Solving Climate Change, Eliminating GMOs and Pesticides

I think they're working on making it yield gluten-free wheat, too...

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/wave-goodbye-to-global-warming-gm-and-pesticides-29525621.html

Dah!
First, good old thunderstorm adds nitrogen to rain.
Second, trees and anything green use carbon dioxide & give off oxygen.
Learned that in grade school.

Vi-Aqua - credulous bunkum spiced with outright lies at best, but I doubt anyone is really THAT dumb.

It's probably all deliberate deceit. And clumsy deceit.

http://www.skeptical-science.com/science/daft-claim-viaqua-device-water-wetter-increases-output-vegetables-fruits-30-cent/


Their own website includes their own allegedly "scientific" paper which pretty much self-identifies them as lame goofballs.

Also it becomes clear from their own "paper" that this set of ridiculous claims is just a re-packaging of the old "magnetized water" claims from some years ago.

http://tredispace.com/viaqua/images/pdf/Full%20Scientific%20Doc%20Proof.pdf

If they had anything real that was 1/4 as good as they claim, it would have been verified by real farmers, gardeners or scientists years ago. "No independent verification" proves that they made up their nonsense.

The BS about Kew Royal gardens is false.

"A spokesperson of the gardens responded as follows to an e-mail from a commenter on a blog which criticizes the article of The Irish Independent:

Thank you for your email dated 29 August. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has not endorsed the Vi-Aqua products since 2009. A recent press article in the Irish Independent that mentioned this endorsement and activities by Kew around it, was inaccurate."
http://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/2013/09/vi-aqua-turning-water-into-snake-oil/


"makes water weter"

That's when I first thought "this must be a gag or an extended mockery based on sounding like "Viagra".

"Intriguingly, chickens and sheep fed the energised water turned into giants. . . but that's another story! -

The only thing they proved is that it's easy to lie, and perhaps that "there's a sucker born every minute".

I'd be more interested if they had said that they could make "magic water" by ecstatically dancing around it in a circle with naked virgins ... "but you can't repeat our results because we ran out of virgins and the stuff we were all smoking that night".

At least then their claims would be harder to disprove.
And more fun to try to prove.

Naked virgins...I hadn't thought of that!

Maybe I need to explicitly label some posts as sarcasm--just to make my intent clear. :«)

I haven't "researched" (sarcasm) the link at all, but I am of the impression that a real Irish newspaper fell for it hook, line, and sinker--and the link is straight to a "real" newspaper article.

Energized water is also the "basis" (sarcasm, again) for homeopathy. The more diluted a homeopathic remedy is, the "stronger" its energy. Some of them are actually diluted to the point that not a single molecule of the original substance is left.

I do hope y'all enjoy this for the chuckle I intended.

This message was edited May 18, 2014 9:39 AM

I did assume you were being sarcastic, I should have made clear that I was banging my head against my desk at the thought that a newspaper fell for it, and enough people to make it worth their while to be so silly.

Sadly, I have seen "water magnetisers" advertised for sale on otherwise sane gardening sites.

If only they would dress it up with a little more New Age wind-chime music and less clumsy pretense to be 'scientific', they would have an easier sell.

But I suppose that chanting the magic word "science" is the new mystical mojo that is supposed to cause incomprehensible miracles. In other words, once "magic" was invoked by shamans as the reason for "why things work" because the entire species was ignorant of chemistry and physics.

Now "science" is invoked by snake-oil salesmen to gull the gullible.

Grumble grumble grumble

The main point of science is that you don't HAVE to take any shaman's word for anything, you can demand "where's the beef" and then ignore them with a clear conscience if they can't show you a repeatable experiment.

It's actually harder to disprove a "Yoga Flyer" if he admits that it's still difficult magic and not yet repeatable. Then you have to invoke a big gun like "common sense" to know that he's a faker, not a fakir.

I get a kick out of the "water conditioners" that are still AFAIK being marketed via a number of sources that purport to prevent deposition of minerals in your hot water heater by running the water through a very small magnetic gizmo with no source of power or visible means of disposing of the extracted minerals - magic?

Alchemy?

Maybe it is alchemy. They found a way to turn BS into money.

Rick--You are dead on! BS into $$$$--proof of alchemy's validity.

Willy etc. I kind of miss all the discussions we used to have...

This is an interesting article. For non agronomists or horticulturalists I am not sure how many people realize the natural toxins plant produce themselves that we eat every day that are found in pesticide free "organic" fruit and vegetables...

http://www.growingproduce.com/fruits-nuts/chemicals-arent-scary-opinion/

" if you asked the average person what causes cancer, what would they say? Chemicals. People are afraid of them.

If you don’t believe me, ask a friend if he or she would want to ingest a food that contained the following: hydroxylinalool, terpinyl acetate, benzaldehyde, ethyl-3-methylbutanoate and 2-methyl butyraldehyde. They’d look at you like you were nuts. But what they don’t know is that all you were offering them was a … blueberry. Those are the components of an all-natural blueberry"

"The amounts of synthetic pesticide residues in plant foods are insignificant compared to the amount of natural pesticides produced by plants themselves. Of all dietary pesticides that humans eat, 99.99% are natural: they are chemicals produced by plants to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and other animal predators"

It really is an irony when people are so afraid of a synthetic pesticide but don't realize the thousands of natural plant produced pesticides they eat.

Willy, i couldn't read that because an ad or request-to-subscribe popped up and covered the screen.

One counter-argument would be that we DID evolve to tolerate phytho-chemicals in plants that we've browsed for millennia.

