The Broader Scientific Method

The scientific method is the whole process whereby science generates, tests, vets, and evolves ideas. Most descriptions of the scientific method are at best partial representations focused on the actions of individual scientists, typically leaving off the subtle distinction between testing or experimenting and vetting, which includes collective actions of many people interacting in conversation as part of the scientific process. Here is one example list of steps in the scientific method:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_scientific_method.shtml
which states:

1. Ask a question.
2. Do background research.
3. Construct a hypothesis.
4. Test your hypothesis by conducting an experiment.
5. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion.
6. Communicate your results.

This list and most lists like it are missing some of the most fundamental steps in the scientific process. Although part of science is conducted at the level of the individual scientist, the rest of it is conducted as an open conversation between different people. All scientists have biases, because they are people. Any of our conclusions could be wrong. They could be wrong because we did not ask the best question. They could be wrong because the background research neglected important relevant points. They could be wrong because our hypothesis was poorly posed, included logical flaws, or because it left out fundamental concepts. They could be wrong because the experiment was poorly designed. They could be wrong because of errors in our analysis or because we applied inappropriate analysis techniques. In the end, our conclusions could effectively be wrong because we miscommunicate them, using language that confuses the listeners.

Given the various pathways we could be wrong, science depends on having other people review our work, including people with biases different from our own. The formal peer review process we follow to publish results is an important first step, but by itself it is woefully inadequate and often results in wrong conclusions being deemed to be right, or correct conclusions being discarded. In a more general sense, science vets its results through an open conversation in which anyone who wishes to do so can challenge or debunk our conclusions for any reason. Similarly, just as anyone can debunk a scientific claim, the counter claim is also up for open discussion and refutation by the original scientist or by anyone else who wishes to participate. Science reaches consensus through years or decades of this type of open debate. The debate takes place in formally published papers, at scientific conferences, in the public media, on the Internet, and in informal conversations. In spite of consensus, no published conclusions are ever considered final, even if they are held at high confidence. For science to function properly, any idea must be open to being debunked at any time.

Modern science functions as an open marketplace of ideas. Most new ideas and some "tried and true" ideas are wrong. Often when we are wrong, we think we are right, so we need discussion with other people to protect us from our own folly. Just as science says that anyone is free to express any idea, anyone must be free to debunk any idea with evidence and logical argument. All ideas should be challenged, including those that are new and probably crazy as well as longstanding broadly accepted theories. As such theories are tested and attacked, if they are true, they can stand the test of time and our confidence in them increases. As ideas are challenged, improved, and communicated better as a result of being challenged, we come to understand them better and to see them better in their context. This open conversation causes our ideas to evolve with time, usually (but not always) toward something more correct. In that sense, we can think of scientific ideas as similar to Darwinian evolution of life. Ideas evolve in the face of criticism and further evidence, changing over time into something more fit for survival, or they get discarded as new ideas take over in the same context.

In a healthy scientific culture, even a child can suggest an idea, have it welcomed, and then have it challenged. In that case, a parent, a teacher, or peers may do the challenging. If being wrong is not disparaged (but is challenged) this approach might have positive impact on the psychology of most children. The school system trains children (and thus the adults that children become) that being wrong is bad, and that they need to seek truth from unquestioned authorities to determine what is correct. Instead of the logical pathway toward an idea being the most important aspect of education (honing the thinking process), whether the final answer is right or wrong is the priority. This educational philosophy has it backwards. Children need to learn to develop and process ideas, to accept challenge of those ideas, and to learn to discard and replace ideas when they are shown to be wrong. They also need to learn that people tend to hold on to wrong ideas, so we collectively depend on vigorous, unrestrained debate. Children need to expect to sometimes be offended as part of that debate, and they need to learn to accept that offense and move on with the conversation focused on the topic instead of the offense.

Teaching the processes that most likely lead to correct answers will ultimately help students to arrive at more correct answers in the future, even on questions that we have not yet thought to ask or questions whose answers are presently unknown. Emphasizing only the correct answers yields people who cannot think effectively. In the healthy open marketplace of ideas, people are constantly discussing, debunking, testing, and seeking good understanding of reality. Sometimes people will be wrong and will want to stay wrong. Sometimes their biases or priors mislead them. This stubbornness is normal. Scientists are not objective people. Science itself is also not completely objective, because it is done by scientists. The reasons science works so well are not that science is simply true or that scientists or experts are right all the time. It's not even that scientists tend to be really great at what they do (even when they are, their greatness is always insufficient). Science works because ideas are freely presented and vigorously tested and debated by other people, and because this debate influences the direction future science takes.

A broader restatement of the scientific method including both the scientist and the scientific community follows: 

You, the scientist should: 

1. Ask a question.
2. Do background research.
3. Construct a hypothesis.
4. Test your hypothesis by conducting an experiment.
5. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion.
6. Communicate your results.
7. Accept and respond to challenges from other people, and revise your questions, hypotheses, experiments, analysis techniques, conclusions, and communications where facts and logical arguments merit.

The scientific community should: 

Engage with the scientist's ideas, discussing each step in the process, criticizing, debunking, or adding clarifying ideas where appropriate. Different scientists from the first should repeat steps 1-7 to validate or refute the original work, then, they should modify questions, hypotheses, experiments, analysis techniques, and conclusions where evidence and logical argument dictate.

The Quest for Diversity in Science and the Climate of Climate Change Science

I recently had the excellent opportunity to present a Teen Science Cafe' at the MiSci museum in Schenectady NY. The audience was great, and I enjoyed the visit. I joined a conversation before the event between a group of brilliant teenage girl participants and the museum curator. He provided them advice he gives to women in science: Stick together. I echo that view in the sense that any young scientist needs several things to be most successful: A good mentor/advisor, friends and colleagues for support and encouragement, and challenge from people who have different points of view.

Gaining support and feedback from people who are similar to us can provide  the courage to go on and the motivation to succeed. As such, university departments specializing in science need to be friendly and welcoming to all types of people.

However, young scientists also need to seek and receive often critical feedback from people who are different from themselves.  Scientific peer review can be brutal. Young scientists may thus benefit from exposure to diverse types of people and diverse points of view. The conversation about diversity in science often rightly includes motivation to increase the number of students and scientists from underrepresented groups. In some fields, especially physical sciences, women are underrepresented, as are Africans and latinos. In some other fields, men are underrepresented (women with PhDs in psychology outnumber men three to one).

