Planetary Ruin

US beekeepers have been stung in recent months by the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees threatening honey supplies as well as crops which depend on the insects for pollination.

Bee numbers on parts of the east coast and in Texas have fallen by more than 70 percent, while California has seen colonies drop by 30 to 60 percent.

According to estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, bees are vanishing across a total of 22 states, and for the time being no one really knows why.

“Approximately 40 percent of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in my 30 years of beekeeping,” apiarist Gene Brandi, from the California State Beekeepers Association, told Congress recently.

It is normal for hives to see populations fall by some 20 percent during the winter, but the sharp loss of bees is causing concern, especially as domestic US bee colonies have been steadily decreasing since 1980.

There are some 2.4 million professional hives in the country, according to the Agriculture Department, 25 percent fewer than at the start of the 1980s.

And the number of beekeepers has halved.

The situation is so bad, that beekeepers are now calling for some kind of government intervention, warning the flight of the bees could be catastrophic for crop growers.

Domestic bees are essential for pollinating some 90 varieties of vegetables and fruits, such as apples, avocados, and blueberries and cherries.

“The pollination work of honey bees increases the yield and quality of United States crops by approximately 15 billion dollars annually including six billion in California,” Brandi said.

California’s almond industry alone contributes two billion dollars to the local economy, and depends on 1.4 million bees which are brought from around the US every year to help pollinate the trees, he added.

The phenomenon now being witnessed across the United States has been dubbed “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD, by scientists as they seek to explain what is causing the bees to literally disappear in droves.

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Never mind the Easter bonnets. In a large swath of the U.S., you had better remember where you put your winter hat and put it on.

Just about everywhere east of the Rockies, it’s extremely cold for this time of year – with snow in parts of the Northeast and Midwest, and freezing temperatures elsewhere – and it’s going to stay this way right through the weekend.

Parts of the upper Northeast are slogging through over a foot of snow which closed schools, tangled traffic and knocked out power to more than 180,000 homes and businesses.

Frost and freeze warnings are in effect for the next few nights throughout much of the Southeast, while the snow continues to pile up across portions of the Great Lakes and the Northeast, which has seen more snow so far this April than what fell over the entire month of December.

The cold weather, says CBS News meteorologist George Cullen, is the result of an intense storm system sweeping down extremely cold air from central Canada on down to the eastern half of the U.S.

The result, says Cullen, is temperatures 15 to 30 degrees below normal, with many record lows likely over the weekend, from the Ohio Valley on down to southeast coast.

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An international global warming conference approved a report Friday warning of dire threats to the Earth and to mankind – from increased hunger to the extinction of species – unless the world adapts to climate change and halts its progress.

Agreement came after an all-night session during which key sections were deleted from the draft and scientists angrily confronted government negotiators who they feared were watering down their findings.

“It has been a complex exercise,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Several scientists objected to the editing of the final draft by government negotiators but in the end agreed to compromises. However, some scientists vowed never to take part in the process again.

The climax of five days of negotiations was reached when the delegates removed parts of a key chart highlighting devastating effects of climate change that kick in with every rise of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, and in a tussle over the level of scientific reliability attached to key statements.

There was little doubt about the science, which was based on 29,000 sets of data, much of it collected in the last five years. “For the first time we are not just arm-waving with models,” Martin Perry, who conducted the grueling negotiations, told reporters.

The United States, China and Saudi Arabia raised the many of the objections to the phrasing, often seeking to tone down the certainty of some of the more dire projections.

The final IPCC report is the clearest and most comprehensive scientific statement to date on the impact of global warming mainly caused by man-induced carbon dioxide pollution.

It said up to 30 percent of the Earth’s species face an increased risk of vanishing if global temperatures rise 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the average in the 1980s and ’90s.

Areas that now suffer a shortage of rain will become even more dry, adding to the risks of hunger and disease, it said. The world will face heightened threats of flooding, severe storms and the erosion of coastlines.

