For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath to death.

Not for everyone and not for every situation, but ...

If you get a propane torch - the full sized ones that attach to a 5gal. propane tank - you can very quickly point-and-shoot a large area with similar effort expended to walking around spraying a liquid.

We have a 2500sf veranda made of decomposed granite and it takes about four man-hours to fully clear it of all creepers and flat broadleafs and all the other things that are impossible to pull by hand ... and since it kills them you're clear for the season ...

  "The only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level"
  "Glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures"
  "Glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet"
  "The Meeting concluded that it was not necessary to establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of its low acute toxicity"

Tptacek in 2018:

  "There are no credible studies indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals. Meanwhile, many of the herbicides that glyphosate displace, plenty of which remain in use, are known human carcinogens. The most widely reported declaration of glyphosate's carcinogenicity, by IARC, was disavowed by the WHO, IARC's parent organization...The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans"

When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate, ten prominent physicians wrote a letter to Columbia University in demanding his removal from the faculty for an "egregious lack of integrity" and for his "disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine." He replied "I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves" and provides "multiple points of view, including mine, which is offered without conflict of interest."

https://www.agrimarketing.com/ss.php?id=95305

Here is Reuters with a 3000-word Special Inverstigative Report filed under "Glyphosate Battle" carrying water for Monsanto, after IARC declared the chemical 2A (probably carcinogenic):

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/who-iarc...

If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.

Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.

Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.

Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.

Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegopodium_podagraria

"The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-control products from a variety of companies for decades."

"We have been very transparent about the new formulation of Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells glyphosate-based Roundup products – which are also EPA-approved – some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold. "

Was that the retracted study or a different one?

Instead, just spray each weed a little bit, right above where the leaves connect to the stem.

Anything there will die, and nothing will grow again for a long time. Although, it does spring back to life eventually. Usually once a year is sufficient.

Doesn't the vinegar act pretty quickly? Keep the dog inside that afternoon, then hose it down in the morning.

Wheat, soy, lentils, ...

> authors didn’t fully disclose their ties to Monsanto

and

> He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.

Those bodies can cause chronic inflammation and the strange autoimmune disorders we see rising over time. Note that some brands like Cheerios (which don't sell an organic equivalent) can contain 700-800 ppb of glyphosate, well over the 160 ppb limit recommend for children by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).

US wheat and other crops seem to have become harder to digest for some people due to genetic tampering. They contains substances borrowed from other species to reduce pest damage, which the body has little or no experience with, which may trigger various reactions (this has not been studied enough to be proven yet).

All of these effects from gut toxicity could lead to ailments like obesity, malnourishment, cardiovascular disease, maybe even cancer. This is why I worry that GLP-1 agonists may be masking symptoms, rather than healing the underlying causes of metabolic syndrome that have been increasing over time.

Many people have chosen to buy organic non-GMO wheat from other countries for this reason. I believe this is partially why the Trump administration imposed a 107% tariff on Italian wheat for example, to protect US agribusiness.

Before you jump on me for this being a conspiracy theory, note that I got these answers from AI and so will you.

My personal, anecdotal experience with this was living with leaky gut symptoms for 5 years after a severe burnout in 2019 from (work) stress, which may have been triggered by food poisoning. I also had extremely high cortisol which disrupted everything else. So I got to the point where my meals were reduced to stuff like green bananas, trying everything I could to heal my gut but failing, until I finally snapped out of my denial and sought medical attention.

For anyone reading this: if holistic approaches don't fix it within say 6 weeks to 6 months, they aren't going to, and you may need medication for a time to get your body out of dysbiosis. But you can definitely recover and return to a normal life like I did, by the grace of God the universe and everything.

[1] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/12/03/er-zijn-richtlijnen-ove... or https://archive.is/rjXrR

[2] Ik heb Gary Williams, de enige van de drie auteurs die nog leeft, drie e-mails gestuurd. Daar heeft hij nooit op gereageerd. Op een gegeven moment houdt het op, hè?

