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“GMO Opponents Are the Climate Skeptics of the Left,” declares the headline of a recent piece by Keith Kloor in

Slate. The argument goes like this: Just as certain conservative writers flout science by denying the urgency of climate change, there are progressive writers-he named me as a prominent example-who defy an alleged scientific consensus by criticizing the genetically modified crop industry. We’re hypocrites, the charge goes, because we thunder against the denial of good science when it comes to climate, but indulge in denialism when it comes to GMOs.

I think Kloor’s critique is nonsense. Sure, there are wackos who campaign against GMOs, but not all GMO critique is wacko. In a 2009 roundtable in

Seed Magazine, I debunked the idea that there’s a scientific consensus around GMOs analogous to the one around climate. I also ruminated on that theme in this 2009 review of Michael Specter’s book

Denialism. I plan to return to the theme of scientific consensus and GMOs soon, but to make a long story short, I’ll quote my

Seed piece:

 The consensus around climate change developed

in spite of a multi-decade campaign by some of the globe’s most powerful and lucrative industries-the petroleum and coal giants-to protect markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The consensus around GMOs-or at least the specter of one-arose through the lobbying and support of an industry desperate to protect its own multibillion-dollar investments.

If such a pro-GMO consensus existed, surely we’d find it in the the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year project, convened by the World Bank and the United Nations and completed in 2008, to assess what forms of agriculture would best meet the world’s needs in a time of rapid climate change. Widely compared to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which definitively established a scientific consensus around climate change on its release in 2007, the IAASTD and its 400 scientists from around the globe ended up taking quite a skeptical view of GMOs-so much so that CropLife International, the trade group for the global GMO seed/pesticide industry, denounced it. “Incredibly enough, the report overlooks the vast potential and highly successful roles of crop protection and plant biotechnology, and misconstrues these products’ risks,” the group’s CEO fumed. Only 3 of the 57 governments that participated refused to sign the IAASTD: the Bush II-led United States, Canada, and Australia.