Thanks, I did not know that. Interesting that the recalled EzriCare and Delsam products make no claim on the packaging that they do not contain preservatives or are specially formulated for someone like you. In fact, both products claim to contain boric acid, which is an antimicrobial. Guess this is not about being preservative free, just bad manufacturing practices.

Heaven forbid that "chemicals" should be added to prevent this.

No just monoculture, any ag system.

It's a matter of best use. For instance, if my farm is 100% Class I soil and I have good water, devoting 10% to "nature" means 10% less production and additional cost for preserving that land applied against productive land. Then, that production needs to be made up somewhere else. What is of greater environmental benefit, a 10% patchwork that really isn't "natural", reduces efficiency, and increases cost of food, or preserving contiguous swaths of land in its natural state?

Now, if a significant portion of my land was marginal for farming and there was an incentive for maintaining it as natural habitat, that's a different matter.

I see it very simply: Minimize the amount of land needed for food production, minimize the amount of land converted to ag and other commercial uses. That mean intensive ag zones and untouched native habitat, not some patchwork of the two.

Why should I devote 10% of my land to birds?

Or perhaps encourage bird species that damage crops?

Terminology must have changed. Growing up in California, these were just normal winter storms. Although I seem to remember colder temps and lower snowline.

So he wasn't gay?

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/closed-loop-pumped-hydro/

Practical Engineering https://youtu.be/66YRCjkxIcg

The Helms Project in that area is pumped storage using Courtright and Wishon lakes. Has been operating since 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_Pumped_Storage_Plant

With the decline in science reporting (not that it was ever great) and the I-did-my-own-research crowd being more influential than ever, I wish professional organizations would keep this stuff to themselves before peer review and publishing. Even that is no guarantee of quality, but the vast majority of lay people don't understand the limitations of preprints or preliminary reports like this. There is such a thing as too much information.

"Two small unpublished studies." Why do people share this crap?

And finally, when reason and evidence is no longer in their favor, antis move the goal posts and turn to conspiracy theories. Same tropes and logical fallacies I have heard repeated for over a decade.

You are absolutely right, one study does not stand alone, the body of evidence counts, but so does the quality and relevance of the evidence. Your claim reminds me of acupuncture studies. There are tons of them out there that claim to show it works, so it must work, right? Dig deeper and you find profound publication bias where large positive effects correlate with lower quality studies, and no or tiny effects correlate with high quality studies.

Did you read all of those papers? How about the one from EFSA that concludes "The current assessment concluded that the weight of evidence indicates that glyphosate does not have endocrine disrupting properties through oestrogen, androgen, thyroid or steroidogenesis mode of action based on a comprehensive database available in the toxicology area. The available ecotox studies did not contradict this conclusion"?

Or Dai et al. "Taken together, we conclude that glyphosate alone has low toxicity on male rats reproductive system." after washing rat testes with glyphosate solution?

And of course, there is the fact that professional, career toxicologists and epidemiologists at national regulatory agencies around the world have reviewed the body of evidence and have concluded that glyphosate can be used safely (does not mean zero risk) as labeled. Among those who have concluded otherwise are well represented by the organic industry (fear and uncertainty is good for business), lawyers employing science by jury against Bayer, and political interests.

Again, animal model with pregnant mice drinking 5,000 ppm solution of glyphosate or Roundup for 19 days. Many, many orders of magnitude greater exposure than humans will ever see unless they drink straight out of a spray tank for 19 days. But who cares, right, as long as they can get "glyphosate" and "effect on ovarian function" into the public's consciousness. There are naturally occurring toxins in many of the foods we eat (cyanogenic glycosides, for instance) that would have killed those mice outright if fed at those levels.

More accurately, an organophosphonate, but don't be coy, all you have to do is read the title of Monograph 112 to know what is going on: "Some Organophosphate Insecticides and Herbicides", and there's glyphosate listed along with tetrachlorvinphos, parathion, malathion, and diazinon. Why? Certainly not because of its mode of action or risk to humans. It's an obvious attempt to mischaracterize and associate glyphosate with organophosphates in the minds of the public to stoke greater fear and uncertainty. Prominently identifying glyphosate as an organophosphorus compound may be technically correct, and not quite as disingenuous as what IARC did, but it's disingenuous nonetheless, and a common feature of activist research.