I let them grow. Dandelions are harmless.

How would you like me to come and pompously shit all over something you enjoy?

I don't know why you think bringing me into this discussion is useful. If you were thinking that some regulatory agency made decisions based on the persuasiveness of my HN comments, probably no.

I'm generally comfortable being on the other side of whatever Mehmet Oz is talking about.

Has he retracted his claim that “raspberry ketones” are a miracle for burning fat in a jar?

Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and think those are the people to follow.

People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the people (or process in this matter) who are constantly checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.

Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn’t allow glyphosates because their political system requires stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.

The IARC says the 2A designation was "based on “limited” evidence of cancer in humans (from real-world exposures that actually occurred) and “sufficient” evidence of cancer in experimental animals (from studies of “pure” glyphosatese"*

* https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/QA_Glyph...

It actually might be the case and it still can be damaging to people by affecting the gut microbiome:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

I haven't kept up with research. Do you have any actual science showing that glyphosate is a carcinogen?

Retraction of a paper doesn't automatically mean the opposite is true. It doesn't make Dr. Oz's methods right.

Using the retraction of a paper to elevate a known pseudoscience pusher who constantly makes claims without scientific basis is intellectually dishonest. It's a common tactic among pseudoscience and alternative medicine peddlers who think that any loss for the other side is validation for their beliefs.

> Trust the science.

Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.

> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...

Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.

> It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.

It is a non-selective herbicide, but it's not a systemic herbicide. It functions by interfering with photosynthesis, but since it is minimally absorbed via root systems, it must be applied directly to the foilage. You can spray it on the ground around a plant and that plant will happily ignore it. This is why the instructions are explicit about applying directly to the foilage during sunny days when the wind is light.

As a homeowner, I loved glyphosate. It was cheap, simple, effective, and could be applied in a selective manner. It's not the best choice for getting rid of broadleaf weeds in a lawn, but I used it all the time in my gardens to kill weeds and keep the bermudagrasses out.

Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.

Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.

Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).

Terrible scheme.

So how do we know the assessments from organizations like the WHO weren't also based on this same faulty and fraudulent 'science' that was, at the time, widely accepted in academia? We would have to logically assume that any scientific conclusions based on fraudulent scientific studies and false data can not be provably true.

Your assertion relies on circular logic.

That is so vague it can apply to everything. Probably drinking a glass of water affects the gut microbiome.

Yours is so much more.. tender though. Poor dandelions, but at least you made it personal!

https://www.rounduppro.com/products/roundup-promax-herbicide...

From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)

If the EU were to officially ban glyphosate, their food supply would increase in quality as a result, since these worse pesticides are not available.

The US needs to catch up. Eliminating glyphosate is not a one-shot kill for human health and never meant to imply that

Kind of crazy that this isn't just obvious to everybody.

Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.

I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.

This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.

Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.

The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.

Unrelated:

I really enjoy "Security, Cryptography, Whatever".

I think the point about the microbiome is well taken, for what it's worth. It's a good response to "humans lack a shikemic acid pathway, which is where glyphosate is active".

NHL odds ratio 2.26: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18623080/

Positive trend of NHL risk with exposure: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12937207/

7x risk of follicular lymphoma in those ever exposed: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8082925/

>

> Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.

He was obviously poking fun at people who say "trust the science" when what they really mean is "trust these scientits" or, even better, "trust this one study".

Undoubtedly "trust the science" is little more than an appeal to authority when used in a casual debate, not some appeal to skepticism, peer review and testability.

but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.

The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.

We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?

Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.

But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.

Some weeds can be damaging to property, trees, sidewalks, etc. or are poisonous.

It's not always about being annoyed by dandelions in an otherwise overly fussed over sterile lawn environment.

Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass

I dislike gardening and enjoy my apartment!

I do think that Thompson and Kirk are finally opening some eyes to the possibilities, on both sides.