“This is a glimpse into an apocalyptic future,” the Greenpeace environmental group said of the final report.

Negotiators pored over the 21-page draft meant to be a policy guide for governments. The summary pares down the full 1,500-page scientific assessment of the evidence of climate change so far, and the impact it will have on the Earth’s most vulnerable people and ecosystems.

More than 120 nations attended the meeting. Each word was approved by consensus, and any change had to be approved by the scientists who drew up that section of the report.

Though weakened by the deletion of some elements, the final report “will send a very, very clear signal” to governments, said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s top climate official.

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The heavy condemnatory breathing on the subject of global warming outdoes anything since high moments of the Inquisition. A respectable columnist (Thomas Friedman of The New York Times) opened his essay last week by writing, “Sometimes you read something about this administration that’s just so shameful it takes your breath away.”

What asphyxiated this critic was the discovery that a White House official had edited “government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming.” The correspondent advises that the culprit had been an oil-industry lobbyist before joining the administration, and on leaving it he took a job with Exxon Mobil.

For those with addled reflexes, here is the story compressed: (1) Anyone who speaks discriminatingly about global warming is conspiring to belittle the threat. Such people end up (2) working for Exxon Mobil, a perpetrator of the great threat the malefactor sought to distract us from.

I’d guess that, in the current mood, I should enter the datum that my father was in the oil business. But having done that, I think it fair to ask: Are we invited to assume that anyone who works in a business that generates greenhouse gases (a) is complicit in the global-warming problem, and (b) should resign and seek work elsewhere? One recalls the plant in Nazi Germany that manufactured the toxic gas Zyklon B. The primary use of this gas was in the extermination camps, whose masters were looking for efficient ways to destroy human beings. Is the community engaged in oil production the contemporary equivalent of the makers of Zyklon B?

Critics are correct in insisting that human enterprises have an effect on climate. What they cannot at this point do is specify exactly how great the damage is, nor how much relief would be effected by specific acts of natural propitiation.

The whole business is eerily religious in feel. Back in the 15th century, the question was: Do you believe in Christ? It was required in Spain by the Inquisition that the answer should be affirmative, leaving to one side subsidiary specifications.

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The New York Coal Trade Association, headquartered in New York City, recently held its 94th annual banquet and meeting at the New York Hilton. One of the guest speakers was Bob Murray, founder and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation and probably one of the few CEOs brave enough to challenge the militant climate control movement that threatens the future of America’s economy. In his speech, he dared to say that he regards Al Gore as the shaman of global doom and gloom. He is not joking when he says, “He is more dangerous than his global warming.”

Unlike many heads of corporations who are taking their companies on that long green mile and caving in to the demands of environmental militants, Mr. Murray is fighting tooth and nail for what he says is, “the little guy that nobody cares about.”

“Some wealthy elitists in our country,” he told the audience, “who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists’ ill-conceived ‘global goofiness’ campaigns.”

Mr. Murray was a coal miner in Ohio who survived two mining accidents and built funds from a mortgaged house into a private coal mining company with more than 3,000 employees. He expresses concern about the proposals in Congress that will ration the use of coal, warning of much worse adverse consequences to Americans than those experienced after the 1990 amendment of the Clean Air Act.

Mr. Murray told me that he had seen the effect of the drastic reductions in coal production, and the wrenching impact on hundreds of communities, as a result of that legislation. In Ohio alone, from 1990 to 2005, about 118 mines were shut down, costing more than 36,000 primary and secondary jobs. These impacted areas have spent years recovering, and some never will. He spoke of the families that broke up, many lost homes, and some were impoverished, because of legislation that the environmentalists call a “success.”

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The threat of severe thunderstorms today shifts to the mid-Atlantic coast, one day after the clash of cold air from Canada and warm moist air sparked a widespread outbreak of hail and damaging thunderstorms across the Plains and Midwest.