A counter-counter argument would be that we have probably not yet evolved to tolerate every component of the "new-fangled" crop plants such as agriculture has developed over the last 10,000 years. I think the anti-wheat people claim this, and it is true for people with celiac disease. Of course, in this case, evolution means "those who can't tolerate it tend to die out of the gene-pool" and that may be contrary to some modern philosophies.

A counter-counter-counter argument would be that we have surely not yet had time to evolve to tolerate xenogenetic or transgenic plant products produced by first-generation GE/GMO crops.

The "counter X 4" argument is that GMOs don't produce anything new or chnaged anyway (well, expect for Bt toxins, extra carotene in rice, extra lignin in GE cornstalks, the anti-browning enzymes in apples, the antibiotics in GE salmon ...)

The (natural, plant-produced) chemicals in orange peels probably evolved there to deter insects, but they are slightly toxic to humans also. (Like cyanide in apple seeds.)

Pure, organic orange marmalade would NEVER get FDA approval if it were a new product and had to go through chemical and carcinogen screening.

As with many synthetic chemicals, you might need to eat tens of gallons of orange marmalade to get a dose large enough to cause a detectable medical reaction, or maybe eat tens of gallons per year for 60 years to raise the cancer rate enough to detect in a study with 10,000 people, but it would fail regulatory limits if introduced today.

-----

I was just reading a water quality report. It admitted that there were some residual organic residues that made it into the drinking water, and "concerns were beginning to be expressed" about those chemicals.

Then it got kind of whiny. I'll paraphrase freely.

"These are household chemicals that YOU sloshed around and flushed down the toilet! 95% of your exposure to them comes from you breathing the household dust in YOUR homes where YOU spray them around and wallow in them! WE remove all we can, but yes a little of what YOU put into your water does come back to you."

I kind of agree: if it is safe to sell and use a gallon jug of household gunk with 10% hydrochloronastystuff, maybe it's also safe to drink water with 10 parts per billion hydrochloronastystuff.

If not, and if it can't effectively be removed by water treatment plants, then I would say it shouldn't be allowed to be sold to consumers (because they will surely wind up flushing most of it down the drain).

Part of regulations should address "ecological safety" after the product is used, as well as "consumer safety". When there are space colonies with populations in the thousands, this will be very obvious to THEM. If anyone has a jug with 10% hydrochloronastystuff, the darn hydrochloronastystuff WILL assuredly wind up in everyone's air and water because it is so obvious that there is nowhere else for it to go, once it's poured out of the jug. Eventually the planet-bound majority will catch on. The solution to pollution is no longer dilution, as population density and land-use intensity increases.


I think it's easier to test for consumer safety (does it burn the hair off their arms?) then ecological safety. You might barely be able to measure "does a consumer wallowing in it get 0.0001% cases of cancer after ten years". But it is really hard to measure "does something bad happen after groundwater reaches 10 ppm for 50 years". Someone has to guess at what level MIGHT cause "something bad". And, with persistent chemicals, by the time you know about an ecological effect (like killing off honeybees en masse), it may be too late to take corrective action.

Most house hold cleaning chemicals are much more toxic than man made pesticides and they aren't tested and regulated like a pesticide is. Most pesticides are readily eaten up and consumed by microbes and broken down by the sun etc. Most household cleaning chemicals are made to kill microbes. You are right to be concerned about them, especially those that use them and breath their toxic fumes.

As far as your theory that we have evolved to tolerate "phytho-chemicals in plants that we've browsed for millennia" this may be true to some extent. Though many of these natural toxins just aren't toxic to us to begin with and thus there was no need to evolve or adjust to them. There are many foods we might have just eaten for the first time...be it a Goji berry or a macademia nut. We often will come across new natural foods that we haven't eaten before and there is no real period of adjustment needed. When the conquistadors came to America and discovered and brought back potatoes, or sunflower seeds, or corn for instance there was no period of adjustment needed.

Most of the traits in GMO's have come from other edible plants or from soil microbes such as Bacillus species which people have already been exposed to (anyone who likes carrots, radishes, turnips, lettuce or potatoes or doesn't always eat with clean hands while working in the soil).

One thing to note is that plants are constantly changing and can change very rapidly the types of chemicals needed to ward off disease and insects...and even weeds through allelopathy. So even without GMO's we can be exposed to new types of "toxins" naturally all the time.

Of course what is toxic to a pest or disease isn't necessarily toxic to us.

Part of regulations already address ecological safety as well as consumer safety. In fact this is where most of the regulations reside and how tolerances are developed.

My whole point is that there is this huge fear of regulated man made chemicals but your average person doesn't realize the thousands of "toxic" chemicals they eat in every fruit and vegetable they consume. Some of these natural chemicals could cause cancers and other sicknesses in people. The harm that these natural toxins may do isn't even considered when a person gets a disease.

>> Though many of these natural toxins just aren't toxic to us to begin with and thus there was no need to evolve or adjust to them.

Good point.

I do think that the general public has swung too far from the attitudes of the first half of the last century, where even arsenic was sprinkled liberally.

Now we tend to fear too many things, or perhaps the wrong things, or perhaps people just drown in all the information and misinformation and decide to distrust everyone and fear everything.

I think you are correct. Good point.

drobarr, Rick, GG, Ernie, CG, kirk, et al. I miss 'em (discussions), too. The past two months have been way too exciting for me and mine in a not fun way, hence my lack of posting. All is fine now. I hope you are all doing well.

Still too busy to finish the weeding and get some DESIRABLE seeds into the ground.