Apparently corporations can spin up subsidiaries that are legally siloed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

I'm also a fan of glyphosphate. Nothing else works nearly as well. People who are critical of "chemicals" to control weeds have never had to deal with a weedy pavement before.

I just use roundup, honestly. It works.

Even when supposedly honest scientists publish, it's often wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi...

Though I didn't prescribe a test. I set a low bar of evidence that we should at least pass before we Kony up over our bowl of Cheerios.

Less is more when it comes to chemicals, which is why reasonable uses of glyphosate seems to be the best we have come up with so far as a species - regardless of abuses of the chemical.

It’s probably the most studied herbicide on the planet at this point with very little evidence that it causes human health issues when used as intended. Doesn’t mean it’s zero risk, but we also feed an incredible number of people off a very small amount of landmass at this point in history.

But a broken clock isn't a reliable indicator of time: You don't know when it's right unless you have another, known-good indicator — in which case just use that other one.

tl;dr targeted herbicide is a much less evolutionarily selected-for offense, as opposed to hand cultivation which mimics attacks plants have evolved to survive for eons

Proving everyone else wrong is quite the incentive for a researcher. To me it's sound unlikely that no one else would jump on the opportunity of fame for proving that it's actually harmful. Money is something but that's not the primary motivator of researchers, otherwise they would be doing way more lucrative work with their intelligence.

Also if you mow your grass drastically shorter or you let it grow for a long time before mowing, do not fail to fertilize it from above right or soon after, start aggressively plucking the leaves of weeds (or other selective methods of fighting them) for a few weeks and (optimally, but highly recommended) verticulate it no sooner than 1 week after cutting. Also time it well to grant your lawn at least 3 weeks of ideal growing weather and climate (It won't die because of a week or two of awful weather, but you'll have A LOT more work fighting weeds ahead of yourself).

Sample size: 867 cases. 2.2% exposed. Rounds to being 19 of those were exposed. How can they compute odds ratios like that with such a small sample?

Here is a list of plants that have glyphosate tolerant varieties: soybeans, alfalfa, corn, canola, sugar beets, and cotton. There is no glyphosate tolerant wheat plant.

These plants are used to make ethanol, sugar, soy animal feed, canola oil, cotton fabric, and feed corn. Humans consume canola oil and sugar, both of which are refined in a distillation process. Possibly some of the corn ends up as cornmeal or corn flour. All of the soy and alfalfa are sold as animal feed.

I’m not afraid of glyphosate or microplastics until the evidence shows otherwise.

Edit: I am out of replies, I hadn’t considered either of those routes for glyphosate to enter the human food supply. The concentration of glyphosate in a cow that eats feed grown with glyphosate has to be much more concentrated as well. Thanks for replying, my apologies for making a bad assumption.

Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face, would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead. Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that stood to profit from the right decision there!

You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree with me about this", expect pushback.

Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:

> Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.

Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.

And that argument was a fallacy in itself. The retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying that glyphosate is dangerous, that it causes cancer, or that Dr. Oz was right.

These threads are frustrating because a small number of people are trying to share real papers and talk about the subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't interested in discussing science at all. They've made up their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push that narrative regardless of what the content of the linked article actually says.

e.g.

     Rotenone Mouse Oral gavage ↓ Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio, ↑ Rikenellaceae and Allobaculum; ↓ Bifidobacterium in both the caecal mucosa-associated and luminal microbiota community structure [169]

That said, just because a product comes from a big company doesn't mean it's bad either. I want to see independent research.

There definitely needs to be more nuance to the phrase in the general case. Eg: “trust established science” Let’s be honest though, it’s a lack of nuance in some world views that need science as an authority the most.

Even if you do successfully get it out, it really is going to be more work than painting a weed killer on them.

There needs to be some kind of evaluation of products being safe to use before they're wildly used and even sprayed onto food.

For studies to prove that there is harm, there typically needs to be widespread use of it to make it easier to use population studies and certainly long-term studies. Simply relying on "there's no definitive proof that it's harmful to humans when used in a specific way" is naive and a sure-fire way to get large corporations to get away with harming people in the name of profits.

