The cover story of this week's Business Week is titled "The organic myth: As it goes mass market, the organic food business is failing to stay true to its ideals." In Berkeley, where every action is political, organic food is about more than just eating food without pesticides. It's also about sticking it to large megacorporations by buying food from small family farms, instead. The problem is that the economics of true organic farming and the economics of spreading organic food to the entire nation are mutually exclusive, resulting in food being technically "organic" while not being grown on small family farms:

Everyone agrees on the basic definition of organic: food grown without the assistance of man-made chemicals. Four years ago, under pressure from critics fretting that the term "organic" was being misused, the U.S. Agriculture Dept. issued rules. To be certified as organic, companies must eschew most pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers, bioengineering, and radiation. But for purists, the philosophy also requires farmers to treat their people and livestock with respect and, ideally, to sell small batches of what they produce locally so as to avoid burning fossil fuels to transport them. The USDA rules don't fully address these concerns.

Hence the organic paradox: The movement's adherents have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but success has imperiled their ideals. It simply isn't clear that organic food production can be replicated on a mass scale. For Hirshberg, who set out to "change the way Kraft, Monsanto, and everybody else does business," the movement is shedding its innocence. "Organic is growing up."

I'm curious to know how many of those people who eat organic for the political implications are aware that "organic" has ceased to be a political movement. Large factory farms are making most of your organic food. As I've written before, there is some question as to whether or not organic food is "better" for you than in-organic food. What isn't in question is that organic food is more expensive and requires more land to produce than "regular" food. Most of the nation's "organic" produce is made by a single company on giant farms in California, Arizona, and Mexico.

A last tidbit: food quality is in the mind of the beholder. In Ohio, brown eggs are cheaper than white eggs because people don't want to buy eggs that aren't white. They perceive brown eggs as somehow not as good as white eggs, because they grew up with white eggs. The only difference, however, is the breed of the chicken laying the eggs. In California, brown eggs are more expensive than white eggs because they're seen as somehow more "gourmet" than plain old workaday white eggs.

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Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, is a vocal critic of global warming. But not in the way you might think.

People like Rush Limbaugh and the late Dixy Lee Ray -- from whom Limbaugh got most of his "facts" about global warming -- have been at the forefront of saying that there's no such thing as global warming and we shouldn't worry about it. On the other side is, most recently, former vice president Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth suggests that global warming is happening, humans are causing it, and it's a problem right now.

Lindzen offers a more nuanced position: one which doesn't lambast liberals for believing in global warming, but also one in which he doesn't outright deny the existence of global warming, either.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Lindzen criticizes Gore and other liberals for suggesting that there is a "consensus" on the issue of global warming. His op-ed goes on to provide evidence for reasons why global warming either isn't being caused by humans or isn't as dire a threat as we think:

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.

I like Lindzen's characterization of Gore's position as one of "shrill alarmism." Rarely, if ever, do scientists make assertions that seem to be written in stone. Gore would have us believe that scientists do think this way, and they think this way about global warming. To the contrary, scientists always add a caveat or an asterisk to their conclusions, noting that their particular conclusions are based on their observations in a particular instance.

But unlike other critics of global warming (who deny both the observations and conclusions of global warming proponents), Lindzen accepts several findings of fact made by global warming proponents: that worldwide mean temperatures have increased by one degree Fahrenheit over the last century; that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen; that carbon dioxide should theoretically lead to increased temperatures. But, he says, these data do not necessarily mean that humans have caused these changes, nor that the changes are inherently bad:

Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.

And what about that oft-cited Science survey, which found that 913 of 928 articles found using the key words "global climate change" came out in favor of human-caused global warming? Turns out that study was loaded to begin with.

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.

On both sides, we have policymakers and their co-horts misrepresenting facts about the issue. Why? Because the issue isn't as black-and-white as we may think. But policymakers cannot make policy based on nuance. In order to create laws that impact the nation and the planet, we need to have an overwhelming preponderance of evidence. In the case of global warming, that doesn't exist; so, people on both sides misrepresent facts and conclusions in an effort to make the case for their side so clear-cut that policymakers would have no choice but to support it.

But the facts don't support that. Sure, Earth's temperature has risen by one degree over the last hundred years -- but why? Some attribute it, by default, to human beings. Others suggest it is probably part of a natural process of warming and cooling. Temperatures worldwide "[rose] significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remain[ed] essentially flat since 1998," according to Lindzen. Scientists in the 1970s actually thought we were on the verge of another Ice Age because temperatures at that time were going down.

Why is it so hard for some to believe that this warming is part of a natural process? We know that Earth goes through such processes. During the Pax Romana, it was so warm in Europe that grapes could be grown for wine in England. We know this from historical documents and artifacts. By the 5th century AD, it became much colder in Europe, so much so that the Rhone River -- Rome's northern border -- froze over one winter, allowing barbarians to enter and begin the process of destroying the Roman Empire. Why is it so hard to believe that we're going through a warming cycle now?

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Last week, researchers at the University of Saskatchewan's Neuropsychiatry Research Unit reported that rats that were given a compound called HU-210, a synthetic cannabinoid 100 times more powerful than THC, experienced generation of new brain cells in their hippocampuses. The finding was reported this month in the magazine Nature and will be published in November in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Today, a study from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs reveals that marijuana smoke may not cause lung cancer as tobacco smoke does:

The difference rests in the often opposing actions of the nicotine in tobacco and the active ingredient, THC, in marijuana, says Dr. Robert Melamede of the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs.

He reviewed the scientific evidence supporting this contention in a recent issue of Harm Reduction Journal.

Whereas nicotine has several effects that promote lung and other types of cancer, THC acts in ways that counter the cancer-causing chemicals in marijuana smoke, Melamede explained in an interview with Reuters Health.

"THC turns down the carcinogenic potential," he said.

For example, lab research indicates that nicotine activates a body enzyme that converts certain chemicals in both tobacco and marijuana smoke into cancer-promoting form. In contrast, studies in mice suggest that THC blocks this enzyme activity.

Okay, so maybe marijuana isn't good for you. But alcohol and tobacco are worse for you from a health standpoint than marijuana. Why are they legal? They got in the door first. Then, when we became Puritans, alcohol and tobacco were already there, and so we said, "Okay, you can stay, but every other drug has to leave!"

Marijuana is a Schedule I controlled substance, according to the DEA. ("Schedule I" just means that, according to the Controlled Substances Act, a drug has a "high potential for abuse" and "has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States." Cf. 21 U.S.C. 812.) Also listed in Schedule I are heroin, GHB (the "date rape" drug), LSD, mescaline, and peyote. Let's get serious, kids. Marijuana is lumped into the same category as heroin, even though there is no such thing as a physical addiction to marijauana and there has never been a substantiated case of a marijuana overdose. It just doesn't happen. It can't happen. Marijuana is far safer for your body than alcohol, and yet marijuana is the subject of restrictions that are not equal to the dangers it causes.

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