San Diego Conference 2007 - no, not comic con

Well, I just got back from the APS conference in San Diego this afternoon. Several of my colleagues felt somewhat let down by this meeting. It seemed that many of the talks and posters lacked the quality of, at least, last year's meeting in Quebec City. I imagine it was just bad luck which labs decided not to attend this year. At any rate I have two stories in preparation for you.

The first was a pretty exciting talk by David Gadoury of Cornell. Biocontrol, the use of predatory/parasitic organisms to control pests in place of pesticides, has long been a holy grail of plant pathology. His talk described (a very rare!) example of a native organism controlling severe epidemics of a serious plant disease in a mainstream agricultural crop. Successful biocontrol is virtually unprecedented as it is, but this talk interested me additionally for the system's apparent sheer practicality, and interesting interactions with pesticide applications (hint* synthetic helps, organic ruins!). more coming soon...

The second story I have is based on a presentation by Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute. He started off his presentation with a scathing assessment of several "green" solutions to the status quo such as organic ag and biofuels. To the extent that he spoke within subjects I've studied (~80% of his points), he was dead on (with very clever and informative examples) but he also ventured onto potentially thinner ice - e.g. denouncing any correlation between human artifacts (specifically elevated CO2 levels) and global warming. I've never really taken the time to look at the evidence for this myself, but after his talk I feel this is pretty intellectually (and literally) lazy. The way the media has handled scientific topics from organic ag to stem cells really calls for everyone to start taking more responsibility to critically evaluate "facts" that they're presented with.

At any rate, the story I'm preparing will include some research into the goals and financial backers of this institute and associated individuals. At the very least, I'll share my notes from his presentation (hopefully with some stats-checking and link to his power point file).

I'll follow up with a look into the primary source evidence for anthropogenic global warming. In the unlikely case that we don't have good evidence that human industry causes significant global warming, it would be foolish to waste conservation cash and effort on this specific goal.

cheers!