[Stoves] Eliminating smoke (Re: Anand Karve)

[Traveller]

Dr Karve:

You say "smoke in the kitchen is a big nuisance and it should be
eliminated, even if its lethality cannot be proved."

While I agree with you - more than a couple of billion people in since the
days of cave culture down to the present have also agreed, just ventilating
or switching to different methods of cooking - Ron appears to insist that
such lethality be proved.

Why, I wonder.

Perhaps not seeking to prove the obvious would mean the blind men will have
to stop defining the elephant?

After all, as I pointed out in a post on the Empire Protection Agency
claptrap on PM2.5 - absence of evidence is presumption of absence,
equitoxicity of PM2.5 and no threshold for exposure - lethality can be
proved by assumption.

But the search for knowledge must continue. A general conclusion is not
enough for academics - like God doesn't exist. They have to look in every
nook and corner of the universe to have all peers accept that God doesn't
exist. Because they have presumed without evidence that God must exist - at
every GPS coordinate to the fifth decimal point. And calibrate the size of
God at every point.

To put it differently, since human health varies perhaps as much as fuel
chemistry -- I can't prove it does, no database is that complete, a few
billion more academic personhours have to be billed - "the relationship"
between fuel emissions and human health must be quantified for every
village where guinea pigs are available.

The question is, do these academics belong in departments of Science or
Theology?

I forget. Western science originated in monasteries. Even monks - perhaps
only the monks - had clarity of minds and respected honesty.

Nikhil (a singularly unprofessional boor).


>
> >
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2016 12:29:42 +0530
> From: Anand Karve <adkarve at gmail.com>
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
>         <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] report with dissapointing results from cleaner
>         cookstoves (Andrew) - Malawi
> Message-ID:
>         <CACPy7SehmPz+kGgEnO4tMtg_-0Vb4L3b9yJ+WDkeVnFdgvnxxg@
> mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Dear Ron,
> as a stove researcher I feel that smoke in the kitchen is a big
> nuisance and it should be eliminated, even if its lethality cannot be
> proved.
> Yours
> A.D.Karve
>
> ***
> Dr. A.D. Karve
>
> Chairman, Samuchit Enviro Tech Pvt Ltd (www.samuchit.com)
>
> Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)
>
> On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 11:36 AM, Ronal W. Larson <
> rongretlarson at comcast.net>
> wrote:
>
> > List,  cc Nikhil, Crispin et al
> >
> > I consider this to be the single least professional document I have
> yet seen on this list.  This is to tell anyone agreeing with Nikhil that
> his rants and ill will towards (apparently) everyone working on stoves do
> not coincide with anyone else?s thinking that I know in this business.  He
> has some strange mental aberration that is beyond my comprehension.
> >
> > It is too late at night to go into detail - but I will do so tomorrow -
> on at least the 28 emphasized words/topics below.  I repeat - I am
> embarrassed that anyone would treat honest stove research in the way he has
> done below (and many earlier times).  There must be some explanation for
> his ill-well.  Anyone know?
> >
> > I repeat - anyone who believes all this animosity - please wait until
> you hear the other side.
> >
> > Ron
> >
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