It is not my view that gender parity is needed for the success of science. The free choices of individuals matter to gender balance in different fields. It is difficult to refute the notion that more men like mechanical engineering while more women prefer psychology or medical sciences, even after accounting for effects of any sexism. Regardless of the initial causes of these personal preferences, they really are personal preferences, and I think personal freedom for people to choose to follow their passion is more important than achieving gender balance. The causes of these different preferences could be social, biological, or some combination of the two, and it is not within my expertise to try to explain why, and it does not influence my argument. We cannot force people to choose to do that which does not interest them. Efforts to increase interest of girls (and boys, for that matter) in science are well intentioned but have limited success. When I manage a search committee to fill a job opening, I cannot start with a fifth grader. In my position, I want to include all people who are qualified and who want the job, and I think that where any systemic resistance to inclusion occurs, it should be corrected through positive action, but exclusion is not the only reason for gender disparities.

Even when gender parity is not achieved, scientists may gain advantage by seeking conversations with scientists of the opposite sex and from people from different demographic groups.

Now, don't get me wrong, progress in most of the physical or natural sciences, such as in understanding the nature of a thunderstorm, doesn't require information about whether the scientist is male or female, or black, white, or even purple, for that matter. Any differences between interacting scientists might catalyze opportunities for new insights. Women should thus seek collaboration with men, men with women, and we should all seek interaction with those of other races or ethnicities. I'm not suggesting that every time a male latino scientist has an idea that he should consider it necessary to march down the hall to seek an opinion from an Asian female. Instead, I think that simply having access to and occasionally working with different types of people can enrich the quality of our science overall. Different perspectives don't change the facts, but they might lead us to find previously unrecognized facts and ideas simply by nature of their different experiences. For example, a biologist who grew up in poverty as a farm worker might have insights relevant to the science because she worked in the fields as a youth. For the betterment of science, all types of people from all backgrounds should feel welcome to participate.

The most important interaction we need, though, is with scientists who might disagree with us, regardless of their demographics. This viewpoint diversity is probably the most needed type of diversity for the advancement of science. When there may be multiple views consistent with existing evidence, and perhaps only one or none of them are correct, science can ill afford blanket rejection of viewpoint diversity. Science stagnates when we exclude the perspectives of scientists with points of view that are different from the mainstream. In the end, it is the facts and evidence that lead to a conclusion, not points of view, but different points of view can lead to different ideas of how the facts fit together, and these ideas can mold the direction of the conversation. Occasionally a scientist makes a profound discovery that overturns the mainstream view.

Study of climate change induced by human activities including burning fossil fuels is one field in which some forms of viewpoint diversity are being shut out. I am aware of few climate scientists who argue that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would not increase the earth's temperature. Nearly every climate scientist agrees that human activities are warming the lower atmosphere, especially in the Arctic (myself included). A large majority of climate scientists agree that more than half of the warming in recent decades is a result of human activities (see the IPCC reports). This type of broad agreement is supported by multiple distinct arguments and analysis techniques. Yet even though the idea of human induced climate change has broad evidential support, the public discourse on this topic is rife with fallacies, especially the argument from authority and argumentum ad populum.

Beyond the points on which most climate scientists agree, there is substantial discussion regarding how much it is likely to warm and how that warming might influence changes in extreme weather events. I think that the most important unanswered questions remaining in climate science relate to how the weather will change with the climate, and how changes in the weather might feed back on the climate. This problem is immensely complicated and the science is still young. People who argue that discussion about climate change and extreme weather events (such as tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, and flooding rains) is over or that consensus has been reached on these issues are being dishonest. Scientists are making progress in these areas (such as uncovering evidence suggesting that in many parts of the warming world, both the amount of time between summer rainfall events and the intensity of the rainfall probably will increase), but the problem of the impact of climate change on extreme weather events is far from solved.

Sometimes behaviors of people who fight scientists who express different points of view are similar to behaviors of schoolyard bullies (one such point of view is expressed here). When people argue that "the discussion is over", they shut out conversation where it may be far from over. Some activists and scientists demonize and attempt to exclude from the conversation people who agree that climate change is occurring and is influenced by human activities, but who do not argue that all types of weather are getting worse, or who do not agree on solutions to the problem. These activists often create strawmen descriptions of the contrarian scientists' views in an effort to discredit them.

Rather than address the arguments of scientists who might cast doubt on prevailing views about extreme weather events, detractors label them as deniers or shills for the fossil fuel industry. The ad-hominem attack rears its ugly head. This behavior is inappropriate and unhelpful. Members of the public who remain on the fence on the climate change issue may be turned off by this behavior, and those who do not believe that climate change is occurring may take this behavior of scientists as evidence of a politically motivated conspiracy. Avoiding the appearance of such behavior requires us to patiently discuss errors where we see them, with respect and in light of evidence.

Those opposed to climate change science are often guilty of the same behaviors I describe above, but in the context of the scientific community, the opposite side holds most of the power and needs to be called out. To me both types of negative behavior are reprehensible. Surely we can do better.

Consequences of Overspecialization in Science

Isaac Newton is famous for new ideas that transformed nearly every branch of science after his time. Known best for physics, his development of mathematical concepts set the stage for most of the advancement of the modern world. Other scientists before and after his time provided foundations of their own fields. Back in that time, little was known about complicated natural systems, including the structure of matter, electromagnetism, light, astronomy, biology, weather and climate, and nearly every other field of modern science.

With so little known, it was possible for a few brilliant minds to contribute deeply to our understanding of what ultimately became many different fields. Knowledge has now been accumulating in these fields for decades to centuries.

Today, a student might specialize in biology as an undergraduate, focus on marine biology for a Master's degree, then specialize for a PhD in understanding a type of skin growth on a rare species of sea slug. The newly minted PhD might be the world leader in analysis of that type of skin growth, but the same scientist might know relatively little about other branches of biological sciences. With so many different subfields that have developed out of many different past research projects, the days are long past when anyone can learn the whole of biological or even marine biological sciences.

Many remaining scientific debates relate to concepts that align in between fields. Although scientists working in individual fields may think that their fields are well understood, understanding of concepts at the boundaries between the fields may be less so.

As a professor, my first research proposal I submitted for funding to the National Science Foundation was aimed to better understand how weather signals interact with El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. Observations suggested that the condition of the ocean at a given time influences weather events, including windy periods, and that the winds then cause changes in the condition of the ocean.