I looked up the product you mentioned and you're right -- it does look like deodorant! It's a gel that contains glyphosate and isopropylamine salt. Neat!

I didn’t say glyphosate definitively causes cancer, I didn’t say Dr. Oz was right, and I’m certainly not arguing that 'all chemicals are bad.' My point was about the credibility of the evidence around glyphosate -- specifically the ghostwritten papers, the regulatory capture, the marketing practices and how that stuff shaped industry and academic attitudes.

That’s a critique of how scientific consensus gets constructed and how it trickles down to sites like HN. It is absolutely not some anti-chemical crusade like you're making it out to be.

If you want to disagree with that argument that would be great but engage with what I actually said, not this Dr. Oz strawman.

Maybe I'm a little sensitive to this since I've rotated HN screen names a couple times after someone tried to track me down off-site to argue a (rather benign) comment I made about something.

In all these discussions, if I could ask for one more data point to be pulled into the context, it's what the other herbicides look like (my understanding: much worse). I think these discussions look different when it's "late 20th century SOTA agriculture writ large vs. modern ideal agriculture with no chemical supplementation" than when it's "Monsanto vs. the world".

A very annoying part of the backstory of the "Monsanto vs. the world" framing are people who care about glyphosate not because they have very fine-grained preferences about specific herbicide risks (glyphosate is probably the only herbicide many of these people know by name), but rather because of glyphosate's relevance to genetically modified crops. I'm automatically allergic to bank-shot appeals to the naturalist fallacy; GM crops are likely to save millions of lives globally.

In mice models, Alzheimer’s is transferrable via gut microbiota. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02216-7?fromPaywa...).

So to say it messes with the gut is no small thing.

> Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege [0]

> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

> Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.

> Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Edit: it was discussed here a few days ago [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817

I agree but if they're flat earthers they've already rejected established science, so what's that appeal to authority going to do?

This is why "trust the science" is so memeable, it's a lazy appeal to authority the other party has already told you they don't trust and yet people are shocked when this argument doesn't work.

Trust the science was a shorthand for “you, or even I, may not understand this thing in perfect detail, but the people working on it do, and they GENERALLY aren’t making catastrophic mistakes that you can detect as an amateur. And when these people collectively stand behind a conclusion the odds of it being completely wrong are exceptionally low. We don’t have a more accurate alternative regardless. Please stop JAQing off about it”

But writing all of that over and over again is annoying. And a lot of “”””critical thinkers”””” can’t be bothered to read it. So the shorthand emerges. Sometimes used incorrectly? Definitely.

Wrong.

See, e.g., https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-pesticides/pe...

“Pesticides are used in agriculture to protect crops from insects, fungi, weeds, and other pests.”

Personally, I suspect that many people who present as wheat/gluten sensitive may in fact be reacting to the herbicides present in the wheat.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

And glyphosate is also used for burndown and/or dessication on a number of non-glyphosate tolerant crops such as wheat, oats, beans, potatoes, etc that go directly to the grocery store

Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?

Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.

> "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an actionor policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans",unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence"

That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including farmers, scientists, regulators, journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.

My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but one example of that. So the question isn't about your personal motives but how you came to believe what you believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain from you believing those things and expressing them on social media.

Sadly: no consumer model yet.

A few of them seem to be pretty active in GrapheneOS related threads here. strcat for example.

It's not necessary, but it probably lets you use a little less vinegar, so it's probably worthwhile. I don't add soap, I just spray straight 30% (agricultural) vinegar in the small set of areas where a torch would be dangerous.

Dried vinegar does not irritate dogs. They will avoid the area while it smells like pickles.

A better chemist than I will hopefully corroborate this, but I think that the strength of smell is directly correlated to the reactivity of the acid. So when the smell is mild (i.e. near the level of household vinegar (5%)), the risk to skin and mucous membranes is low-to-zero.

