Bumblebees Being Crushed By Climate Change 225
sciencehabit writes: As the climate changes, plants and animals are on the move. So far, many are redistributing in a similar pattern: As habitat that was once too cold warms up, species are expanding their ranges toward the poles, whereas boundaries closer to the equator have remained more static. Bumblebees, however, appear to be a disturbing exception, according to a new study (abstract) . A comprehensive look at dozens of species finds that many North American and European bumblebees are failing to "track" warming by colonizing new habitats north of their historic range. Simultaneously, they are disappearing from the southern portions of their range.
Colonization patterns (Score:3)
...many North American and European bumblebees are failing to "track" warming by colonizing new habitats north of their historic range. ...
Maybe bumblebees select habitats to colonize based more upon the daylight patterns than temperatures, and that is why they are not following the warmth as it moves towards the poles?
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Maybe bumblebees select habitats to colonize based more upon the daylight patterns than temperatures, and that is why they are not following the warmth as it moves towards the poles?
Sounds like something whose name starts with "bumble" would do. ;-)
Re: Colonization patterns (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that bumblebees are not the same as honeybees, right?
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Re:Colonization patterns (Score:5, Informative)
In fairness, on behalf of all of us who aren't entomologists ... I had no idea of the difference either.
This [bumblebeec...vation.org] gives a rundown of what the differences are.
I bet the majority of people don't know they're different things.
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Seriously? This ought to be common knowledge.
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Why? It's entirely easy to go your entire life and not feel compelled to educate yourself about bees. Maybe I even knew this at one time. I have no idea.
But in the same way I know almost nothing about flower arranging or weaving ... knowing the difference between bees hasn't been something germane to my life experience.
Quick, without googling it, tell me 10 techniques a blacksmith would use. (And, no, I don't know either ;-)
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primary school biology lessons maybe?
can't name ten blacksmith techniques, but four or five - no problem.
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Once again, we're talking about Bumblebees, not Honey Bees. Very different and not domesticated. Just slightly up the page, this was posted, http://bumblebeeconservation.o... [bumblebeec...vation.org]
From the article (Score:2)
More mysterious is their failure to push north. “What we can infer is that temperature in the northern latitudes is not what's limiting their spread,” says Ignasi Bartomeus, a researcher at Spain's Estación Biológica de Doñana in Seville
Wish I could read the actual paper, but it's pay-walled.
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Fuck those insidious things. Taking out a hornets/wasps' nest up in the eaves with a 12ga loaded with birdshot (the smaller the shotsize, the better)...? Priceless. Watching bits of wasp rain gently down for 30sec afterwards only adds to the fun!
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You know? I have never been stupid enough to try that. Should I use a choke?
Doesn't really matter. It's more important that you wear some hornet proof clothing for the aftermath.
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Er, mine was just a light hearted comment play on why shooting a wasp's nest with a shotgun sounds like an amazingly bad idea.
I'm not allergic, and I leave nests (insects of all kinds really) well alone unless they're somewhere where they really prove a serious inconvenience or hazard. If I find a wasp indoors, I usually try to trap it and let it out outside.
I had to poison an ant's nest recently. I didn't relish the act, but ants and houses don't mix if they nest in the wrong place.
Africanized Killer Bees (Score:2)
Bring in the undomesticated bee strains as pollinators.
The European /North American bees have been bread for docility for centuries to the point where we transport hives on trucks to pollinate where needed, is it any wonder that they are not migrating "naturally" they are for all intents and purposes domesticated, it's like expecting cows to migrate on their own.
I would expect that so called "killer" bees would be adapting better to climate change.
Re: Africanized Killer Bees (Score:2)
The article is about bumblebees (which are not domesticated), not honeybees.
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The Africanized bees ARE adapting fairly well and are have further crossbred with (now) indigenous honeybees and as a result are able to handle the cold much better than they have in recent years. As a result of this they are moving further and further north each year. I saw a documentary recently that stated that some scientists thought they would eventually make it up to through Canada and to the southern parts of Alaska eventually! IMHO that may be a little overstated (although I'm no scientist), how
Carpenter Bees (Score:2)
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If carpenter bees are considered a type of bumble bee I hope they do extinct ASAP. Not only do they drill holes in any wooden structure they can find, but after they've built a nest the woodpeckers tear it apart and make an even bigger hole.
Those suckers are nasty! I had one on my deck a few years back. It started boring a hole in one of the posts to make a nest. You could actually hear it chewing through the wood! I tried to swat it away, but it would keep coming after me, and I didn't want to get stung, so I decided to wait. It dug about half an inch into the wood in about 15 minutes. I figured it was safe at that point, so I took the hand spade I had been using in my garden and chopped it in half at the abdomen. Had to pull the head out by
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No. Bumble bees are the vast, furry, bees which, well, kinda bumble around. Despite being vast they don't sting anything like as badly as honey bees. Primarily this is because honeybees have suicide sting designed to inflict the maximum damage without regard to the bee's life. Bumblebees don't hive in the same way so they have some sort of self preservation. They nest in old wood. People make artificial nests using stacks of old bamboo.
