Updates - Continuing Bad Weather

Over the last year, I've posted on a number of incidents and issues that in many instances continue to be in the news, but here is a short round up of some of the stories and issues that were either less prominent to begin with or which faded from news coverage (often in spite of their importance), and what has happened since the original post.

Good news on the story of Rania Abdechakour. Rania was the little 5 year old Algerian girl with cerebral palsy who had been living with her aunt and uncle in Lancashire for several years. Back in May, the British Government decided to expel her, in spite of the lack of medical facilities or a secure home for her back in Algeria. After a lot of hard work by her aunt and uncle and others, she was granted the right to remain in late August and they are now formally adopting her.

The "Ground Zero Mosque" - remember the fuss about something that was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero? For weeks the media was filled with protests and reams of commentary about how the proposed Muslim cultural centre in New York was an affront to the people who had died in the Twin Towers, dreadfully conflating all Muslims with the handful of men who led the attacks on 9/11. Since last year, the centre has progressed slowly in terms of development - planning obstacles have slowly been overcome and designs for the front of the building which incorporate the Jewish Star of David and the Christian Cross suggest that its intention remains what its sponsors have all along insisted - a centre for faith reconciliation, not some victory monument. Given that some 70 innocent Muslims died in the carnage of the Towers (and tens of thousands in the wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan since), why in any case should there be no Islamic content to marking the losses of that day?

An ice free North Pole may now be barely 5 years away...

Not so good news on climate change....Britain had its most severe winter in decades last year amidst speculation that the warming "Atlantic conveyor", which brings the mild climate from the Mexican Gulf, had slowed down or even stopped. After millenia of Britain enjoying a much warmer climate than its latitude warrants, at least one expert in the field believed the Gulf Stream, as it is called, had turned off, at least temporarily. Without confirming anything, the Government did acknowledge that the weather was much worse than normal for the second year in a row and decided to ask the Chief Scientist if there had been a "step change" in our climate. He has yet to report, but Britain's summer has now been cooler than normal in spite of a continuing global rise in temperatures - and more and more extreme weather events around the planet as man-made carbon emissions continue to rise faster than ever. Climate change does not simply mean constantly warmer weather everywhere - although the longterm trend is upwards. The impact of global warming could mean cooler temperatures in Britain and western Europe for a time if polar ice melts and the cooler water from the Arctic melts into and diverts the flow of warmer water from the south-west. The latest prognosis from the Arctic is bad - summer ice melt has reached record levels this year and is proceeding at roughly double the anticipated rate, with an ice-free North Pole anticipated during the summer by sometime as early as 2016 rather than the 2030s as previously predicted.

Meanwhile, in the USA, climate activist Tim DeChristopher continues to languish in jail under a two year sentence of imprisonment for disrupting an auction of land to the oil and gas industry by falsely bidding. At his trial, he argued that he had been forced to choose the lesser of two evils - acquiesce to the land auction going ahead and the damage the resulting oil and gas exploration would cause; or commit a crime by bidding falsely in order the disrupt the land sale. He has lodged an appeal against his conviction, but for now remains in prison for a crime that harmed no one and no organisation - in fact, the auction itself turned out to be an invalid process because of procedural irregularities, so Tim has been imprisoned without technically committing any crime at all.

But better news for bees: in the UK at any rate, the general consensus seems to be that it has been a good year for our stripey pollinating friends. Colony Collapse Disorder has decreased and there is now some evidence to support a diagnosis that agrochemicals are responsible for their recent, often mysterious declines. Even the bad winter didn't deter them and there has been a bumper honey crop this year as a relatively mild spring let them get busy. However, with no consensus on how to tackle CCD and the chemical industry keeping a close involvement in the beekeeping world in defence of its own interests, bees are still in longterm decline - the number of UK bee species has fallen by 50% in the last sixty years; so our little friends are not out of the woods and into the flowery meadows yet.

In spite of all the violence of the Arab Spring and the apparent shaming of Britain and other western states over their longterm association with Arab dictators and kelptocrats, our Government's lust for profit from blood remains undiminished. UK Premier David Cameron behaved appallingly when he took a group of British arms merchants on a tour of Cairo's Tahrir Square where people had died protesting against a regime funded by America and supplied by the British arms industry. But just days later, we were at it again, with a big UK delegation out in the Gulf at the IDEX Arms Fayre in Abu Dhabi which took place hours after the Bahrain Government machine-gunned protestors on the streets of its capital. 

Cameron later welcomed the Crown Prince of Bahrain to Downing Street, while it was with clear reluctance that the British Royal Family cancelled the King of Bahrain's invite to the Royal Wedding at the end of April. In September, in spite of their mealy mouthed condemnation of dictatorships and the embarrassment caused when Libyan rebels found evidence that the Con Dem Government had been selling sniper rifles to the Gaddafi regime right up to the start of the civil war,  Ministers supported the huge Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition in London - where one company was exposed by Amnesty International to be selling illegal leg irons. Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, tabled an early day motion in the Commons condemning the exhibition and calling for an end to arms sales to regimes with poor human rights records.