And the basic reason to think glyphosphates are safe is the attack mechanism doesn't apply to our metabolism and environmental persistence was believed to be very short. (Turns out there are edge cases in the latter.) And it still comes down to how does it compare to the natural risk?

Do you know of any study that is able to detect glyphosate in the flour or end product ? If they can't find it, it's probably a nothingburger.

No it isn't.

That doesn't square with the fact that Monsanto thought it worthwhile to commit scientific fraud to push the narrative that glyphosate is safe, in a scientific paper published the same year that the patent expired.

But I'm certain that "spray it everywhere for 30 years and see if people die" is not the way.

Bypassing the proper protocols, publishing dishonest research, is the issue under discussion today. Glyphosate might be safe, or safe enough. Proper research could reveal more subtle effects than mortality numbers.

Your other points are valid, but would you advocate for dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?

Assuming you would not, then I think you'd agree that there should be repercussions. Monsanto is not Uber for agriculture.

Given that technological improvements in farming are the only reason we haven't all starved to death and that society continues to grow while the amount of farmland stays the same I oppose anything that might impede our ability to produce food.

Did you know that 80% of the nitrogen in human tissues now originated with the Haber-Bosch process? If we were still waiting around for someone to prove that Haber-Bosch, or Ammonia in general, couldn't possibly harm humans then most humans would have long ago starved to death or never have been born.

I very specifically did not say that PP analyses were dead on arrival, or that problems with PP thinking were dispositive. I said rather that it is not enough to simply invoke the PP in policy debates; that rhetorical habit has bad outcomes. Again: the idea is not that "precaution" is bad. It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default --- you have to make that argument on the merits.

There's a good Cass Sunstein thing about the PP if you're interested in understanding critiques of it:

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

/s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

In the real world you should not be looking at the risk of X. Rather, you should be looking at where X stands amongst the competing options.

Nuclear power is an extreme example of this going wrong. The US effectively legislated it out of existence by decreeing that reactors should be as safe as reasonably possible. The problem is "reasonably" is fundamentally fluid. In theory at least you can always make things safer by throwing more safety systems at it. And if nuclear power is cheap enough you can afford to throw more safety systems at it. Thus nuclear power is by definition too expensive. And that's before the NIMBYs abuse the regulatory system to drive the costs way up.

Look at the reality: Depending on your yardstick nuclear is either safer than any other large scale power source, or nearly as safe as anything else and far safer than where most of our power comes from.

(The yardstick problem comes down to Fukushima. That's more than half of the "nuclear power" deaths right there--entirely because the politicians messed with things. Listen to the engineers, there would have been an expected death toll of zero. But nuclear power is blamed for the political decisions that killed hundreds.

And the yardstick comes down to a dam failure in China--ascribe the deaths from their hydro power dam failure to hydro and it's out of the running.)

But in the real world natural gas has about 10x the risk of nuclear before looking at climate effects. And oil has about 10x the risk of natural gas, plus a bit more in climate effects (a greater percentage of an oil molecule is carbon.) And coal has about 10x the risk of oil, plus considerably more climate effects.

We don't have the power, civilization (and virtually everyone in it) dies. The plants must run, the question is what runs them. Society would be safest if we took the existing rulebook and threw it in the trash can, replace it with a standard that expects a given risk per terawatt-hour, it's the job of the regulators to devise rules that accomplish this and any company is allowed to present evidence that a different approach is better. (If we focus less on risk X and more on risk Y we can get more safety for less cost.)

That's at least half a million American deaths in the last three decades on the altar of the precautionary principle.

Glyphosate is already out there.

We have large papers that look into occupational and dietary exposures of real world cohorts, and they don't converge on much of anything that should make us concerned about our dietary exposure.

Yet you have some sort of "testing protocol" in mind that would somehow be more robust than the analyses already being done on real world populations that were inconclusive?

At least pitch a rough idea of what these experiments look like.

