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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (11199)	4/5/2007 6:52:56 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 36921

What's happening to the bees? Suddenly, the bees farmers and growers rely on are vanishing. Researchers are scrambling to find out why. By Moises Velasquez-Manoff \| Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Page 1 of 3 Beekeeper James Doan first began finding empty hives last fall. Entire bee colonies seemed to have up and vanished, leaving their honey behind. Noting the unusually wet fall in Hamlin, N.Y., he blamed the weather. Unable to forage in the rain, the bees probably starved, he reasoned. But when deserted hives began appearing daily, "we knew it was something different," he says. Now, at the beginning of the 2007 pollination season, more than half of his 4,300 hives are gone. "I'm just about ready to give up," says Mr. Doan from his honeybee wintering site in Ft. Meade, Fla. "I'm not sure I can survive." The cause of the die-offs has yet to be determined. Its effect on the food supply may be significant. Longer-term, it may also force a rethinking of some agricultural practices including our heavy reliance on human-managed bees for pollination. Scientists call it "colony collapse disorder" (CCD). First reported in Florida last fall, the problem has since spread to 24 states. Commercial beekeepers are reporting losses of between 50 and 90 percent, an unprecedented amount even for an industry accustomed to die-offs. Many worry that what's shaping up to be a honeybee catastrophe will disrupt the food supply. While staple crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops – from almonds and apples to cranberries and watermelons – rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollinization. Honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, says a Cornell study. Bees help generate some $14 billion in produce. Research is only beginning and hard data is still lacking, but beekeepers suspect everything from a new virus or parasite to pesticides and genetically modified crops. Scientists have hastily established a CCD working group at Pennsylvania State University. Last week, the US House of Representatives' Committee on Agriculture held hearings on the missing bees. For many entomologists, the bee crisis is a wake-up call. By relying on a single species for pollination, US agriculture has put itself in a precarious position, they say. A resilient agricultural system requires diverse pollinators. This speaks to a larger conservation issue. Some evidence indicates a decline in the estimated 4,500 potential alternate pollinators – native species of butterflies, wasps. and other bees. The blame for that sits squarely on human activity – habitat loss, pesticide use, and imported disease – but much of this could be offset by different land-use practices. Moving away from monoculture, say scientists, and having something always flowering within bee-distance, would help natural pollinators. This would make crops less dependent on trucked-in bees, which have proved to be vulnerable to die-offs. The stress on honeybees grew as native and wild pollinators diminished and farmers came to rely more on honeybees. We've put "all of our pollination eggs in the honeybee basket," says Mace Vaughan, conservation director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Ore. "We need more baskets." Page 1 \| 2 \| 3 \| Next Page csmonitor.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (11199)	4/5/2007 1:53:20 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

Yup, that's the chart that Mann et al switched too after the outcry about the previous hockeystick that showed 1000 years of stable climate became too much. It at least shows the MWP and the LIA. Temperatures from England and the Sargasso Sea were about 1 degree C warmer than now in the MWP. Let me just say: Errr….what? If funding was all that climate scientists were after, then you’d expect them to be flocking to where the REAL money is: climate change denial. Boy is that lame! "There's no catastrophe, nothing to be scared of, now gimme 2 billion dollars right away!" Like that would work. People love a good scare.