March 04, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

HONEY BEES DISAPPEARING

Some of the scariest movies ever made deal with nature gone awry. You think of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, for example. Now we have a real life natural disaster occurring in the insect world. Honey bees are mysteriously disappearing. It's a major issue because honey bees pollinate plants and pollination is integral to the life cycle. This story is also interesting because The New York Times published a story about a farmer in Visalia, California, right here in the Central Valley. This commentary by Stephen Fleischman is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

It may not be a nuclear war or global warming that brings us down, but the mysterious disappearance of the honey bee. We've been messing with nature since Adam plucked the first piece of fruit off the apple tree.

The New York Times, on Feb 23rd, reported on a beekeeper named David Bradshaw in Visalia, California who got the shock of his life when he opened his boxes one morning and found half of his 100 million bees missing. His bees had been pollinating the almond crop in the Central Valley, the world's largest almond producing area.

The honey bee, apis mellifera, is the most commonly domesticated species in the United States and is used not only for producing honey, but more importantly for pollinating crops. Hence, the consternation when it was discovered recently that bees in 24 states across the country were mysteriously disappearing. The bees leave their hives to seek pollen and nectar and in the process pollinate the blossoms of the crop. But these bees never return to the hive and the colony becomes defunct. The phenomenon has been given the name, "Colony Collapse Disorder". The scientists are scratching their heads. They don't understand what's happening here. At least, not yet.


CHANTING LA-LA-LA

Today's Fresno Bee had another letter from a right-winger who just doesn't believe global climate change is real. We've had cycles of warming and ice ages in the past, he says. His big point was the alleged hypocrisy of people at the Academy Awards last week. Even if Hollywood stars are not perfectly "green," how is that relevant to the issue of global climate change?

People who bring up the point about cycles of heating and warming in the past don't seem to realize that scientists are perfectly aware of those cycles. And it is scientists who are saying that the evidence is indisputable that human activity is warming the planet. If we build a dam, aren't we altering the environment? If we strip mine a mountain, aren't we altering the environment? Those events are small scale in comparison to sending tons and tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere every day. As Newton's Law about the conservation of energy established, there is no free lunch. What we do has an effect on the planet. But it's easier for global climate change deniers to stick their fingers in their ears and chant la-la-la very loudly.