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Science

Craig Venter Tackles Global Warming 57

Posted by timothy from the or-at-least-tickles dept.
Venture$cience writes: "Fresh from his arguably successful sequencing of the human genome with his company Celera Genomics, Craig Venter is now entering the field of global warming. Specifically, he is readying an ocean wide expedition to harvest novel forms of bacteria from the ocean's deep. From these collections he hopes to find bacteria that excel at converting CO2 into proteins, sugars, and methane. The current candidate for an atmospheric "scrubber" is the ancient Archae family of bacteria that is believed to have helped modify the early Earth's original atmosphere. This all brings up another question concerning what cross-contamination protocols should they use? What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?"
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Craig Venter Tackles Global Warming More

Craig Venter Tackles Global Warming

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  • This worries me (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cmdr Taco (luser) ( 578089 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @06:15PM (#3613168)
    Venter is a egotist to the nth degree, as we saw when he revealed that much of Celera's gene database is comprised of his own genetic code. The news related to the whole Celera enterprise over the last few years is rife with other examples.

    Global warming, in my opinion, is not a well understood phenomenon, scientifically. In fact, I'm not convinced that it is even a problem to worry about, but I don't wish to become involved in that debate in this context.

    What concerns me is Venter's apparent disregard for scientific procedure, which is often quite rightly conservative. I am afraid that Venter is just the man to unleash a dubious solution to a phantom problem, potentially unbalancing the environment with his CO2-eating bugs much worse than "global warming". Thusfar, Mankind has been shown to be ineffective in reversing the global processes of nature, unless global warming really is such an effect. Attempting to create a form of life with the intent to reverse a reversal of natural processes seems to like playing with fire... or nuclear weapons.

    • Re:This worries me (Score:2, Interesting)

      by putzin ( 99318 )
      I agree. This seems to be staged to keep him in some sort of spotlight for a little while. The only problem here is that he has two things going for him.
      1. Money! Duh, with enough cash, the sky is the limit for stupid ventures. (see the tech industry circa 1999)
      2. Clout with less technically minded people. He probably could convince other less intelligent or thoughtful individuals with money that he is on the right track.
      Anyway, this will probably go away. There doesn't seem to be any sort of real science in any of this, but rather some grandiose parading around. However, I will have to admit that sometimes, good things come from very unlikely places. Maybe he actually starts the project and does something good? Maybe not. Really, until the journal Science publishes a paper or Woods Hole Oceanagraphic signs on to help, I'll just consider this so much news fluff from our new entertainment source, the news.

  • Not likely... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @06:29PM (#3613293) Journal
    This all brings up another question concerning what cross-contamination protocols should they use? What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?

    Superman notwithstanding, if you bring organisms into an environment utterly unlike what they're designed for they'll die, not develop super powers. It's not like introducing pigs and cats to Hawaii, where they have abundant food and no predators. If some deep-sea methanogen will do well above water, one of the billions that must bubble to the top every day would have already flourished.

    You need to be careful anyway so as not to cross-contaminate one sample with another. I wouldn't worry too much beyond that.

  • What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?

    Venter will bring it up anyway, as long as he can squeeze some money out of it. And then he'll name it after himself.

  • This makes me think of an oversimplification of the origin of killer bees:
    Scientist 1: "How can we make these docile, yet territorial honey bees make more honey?"
    Scientist 2:"Let's cross breed them with these here harder working, yet more agressive African bees. We'll get harder working honey bees!"
    Scientist 1: "Did you just pinch my ass, or was that a ..."

    Of course, what we got instead were hyper-agressive, territorial bees; not harder working honey bees. Or something like that.

    So what happens when we create this super organism that eats carbon dioxide and craps out twinkies? Nothing bad, of course!
    Side effects are inconceivable!
    Those obedient microorganisms would never take their behavior beyond what we want. There's no way they would go on to consume too much airborn carbon, ending the greenhouse effect, and tumbling the Earth into a devastating iceage, now would they?

    I'm tired of shortsighted technogeeks peddling pseudoscience that could alter the earth's entire ecosystem; never seeking to fully understand the complexity of the issue at hand. The same caution that prevented us from using nuclear bombs to create commerce in Alaska [uconn.edu] applies here.

    Let's just end internal combustion [slashdot.org] and leave these undersea critters where they belong.

    • Of course, what we got instead were hyper-agressive, territorial bees; not harder working honey bees. Or something like that.

      So what happens when we create this super organism that eats carbon dioxide and craps out twinkies?

      An alarmist might think that this would produce large amounts of oxygen from large amounts of carbon dioxide. If these buggers ran amok and produced far too much oxygen, we'd suffer from a different type of Global Warming...

      Maybe it's too radical a notion, but we seem to already have life forms on the planet that get rid of carbon dioxide. Plants. Maybe this fellow hasn't heard of them, though.

  • This is what will happen... (Score:3, Funny)

    by emag ( 4640 ) <`slashdot' `at' `gurski.org'> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @06:54PM (#3613472) Homepage
    What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?

    If they find something that Should Not Be Brought Back Up, why, obviously, most of the expedition will die horrible deaths, one at a time, or in small groups. The organism will terrorize the vessel they're travelling in, which will coincidentally be caught in a storm preventing any contact with the outside world. Rescue will also be impossible.

    In the end, it will be up to the suave, dashing Hero and the Eye Candy. In a last, desperate move, they'll manage to barely defeat the organism, saving humanity. And then the storm will clear, and a Coast Guard ship will be on the horizon...
  • What we need is a Human Instrumentality project.
    Google search: "human instrumentality [google.com]
  • 25-30 years ago, everyone was in an uproar over the environment changing as well. Only, it wasn't global warming that was the threat to Life As We Know It, it was global cooling [globalclimate.org].