Fair, the word pesticide is technically accurate - simply not used where I am from to describe herbicides.

> would you advocate for dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?

I don't see where anyone is advocating this. I see a lot of attacks against the most tested and studied herbicide on the planet - many such studies and tests set about with a pre-determined agenda (by either side). If there was strong evidence of this chemical being widespread harmful to human health, I feel it'd have come out by now.

What it means is that instead of using glysophate, agriculture simply switches to less tested and newer chemicals that may end up actually being more harmful. Certainly more expensive. Using nothing is not an option for modern agriculture if we're going to feed the number of humans on the planet.

There are plenty of "bad actors" in this field (no pun intended) - but if used as directed and in conjunction with GMO crops engineered to reduce herbicide applications it's likely one of the best ag inventions of our lifetime. Why so many people are willing to die on this hill is beyond me. I see otherwise very intelligent people in my life who as they have aged went down the youtube conspiracy theory rabbit hole and now preach about how it's the devil.

If Monsanto (or others) conducted research or scientific fraud they should absolutely be punished for it. To be blunt - especially the scientists - since it is absolutely deleterious to public trust.

Not quite - it is true that you cannot assign a lower risk to the status quo by default, but the burden of proof is on the new intervention to prove that it's safe, not on detractors to prove that it isn't.

In other words, if the world is functioning today, you need to prove that your intervention won't cause ruin, no matter how small the chance or how big the upside.

https://www.epa.gov/minimum-risk-pesticides/what-pesticide

I'm just particularly bothered by sketchy research on the edges of contentious public health issues.

I hope this issue is litigated to conclusion, and if Monsanto is found to have pushed fraudulent research for their own benefit, I hope regulatory agencies around the world come down hard, even if the net effect on human health is small or zero. There's just no place for that kind of shite any more.

If you tell me that EPA doesn't have a better process than "dunno, seems OK", then I'll humbly defer.

Not holding EPA up as infallible, just asserting that intentionally-deceptive research should not be tolerated -- and should demand a higher degree of skepticism of other research from the same entities or with the same beneficiaries.

I don't see why you're focussing on the manufacturing process rather than the products (final product and waste produced) although there are issues with the Haber process (e.g. high energy use and dumping nitrogen which can produce algal blooms).

There is a lot of distance between "we must never use any artificial process that hasn't been tested for x years" and "we must use every means of improving agricultural yields even if it means poisoning our children etc".

I feel like you're being disingenuous and not really evaluating whether poisonous chemicals should require a level of safety testing or not.

This is what I've come to expect from discussion on things like glyphosate, cholesterol, seed oils, etc.

You supposedly are raising an issue, yet you can't even squeak out the smallest concrete claim.

You're "in the field" enough to claim they didn't do the proper "testing protocols", but when simply asked what you mean by that or how it's different from the existing research, you're so "out of the field" that you can't even elaborate on the words you just used -- that's a task for the experts.

"The doses of glyphosate that produce these neurotoxic effects vary widely but are lower than the limits set by regulatory agencies. Although there are important discrepancies between the analyzed findings, it is unequivocal that exposure to glyphosate produces important alterations in the structure and function of the nervous system of humans, rodents, fish, and invertebrates."

Costas-Ferreira C, Durán R, Faro LRF. Toxic Effects of Glyphosate on the Nervous System: A Systematic Review. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2022; 23(9):4605. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms23094605

"Today, a growing body of literature shows in vitro, in vivo, and epidemiological evidence for the toxicity of glyphosate across animal species."

Rachel Lacroix, Deborah M Kurrasch, Glyphosate toxicity: in vivo, in vitro, and epidemiological evidence, Toxicological Sciences, Volume 192, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 131–140, https://doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfad018

"Utilizing shotgun metagenomic sequencing of fecal samples from C57BL/6 J mice, we show that glyphosate exposure at doses approximating the U.S. ADI significantly impacts gut microbiota composition. These gut microbial alterations were associated with effects on gut homeostasis characterized by increased proinflammatory CD4+IL17A+ T cells and Lipocalin-2, a known marker of intestinal inflammation."

