup, Spectrum, Tillage

Proof continues to mount that the use of glyphosate herbicide in agriculture and landscape weed control poses no danger to humans, the claims of covetous plaintiffs’ attorneys notwithstanding. Glyphosate is the compound in Roundup and Spectrum weed killers. Ag Daily summarizes the EPA’s 10-year review of the empirical evidence in “EPA reaffirms no human health risk from glyphosate has been found“. The article notes that glyphosate has been studied extensively around the globe:

“The bodies supporting these safety findings include the European Food Safety Authority, European Chemicals Agency, German BfR, and Australian, Canadian, Korean, New Zealand and Japanese regulatory authorities, as well as the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues.“

I should make one qualification about the EPAs findings: they apply to registered uses, and not to improper application or exposure to more than the prescribed use of glyphosate. Evidence that excessive exposure is dangerous is not in doubt, yet such findings are routinely presented as if they apply generally. This article in The Scientist makes clear that there are number of pathways along which glyphosate might be harmful to humans and animals (like anything else, really), but the evidence of those effects is mixed, at best, and limited to unrealistic conditions. Glyphosate, the so-called active ingredient, is heavily diluted for application, so it is correctly used in minute quantities. It is always important to follow the manufacturer’s instructions for use, wear appropriate protective gear, and in the kitchen, rinse your produce thoroughly just to be safe.

It’s also important to note that in terms of toxicity, glyphosate is benign relative to the herbicides it replaced, a process that accelerated in the 1990s. Michelle Miller describes a basic relation that is critical to understanding the real dangers posed by any natural or manufactured substance: Risk = Hazard + Exposure. So-called “natural” herbicides used on organic farms are often applied heavily due to their relative inefficacy, so heavier exposure to those herbicides may well offset the presumed health advantages of organic foods.

Glyphosate has additional advantages: it minimizes tillage of fields, which reduces the energy-intensity of farming and avoids unnecessary microbial disturbance, thereby reducing emissions of methane, nitrous oxide, and CO2. It also improves farm yields, helping farms prosper and enhancing the world’s food supplies.

 

Anti-Glyphosate Goons and Gullibility

15 Sunday May 2016

Posted by pnoetx in Agriculture, Regulation, Technology

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Tags

Biology Fortified, Carcinogens, Christopher Portier, David Zaruk, Environmental Defense Fund, EPA, Farmer's Daughter, Glyphosate, IARC, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Julie Kelly, Kathryn Guyton, Matt Ridley, psuedoscience, Rational Optimist, Risk Monger, Roundup, Toxicity, WHO, World Health Organization

pseudociencia-a-saco

See the Postscript below.

A “roundup” of findings on the safety of glyphosate shows that the herbicide is very benign, highly unlikely to pose any real threat to humans, and far less toxic than many common household chemicals and even natural hazards in the environment. However, the debate over glyphosate is heavily politicized, as illustrated by the unsavory details surrounding a report issued last year by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO). The IARC reclassified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on a few cherry-picked, poorly-designed studies with weak statistical power. That finding is inconsistent with the vast preponderance research, which shows that glyphosate is not a significant threat to human health.

The Farmer’s Daughter provided a good summary of the issues shortly after the IARC’s ruling was announced last year. She offers the following quote from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):

“The U.S. EPA classified glyphosate as Group E, evidence of non-carcinogenicity in humans. The U.S. EPA does not consider glyphosate to be a human carcinogen based on studies of laboratory animals that did not produce compelling evidence of carcinogenicity.“

European regulators reached similar conclusions and are rather damning in their assessment of the IARC’s findings, though Brussels recently disregarded their findings and decided to ban the sale of glyphosate for gardening. In this post at Biology Fortified, Anastasia Bodnar discusses the low toxicity of glyphosate with links to several recent studies on its safety. And here is the Risk Monger blogs’s list of “ten reasons why glyphosate is the herbicide of the century“:

  1. Controlling invasive weeds leads to better agricultural yields
  2. Better yields = less land in production = more meadows and biodiversity
  3. Extremely low toxicity levels compared to (organic) alternatives
  4. Allows for no or low till farming – better for soil management
  5. Reduces CO2 emissions (compared to organic)
  6. Glyphosate saves lives
  7. It is much more affordable and effective than other options
  8. Glyphosate is off patent so no single company is profiting heavily from it
  9. Glyphosate-resistant crops allow for more ecological weed management practices
  10. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that glyphosate is safe for humans

How, then, did the IARC reach such a negative conclusion? Again from the Risk Monger, David Zaruk, the IARC hired just one external technical advisor, Christopher Portier, an activist previously employed by an NGO, the anti-pesticide Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Portier has no technical background in toxicology, and the IARC apparently went to pains to avoid references to his affiliation with the EDF. Moreover, the IARC’s conclusion seems to have been preordained:

“The IARC study rejected thousands of documents on glyphosate that had industry involvement and based their decision on carcinogenicity on the basis of eight studies (rejecting a further six because they did not like their conclusions).“

The lead author of the report, Kathryn Guyton, gave a speech in 2014 in which she stated that herbicide studies slated for 2015 showed indications of a link to cancer. Just how did she know, so far ahead of time? And then there’s this revelation:

“According to the observer document, the glyphosate meeting started with the participants being told to rule out the possibility of classifying the substance as non-carcinogenic.“

Zaruk believes there is internal pressure for the IARC study to be retracted. The organization has suffered a great loss of credibility in the scientific community over the report. In addition, WHO has remained neutral thus far, but they are expected to address the issue this month.

Zaruk and Julie Kelly provide a more succinct summary of the issues in “The Facebook Age of Science at The World Health Organization” at National Review. The suggestion made in the title seems to be that WHO’s decision might be swayed by public pressure, measured by Facebook “likes” by the superstitious, such as unknowing David Wolfe devotees, rather than science:

“Environmentalists and organic companies tout phony studies claiming that glyphosate is found in everything from breast milk to bagels. … Meanwhile, farmers who use glyphosate to protect their crops and boost yields are caught in the crossfire. Even if glyphosate is banned, they will need to use another herbicide, probably more toxic, because the romantic notion of hand-weeding millions of acres of crops is promoted only by those who have never done it.“

I’ll keep using Monsanto’s Roundup, thanks! Or a competitive brand of glyphosate. To close, here’s a quote from Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist blog on the embrace of pseudoscience at the IARC and elsewhere (including social media):

“Science, humanity’s greatest intellectual achievement, has always been vulnerable to infection by pseudoscience, which pretends to use the methods of science, but actually subverts them in pursuit of an obsession. Instead of evidence-based policymaking, pseudoscience specialises in policy-based evidence making. Today, this infection is spreading.“

Postscript: On May 16, WHO announced that glyphosate is “unlikely to cause cancer in people via dietary exposure.” Here is a Q&A from WHO regarding its assessment, explaining that it is based on risk as opposed to mere hazard, upon which the earlier IARC report was based. This is good news!

 

Nice Splice: New & Old GMO Varieties Blossom

16 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by pnoetx in Biotechnology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bill Nye the Science Guy, Bt gene, Dan Charles, David Wolfe, GE food., genetic engineering, genetic modification, Glyphosate, GMO food, golden Rice, herbicide resistance, Lydia Ramsey, Monsanto, NPR, Ringspot virus, Roundup Ready, Slate, William Saletan

image

Good for Bill Nye the Science Guy! And separately, good for Slate! First, the pop “scientist” Nye has turned the corner and now understands that genetic engineering (GE) and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) represent wonderful technology, holding great promise for humanity. Here is what he describes as the key:

“This is what changed my mind, is being able to do [sequence genes] 10 million times faster than they used to be able to do it … and being able to eliminate the ones not suitable for farming and susceptible to diseases and so on. We’re farmers, and we want them to come out the way we want them.“

Lydia Ramsey, whose post at Business Insider is linked above, distills Nye’s position this way:

“We are a society of farmers, and for thousands of years, farmers have been doing everything in their power to get the most product from their labor. Genetically modified crops are a way to do that.“

Apparently Nye is also impressed with the lengthy selection process and careful testing  that takes place before GMOs are ever brought to market. That contrasts with the nonexistent testing that is typical of conventional cross-breeding and irradiation, which can result in millions of gene mutations.