Since my field was closest to atmospheric science, I submitted my proposal to the branch of the NSF that oversees atmospheric dynamics. However, the oceans component of the work necessitated that the proposal also get reviewed by a panel of oceanographers. The atmospheric science reviewers ranked the proposal well, but the oceanographers prevented it from being funded, because they thought my proposed analysis of observational data was not exciting.

Sometimes the subculture of scientists in one field resists changes initiated by scientists who started out in neighboring fields, and it can be difficult for scientists trained in one subfield to gain access to the community in a neighboring field.

Alfred Wegener was a prime example: He was a meteorologist who presented the concept of continental drift to a community of geologists who were clearly not ready for the idea and who on the whole did not accept it until decades later.

Bottom line: In order to make more efficient progress, scientists need to work to speak the languages of neighboring fields when they attempt to solve problems in those fields. They also need to not be quick to reject new ideas suggested by scientists from neighboring fields just because the authors do not know all of the jargon and the history in their own fields.

Seattle Conference, Inauguration, and Protests

I arrived in Seattle Washington today to attend the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society. Friday I watched footage of the rule of law, managed democracy in action, in the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump. Yesterday I saw freedom of expression in action as people swarmed the streets of Seattle as part of the set of nationwide "women's marches" protesting the inauguration and Trump's rhetoric, history, and proposed policies. As this is an education blog, my point in discussing these issues here is to encourage people to listen to diverse perspectives different from their own. My purpose is not to side with one view or the other on the Trump presidency.

I took some time to mingle with the crowd, listening to their conversations and perspectives. Most of them aligned solidly with the political left. Yet, aside from their chants and signs, most of their conversations were about things they saw around them, their experience of the day, and their decisions for their next meals. Really similar, actually, to what I saw in Tea Party rallies. Also similar to my observations of videos of Palestinian and Israeli birthday parties posted on Youtube. As different as aspects of our views are, most of us are surprisingly similar. Some readers my trivialize my perspective here--I mean, obviously both groups are human, but that is precisely my point. It is becoming common practice for each side to dehumanize the other, and it does not make things any better. 

I recently posted on Twitter how I think that every person on the political right needs a friend on the left. Every person on the political left needs a friend on the right. We all too often listen just to people (and sources of news) with whom we already agree. Besides being intellectually weak, this behavior amplifies political polarization. We construct for ourselves echo chambers, where we tend to hear progressively more extreme views with which we see no reason to argue. People on the left and the right have also segregated themselves geographically. This separation leads many of them to conclude that basically everyone is like themselves, and that the distant strangers who disagree are simply deluded or even evil. Many people on the urban east and west coasts do not have many opportunities to meet conservatives. Many in rural America do not know people on the political left. 

In comparison with the past, I think there is relatively little hate left in the United States that is motivated by race, sex, or other characteristics of identity. Most of us mingle well with the opposite sex, other races, and people of other religions or belief systems. Of course hate motivated by those things still exists and still impacts people's lives, and it is an important problem for the individuals seriously impacted by it. I'm just claiming that it does not dominate our culture. 

Recent events suggest to me that most of the hate left in the United States is now aligned with politics. Abhorrent attacks on Trump supporters, including a man with a mental disability, along with other attacks going the other way support this view. 

People on the left, for the most part, did not hate George W. Bush because he was white. They disliked his conservative rhetoric and policies. Similarly, most people on the right did not dislike President Obama because he was black. They hated his left-leaning rhetoric. The truth of this point becomes obvious when the same people voice support for Clarence Thomas. I think we can all do better than this. There is no good reason to hate any person because of either their skin tone or their politics. 

Although it may be true that some ideas on either side really are simply wrong or harmful to humanity and human dignity, most of the time when we see the views of the opposition that way, it results from our own restatement of their position. The straw-man fallacy shows up frequently in both Tea Party protests and the ongoing anti-Trump marches. In the straw-man fallacy, we put up a false caricature of the opponent's view, then attack it as if it were their actual view. Sometimes we even do it while thinking our representation of their view is correct. Being wrong and not knowing it still feels like being right. Personally I would rather be less wrong. 

Obviously not everything either side claims about the other is a straw-man, but we owe everyone the common decency of an honest representation. Our politics can do better. My invitation to each of you is to seek out people with views different from your own. Question yourself and each other. Don't attempt to silence people with differing political views. Celebrate free expression, consider each other's views, and then stand up for what you think is right. 

Claims About the Nationwide Popular Vote, US Presidential Election

Hillary Clinton's apparent lead in the nationwide popular vote continues to grow as previously uncounted ballots get included. As the additional votes pile up, so do comments about unfairness in the US election system, since these votes will make no difference in the outcome. People are repeating their calls for repeal of the electoral college system. Although we need to work through this debate (again), I think our biggest problems lie not in the electoral college, but in the primary election system, but I digress. In full disclosure, I must admit that I personally could not get myself to vote for either of the leading candidates, and I did not favor any of the third party candidates either. I think we as a nation can do better.

I posed one contrarian view providing some reasoning for retaining the electoral college:
http://roundyeducationblog.blogspot.com/2016_10_01_archive.html

The point of this posting is to comment on how some Clinton voters argue that the system is unfair since she seems to be leading by millions of votes nationwide. If the election were held again, they might claim, given the same vote margins, but with the conclusion determined by the popular vote, that she would have won and would even have had a substantial mandate. This perspective is understandable, but not on firm logical ground.

The popular vote situation in the electoral college system would not be the same as the popular vote in an election set up from the start as one to be decided by the popular vote. There may be millions of conservative voters in Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts (for examples), who didn't bother to vote in the present system because they did not see their votes as making any difference, because large majorities in these states vote for Democrats. One could claim the same thing about left leaning voters in red states. More such people may have voted in a different system. My point is that in the present system, the popular vote nationwide is meaningless and possibly misleading. Only if the election were posed from the start as determined by the nationwide popular vote would we actually know what that vote would be. These same claims would hold true if the tables were turned.

Both candidates ran knowing the electoral process. That framework determined their efforts and the outcome. For better or worse, Trump won in that framework.

We should be spending more of our time concentrating on how to make the nation function well regardless of who is leading it.

Paris Climate Agreement and the United States Election Result

Many people who are concerned about climate change view the election of Donald Trump with trepidation. He has denied that climate change includes a substantial response to human activities, arguing that it is a hoax, and he has vowed to open up more federal lands to oil and natural gas drilling. He will probably withdraw from the recent Paris climate agreement. Yet, even if he did all of these things and more, in terms of outcomes actually relevant to the portion of climate change induced by human activities, the talk may be all bark and little bite, and I think the fear is more political than based on facts. My reasoning is that market forces are already changing the carbon emissions patterns of the United States economy. Trends in the costs of different forms of renewable energy, trends in how we use renewables together with fossil fuels, and changes in the types of fossil fuels that dominate the market reduce the depth of my concern.