Must be exhausting at times, and frustrating to have to counter such ignorance. It would be one thing if it was just a matter of presenting the facts, but the anti-gly crowd knows all they have to do is plant a seed of doubt or fear, and it will grow on its own regardless of the facts.

Interest in ag chem goes back to his university days, which were not all that long ago. Was a major contributor to Team Seralini, including retracted work, which should be disqualifying in itself. Read his papers as lead author while with Seralini, pretty sad work. He is currently a consultant profiting from litigation against Bayer and also, since this past April, he is Lead Data Scientist at Buchinger Wilhelmi Clinic, a spa that promotes dubious claims for detox benefits of intermittent fasting first developed by Otto Buchinger 100 years ago. Germans certainly do seem to have an affinity for quackery.

Yup, still big load of nothing. Activist scientists have been churning out this stuff out for well over a decade. Look beyond the titles and actually read the papers and you find animal models, high exposures that are not relevant to actual human exposures, and conclusions that are not supported by the data.

It's a small study with tiny effect size, dubious subject selection methods, and unknown confounders. Add scientists with a history of anti-gly activism and no relevant credentials in epidemiology, and you wind up a big load of nothing.

Not to let the opportunity for even more quackery go to waste, she attempts to connect COVID19 and glyphosate. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-pseudoscience-environment/dr-stephanie-seneff-strikes-out-again-glyphosate-and-covid-19

Unfortunately, yes, same bad science, different day. There is always a journal willing to publish crap for a price. He is the epitome of an activist research scientist. Good example of research that always supports a predetermined narrative.

Anti-pesticide, anti-GMO, anti-glyphosate crowd is always saying "follow the money," but they never say that about charlatans like Seralini who is making a nice living milking the credulous and true believers. Much the same as anti-vaxxers like Mike Adams or Alex Jones hawking snake oil and supplements for COVID19. In Seralini's case, it began with ties to Sevene Pharma and homeopathic detox products. Scare people about toxins, and then sell them detox products. He is still at it.

Original cohort of 822 whittled down to 155 newborns. n=155 is a small study, and lots of opportunity to cherry pick subjects when starting with 822. High-risk pregnancies = preexisting health issues, lower socio-economic status, substance abuse, alcohol, smoking during pregnancy, which often have significant effects on their own. They made an attempt to adjust for confounders, but you can only do that for the confounders you know about, and they were limited by what they found in medical records. For instance, most significant correlation was between GLY concentration and less than high school education for mother. What is going on there besides just the fact mother had less than high school education? With such a small n and effect size, a few outliers is all it takes.

When there is a lot of noise in the data, pretty easy to pick out a signal that serves your purposes.

As was pointed out in peer review, all references support conclusion, in other words, they mined the literature for work that supported a preexisting narrative; they weren't trying to prove themselves wrong, they were trying to prove their hypothesis was right, which is not the way science is supposed to work.

"This study aims to establish baseline urine GLY levels in a high-risk and racially diverse pregnancy cohort and to assess the relationship between prenatal GLY exposure and fetal development and birth outcomes." They start off by saying there is a relationship = red flag.

Authors lack credentials in relevant fields; none are epidemiologists, and at least two, Mesnage and Antoniou have signed on to previous work by Seralini, which is a red flag all by itself.

Another red flag pops up when you review past, related work from authors and it always points in the same direction. That is virtually impossible if one does honest research, especially when dealing with very small effect sizes, underpowered designs (small number of subjects), and many confounders. That is the case here as well. Either its publication bias or they are putting their thumb on the scale.

In the end, those doing activist research know that most people don't read past the title or the headlines their work generates, all they have to do is dress up their reports so they can navigate past peer review and make it into some journal, any journal, even if they have to pay for it. Flawed peer review process and predatory journals are a whole other can of worms.

I've been reading papers like this ever since the original Seralini report, and it has become easy to spot activist research. But then, researchers like that don't care, they are just running headline mills, nothing more.