And mention of the Royal Wedding brings back memories of perhaps the most confused newspaper page of the year, if not longer. Clinging on to the last of the big wedding story of the year but wanting to move onto the big breaking news story, the Daily Telegraph's international edition ended up with one of the most bizarrely tasteless front pages in newspaper history...

In June, Greenpeace used Star Wars as a theme to attack Volkswagen car company for its lobbying against reductions in carbon emissions in spite of its advertising promoting it as an allegedly environmentally aware company. Stung by being likened to Darth Vader's planet-destroying Death Star, VW  deployed its employees in a counter-demonstration when Greenpeace unfurled one of their signature banners at a car show: the result can be seen here, but you do have to look closely to see the staff holding up their blue placards.

And lastly, back in May, I blogged on how police had very brutally arrested and carted off a film maker and a handful of others who were silently dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. They were held under anti-terror laws, a ludicrous over-reaction by the authorities to a perfectly harmless activity - all of it filmed here.

The following week, in a challenge to authoritarianism's assault on peaceful activity, hundreds of people turned up to dance, though a little less silently...

Bee Afraid

Colony Collapse Disorder of bee hives has killed tens of billions of bees over the last decade or so. Beekeepers across Europe and North America have found each summer their hives empty or filled with dead bees - as much as 40% of the total bee population. In the absence of any obvious cause, there has been wide ranging speculation about climate change, viruses and mites, and pesticides.

 

Bees - Nature's free service to humanity

We depend on bees pollinating crops for a huge proportion of our food - some estimates suggest as much as 70% is dependent on pollination by bee and other pollinators such as various weevils and beetles, birds and bats. Bees are particularly important as they carry out about half of this "free service" from Nature, as farmers refer to the pollination process.

ALL of these species are mysteriously declining across Europe and North America - notably, there are fewer to no instances of colony collapse disorder in countries where these chemicals are still largely absent from their agriculture (although there is a risk that, if they are banned country by country in the rich nations, the chemical companies will try to foist them on poorer nations, spreading the contamination). If the decline is not arrested, the brutal truth is that it will not be long before a domino effect could follow with significant declines in food production in the northern hemisphere when food prices are already at record levels. No one can realistically guess how far the process could go and the serious social, economic and health problems that could result.

A two year old North American study, as yet unpublished but seemingly verified by recent work by French scientists, confirms the adverse toxic impact of nicotinoids (including a specific type called Imidacloprid). A range of experiments have shown that, even with tiny dosages which cannot eventually be traced in their bodies, bees exposed to nicotinoids are very substantially more likely to contract illnesses which kill them. Although the pesticide itself may not destroy them, there appears to be a strong link between it and bee deaths, perhaps through damage done to the immune and/or nervous systems.

The pesticides are used to target mites attacking agricultural crops, but once a plant is treated with them, they are highly invasive, seeping into the plants' structure rather than remaining as a coat on the surface. Consequently, bees taking pollen from the plants, even sometime after the pesticide treatment, are likely to be ingesting the toxins and, by then feeding the pollen back into their hives, spreading its effect to other bees, including unhatched larvae and the Queen Bee.

The German company Bayer is the largest manufacturer of nicotinoids, which were deployed over a quarter of Britain's agricultural land last year. Bayer insist these are safe "when used correctly" - even although the tests they have used previously to establish this safety stamp have been criticised by some in the scientific community as not valid.

But perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of this has been the lobbying Bayer has done with the British Beekeepers' Association to try to head off criticism of nicotinoids - the Co-op has banned their use on its suppliers' farms and the Soil Association has petitioned to make them illegal. As well as supplying speakers to run sessions at last year's BBKA conference to reassure about the supposed safety of nicotinoids, Bayer have managed to secure BBKA endorsement of some of its products as bee-friendly, in spite of the strongly voiced reservations about the toxins impact on bees voiced by some very well-qualified BBKA members.

The BBKA has been criticised by members over its financial relations with the agrochemical industry in the past, but in the wake of the latest furore it had now promised to break these off. However, the fact remains that, although nicotinoids and their derivatives have been banned in many European countries, they remain widely used in Britain and the USA. Bayer and other manufacturers such as Syngenta remain busy at work justifying the continued use of their products.

International action by the Food &Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations is urgently needed to arrest the spread of these dangerous chemicals and tackle the decline in pollinator populations. Further confirmation of the study's findings is needed, but in the meantime, nicotinoids should be prohibited internationally as a precaution. Our biosphere and the creatures that inhabit it (humans included), all linked in ways so complex we cannot even begin to comprehend, are too fragile and too precious to put at any further risk simply for the sake of the shareholders of agrochemical giants like Bayer and Monsanto.

There is a quote attributed to Einstein, that claims:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” 

The words, contrary to myth, are not his and they may exaggerate the speed of impact - but in a world with such incredible co-dependency between the species, we ignore their salutary warning at our peril.