Most renewable energy sources are intermittent. In order to absorb their production into the electricity grid, we need either the capacity to store the energy when it is produced to release it when it is needed, or we need some backup energy supply that can respond quickly to make up the difference when renewable energy sources are insufficient. When renewables and storage are cheaper than fossil fuels, market pressures will phase out fossil fuels, in spite of any government action (or lack thereof). Some fossil fuels are dirtier than others. Natural gas is on the whole cleaner than coal, even after accounting for leaked methane. Natural gas power plants can also respond far more rapidly than coal power plants to volatility in electricity generation rates from renewables. The cheap natural gas available now due to the fracking boom offsets the market for coal and makes assimilating renewable energy into the grid easier. In fact, some renewable energy firms have used natural gas to allow them to guarantee to grid managers a certain amount of energy production: They provide renewable energy when it is available, and they make up the difference when renewables are insufficient by using fast response natural gas power. Eventually when low cost storage becomes available, the need for electricity from natural gas will diminish.

I am not worried about a dramatic increase in coal production or oil drilling in the Trump presidency, even if he relaxes federal constraints on drilling on federal lands. For now, a glut of oil production has made the price of oil so low that there will be little incentive for oil companies to rapidly expand to new fields. In the meantime, continued investment in private sector battery research for electric cars may lead to the breakthroughs needed to solve the renewable energy storage problem. Thus I think that the best way for government to catalyze transition to a market driven by renewable energy is not to fight fossil fuels, but to invest in development of energy storage technologies. When renewable energy is truly cheaper, the big money will move that way. 

A Discussion of the Young Science of Seasonal Forecasting

Every fall, clients expect private sector meteorologists to make forecasts for the upcoming winter season. These forecasts are intended to provide useful information about the average outcome over the season, such as whether it is likely to be warmer or colder than normal. Such forecasts can be difficult to make, and many forecasters make predictions based on tenuous claims.

Seasonal forecasting is complicated because the average weather in the upcoming season depends both on signals evolving on seasonal or longer timescales, such as El Niño and climate change, and on signals that were originally acting on short timescales but that cause longer lasting changes in the state of the atmosphere or ocean. Phenomena like El Niño provide a kind of anchor pattern to which the weather can often return throughout the season, occasionally allowing skillful predictions to be made on a seasonal level.

In contrast, relatively brief weather events like major midlatitude storms, hurricanes, or Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) events can displace warm air from its normal locations to higher latitudes, leading to blocking patterns that can sometimes hold on for weeks at a time, influencing weather around the world. Wind stress associated with weather events can also give the ocean a "kick", thereby moving warm or cold water around. Such "kicker" events can make conditions after them different from conditions if they had not occurred (such as by amplifying or breaking down El Niño). They can move the climate into a new state. Most such transitional events are not usually predictable more than a couple of weeks in advance. Events that can alter the subsequent mean state of the seasonal climate are characteristic of nonlinear or chaotic systems. The best we can hope for in predicting such events beyond part of the next month is to correctly predict whether such events are more or less likely under certain background conditions.

Seasonal forecasters use both global climate models and statistical methods in their quest. Climate models are usually not good at predicting weather event-driven changes in the mean state, but they are good at maintaining the present state. Statistical methods, including data mining in large climate datasets, allow us to find relationships between different signals across the climate system. For example, strong El Niño conditions might be correlated with reduced snow cover in Canada, which then affects the temperature in Canada and the United States. Correlated signals like Canadian snow cover extent and eastern United States temperature can sometimes be applied to make predictions. When the ground is covered with snow, sunlight gets reflected back into space. Snow also creates cold air by emitting longwave radiation into space.

With many interacting variables, however, it can be difficult to determine cause and effect. Usually real weather events respond to multiple interacting causes, some contributing more than others. Snow cover may be reduced because the background pattern favors import of warm air over the continent, which can sometimes continue even after a snow event. If an assumed cause (such as extensive snow cover) is present, but another major factor such as strong southerly wind is also present, using the snow cover alone to predict upcoming temperature patterns would lead to a bad forecast. During strong El Niño events, a rogue storm event might increase Canadian snow cover, contributing toward lower temperatures, but import of warm air characteristic of El Niño can overcome these cooling effects and even melt the snow. Without taking the likelihood of import of warm air into account, a forecaster might suggest a long-term shift in outcomes across the season due to increased snow cover when one might be unlikely.

It is easy and occasionally useful to blame a warm or cold weather event on climate change, El Niño, abnormal Arctic Ice cover, snow extent in Siberia, the distribution of rainfall in the tropics, the North Atlantic Oscillation, sudden stratospheric warmings, tropical cyclone recurvature, the Pacific decadal oscillation, the Madden Julian Oscillation, or many other possible mechanisms. Many forecasters have their favorite indicator. My favorite is organized rainfall patterns in the tropics. I emphasize this indicator not because I think that it causes every major outcome in the atmosphere, but because it constitutes a well-defined energy source that leads to stationary or propagating waves that communicate outcomes to different parts of the world. Tropical rainfall also includes many signals that tend to favor certain sizes, propagation speeds, and lifetimes, implying some level of consistency from event to event. Yet, although rainfall in the tropics does drive changes in patterns in atmospheric circulation, it also responds to that circulation, complicating forecasting because the quantity often labeled as the "effect" can lead to changes in the thing we labeled as the "cause".

Another scientist might prefer to track snow cover in Siberia as a favored indicator in a seasonal temperature forecast. When cold air is available in Siberia, it can be displaced across the frozen Arctic Ocean into Canada, leading to an available source of cold air for the eastern United States. Yet, the presence of snow cover in Siberia does not necessarily imply that cold air will ultimately reach the eastern United States for any extended period of time. The winter of 2015-2016 was an excellent example of an exception (at least considering the season as a whole). Snowcover accumulated early in Siberia, but that winter was the mildest on record across much of the eastern United States. That winter, the structure of the El Niño response pattern favored both extensive snow cover in Siberia in October and warm outcomes through most of the winter in eastern North America.