Peter C. Lehman, Nicole Cady, Sudeep Ghimire, Shailesh K. Shahi, Rachel L. Shrode, Hans-Joachim Lehmler, Ashutosh K. Mangalam, Low-dose glyphosate exposure alters gut microbiota composition and modulates gut homeostasis, Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology, Volume 100, 2023, 104149, ISSN 1382-6689, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.etap.2023.104149. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138266892...)

I still think we are talking about two different things here.

And I'm not raising an issue. The article is.

For the record, I do not have an opinion on the safety profile of glyphosate at all. And I've spent zero time even wondering about cholesterol, seed oils, etc. You're dropping me into the middle of the wrong argument.

I do have strong opinions about research integrity, and this story about Monsanto is unfavorable. Do you disagree with that?

I can't say enough that this is not random message-board dorm-room logic, and that lots has been written about this flaw in the simplistic application of the Precautionary Principle. I already gave a link upthread; I feel like I've done my due diligence at this point.

We're talking about the same thing. I wonder if you've just never read anything deeper about the Precautionary Principle than activists weaponizing it to make points about glyphosate (or vaccines or nuclear power).

Not necessarily. The PP is interpreted so many different ways, it was actually invoked by people like Nassim Talib to not only justify the vaccine rollout but to call for strict lockdowns among other measures.

There are many arguments made against the precautionary principle, just like there were many arguments made in favour of leaded gasoline. We all know who ended up on the right side of history on that one, and I expect it will be the same for roundup.

In the context of this article, we are discussing the PP as relevant to regulatory agencies. The EU employs the PP while the USA takes something called the Scientific Approach - in other words, the EU requires evidence that an intervention carries no risk, whereas the US requires proof that an intervention has significant risk in order to ban it. Idk about you, but I feel a lot better eating food grown in Europe.

Your position isn't unique, there are many very intelligent people who nonetheless overestimate their capacity for understanding the world and predicting the future.

As always, it comes down to the risk of X vs the risk of not doing X. And history has clearly shown we made the right choice.

Others in this thread state that this is what they want directly, so i may have inadvertently strawmaned you.

Certainly we can find middle ground between the two approaches, and probably should.

Again, its possible I misunderstood your stance. If so mea culpa.

It relies on studies in rodent that get exposed to amounts of glyphosate that are absurdly high. Equivalent human absorption would be in the gram range, to the point where someone eating 250g of bread everyday would have 1% of this mass ingested as glyphosate.

By this standard, things like vitamins and minerals are toxic as well.

It makes no sense, to me it looks like bad science.

Agricultural products that are not new products can be shown to not be expected to have negative effects (e.g. fertilisers made from food waste). However, there does need to be some evaluation if it's a known toxic product - is it detectable in food produced with it etc.

There's also the problem of companies being short-sighted - they'll happily push a product if they know that it'll make money, but is likely to cause issues further down the line, or in other locations (e.g. run-off polluting waterways).

However, there can be significant environmental harm caused by traditional farming methods too if they're scaled up massively, so I'd say that it's often about trying to find the products that produce the best benefits with the least harm. I'm of the opinion that glyphosate is probably too harmful, but then I'm not a farmer or chemist.

The comparison with vitamins is not relevant, and to bring it up suggests you are not thinking clearly.

In fact the purpose of meta analysis is to compare and contrast the conflicting research and results on a topic. It's very useful when forming a scientific view.

We are reasonably confident that no likely gamma ray bursters are pointed at us and within lethal range. We know dinosaur killers are out there--a failure to map every such object in the solar system is a small probability of an infinite risk. Why are there no ICBMs fitted for point defense against a city killer asteroid? You have the rocket, you have the boom. You need a seeker that can guide it to impact (there are other radars that could illuminate, it just needs to home on the reflection) and a standoff fuse that will fire it at the last possible millisecond.