On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 3:04 AM Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
> *It's not morality, but the precautionary principle in action.* Every single year you delay doing this you will be condemning 725,000 people to die from malaria and other diseases and incapacitate hundreds of millions more for weeks at a time. This is caution? > > > *I> t's one thing to show this works within a lab. But causing the > extinction of a species in an ecosystem can cause an avalanche of knockon > effects, which generally speaking, cannot be tested for in the lab.* I can't claim there is zero risk if we do this, there is just no way we can live in a zero risk world. So we must use judgement. I know of two facts that you can use to make your judgement: 1) If you decide to do this there is a possibility some species of birds that eat mosquitoes might be harmed. 2) If you decide not to do this there is a certainty you will be sentencing 725,000 people to die each and every year. I believe the rational judgement that needs to be made in this case is obvious. > > > *I would be in favour of a moratorium until such time as the ecosystem is > studied in detail, and detailed simulation models of the ecosystem run.* That day will never ever come! There will never come a time when self proclaimed protectors of the environment will say "OK enough simulations have been done and you've convinced me, lets do it" just as the will never be a day when the ESP fans will say " I'm seen enough well conducted studies with negative results to convince me that ESP is not worth pursuing further and we should move on to studying something new with more potential to find something interesting". Environmentalists and ESP fans will ALWAYS demand just one more study before moving on. > > *Let's not go into this blind as so often we've done before - eg the story > of the release of the rabbit calixi virus in Australia.* > If that virus saved 725,000 people from death every year I'd call it an enormous triumph regardless of the harm it caused to pet rabbits in Australia. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