Many seasonal forecasters fall into the trap of identifying a tracer signal of future outcomes, while not understanding the different pathways whereby different outcomes can occur. Scientists like simple explanations. This type of reductionist thinking often leads to good understanding, even in climate science. In a linear system, the total is just the sum of the parts. On the other hand, in a nonlinear system like the atmosphere, reductionism can occasionally lead to large errors. Brief weather events can sometimes kick off long lasting changes. Interacting signals in the climate system can lead to outcomes that are different from the simple sum of the signals.

Bottom line: When considering a seasonal forecast, think about the arguments being made, the level of confidence in those arguments, and alternate pathways to different solutions. Skill of even the best forecast techniques is relatively poor. In the end, no matter how well informed your seasonal forecast might be, anticipate that occasionally, weather events will alter the signal over the course of the season, leading to seasonal averages that are different from what you anticipated. That outcome does not necessarily mean that the forecast was not based on good information--it might just mean that unpredictable signals in the climate system led to a different outcome.

A Simple Argument in Support of the Maligned Electoral College

I don't often delve into political questions in this science and education blog, but from time to time I think it good practice to examine arguments for or against certain controversial political questions. My intent is to provoke or enhance debate on the topic.

The electoral college is the somewhat convoluted process of selecting the President of the United States. Each state gets the same number of votes in the process as they have senators and representatives in congress. The rules guarantee each state at least 3 votes, which implies that people in less populous states are represented better than people in more populous states. Wyoming voters get more impact per person than voters in New York. This difference helps make it possible for someone to win the election without winning the nationwide popular vote. The system has thus been maligned as undemocratic.

The enhanced clout of the small population states is not sufficient to allow individual small states to dominate an election because their total number of votes remain well below those of individual populous states (For example, Wyoming's 3 votes to California's 55). If the small states voted in a way that was random with respect to each other, they would usually cancel each other out to irrelevance. On the other hand, when many small states together agree, the effect of their extra weight is constructive and it acts to protect their collective rights. I think it is a work of genius, even if it seems undemocratic.

The Senate in the US Congress provides each state with equal representation regardless of population, while the House of Representatives provides representation roughly proportional to population. Why should the senate be the only branch of government that gives equal weight to the small states as to the large ones? Why shouldn't the selection of the chief executive give them similar benefits? Many people think it is unfair to grant small states additional protections. Yet, many of the same people think it is fair to protect low income taxpayers with lower tax rates than for the wealthy, or to provide underrepresented demographic groups with scholarships and other support for education.

I see the electoral college system as a just another systemic protection of an underrepresented group of people from the tyranny of majority rule.

From Premature Babies to the Gift of Freedom of Thought: At Talk at the Yacon Village Unschooling Conference

Today I gave a 45 minute talk to a group of unschoolers at the Yacon Village community center on Colonie New York. I decided to relate a couple of my main points here.

Isaac Newton's early life was difficult. His father died a couple of months before his birth. His mother claimed that he was so small that he could fit into a quart jar. She subsequently remarried and left Isaac in the care of her own mother. Isaac claimed that he could never forgive her. Isaac hated his stepfather. After his stepfather died, his mother resumed his care. He went to school during his 12th through 17th years. The next part I thought was a variation on the Dead Poet Society movie script. His mother decided that he was supposed to be a farmer. Isaac hated farming. Now imagine the delays in the progress of our science and mathematics if his mother had had her way. Sometimes we as parents or teachers really do not know what is best for the future of our children and our students, even when we think we do. It is unwise for us to quell their core aspirations and pack their lives with our own aspirations for them.

My own early life was arguably not as difficult as Newton's, though we had a few similarities. I was born several weeks early, and might even also have fit into a quart jar. Neither of my parents had Bachelor's degrees, and from when I was about three years old and older, my father worked as a farm hand in the small town of Oakley Idaho. Before I turned four, I developed a fascination for nature. One day when I was around that age I found a 5-gallon bucket half filled with ashes from our wood burning stove. I remembered that plants grow from seeds, and I figured that popcorn kernels were seeds, so I would try my hand at growing them. I found some unpopped kernels in the bottom of a large bowl of popped popcorn, and I told my mother that I was going to plant them!  I'm sure she thought it was ridiculous, but she smiled and waved me on. I toddled out to my bucket of ash, buried the seeds in the ash, watered them, and a week or so later, sure enough, two corn plants began to grow. I continued caring for the two plants through that summer, and they actually provided two small ears of real popcorn. My parents did not try to stop my daring experiment. My parents and neighbors expressed astonishment. They started calling me the little professor, and the nickname caught on through my community.

The moral of my story is that parents, teachers, and the education system as a whole should extend age dependent freedoms to children and not attempt to cram them into a one-size-fits-all curriculum. Parents and teachers should aim high in general expectations, but should keep out of the business of specific expectations. We do not know the future, and our expectations of it are likely to be far off anyway. Society owes children challenge and intellectual stimulation, not heavy external controls and confinement. If the children knew freedom now, they would deal with it better later in life. The challenge to us is to help them grow into it.

Some Comments on "Saving Science"

Recently, Daniel Sarewitz, professor of science and society at Arizona State University, posted an essay on Saving Science at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science . It is long, though I think it is worth the read. Others have offered their perspectives on his points, including  https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/saving-science/ and Judith Curry at https://judithcurry.com/2016/08/22/dan-sarewitz-on-saving-science/

I think that Sarewitz raises some valid points of concern, but he makes some broad sweeping generalizations that I think are unsubstantiated and at times myopic. Although I cannot possibly address all of my concerns about his assertions here, I hit a few points that I think are most important.

Vannevar Bush stated

"Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown."

The crux of Sarewitz's argument is that financing the free play of free intellects is not productive and often yields results that turn out to be wrong. He advocates for managed science with planned outcomes in technology or applications, a concept that many define as engineering. He argues that when managed for a specific outcome in the presence of a pressing need, science (er, engineering) yields the greatest outcomes. Although I agree that many of the most transformative ultimate outcomes of science have followed such enterprise, history suggests that without the free play of free intellects, most such ventures could never have been conceived in the first place. I argue that today's science has too little rather than too much free play. Free play today is often overly constrained by imposed goals and social pressures, sometimes including too much drive to conform to pass peer review.

Yet, what modern technology or innovation of science did not have at some point at its roots the free play of free intellects?

