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Oxitec — a company that seeks to control pest insects through their genetics — has announced that it will invest $9.88 million to mass-produce one billion genetically modified mosquito eggs per week at a new state-of-the-art facility at its United Kingdom headquarters near Oxford.

“Oxitec’s technology represents a paradigm change in combating dangerous Aedes aegypti that threaten more than half of the world’s population, and this factory will better position us to help countries in need of superior solutions in the fight against this invasive mosquito that carries Zika, dengue and other harmful viruses,” said Oxitec CEO Mark Carnegie-Brown.

Read the full post at the Cornell Alliance for Science.

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If everyone in the world went vegan, it would solve both the greenhouse gas and biodiversity problems almost overnight. Evidence shows that if people adopted entirely plant-based diets, the planet could easily support a population of 7 billion while at the same time returning huge areas of land to natural ecosystems.

Unfortunately it’s not going to happen. In fact, the world is moving the other way. As developing countries emerge from poverty, they shift inexorably towards more meat and dairy-heavy diets.

So is all lost? Not necessarily. Veganism and vegetarianism are increasing in popularity in rich countries, driven by an awareness of the health, environmental and animal welfare benefits of eliminating meat. This demand reduction can be an important future contributor to more sustainable agriculture.

For the full piece please visit the Cornell Alliance for Science

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By Mark Lynas

Although many papers have been published claiming that genetically engineered (GMO) foods are harmful and that humans aren’t changing the climate, not a single one of them stands up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.

With the recent uptick in extreme weather events around the world — exemplified by catastrophic flooding in Nigeria, Houston and India, all in the same week, followed by multiple hurricanes in the Atlantic — climate change is back in the headlines, and with it a resurgence of skeptical claims denying the existence of an international scientific consensus on global warming.

Responding to these denials, and allegations that skeptical research papers have been “suppressed” and thereby prevented from being published in scientific journals, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe responded with a Facebook post pointing out that numerous studies purporting to falsify the mainstream view of global warming have in fact been published over the last decade.

Hayhoe wrote that “over the last 10 years, at least 38 papers were published in peer-reviewed journals, each claiming various reasons why climate wasn’t changing, or if it was, it wasn’t humans, or it wasn’t bad. They weren’t suppressed. They’re out there, where anyone can find them.”

For the full piece please visit the Cornell Alliance for Science

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(CNN)- This is what climate change looks like. Entire metropolitan areas — Houston in the United States and Mumbai in India — submerged in catastrophic floods.

Record-breaking rainfall: Harvey’s 50-plus inches of torrential deluge set a new national tropical cyclone rain record for the continental United States.

They used to make Hollywood disaster movies about this sort of thing. Now it’s just the news.

To see the full opinion piece please visit CNN.com.

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Withdrawing from the Paris climate accord is about the only predictable — even rational — move that President Trump has made since taking office.

Following embarrassing reversals on the Mexican wall, the Muslim immigration ban and other signature policies, he sees rejecting accepted orthodoxy on climate change as an easy deliverable to please his populist base. Too bad it fries the planet. He was elected on this pledge, and he plans to deliver.

Canceling the Paris deal is a classic post-truth policy. Based on the outright denial of overwhelming scientific reality — and telegraphed in suspense-building gameshow style this week via Twitter and conflicting media teasers — it is Trump at his most callous, ignorant and attention-seeking.

As a former reality TV star, Trump cares about how things look, not how they really are. Torpedoing climate efforts is the ultimate “up yours” to liberals — after all, that’s the point. The aim is symbolic, but faced with higher carbon emissions and consequent disastrous global warming, our children may not see it that way.

My guess is that far from undermining the determination of other world leaders to cut carbon emissions, Trump’s action will have a galvanizing effect on the Paris accords. It will prompt other countries to redouble their efforts, precisely in order not to let Trump be seen to win this vital battle over the future of the planet.

