News: AlgaeTec showcase facility visit from The H, page-36

re: News: AlgaeTec showcase facility visit fr... You could argue that what we are doing now is an experiment, but it's still not science because it's still untestable. We need a control planet without humans to see what the difference is. We've seen that many times before humans existed the climate has exceeded current limits and rates of change, and looking at the last 200 years or so (the time it's reasonable to say humans may have had a relevant impact) the trend has simply continued, not begun, so how much if any impact we have had will be very difficult to determine even in retrospect. I agree that we're obviously having an impact, but how much and what type of impact is extremely difficult to say without a control.

Taking a "But what if..." approach just gets back to philosophy and philanthropy, not economics. What if I'm wrong and we're pushing the climate to an inevitable death of the planet? Well, AEB isn't an insurance policy, it's barely a band aid on a severed leg. I don't think anyone is predicting that climate change is going to have catastrophic effects in the timeframe relevant to investing in AEB. You keep using this argument, but its only relevance is in long term philanthropy.

It is interesting that you might think big business has reason to take the climate change sceptic stance but the research and media is massively biased in the opposite direction. Likely this is because governments are the ones putting the money up to fund the research and if they find a problem they can tax it or control it or have some say in things. Despite what is being publicised you'll notice that very little is coming of it. We still burn coal on a massive scale, we still do all our normal stuff. If we're driving more economic cars it's just because we're trying to keep oil consumption down because if we didn't we wouldn't be able to afford to drive at all. You still never hear anyone responding negatively when people choose to fly all over the world for work or holidays rather than holiday locally or work by correspondence. Heck, big thirsty cars are still very popular and few people seem to care. I don't think big business really has much need to bother with a propaganda machine.

Believe me, heaps of things are never published simply because they are politically incorrect, even when they're blatantly obvious to anyone who knows much about it. Many points of human taxonomy are unpublishable because there would be public outcry if they were (no, I won't repeat them publicly because I'd be called a monster for believing in such things). Actually, many aspects of human polymorphism are completely unpublishable for similar reasons. The problem with climate change science is that most of it isn't science. For something to be science it needs to be testable, so by definition most of it isn't actually science at all. When something is popular it's very difficult to go against it without proof, and that's what any climate change sceptic faces.

My career? That's not terribly relevant, but hey, why not indulge myself? :P My background is biological sciences. I worked with climatic niche modelling for about a year and with the animals (geckoes and grasshoppers) for two years. Most of my work revolved around thermal biology of the animals, largely towards the goal of better understanding how to predict species distributions in the event of them being introduced to different climates either due to introductions or climate change (climate change being more relevant to the future of my species and their history and existence being remarkably intertwined with prehistoric climate change). In a nutshell, well over 100,000 years ago (not really that long) these animals (the geckoes and grasshoppers have a very similar pattern of distribution and speciation) were spread out. The climate became harsher and much of the deserts became too hot and dry for them to survive, so they were restricted to smaller populations which speciated. The climate became more favourable (less extreme) again and the animals were able to recolonise areas which were once again habitable. This of course meant that these newly formed species came into contact with each other. It's a complicated story, but they were still similar enough to hybridise and produce offspring but not similar enough for the babies to be normal, the offspring's DNA couldn't quite work normally during the formation of eggs and sperm and the entire genome of the females were dumped into their eggs meaning the eggs developed and hatched into clones of their mothers. Those hybrids were produced over 100,000 years ago and their descendants are still cloning away today in the Australian arid zone. Interestingly, their populations are still spread out, because the conditions today are milder, just another example of evidence that even in recent history the climate was more extreme than it is now. Just a little over 100,000 years ago the areas these lizards are currently thriving in were uninhabitable, and within the previous 100,000 years they were thriving in them just like today. People are whinging about animals not having time to catch up with the climate become more extreme, but there's an example of an animal which is actually genetically programmed for an environment we are actually heading towards! If we wanted to cherry pick data we could use the geckoes to prove that the climate actually needs to get hotter and if humans are helping that process we're actually doing a good thing. Instead the scientists cherry pick data and use untestable models to show the opposite.

If you want to see how biased the available data is, jump on to Google and search for prehistoric climate change data. The actual information is very basic, easy to understand and shows that extremes and rates of change are naturally commonly beyond current levels, but this information is very difficult to find. What you are bombarded with is all the stuff saying the opposite. Why is the actual data so unreported? Because it's an interest of mine I jump on Google and search for things like that every now and again, and I notice that every few years it becomes more and more difficult to find long term climate data for the planet.

Anyway, back to your question, that project with the climate-related animals finished up and I moved interstate (worst mistake of my life!), I mucked around, moved back to my home state in 2008 which is when the big 'GFC' hit which meant research funding was being cut, lab staff were not being put on and many were being laid off, which made lab work extremely difficult to get, so I took a job in another industry for a few months. I eventually got back into a lab role in a human research lab which was great until the role ended in 2010. It was over the previous couple of years that I'd started trading stocks and I was making more trading during my breaks at work than I was from my wage, so I got lazy and figured I'd rather play and holiday than find another job.

I'm not sure I agree with this statement: "Science spends much more on skin and hair science than on curing many diseases that cause great suffering, its all about the money, which I guess is understandable but sad in a way."

You're believing a truism without any evidence, and I'm not sure you're correct. Either way, I think you're missing the differences between 'science' and 'science'. It's mostly about money, at least in terms of where the funding comes from. My climate/biology interaction work was not really anything commercial, not from the researchers' point of view, we just thought it was really cool stuff and wanting to add to the body of knowledge possessed by our species. Of course, funding was obtained because it sounds sexy to the government to say that we're going to tell them how to model and predict species distributions etc. etc. (which we did, and does have value to them, but it wasn't my main focus). There is a big difference between government-funded and privately-funded laboratories/research. There is absolutely massive resources behind disease research, I'm surprised you'd belittle it, but it's not all the same... A government-funded lab might try to look for a cure for a disease, but there's very little money in that. A privately-funded (well, non government funded) lab rarely bothers trying to cure a disease because it's not profitable, but they'll research treatment drugs. If you cure everyone your market is gone, if you can come up with a drug which manages the symptoms if you take it daily/weekly you have a market which doesn't go away and instead of treating them once you treat it hundreds, maybe thousands of times. It is a pretty painful thing to think about, we could have cured AIDS many times over if we'd put a small amount of the treatment research into cure research (AIDS often comes to my mind because the first real money I made on the ASX was with a company researching an AIDS management drug). I don't think we spend as much on skin and hair science as you think and I think we spend a lot more on disease research than you think, but yes, most of the disease research is funded by greed and without much regard for any altruistic goals.

My doomsday prediction? Well, a disease is possible, and yes I think our descendants will condemn us for their overuse just as we condemn our ancestors for many things, but I don't predict it to be a problem to end civilisation. I'm not sure of any planet-destroying asteroids due to impact us in my lifetime, and hopefully we can nuke them or something when the time eventually comes. Basically, I see the planet like a room filled with feed and mice. If there's enough feed to last 10 years, the mice will rapidly grow their population at an exponential rate for 10 years, everything will seem great, the glorious age of the mice will seem most glorious just a touch before the last of the feed runs out. We all know we're chewing through resources unsustainably and if we have a population too large to sustainably support the result is inevitable, there is no way to avoid the tipping point. When that happens I predict fierce wars (people who are otherwise going to starve to death get very ruthless). I could be wrong, there are alternate outcomes, but I can't see any more likely, and my calculations point to it happening within my lifetime (50ish more years, assuming I don't meet an untimely death).