The Manhattan project yielded the atomic bomb and nuclear energy technology. This project was clearly more engineering than science, managed for a specific outcome, following the ideal supported by Sarewitz. I argue that this project would not have had a context to begin without the works of free-playing predecessors, many of whom simply wanted to understand nature and could not have imagined what kind of applications would ultimately grow out of the understanding the physics of matter and radiation that they gave us. This point does not support Sarewitz's suggestion that all scientific ideas should have a clear trajectory to positive direct impacts on fulfilling human needs before we should consider them for funding. Fundamental research from the play of the intellects often needs further development in planned projects to yield such outcomes. Pondering on the results of the playful projects often yields the planned ones. Projects like Manhattan are not, for the most part, new ideas, but development of old ones, refining them to fulfill the needs of society.

Some people might see the outcomes of both free and managed science during the first half of the 20th century as wildly different from the outcomes of more recent science. Yet, we might perceive recent science as more wrong than science of the past because our recollection of the science of the past is biased toward the positive and well supported conclusions that we retain from the past. Science that was wrong then has since been supplanted or neglected and has thus been forgotten.

The science of today will in the same way as in the past filter into the future, leading to some grand leaps forward, while much of it that is ultimately deemed less relevant or wrong will eventually fade into the ether. I do not see it as problematic that many new ideas are wrong. Some ideas are right, and I argue that fact will ultimately make the scientific enterprise worth it.

Sarewitz is troubled by the constant debates and changes of prevailing views in evolving branches of science. He raises a nice example in the conflict in dietary science, which recently has undergone a refreshing transformation. I suggest that the process of arguing through the literature, discussing stark contrasts between different views in light of evidence, is not a flaw in science: It is science itself! Scientists need to work to educate the media and the general public that peer review, although perhaps the best preliminary sifting process we have, is only a first step in the process of scientific discussion that ultimately yields high confidence conclusions. Whether a field finds a new direction based on newly published science depends on how the original authors and other scientists interact with the new material, often over many years. The public and the media need to recognize that science is not simply a list of facts emerging from peer review. I give peer reviewed results deference over statements not subject to such review, but I don't see peer review as infallible. I see the process of open review and discussion after publication as far more important than the peer review itself.

Direct management to generate new and fundamental ideas to yield specific outcomes is difficult, because we do not yet know what those ideas will be or how they will pan out. We need new ideas, even if most of them eventually turn out to be wrong. Most ideas of the greatest scientists of the past were also wrong and were ultimately discarded. Although science is far from perfect, it is a winnowing process that gradually blows out chaff, however frustrating and sometimes drawn out the process might be.

The type of managed science or engineering that Sarewitz supports is also needed, but such projects need bases to work from. Free play of the intellects provides those bases. Our own collective actions and inactions serve as the filter that will yield the best of today's science to fulfill the needs of the future world.

Minecraft and Children's Free Play

Early Thursday evening I sat down at a table at the Yacon Village Community Center, pulled down a book from the shelf, and just listened to the children play. Yes, I was spying on them. They were cooperating in a minecraft world. I don't really know exactly what they were doing, but listening to them led my memory back to my own childhood.

http://roundyeducationblog.blogspot.com/2015/11/be-part-of-revolution-in-education-for.html

My neighborhood friends got together on Saturdays and through the summer to play games, and build forts, treehouses, and rafts. I relish those memories, and I have been saddened at times that my own children have not been able to do many of the same things. When we moved to the Albany area, we chose a rural neighborhood that we found out later had few children their age. Even if we had such children around, though, I think today's culture would not support their ability to play freely and largely unsupervised. I understand the drive to keep children safe, and I support it to some degree, but when we take it too far, it comes at a high price. Without free play, children lose opportunity to learn how to deal with people with whom they might disagree and to learn other social skills. Free play teaches them how to negotiate and how to deal with criticism.

My mind wandered back to Yacon Village and the Minecraft world. I realized something exciting: The children were free playing in Minecraft in nearly the same ways I recall my friends and I playing in the fields. Minecraft cannot provide the physical benefits of such play, but the types of interactions I heard between the children, including their conversations and decisions, were similar. 

One of the problems I see in the world today is a general lack of willingness for people to listen to and converse with those with whom they disagree. I think that the way children have been raised in recent decades has contributed to their tendency to want to be protected from differing viewpoints. Yet, I think that all is not lost for future generations. My experience listening in to Minecraft time proved to me that children can still learn to function positively. 

Independence Day Weekend: Hiking and Cherry Harvest

Today I harvested and pitted three gallons of dark red carmine jewel cherries. That's probably a tenth of the total crop. I have toiled since early spring to control fungus and keep the insects, birds, squirrels, and chipmunks out. These cherries are one of the many crowns of human ingenuity. Specialists at the University of Saskatchewan have been working for more than 50 years to create a sweat and tart cherry that can handle their brutal winters. They bred more common cherry varieties with a wild cherry from the Himalaya Mountains and selected the offspring with the best fruit for multiple generations, providing us with a tasty result that nature could not and would not provide. I love artificial selection: Our hunter gatherer ancestors would be shocked at the good things we eat. The wild animals know it too--They take my fruit over wild berries whenever they can.

I have seven bushes presently in production, each near 10 feet tall and 8 feet wide. I gather the fruit by the gallon and run them though a commercial pitter, pack them in quart bags, and settle them into a deep freeze. 

Besides the fruit picking, Sunday morning, I jogged 11 miles around my neighborhood, then I hiked the White Rock trail along the Taconic Crest to the Snow Hole with my 13 year old son. Here are a few pictures: 

The snow hole typically has several feet of soft snow left over in July, but last winter had far less snow than average, so all that was left was a small pocket of ice in the bottom of the hole. It was refreshingly cold down there, though. The ferns, mosses, and plant and animal life were remarkable. After finishing the hike, my smartphone beeped at me congratulations: My most active day since I purchased the phone over a year ago. 

Yacon Village Science Club Summary June 23, 2016

Every Thursday afternoon I volunteer to lead the science club at Yacon Village, my wife's home education community center in Colonie New York. I decided to occasionally post summaries of the science club meeting here as part of my blog. The purpose of the club is to provide opportunity for children and teens to meet to discuss and occasionally do science. We don't have the resources of a university or even a high school science lab, but the lack of systemic constraints on our activities allows us more flexibility to focus on topics of interest to the kids. This year our focus has been on the history of science, beginning with ancient Greeks and Egyptians through the modern age. A week ago Thursday, the topic was the deep oceans, and we covered sea floor spreading, continental drift, flips of the earth's magnetic field, and life at deep sea volcanic vents. This week's topic was ecosystems, including topics in geology and adaptation and evolution of life.