Seeing a bumblebee pootling round is just one of those wonderful thin
Pettable (Score:2)
Is jumping to conclusions really... (Score:2)
...the only exercise Liberals aspire to? The fact that bumblebees are not colonizing new areas "opened up by global warming" - especially in the face of the fact that no warming has been seen for twenty years except by people who expect to make money from it - is clear evidence that their decline has some other cause. It's not like the damned bees are refusing to use the new territory. What? Are they offended about warming and doing a racial suicide to make us feel guilty?
Come on, if you want to keep up the
Re:Surely this is simply a natural, normal process (Score:4, Funny)
Bumblebees are clearly Communist Ecoterrorists out to destroy our fine, God-fearing Capitalist agricultural industry. We should immediately start executing those evil climatologists. God and the Invisible Hand would never permit massive CO2 emissions to effect humans, and anyone that says so should be taken out and beaten to death.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
Bumblebees are clearly Communist Ecoterrorists out to destroy our fine, God-fearing Capitalist agricultural industry. We should immediately start executing those evil climatologists. God and the Invisible Hand would never permit massive CO2 emissions to effect humans, and anyone that says so should be taken out and beaten to death.
Well, get ready to start beating, because apparently the (interim) solution is asexual reproduction:
https://xkcd.com/1259/ [xkcd.com]
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The question is, if humans never existed, would the bees have died out anyways as the climate would eventually change by the same amount as we are coming out of an ice age.
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Yep. The obvious point that you miss is, if we kill off the bees quicker, do we also kill off ourselves quicker?
Or are you just too shortsighted to see that?
Re: Surely this is simply a natural, normal proces (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdot climate change discussions, man. It's Friday, Friday.
What time does the men's rights activist clickbait get posted? Then the real fun starts.
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You must be thinking about WASPs, honey.
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The real question is, if human beings never existed, would bumble bees have developed intelligence and civilization, as no other species filled that niche.
This really gets to the heart of the debate.
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Sensitive much? I don't believe I said anything in that sentence that should indicate that I doubt that the climate is changing, or that humans likely are the cause. I also didn't type anything to indicate that I think we shouldn't study the changing climate to see what effects it will have on our society. I was just wondering if this same thing would happen without the man made climate impacts (slower change). Likely the answer is no, they bees would have had time to adapt and migrate with a slower cha
Re:Surely this is simply a natural, normal process (Score:4, Interesting)
Climate change is another issue but you can't debate the dangers of bee toxins being sprayed on agricultural crops, and habitat loss is easy to demonstrate.
Too bad this audience is all basement dwellers, you guys should really take up bee friendly gardening [davidsuzuki.org].
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Well, when it is over, I bet there will be absolutely no proof that the human race self-exterminated due to sheer stupidity.
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Unfortunately, you are way off. People worried about climate and food as soon as they were able to and most still do so today. Sure, not with a strategic view, but the problem has been mostly unchanged for a long, long time.
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I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth. No, this isn't a troll. I am serious.
Before we do that we need to terraform Mars and probably Venus so we can grow enough food to feed a Trantorized Earth. Note that Asimov had 20 nearby agricultural worlds to supply Trantor's food.
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Nice non sequitur. I was referring to your completely off-the-mark claim that pesticides were killing bees. Once I read that claim, it's hard to believe that there's any sort of logic or science behind your other claim.
To be blunt: it appears you might be just pulling stuff out of your ass.
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If this is a trend that predates you then there's a strong chance it's not the current trendy thing people are fixating on NOW.
Or have you run out of things to blame on climate change in the here and now and have to start with historical events.
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Indeed, this is the case of the cult science of Climate Change vs. the cult science of Evolution. Considering how many warming periods and ice ages bumblebees have survived, it's ludicrous to suggest that they can't adapt to a changing climate through basic "These bees survived because they moved further North. The further North, the more likely the hive is to split and thrive. Therefore, we can predict that the Bumblebees will, as a species, propagate North" which is the least-disagreeable pillar of evo
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Considering Polar Bears only evolved their current teeth about 10,000-20,000 years ago, strictly speaking the current species has not survived many cycles.
Polar Bears are marine animals and dependent on hunting seal, so hanging around on land leads to starvation.
Of course they can evolve into Pizzly bears which can live on land but strictly speaking, they're not Polar bears anymore.