The European Union in particular, led by Germany’s Angela Merkel, has no intention of letting Trump get away with this kind of global vandalism. On climate, the EU is united far more than on any other issue. Brexit will make no difference — all mainstream political parties in the UK back Paris. The move will lead to the isolation of the Trump administration and further corrode international goodwill towards America.

It will also mean the US ceding climate leadership to China, a mantle Beijing is only too eager to assume. The Chinese want both to solve their crippling smog problem and look like a responsible global superpower. Their considered and long-term approach is cast in direct opposition to the self-centered showman now inhabiting the White House.

And the Chinese approach is not merely altruistic. China’s leaders have long recognized the economic opportunities in moving aggressively into clean energy technologies. Solar is now cheaper — as well as cleaner — than coal in many developing countries.

Trump, who likes to pose as a successful businessman, seems not to understand the value of innovation. Instead he seeks to turn the clock back to an imagined golden age of fossil fuels. If America falls behind in the clean energy revolution, it is not Trump who will pay the price.

For the environmental community, this looks like a rerun of George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the earlier Kyoto treaty in 2001. That political gambit lost the world a decade. Trump’s may lose far more — if we let it.

I now expect to see the full fury of the environmental movement — including just about everyone except for the Breitbart right — to be turned on the US coal industry, the only powerful economic player to oppose climate action. (Even Big Oil now backs Paris, along with most of the rest of corporate America.)

Expect determined efforts to defund coal mining, huge divestment campaigns against coal company stocks and rallies to close down coal-fired power plants all across America.

The coal industry has now put itself squarely in the cross-hairs of an intense global reaction. Hitting coal is a way to hit back at Trump — where it hurts.

Trump will thus have achieved precisely the opposite of his intended effect.

Instead of shoring up coal jobs, he will have made a full-scale “war on coal” — and US coal in particular — the pre-eminent moral cause of our time, just as the struggle against apartheid was for an earlier generation.

And — ironically for such a divisive person — he will have helped bring about an unprecedented degree of global unity, albeit against his own administration. For that, we can perhaps be grateful.

 

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/02/opinions/trump-has-alienated-the-us-lynas-opinion/index.html

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Sometimes I hear scientists in the West — especially those who have had their lives made difficult by anti-GMO activists — say they wish things were as straightforward as they are in China, where political dissent is not tolerated and science-based development can supposedly proceed unhindered.

I tell them to be careful what they wish for. The situation in China is far from simple. In fact it is as complicated, if not more, than anywhere in the world. China may not have much in the way of freedom of expression, but that does not mean that all public debate is curtailed. Indeed, the GMO debate in China has been as fractious and polarizing as anywhere. (more…)

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The date April 22, 2017 may go down in history as a world first. Not only was it the first time that scientists took to the streets to march in defense of the most basic values — evidence and truth — but it was the first outing for what is fast becoming a new phenomenon: a global pro-science movement. At the final count, more than 600 March for Science events took place around the world.

The ambivalence that scientists feel about activism was clearly on display in the various Marches for Science. “I really should be writing!” apologized several placards seen in different cities. “You know things are serious when the introverts arrive,” read another. Some of the chants were similarly baffling to passers-by. London marchers chanted, “What do we want? Evidence-based policy. When do we want it? After peer review!” as they filed past 10 Downing Street.

As an official partner of the March for Science, the Alliance for Science at Cornell University assisted with the main march in Washington D.C., as its Global Leadership Fellows and country coordinators led or supported march events in Kenya, Uganda, Bangladesh, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, London, Ghana, South Africa, Chile, Madrid, San Francisco and Mexico City.

Read full article here –

http://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/launching-global-pro-science-movement

 

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Bad science costs lives

It’s late afternoon in Makutupora and technicians wearing blue overalls pour sacks of maize onto a bonfire. They exchange a few wistful looks as the flames consume the grain. After all, this is good food, and the country is hungry.

 But government regulations are government regulations. 

The Makutupora agricultural research station, located a few miles from Tanzania’s dust-blown interior capital of Dodoma, is surrounded by misery. Drought has stalked the land for over a year. Farmers watch helplessly as their wizened crops of maize — a staple food for the area — shrivel under the relentless sun. Skinny children sit listlessly in the shade. 

