SARA PETERSEN, - Liberty Voice
Stephan: Here is a kind of report from the field of where the Bee Trend is going. It is not good, and if we screw this up, the consequences are going to be staggering.
If you garden please do as my wife Ronlyn does, plant flowers and herbs that bees like, and don't use chemicals and poisons. We need to support these little beings and,bees are like everyone else: If you open a good restaurant you will develop a thriving clientele. We don't see many honies, but we have a healthy population of bumbles and other species. You should take garden support quite seriously.
Warmer weather is fast approaching, trees are turning a leafy green, and flowers are blooming. The chirping of birds is starting to fill the air, but one small sound might be missing, the buzzing of happy bees. Bee keepers are becoming more and more concerned about the status of bee colonies, prompting the question, could bees be in danger of extinction?
Sue Garing is a bee keeper in Kirkwood, New York. Garing is becoming rapidly alarmed by the absence of buzzing bees. The bee keeper blames the growing decline of bees to the Colony Collapse Disorder. This disorder is largely due to the varroa mite, which is similar to a tick, and is a parasite of the honeybee. The varroa mite wounds the honeybee by puncturing the protective outer shell full of holes. This leaves the honeybee vulnerable to bacteria and viruses.
Garing shares that there are more than 50,000 honeybee hives in New York alone, and these hives produce over 2.5 million pounds of honey per year. Garing explains that if bees actually do become extinct, not only would honey production suffer, but the economy, environment, and farms would also suffer. Bees directly affect about two-thirds of the food we eat, […]
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ANDREW FREEDMAN, Senior Climate Reporter - Mashable
Stephan: I'm looking at a lot of material on the response to the IPCC report, and this struck me as a very sensible one. I recently had occasion to drive through the parts of California mentioned in this. This is another case of the Water is Destiny Trend. SR readers know that I think there will be two big migrations, both because of water: Away from the submerging coast and, out of the Southwest and Plains States. The first because of too much water, the second because of too little.
The severe drought that threatens water supplies and a potentially devastating wildfire season is deepening and locking into place across much of the far West, Southwest and Southern Plains, according to new climate data released Thursday.
In California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, where runoff from the spring snowpack provides much-needed water supplies during the dry season, half of the snowpack’s liquid water equivalent melted in just the past week in some areas, due to temperatures that soared as high as 12 degrees Fahrenheit above average of early April, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
To make matters worse, the sudden snow melt in California barely boosted reservoir supplies, which remain well below average across the state.
Officials already knew that the snowpack was unusually thin and would provide below average amounts of water when it melted, considering that the state had its third-driest winter on record, following its driest calendar year in 2013. However, they did not anticipate it would melt so quickly.
The California state snow survey on April 1 found that the snowpack contained just 32% of the average water content at that time of year, when snowpack typically reaches its annual peak. This placed 2014 as among the lowest water-content years on […]
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Stephan: This is a really good essay that walks the reader through why different people respond as they do, as well as laying out the reality of the battle going on over science. The concerted well-financed attack on the transition out of the carbon energy era, and all the industries, associated with it, financed by those industries. You can also see the Willful Ignorance/Neo-Medievalism Trends. Oligarchs still faced with voting want an ignorant electorate. And shows why it is in corporate interest to finance these trends.
Regardless, new technologies that work with nature's meta-systems are coming. And a social shift is going to occur in at least some of the states. Others I think, are going to become baronies.
This piece lays it out, very well.
In the run-up to Earth Day this year, two major reports were released by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the largest such body in the world. On March 31, Working Group II released its report, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, and on April 13, Working Group III released its report, Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Both reports cited substantially more evidence of substantially more global warming and related impacts than past reports have, and they did so more lucidly than in past iterations.
As climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe told Salon, ‘This time around, to its credit, the IPCC has gotten a lot more serious about improving its ability to communicate the report’s message, through graphics and other ancillary products.” There was also a greater sophistication in how to conceptualize, measure and compare things, even where substantial uncertainties are involved. And there was a substantial list of more than 90 major impacts already recorded on every part of the planet.
Yet, one of the most disturbing stories to emerge around the reports was the New York Times report that language about the need for $100 billion in crisis funds to aid poor nations was removed […]
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Saturday, April 19th, 2014
JEFF ST. JOHN, - Green Tech Grid
Stephan: Here is one of the clearest examples I have seen recently of the difference between Red value states, the social outcomes their policies produce, and Blue value states and the consequences of their social policies. In contrast to Oklahoma, California is leading the way in the transition away from carbon energy.
California regulators have just issued a rebuke to utilities, and a thumbs-up to customers and companies that want to connect hundreds of now-stalled battery-backed solar PV projects across the state.
On Tuesday, the California Public Utilities Commission issued a proposed decision that would exempt most storage-solar projects from extra utility fees and interconnection studies (PDF). Instead, it would require utilities to treat them as regular old net-metered solar systems, as long as they meet certain requirements.
For the past twelve months or so, California’s big three investor-owned utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — have been demanding these systems undergo extensive reviews that come with between $1,400 and $3,700 in extra fees. Utilities have said they need to do this for safety reasons, as well as to make sure that batteries don’t store grid power, then feed it back under the guise of green, net-metered power.
Solar and storage system installers say these unnecessary fees and studies have brought new battery-solar projects to a screeching halt, and slowed to a crawl grid interconnections for those that have been approved. SolarCity, for example, says that of the more than 500 customers that have signed up […]
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Saturday, April 19th, 2014
SCOTT KAUFMAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: There were two stories about Oklahoma that reveal trends in that state. This one involves education, and is part of the Neo-medievalism Trend that is sweeping the Red states. They are actually deliberately educating their children to be more ignorant. This is also part of the Great Schism Trend that is breaking the country into two very different worlds.
Click through and you can get the link to download the actual report discussed in this story.
A study published in the latest edition of Evolution: Education and Outreach demonstrated ‘the average student…completed the Biology I course with increased confidence in their biological evolution knowledge yet with a greater number of biological evolution misconceptions and, therefore, less competency in the subject.”
The study, conducted by Tony Yates and Edmund Marek, tested biology teachers and students in 32 Oklahoma public high schools via a survey the pair called ‘the Biological Evolution Literacy Survey.” The survey was administered to the teachers first, to get a benchmark of their grasp of evolutionary theory. The survey was then administered twice to the students – once before they took the required Biology I course, and once after they had completed it.
Yates and Marek found that prior to instruction, students possessed 4,812 misconceptions about evolutionary theory; after they completed the Biology I course, they possessed 5,072. Of the 475 students surveyed, only 216 decreased the number of misconceptions they believed, as opposed to 259 who had more of them when they finished the course than before they took it.
‘There is little doubt,” they argued, ‘that teachers may serve as sources of biological evolution-related misconceptions or, at the very least, propagators of existing misconceptions.”
Despite holding […]
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