Nye, a mechanical engineer by training, probably knows enough science to recognize that there is a massive volume of literature that testifies to the safety of GMO crops (see here and here).

In Slate, William Saletan has written an excellent report entitled “Unhealthy Fixation“, and subtitled “The war against genetically modified organisms is full of fearmongering, errors, and fraud. Labeling them will not make you safer.”  Saletan emphasizes that GE is not any one single “thing”, but instead is a process. He discusses the histories of four distinct GMO issues:

  1. Overcoming the devastation of the papaya ringspot virus;
  2. Crops with a single Bt gene inserted versus Bt insecticides used on organics;
  3. Malnutrition, childhood blindness, and Golden Rice;
  4. Herbicide tolerance, farm productivity and herbicide overuse;

The fourth issue is an unfortunate aspect of our experience with GMOs, even to this day: much of it has related to strains of GE crops that are resistant to herbicides, glyphosate being the most prominent (until the patent expired in 2000, Monsanto’s Roundup was the only brand). In the public imagination, GMOs are almost synonymous with “Roundup-ready” crops. Glyphosate is only one type of herbicide, however, and there are significant benefits to herbicide-resistant crops, some of which are created without the help of GE. But herbicide-resistant crops are only one type of GMO. There are many other GMO varieties, and Saletan provides a long list of varieties in the pipeline:

“… drought-tolerant corn, virus-resistant plums, non-browning apples, potatoes with fewer natural toxins [and fewer carcinogens when fried], and soybeans that produce less saturated fat. … virus-resistant beans, heat-tolerant sugarcane, salt-tolerant wheat, disease-resistant cassava, high-iron rice, and cotton that requires less nitrogen fertilizer. … high-calcium carrots, antioxidant tomatoes, nonallergenic nuts, bacteria-resistant oranges, water-conserving wheat, corn and cassava loaded with extra nutrients, and a flaxlike plant that produces the healthy oil formerly available only in fish.“

Saletan bemoans the dominance of the herbicide industry in commercial applications of GMOs. He wants the food industry and regulators to move forward with the many other promising GE applications like those listed in the quote above. He also rightly blames anti-GMO activists for holding up promising varieties:

“First, it’s true that the issue is complicated. But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.“

There is a lot about GE technology for farmers and consumers to love. Many detractors seem unaware that life-saving products like insulin are made with GMOs, or that GMOs are in widespread use in the production of products like cheese, beer, and wine. The anti-GMO drumbeat goes on, however, promoting myths like the five discussed here by Dan Charles at NPR. This includes the fallacy that farmers saved their own seeds for planting until Monsanto came along. A particularly egregious piece of recent propaganda was a video promoted by the huckster David Wolfe. It involved a family who ate only organic food for two weeks and saw the trace levels of pesticides in their urine vanish. Of course, the researchers did not test for organic pesticides, such as Bt, but that escapes the notice of Wolfe’s uncritical acolytes.

You’ll find eight earlier posts related to GMOs on Sacred Cow Chips at this link.

Haunted By Food Demons

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by pnoetx in Biotechnology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

GE crops, Glyphosate, GMOs, Herbicides, Pesticides, Roundup, The Credible Hulk, Toxicity

dr-jekyll gmo Glyphosate herbicide usage (as in Roundup) in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the last two decades, replacing the use of far more toxic herbicides on many crops. That’s one of the major points in a post at The Credible Hulk blog entitled “About those more caustic herbicides that glyphosate helped replace“. The increased use of glyphosate corresponded to heavier reliance on glyphosate-tolerant strains of genetically-engineered crops. The author provides charts and other details on the changing use of a number of different herbicides both over time and across crop varieties.

