Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Of course its Dr. Lark again. He's been contradicting USDA for years.

There's something like 12+ PH.ds who are working in this field and create papers consistently. 11 of them agree, and then Dr. Lark comes out and disagrees.

Every couple of years, Dr. Lark comes out with a new set of studies that contradicts everyone else. And then the news organizations / hacker news around here focuses on what Dr. Lark says rather than what the other 11 guys say.

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I don't necessarily want to demean Dr. Lark or his work. But people need to have context here. This guy is anti-Biofuel, and has been since the early 00s (maybe earlier).

I'm not 100% sure what to do about this problem per se. Contrarian professors are important parts of the scientific process. Someone like Dr. Lark is very important to making sure that everyone's i's are dotted and t's are crossed.

But the general "media" picks up on the contrarian, and uses that as "Entire field is wrong, everybody is wrong" and shouts it from the rooftops. Rather than... you know... rightfully pointing out that they're focused on the contrarian.

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We need contrarians like Dr. Lark. But we don't need media overly focusing upon contrarians and highlighting their specific research as if its the mainstream in the field.

See yall in 2 years when Dr. Lark publishes another contradictory paper, like he always does.

Honest questions from a totally ignorant cynic:

Who is funding who here? Is Dr. Lark being funded by the fossil fuel industry? Are the 11 other scientists being funded by 'big corn' or the USDA itself? Does the USDA/'big corn' have a revolving door situation where the USDA scientists have come from and maintain ties to industry?

That's just not the point of this at all.

Dr. Lark's contribution, is that he has correctly identified holes in everyone else's research on a somewhat consistent basis. Sometimes you need an outsider to see the flaws in your methodology.

Dr. Lark in particular brought up the issue of land use changes: how forests get cut down, release a lot of carbon, and then farmland is made over the forests. He has legitimate points, and releases calculations and research to show how it changes the biofuels numbers.

Yes, its exaggerated at times and then the counter-points come out, but the push back-and-forth is necessary to advance the field. And we actually have technology that answers questions that Dr. Lark poses. IIRC, Argonne National Labs took satellite photos over the USA, measured how many forests got converted into farms using AIs, and ran the numbers.

The discussion going on is very high level and sophisticated, modern, and high tech. This is a field (and discussion) to be proud of as an American.

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What I'm cynical about is how the media treats these discussions. They want to invent problems where there are no problems. Instead of pointing out what most of the researchers agree on, today's media focuses on what the singular, most extreme member of a group disagrees with everyone else about.

At the end of last year, Ars Technica picked up this piece on the researchers you describe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134963

Reply on news.ycombinator.com