Image from dailymail.co.uk

A beautiful example of semi-isolated ecosystems are the Tepuis of northern South America (see photo example above). Tepuis are remnants of an ancient plain that was uplifted evenly by tectonic forces, then eroded away at the edges, leaving isolated wooded mesas behind. Surrounded by tropical forest, but jutting up to a mile into the sky, the flatlands topping the cliffs experience a cool moist climate and are home to unique species. Looking to the distant future, the same erosive forces that made them will ultimately eliminate them. 

We finished the meeting with a video from National Geographic about a scientist and a team of assistants who traveled to a Tepui by helicopter to collect samples of a rare tree toad:

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/short-film-showcase/mysterious-islands-in-the-sky-unlock-secrets-of-our-past-return-to-the-tepuis

My Orchard is My Summer Hobby Laboratory

With spring semester over, my work time focuses on research and publication of results. When I'm not playing with my kids on my personal time, I work in my orchard and grape vineyard. Most of the pictures I have posted in my earlier blogs were from the orchard, so I thought I would include a little discussion about it. I have enjoyed gardening since I was four or five years old--It made a nice laboratory for a young scientist. Now, it yields tasty fruit along with struggles, frustrations, and some victories. I gave up vegetables a few years ago in favor of fruits, which tend to be more valuable and much tastier than the ones from the store.

Eight years ago, I planted my first pawpaw trees. This is my first pollinated pawpaw!  Several fruit have set so far this year. One of my trees is a seedling, which makes it a bit of a gamble in the pawpaw world--named grafted varieties produce more reliably tasty fruit, but once in a while a seedling turns out to be a gem. I have never actually tasted a pawpaw. Pawpaws are the largest fruit native to the United States. Some wild or seedling pawpaws have been described as insipid, but many people describe good ones as tasting like banana-vanilla custard. Mine should ripen in the fall. Fingers crossed.

The oldest vines in my grape vineyard are maturing, and I'm expanding the vineyard with new vines. I grow concord and table grapes. My favorite table grape variety is Somerset:

Four year old Somerset seedless grape vine nearing bloom.

Second year Somerset seedless grape growing its trunk. I also grow seedless canadice, mars, and a new variety called ticked pink.

Grapes take a lot of work to get tasty fruit year after year. They need to be pruned back hard during the dormant season, and I also thin the fruit clusters and the flowers within the clusters near bloom time (I comb them out with a hairbrush). I treat the young fruit clusters with gibberellic acid, a natural plant growth hormone that can be extracted from kelp, to stretch the clusters and expand the berries. Seeds in seedy fruit produce similar hormones that cause the fruit to grow, but seedless varieties often need a little help. I also girdle the vines above the first shoots to force more sugar into the fruit, while still allowing sugar from the lowest shoots to get to the roots. I end up with large fruit that taste amazing.

Growing grapes in a humid climate is a constant battle against fungus and insects. I put up a temporary electric fence in August to keep out the varmints. I grow the vines through deep wood chip mulch so I don't need to worry much about weeds.

I mount the vines on an 8 foot high trellis, much higher than most commercial vineyards. Benefits of the high trellis include raising the buds above the coldest air layer, which resides right at the ground level on cold winter nights and in the spring. I have had buds close to the ground break in the spring and freeze on cold nights, while the buds high on the trellis are often unharmed. The high trellis also prevents the vines from dragging on the ground. 

I raise apple trees, including disease resistant varieties, liberty, freedom, sundance, enterprise, and Zestar. I favor disease resistant varieties because of a disease endemic to my neighborhood called cedar apple rust. It is caused by a fungus that lives one stage of its lifecycle in apple trees and the other stage in cedars.  

Getting great apples is a battle against nature. Besides pruning and thinning the apples, I fight insects and wildlife. This year, four of my best 8-year old apple trees were completely girdled by voles next to the soil level. Starving voles chew the bark off in the early spring, seeking the tasty and nutritious cambium layer just below the bark. I thought my trees were old enough to be immune, but I could not have been more wrong. I learned the hard way to protect all the trees with hardware cloth. My deep mulch, while apparently healthy for the trees, also makes a nice home for voles. The girdled trees have leafed out and bloomed. Most apple experts suggest that without treatment, the trees would not be able to get sugar from the leaves into the roots. The roots then gradually lose their stored sugar. After running out of sugar, they cannot pump water and nutrients up to the treetop, which then dies. So, without surgery, I might possibly get a final harvest before the trees die. Some apple growers girdle their trees on purpose in oder to force sugar into the fruit instead of the roots, but they keep the girdled section narrow so that it quickly heals over. Mine would not have healed on their own. 

The objective of my surgical technique is to establish a new pathway for the tree top to feed the roots. I tried some approaches that have never been reported in the apple literature (at least as far as I know). I pruned off some lower branches, pealed off the bark, and stapled it to cleaned sections of the girdled bark to bridge between the remaining bark above and the root cambium below, with "up" in the same direction as it was on the original branch. A month later, several sections of the stapled bark remain alive, and it is thickening, suggesting that a new conduit between the tree and the roots is being made. In addition to the bark grafts, I performed traditional bridge grafts. Bridge grafts are made from young branches that are spliced under living bark above and below the girdle. I tried it both with sticks collected from the tree above and with pencil-thick root segments collected from another tree (note the reddish colored graft on the right side of the trunk in the picture above). The use of a root segment is another experiment, as all the experts suggest using sticks collected from above ground.

One successful project this year (so far) is carmine jewel tart cherries. The bushes are 7 years old and about 8 feet tall. They are covered with green cherries: 

These bushes laugh off our Albany New York winters. The most difficult parts of raising these cherries include fighting off fungus and removing the pits from the ripe fruit. Fungus control involves cleanliness, such as removing rotting fruit and cutting out sick branches. It also involves spraying the dormant plants in the winter with copper sulfate to kill spores from the year before. I spray fungus control before and after rainy periods. Harvest is in early July.

Finally, my hardy kiwi is nearing bloom (here is a picture of the fruit from last year):

These fruits practically grow themselves, but I prune them back hard in the winter and tip the new growth in the summer so the vines don't wind around each other. 