“… the purpose of this [post] is to show that when opponents of GE technology and of glyphosate claim that GR crops are bad on the grounds that they increased glyphosate use, they are leaving out critical information that would be highly inconvenient for their narrative.“

The use of insect-resistant GE crops has also been associated with a declines in total pesticide use. [The links above are all given in The Credible Hulk post].

There is a great deal of distortion prompted by certain interest groups who oppose the use of synthetic herbicides and insecticides and GMOs. Irrational fears among consumers are inflamed by this sort of propaganda. This post and this post give farmers’ perspectives on some of the misinformation with respect to glyphosate. No, farmer’s do not “drench” their crops with glyphosate prior to harvest. That claim is pure hyperbole.

It’s also important to note that organic crops are not free of treatments. So-called organic pesticides are often just as toxic as synthetic pesticides, and they are often used in heavier quantities. Furthermore, organic foods carry undeniable health risks to consumers. A balanced view must acknowledge the benefits of crop treatments to consumers (whether the treatments are organic or nonorganic), that residues on produce in the U.S. are minimal, that safety still dictates that consumers wash their produce, and that consumers deserve a free choice between crops grown conventionally or organically.

Pesticides Preferable To Pests, Damaged Crops

08 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

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Tags

Autism, Biofortified, Coyote Blog, Discover, Facebook GMO Skepti-Forum, Glyphosate, Huffington Post, Kevin Drum, MIT, National Public Radio, pesticdes, Stephanie Seneff, Synthetic vs. natural pesticides, Warren Meyer

10269496_10152643243618460_6812219241634879386_n

The chart above is something of a joke, but it has a serious point: it provides evidence every bit as solid as some research making the rounds on social media. Bad science finds easy footholds on the internet, but more shocking is the ease with which it is tolerated and even promoted within academe. But according to Warren Meyer, we live in the age of “post-modern science“:

“It means that certain data, or an analysis, or experiment was somehow wrong or corrupted or failed typical standards of scientific rigor, but was none-the-less (sic) ‘accurate’. How can that be? Because accuracy is not defined as logical conformance to observations. It has been redefined as ‘consistent with the narrative.’”

Here is a particularly egregious example of scientific swill that I have seen posted several times over the past few days: “MIT Researcher: Glyphosate Herbicide will Cause Half of All Children to Have Autism by 2025“. The headline itself is more than sufficient to sound the BS alarm. This MIT “researcher”, Stephanie Seneff, is not a biologist, chemist, or geneticist. As it happens, she is a computer scientist (with advanced degrees in electrical engineering) who specializes in “text mining.” Her work, apart from serving as an activist, involves finding correlations between the appearance of words and “adverse outcomes” in reports and literature. She has a reputation in the scientific community as a bit of a “quack”. In this case, HuffPo goes so far as to say that her glyphosate research is “dumb.” Discover has also objected to Seneff’s work, and MIT’s tolerance of it.

A frequent refrain in critiques of research is that correlation is not causation, a fact that is demonstrated by the chart above and Seneff’s research. At best, Seneff presents evidence of correlation between the uses of certain words, the selection of which may be subject to severe bias. In addition, there is no convincing evidence that autism is increasing, but there is plenty  of evidence that the definition and diagnosis of autism have expanded dramatically. There is increasing evidence that autism is often of purely genetic origin.

Here are a couple of other useful links debunking Seneff’s work:

“Medical Doctors weigh in on Glyphosate Claims”

“Stephanie Seneff: Following the Geiers dumpster-diving in the VAERS database”

Synthetic pesticides like glyphosate are applied to crops in low concentrations that are unlikely to cause harm. So-called natural pesticides are often applied more heavily because they are less effective at controlling pests. It is not clear that one is safer than the other. Here is a nice piece on synthetic vs. natural pesticides.

Kevin Drum has asserted that the internet contributes to “cognitive inequality”. That is, it “makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber”. The spread of disinformation like Seneff’s research via social media is a good case study of the latter part of Drum’s claim.

A big hat tip to members of the Facebook GMO Skepti-Forum for many of the links above.

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