According to the Severe Weather Center, potentially damaging thunderstorms will develop today from the lower Chesapeake Bay to the coastal plain of the Carolinas.

Today’s storms will not reach the intensity of the numerous storms that pounded the nation’s heartland on Tuesday. The News Summaries page reports on the thunderstorms that produced over 350 reports of hail, including some that were larger than a grapefruit. There were more than 100 reports of strong wind and at least 5 unconfirmed tornadoes.

The severe weather outbreak took place on the 33rd anniversary of the “Super Outbreak of 1974″, the worst 24-hour weather event in U.S. history that created 148 tornadoes in 13 states.

While the severe thunderstorms will bypass the Northeast, the cold side of the advancing storm will send a blast of wintry weather into New England. According to the Winter Weather Center, snow and sleet will fall over northern New England through Thursday morning, with snow showers beginning tonight across the remainder of the Northeast interior.

The Midwest Regional News story reports heavy snow will continue today across the upper Great Lakes. The combination of the snow and strong winds howling around the storm has led to Blizzard Warnings across northern Michigan. The winds gusting past 40 mph will blast the entire Midwest, making the air feel even colder than the actual temperatures.

The advancing cold front will lead to significantly colder temperatures across the mid-Atlantic states. The East Regional News story reports cold air flowing in from the ocean has ended the period of warm weather east of the Appalachian Mountains. Temperatures through Easter weekend will be as much as 30 degrees colder than Tuesday’s highs.

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President George W. Bush said he took climate change very seriously Tuesday, a day after the US Supreme Court ruled the government must regulate greenhouse gases, seen by analysts as a potential watershed in fighting global warming.
A sharply divided court ruled Monday that greenhouse gases are pollutants, and so the federal Environmental Protection Agency was wrong to say it had no mandate to regulate them.

The decision dealt a new blow to Bush’s administration, which has been steadfast in refusing any limits on US industry or on its gas-guzzling cars, arguing it could hurt the country’s economy.

“The decision (of) the Supreme Court we take very seriously. It’s the new law of the land,” Bush told reporters.

He insisted that “I’ve taken this issue very seriously. I have said that it is a serious problem. I recognize that man is contributing greenhouse gases.”

But Bush argued that “anything that happens cannot hurt economic growth. I care about the working people of the country but also because in order to solve the greenhouse gas issue over a longer period of time, it’s going to require new technologies, which tend to be expensive.”

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Australian Prime Minister John Howard fired a broadside at the European Union Tuesday for criticising his climate change policy, saying it should get its own house in order before attacking others.

The counter-strike came a day after EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas accused Australia of having a “negative attitude” and refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change for political reasons rather than economic ones.

But Howard, who is under intense domestic pressure ahead of elections later this year over what critics claim was a failure by his government to tackle climate change, would have none of it.

“You’ve got the spokesman for a group of countries lecturing us about not having signed Kyoto,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

“Yet the great bulk of the countries on whose behalf he speaks are falling well behind their Kyoto targets and are doing less well in meeting them,” he fumed.

“Our answer to the spokesman for the European Union is: Look to your own affairs, get your countries complying with the targets you have proclaimed,” Howard said.

Australia and its ally the United States are the only major industrialised nations to have rejected ratifying the UN’s Kyoto pact.

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The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency must consider greenhouse gases as pollutants, in a blow to the White House.”Because greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of ‘air pollutant’ we hold that EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of such gases from new motor vehicles,” the court ruled.

Led by Massachusetts, a dozen states along with several US cities and environmental groups went to the courts to determine whether the agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide emissions.

“The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized,” said judge John Paul Stevens as the ruling was carried by five votes in favor to four against.

The Republican administration of US President George W. Bush has fiercely opposed any imposition of binding greenhouse limits on the nation’s industry.

Environmentalists have alleged that since Bush came to office in 2001 his administration has ignored and tried to hide looming evidence of global warming and the key role of human activity in climate change.

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