Climate Change and Violent Tornadoes

Climate change induced by human activities apparently leads to many conditions that affect people and the natural world negatively. Negative aspects of climate change dominate the media, and understandably so, as some negative outcomes are likely to be painful. Many activists emphasize the negative aspects because they might lead people to take greater action. Yet, informed people should realize that not everything gets worse. Recently, Bill Nye tweeted "More severe weather. More suffering. Let's all take climate change seriously."  I strongly agree with the need to take climate change seriously. Yet, his focus on severe weather may be backwards!  During the tornado season, we all see the pictures, and they seem to create the feeling that this year is always worse than last. Yet, how do violent tornado outbreaks really trend over time? Data posted at the National Climatic Data Center website gives us clues:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado-climatology/trends

Although F1+ tornadoes do not show much trend over time,

F3+ tornadoes actually show a pronounced and statistically significant downward trend (trend line not shown). Keep in mind that the way we observe tornadoes has changed over time. We are likely to identify more tornadoes given today's technology than we did in the past. The most intense tornadoes, however, are the most likely to have been observed and recorded, and they seem to be declining with time.

Study of the effects of climate change on severe weather is a young field. One major problem is that climate models do not simulate severe weather, so it is difficult to perform experiments to diagnose the causes of changes over time. Regional models embedded in climate models might be helpful. In any case, we can suggest hypotheses that might explain these changes. One possibility, for example is that climate change might reduce the size of temperature differences between cold Arctic and warm tropical air masses that meet over the plains of the United States that favor violent tornadoes. Tornadoes rely on the wind blowing from different directions at different heights, a condition that can be reduced if these temperature differences weaken over time.

My bottom line is that there are plenty of good reasons to take action on climate change. Yet, we should be honest and not claim that one of those reasons is to reduce violent tornado activity. Given the data, it would be astonishing if climate change were actually increasing activity in these severe storms.

****After posting this commentary, after some communication with experts in tornado data, I now understand that prior to 1977, intensity of tornadoes was biased to higher values relative to estimates of intensity of more recent tornadoes. This adjustment eliminates the downward long-term trend. At the same time, this change does not seem to suggest a trend upward, suggesting that it remains inappropriate to claim that violent tornadoes become more active with climate change.

Spring Plastic Removal Day, Organic Agriculture, Roundup, Mulch, and Worms

Yesterday I celebrated spring plastic removal day. Every fall, I wrap my house in a bubble by enclosing my 3/4 wrap-around porch in greenhouse plastic. It provides a sunroom for the winter and cuts down on our home heating costs. I usually take the plastic down around May 1. It feels liberating the next morning to look out on my orchard in the front yard, from inside the house, without the plastic distorting the view. I keep an orchard of about an acre, with blueberries, raspberries, elderberries, aronia berries, hardy kiwis, tart cherries, pawpaws, table and concord grapes, apples, pears, apricots, and peaches. The cherries, apples, pears, and pawpaws are in bloom right now, and the hardy kiwis and table grapes are beginning to leaf out. Warmth in early March encouraged the plants to start waking up early, and that warmth was followed by an unusual cold snow event that destroyed most of my peach blossom buds. Out of 7 peach trees, we might only have 2-3 peaches this year!  That's 4 years in a row with basically no peach crop. The Albany area is borderline for peach production, though climate change is gradually making it better. The peach buds start to winter kill around -15F. Last winter was Albany New York's warmest on record (blame a combination of El Niño and climate change), but it also included the coldest individual night in more than 10 years.

I planted my orchard in soil with insufficient potassium and phosphorus for healthy fruit production. The people who contoured the land 16 years ago neglected to collect and replace the topsoil, leading to depression of these nutrients. I have been working for years to build the soil back up. Soils with insufficient concentrations in potassium, phosphorus, and boron can increase plant sensitivity to winter damage. I am rebuilding the soil with a thick layer of composted wood chip mulch along with potassium sulfate and mono ammonium phosphate. My soil is now full of worms and teaming with life.

I manage my orchard with a combination of organic and conventional techniques. I choose my pest and fungus control methods based on what works and what has been shown to be safe, not based on urban (or rural) legends or an assumption that organic is always best. Some people are dogmatic against use of chemicals, as if the word "chemical" itself implies something dangerous. Modern chemicals, hybridization, and genetic modification demonstrably increase the productivity of agriculture and allow us to feed the modern world. Anyone who argues otherwise is ignoring the evidence in favor of dogmatism. I like to make my pest control decisions based on evidence. It is true that some types of pests are just nuisances. A hole in an apple can be a minor problem (unless you want to store the apple for several months, because the holes encourage rot). Yet, some insects can completely destroy a whole crop, and some fungal pests can kill plants, make the fruit unpalatable, or produce natural chemicals that are toxic to humans and other life. Those toxins might be natural, but so is rattlesnake poison.

I reclaimed my orchard area from a wild meadow that was full of noxious weeds. Roundup weed killer can be a gardner's best friend in preparing a landscape for planting, but once the orchard is growing, it is difficult to use Roundup without damaging the crop plants. Over the years I have used organic techniques to replace the need for Roundup weed control. These techniques include flaming seedling weeds with a propane burner and building up a thick layer of composted wood chip mulch.

I'm not opposed to wise use of Roundup, however. I have read some interesting studies that have been interpreted to suggest that it is allegedly dangerous to humans. These studies claim, for example, that Roundup caused the death of human liver or umbilical cells in a petri dish. The culprit ingredient is the adjuvant, or the substance that causes the chemical to stick to the leaves of plants.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weed-whacking-herbicide-p/
These studies, along with the numerous websites that repeat their claims, neglected to report that this component of Roundup is the same compound that allows baby shampoo to produce suds!  This same compound can be derived naturally from coconuts and from fats obtained from meats. Related compounds are frequently applied in organic agriculture as insecticidal soaps because they disrupt cell membranes, leading to death of soft-bodied insects. It is thus no surprise that this compound kills human cells in a petri dish--it disrupts the lipid bilayers of human cell membranes in the same way that baby shampoo cuts grease. Yet, to suggest that this component of Roundup is dangerous to humans as applied in fields is patently ridiculous, given that those who eat coconuts ingest it without complaint. It is no more dangerous to you than baby shampoo. Although injecting fully concentrated baby shampoo into your blood might be deadly, coming into external contact with it is not harmful. I'm not claiming that all components of Roundup are definitely safe. My point is simply that many people who make specific claims that it is dangerous often rely on misleading information from studies that have not been completely honest about the context in which their studies imply that Roundup can cause harm to humans. The majority of people who believe the claims of anti-Roundup websites do so because the website views are consistent with their pre existing biases.

http://roundyeducationblog.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2016-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=9

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10854122

For the sake of those who might consider my future offer of fruit from my orchard, but who might be opposed to Roundup use, please rest assured that I don't spray it anywhere close to my grape vines and fruit trees, else it would kill them too.