Case in point:

BP, for example, puts $1.3 billion to $1.6 billion a year into alternative energy projects. That’s about 1 percent of the company’s total $20 billion investment this year in future business prospects.*

I was going to beat up on the greenpeace blog where I read this sentence, but on a closer rereading I realized it was actually a direct quote from this article on the New York Times website. Come on people, 1% is easy, all you do is move the decimal place, you don’t even have to divide or multiply. Now there could be some obscure accounting reason that regular math doesn’t apply here, but if so it should have been mentioned and it wasn’t.

Now I don’t know if this is sloppy journalism or a typo or what, but at least three people (the author of the piece, the editor at the new york times, and the greenpeace press officer to copied and pasted 1.5 sentences of the article including that fundamentally impossible statistic) looked at it and didn’t realize that something was obviously wrong.

Typos can happen to anyone (I make plenty of them myself), but one this obvious shouldn’t be able to make it past three sets of eyes without someone catching it.

For the record I’m not trying to defend the publicity campaigns of oil companies here. (If you feel your blood pressure is too low I recommend watching one of the “We Call It Life” ads about carbon dioxide.)

*1.3 to 1.6  billion dollars is clearly not 1% of 20 billion. It’s 6.5% or 8% respectively. Not 2 + 2 = 5 but 2 + 2 = 32 and apparently 26 at the same time

Refuting every post across the web that makes false claims about agriculture, genetics, or plant biology would be, firstly impossible, and secondly, incredibly tedious. Once a piece of misinformation escapes into the wild it is far harder to call back than the horrible trans-genes of anti-GMO activists nightmares. A false idea will spread far faster among those who want to believe than it can be refuted (at length and in detail) by those who know better.

But this morning (or afternoon, or evening, or dead of night), I came across a wonderful example of what I believe has the potential to be an entirely new false fact that could float around the web, and obscure corners of the public consciousness for years to come (or be forgotten in a week, it’s hard to pick which facts will escape and thrive in the wild until they actually have.)

Consider this article posted on Greenpeace’s website, provokatively titled “US court ruling on GMO rice affirms danger of Bayer crops”.

As a person (for the purposes of this example) already convinced of the dangers of GMOs, I see this headline and think: “A-ha! I always knew those evil genetically modified crops were a disaster waiting to happen!” And I click through to read about the details.

The article I find covers a number of subjects:

• Bayer recently lost a court case in the US, two Missouri farmers were awarded two million dollars (total, not each), because the discovery of a variety of genetically modified rice developed by Bayer in the food supply has reduced foreign demand for US rice, driving down the price of rice for US farmers*. Lower prices  = smaller profits (or bigger losses), and so the farmers sued Bayer and a jury found that Bayer was at fault.
• In the Philippines (and presumably a bunch of other countries) Bayer has filed to get their variety of rice approved for human consumption. Once it’s approved, imports of rice from the US can resume, without any special testing. Increased exports of rice bring up prices back up for US rice farmers.
• Greenpeace opposes the approval of Bayer’s rice in the Philippines.
• Feel free to point out in the comments section any other points from the article that I skipped over

Notice anything missing from the story … like any mention of a US court ruling that the rice was dangerous as stated in the headline? I did, but I was reading the article looking for it, because I don’t think Bayer’s crops ARE dangerous and wanted to see what reasoning a judge (or judges) had used to reach the opposite conclusion. And it wasn’t in there.

If I’d already been convinced GMOs weren’t safe I very much doubt I would have noticed the article didn’t actually address the issue raised in the title. Instead I would have read an article about the evils of GMOs, and the concept, put forward by the title (that even the american judicial system agreed with me) might have stuck in my head. In future conversations with like-minded people I’d repeat it as fact, and they, also excited to hear that the courts were on their sides would repeat it to their friends, with details, if any were included, mutating with every retelling**, evolving and spreading faster than any DNA sequence ever could.

Depending on how many people read the original story, how talkative they are, and if the (false) fact sounds interesting enough to pass on, in a day or two anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of people could hear from someone they trust that courts have ruled that GMOs are dangerous. It could become one of the myths (like the idea that modern corn in sterile as a result of genetic engineering, when terminator technology has NEVER been used commercially) that people like me must spend time and effort refuting over and over and over again.

An article with such a big, yet not immediately obvious, disconnect between what the title claims and what the story says is either the result of incompetence or intentional dishonesty, and either way it’s an great example of why I don’t take Greenpeace seriously anymore. Intelligent people can disagree and learn from discussion why they disagree. On the other hand, productive discussion is NOT possible with people who substitute tricks and misinformation for real data and logic.

*This was a case about whether Bayer should be liable for the harm caused by reduced prices for rice. No one was arguing the rice truly wasn’t safe for human consumption.

**If you have ever played the game of telephone as a child, where a message is whispered from one child to the second who whispers it to a third and so on, you know how quickly ideas can be misunderstood and distorted as they’re repeated from one person to another.

Steve Savage has the conversation with a Greenpeace campaigner I’ve always wanted to have with the people who can constantly be found soliciting money for similar organizations on my walk to work.

Steve’s post reminded me of this awesome (and freely available article) from Plant Physiology: Forbidden Fruit: Transgenic Papaya in Thailand* which is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in genetic engineering, the developing world, and the role of NGOs like Greenpeace.

I’m considering making this a regular feature. I often read cool articles, but it feels weird to put up a post that just says “go read this” when I don’t have anything of my own to add. Anyway, the test of whether this will be a feature or a fluke will be if I remember to post another one in a week.

*I know I’d previously mentioned this in my post on virus-resistant papayas, but I think there are at least several new readers since then and I’ve been dismayed to find out how little publicity this article seems to have received when it first came out.

Greenpeace on Friday called on the International Rice Research Institute to abandon its genetic engineering program as the environmental activist group offers marker assisted breeding as a safe alternative to bioengineering.

Source.

Dear Greenpeace,

I would like to call upon you to abandon your campaign against genetic engineering and offer up an alternative priority your organization could focus on to the greater benefit of the world we all share: Fighting man-made global warming.

-James

Now you could argue greenpeace already is opposed to global warming. And you’d be right. They are. I guess my offering it to them looks pretty stupid doesn’t it?

The same could be said of greenpeace offering marker assisted selection to the plant breeding community that pioneered the technique and is taking full advantage of it, and has been for years in both the private and public sectors. Case in point:

Sub1 rice is much less damaged by flooding, a risk in many rice producing areas, such as Bangladesh. The trait was first prototyped using genetic engineering, and after it had demonstrated its effectiveness, the long hard work of bringing the gene into cultivated rice lines (using marker assisted breeding) began. Now the trait has been freely released to farmers  If you haven’t seen the video of the difference the sub1 trait makes in a flooded rice field, check it out.

Marker assisted breeding is very important for crop improvement. As things stand today, I’d say its contribution to feeding the world is substantially greater than genetic engineering. Make no mistake, genetic engineering has done some cool things, but marker assisted breeding is increasing yields, resistance to draught, pests, and disease every single year!

Marker assisted breeding and genetic engineering are two different tools in the toolbox of plant scientists and plant breeders. There are problems that call for a hammer, and others that call for a screwdriver. You wouldn’t tell someone to stop using a screwdriver to screw in screws and offer to let them a hammer instead. If you do, don’t expect to be taken that seriously. And if the hammer you offer to let them use is one you just took out of their own toolbox…