Some local farmers are aware that the drought-tolerant crop that was just tested successfully in Makutupora could have helped feed their families. But it didn’t, because the maize carries the stigma of being a “GMO.” Although every scientific institution in the world agrees that genetically modified crops are as safe as any other crop, outdated “biosafety” regulations treat GMO crops as if they were little better than germ warfare. 

 

Read full post here –

http://littleatoms.com/science-world/tanzania-burning-GM-corn-while-people-go-hungry

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Scientists and science supporters will take to the streets in a global March for Science on 22 April . What began as a small Facebook group in the US capital, Washington DC has spiralled into a global phenomenon that will now see marches and other events in more than 500 locations around the world, from Seattle to Seoul.

It is great news that so many people are prepared to stand up and defend the need for evidence-based thinking and the scientific method. But it is also a sad comment on our times that a March for Science is needed at all. Post-truth populism has infected democracies around the world, scientific objectivity is under threat from multiple sources and there seems a real danger of falling into a modern dystopian dark age.

It is clear that the old days of scientists staying in the lab, publishing papers in scholarly journals, and otherwise letting the facts speak for themselves are over. As the Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes reminds us: “The facts don’t speak for themselves because we live in a world where so many people are trying to silence facts.” In her book, Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes wrote about these efforts from the tobacco industry onwards; science denialist attempts that are paralleled in today’s climate sceptic, anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements.

These campaigners against truth take great pains to deny the existence of scientific consensus on their different issues. The fact that 97% of the peer-reviewed literature on climate change supports the consensus that most of global warming is human-induced is dismissed as mere elitism. But as Dr Sarah Evanega, director of the Alliance for Science at Cornell, writes: “The values we defend are those of the Enlightenment, not the establishment.” Expertise is real, and we reject it at our peril.

Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of the March for Science, and what may prove to be its most enduring legacy, is its truly global nature. Science is not western; it is everywhere and for everyone. I have worked with Alliance for Sciencecolleagues to help get marches off the ground in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Uganda, Venezuela, Chile and other places. In between long Skype calls about logistics, fundraising, and media outreach I watched the lights flash on as the number of marches on the global map kept on increasing. It was like watching the world light up with knowledge.

Bangladesh March for Science’s lead organiser Arif Hossain says: “I am marching to let the world know that we are united for science in Bangladesh. We have 160 million people to feed in the changed climate, and together we will make a better day with science and innovation.”

Although the issues of most concern vary in different locations, appreciation of the need for science is global. As Nkechi Isaac, an organiser of the March for Science in Abuja, Nigeria, says: “Science is revolutionary. It holds the key to constant development and improvement for addressing climate change, food shortage and challenges in medicine. Science holds the solution to our food security.”

Nigerians can testify to the tragic effects of anti-science activism. Efforts to eradicate polio in the country were held up for years because of conspiracy theories spread by those suspicious of modern medicine and vaccines. People die when science is denied.

So here’s what we will be marching for. It’s time to enter the post-post-truth era. And there is no time to lose.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/18/scientists-take-streets-global-march-truth

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In a rational world, people would take climate change more and more seriously as real-world evidence for its damaging effects mount.

The dying of the Great Barrier Reef; the crippling, ongoing drought in East Africa; the thawing of Arctic ice. All of these should make us more determined to tackle the problem at the source by reducing our worldwide carbon emissions.

But we don’t live in a rational world. Tracking the rapid rise in global temperatures has been an equally fast increase in the politically motivated denial of the basic science of climate change. This process of anti-science posturing has now reached its nadir in the determined effort by the Trump administration to unravel former President Barack Obama’s efforts to tackle global warming.

The Trump administration’s war on science is fast becoming its most destructive attribute. We will never be able to tackle climate change if we continue to live in a post-truth age, where factual accuracy plays second fiddle to political ideology.

 

Read full article here –