    Generally, if you s/warming/cooling/g, you end up with all of the arguments from the 1970s about that particular environmental scourge.
    • 25-30 years ago, everyone was in an uproar over the environment changing as well.


      Yeah, and a few decades ago your doctor would tell you to take up smoking if you wanted to loose weight.

      We've learned since then, both about human health and about global climate.

    • So in other words, because our climate model has changed over the years, no climate model can ever be correct? Our climate will never change, QED?

      This has got to be one the lamest arguments I keep hearing against the current theories of global warning.
      • I didn't read it as an argument for/against global warming. I read it as an indictment of the credibility of the chicken littles of the world.
        • So your argument goes:

          a) Any person suggesting that global warming is going to happen is a chicken little.

          b) Chicken littles have been wrong before.

          c) Hence global warming is not going to happen.

          This is what is known as a circular argument, and it completely fails to address things like facts and data, which some might find important.

          Besides, given no human input into the climate, we could easily be going into an ice age within the next 1000 or so years. But global warming is a big enough pertubation to make all bets off on that.
          • "But global warming is a big enough pertubation to make all bets off on that."

            And you know this how?

            All the CO2 added to the atmosphere from manmade sources is still only a small fraction of what nature is pumping out every year. Manmade sources are on the order of less than 5 percent of global CO2 production. Mount Pinatubo pumped out orders of magnitude more CO2 than anthropomorthic sources. I really do not believe we can change the direction we were (already) headed in before the Industrial Revolution. We just do not matter that much.

            • We just do not matter that much.

              Nonsense. Clearly we can save the Earth and move its orbit [space.com] by having everyone on varying sides of the globe jump up and down on a timed schedule.

            • We just do not matter that much.

              Sadly this just isn't true. The atmospheric levels of CO2 (pre-modern human society) is roughly in equilibrium (ie. the amount of CO2 going in from natural processes is approximately the same as the amount of CO2 being removed by natural processes). If a new source of CO2 appears (ie. us) the global CO2 levels will rise until a equilibrium is reached again.

              There is considerable evidence that human activity is causing a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 levels:

              * Recorded CO2 levels have risen considerable as human society has developed. These increases are consistant with estimated human CO2 production.

              * The radioactivity of CO2 has been dropping since the 1950s. This suggests that an increasing amount of CO2 has come from fossil fuels (which tend to be less radioactive than natural sources).

              Given that for the past 1000 years (until approx. 1800 CE) atmospheric CO2 levels have been in the 270 to 290 ppm range, and that now they are much much higher (in 1994 they were at 358 ppm), it seems that we can, in fact, make a difference.
    • Wow... is the psuedoscientific industry so desparate that Newsweek is now a source of scientific information?

      For those who are interested, in the 70's it was predicted that the earth's climate would start to cool slightly (due to several longterm cycles). Now the effects of global warming would easily outweigh this cooling effect, so global cooling isn't really a concern. However has been misused by several antiscience lobby groups to attack climatic science.

      Another variation of this claim is about scientists predicting a coming ice age. This is untrue [care4free.net].
      • Nah, that was the only thing I could quickly find online that had a date in the right period. Search for "global cooling" on google, and you'll find lots of modern-day theories as well.

        I was merely pointing out that the environmentalist lobby seems to like to hop from one theory to the other. I couldn't find it, but the same types of people who've written doom and gloom books on the effects of global warming and how we've got to stop killing the earth before we kill ourselves, have also written books on global cooling, which, in general, could easily be adapted to the current popular theories by almost a literal substitution of "cooling" with "warming" (including the effects on food production, geographic areas, etc).

        I was actually trying to go for a "funny" rating, but should have realized with the /. population that it was either too subtle, or too close to their sacred oxen...
        • There is a massive difference between find scientific evidence (by that I mean peer reviewed journals) for global cooling (in a doomsday sense), and searching the internet for some crank theory.

          The global cooling scare mostly came from a few people (mostly nonscientists) misintrepretating scientific theories, whereas the global warming hypothesis is well accepted in the scientific community (and commonly misrepresented in the media). The difference between the two are massive, but also allow the global warming skeptics to play a media game rather than a science game (which, along with the creationists) they lost a long time ago.

  • LOTR (Score:2)

    by isorox ( 205688 )
    "What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?" "

    Like the balrog in Kazhadum? the srawves dug deeper and deeper for gold (profit), but it was their own undoing..


  • > What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?

    You mean, like, Cthulhu?

  • This is kind of offtopic, but I just read a book called Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing Our World [addall.com]. It talks about Venter's interesting background. Other scientists mentioned:

    Susan Greenfield [sirc.org],

    Geoffrey Marcy [sfsu.edu],

    Polly Matzinger [wayne.edu],

    Saul Perlmutter [lbl.gov],

    Gretchen Daily [stanford.edu], and

    Carl Woese [hbcollege.com].
  • In reading the article, I noticed that the
    bacteria Venter was looking at turned CO2 into
    methane. My understanding is that CH4 is a more
    powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. If the methane
    is collected, rather than being vented into the
    atmosphere, what do we do with it? Burn it, and
    get the same amount of CO2 back?
  • Its all the cow farts!

    Just think of all the methane being produced by all them cud chewing, gas expulsing cows.

  • why don't we encourage people like this to experiment on other, lifeless [nasa.gov] planets before messing up this one?
  • Isn't methane as bad or worse a greenhouse effect agent as C02 (c.f. cow farts vs. automotive exhaust as greenhouse effect causes)?
    Frying pan, fire, what?

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