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Who could possibly imagine that altering such a fundamental characteristic of the planet like the amount of energy it retains would have an enormous range of impacts! Science sure is ridiculous!
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I read one theory is that its not the pesticides that are killing them but modern farming in general. As more and more land is put under cultivation and farms industrialize and specialize you get more farm fields and less forest/wet lands/other. Additionally industrialization of agriculture is trading small farms that may have multiple crops on tens of acres each for farms that have a single crop on 100s of acres.
The impact is that rather than having a variety of plants blooming at all different times a l
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What's funny is that this was a source of hysteria in the 70s. Those bees were going to migrate up north and cause mass havoc. Not just ecological disruption mind you but actually bothering people that were nowhere near nature.
Didn't seem to pan out. You have the occasional killer bee attack here and there but nothing too bad in the grand scheme of things.
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Just log off now. For everyone's sake.
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Wow, can't take a damn joke?
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Yes, god forbid we not be insensitive to others. That's just the worst.
racially insensitive (and for the record it's not).
Your opinion. And it's a wrong opinion. Try this. Go tell that bee joke to a black guy. See if he finds it funny, racist and/or insensitive.
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Actual quick fix: breed regular non-modified bumblebees in captivity and sell hives to farmers.
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Honey Bees would be better as they have 3-4 orders of magnitude more Bees in a hive. Besides the Honey Bee makes hives that are easier to domesticate and sell, imagine digging up a Bumble Bee hive and trying to sell it.
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Tomato farmers claim that Bumblebees are superior to regular bees when it comes to pollinating tomatoes, so that's wy there is a market for them.
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Dude - bees have a much more immediate and far larger problem than some speculative "Oh Noes teh Hooman iz changings teh Climatez!" correlation:
http://www.theguardian.com/env... [theguardian.com]
I bet if you fix that, you'll see the populations rebound. 'course, stopping idiots from spraying neurotoxin-based pesticides is nowhere near as sexy as the magic words "Climate Change", but you know? I think it'd help the bees out a hell of a lot more, and a hell of a lot faster...
Re:Pollinators (Score:5, Informative)
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This Alanar Pindar sounds like a red pinko Commie (the last name totally gives it a way, can you imagine an Invisible Hand-fearing capitalist having a pinko name like "Pindar"). She should be fired and forced into some more appropriate Invisible Handy worthy occupation, instead of being an evil Communist out to ruin our economy and turn us all into universal healthcare-demanding socialist fuckers. Scientists, except where they are developing new means of producing massive profits, should all be taken out an
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...then that makes it sound like the problems with Bees predate the current trendy nonsense of blaming everything on "climate change" and the climate conditions to match.
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And it was predicted already in the 19th century.
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Troll...? Really?
GO check out the Time magazine front pages and other article found back then, they WERE saying the threat was global cooling.
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Re:Pollinators (Score:5, Informative)
This has been considered. From the article:
"In addition to land-use changes, we investigated whether pesticide use affected shifts in thermal and latitudinal range limits among bumblebees. Spatially detailed, annual pesticide measurements, including neonicotinoid insecticides, were available for the United States after 1991. Neither total pesticide nor neonicotinoid applications there relate to observed shifts in bumblebee speciesâ(TM) historical ranges or thermal limits (table S1). Neonicotinoid effects known from individual and colony levels certainly contribute to pollinator declines and could degrade local pollination services. Neonicotinoid effects on bumblebees have been demonstrated experimentally using field-realistic treatments (20). These locally important effects do not âoescale upâ to explain cross-continental shifts along bumblebee speciesâ(TM) thermal or latitudinal limits. The timing of climate changeâ"related shifts among bumblebee species underscores this observation: Range losses from speciesâ(TM) southern limits and failures to track warming conditions began before widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides (figs. S2 and S3). "
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... [sciencemag.org]
False dichotomy alert (Score:2)
Also society can, and does, tackle more than one issue simultaneously, fixing the pesticide issue would certainly b
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You joke, but if you watch the excellent documentary "More Than Honey" (on netflix) you can see that due to the bee population being severely impacted in China they actually DO have people running around pollinating plants!
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Maybe 30% overall. For some things (at least almonds) they are responsible for 100% of the pollination.
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Also, bees only are responsible for 30% of pollination.
Yes, grasses and grains, many kinds of trees and things like ragweed are pollinated by wind. That's why we have hay fever. But many important foods [wikipedia.org] do need bees to pollinate including legumes, fruits, berries and melons.
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You joke but parts of Asia are already doing that; well with Asians anyway.
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I thought bumblebees are everywhere except maybe the desert?
From what I can tell Bumblebee [wikipedia.org] is a genus, so there are about 250+ individual species, each with its own habitat and temperature range it's adapted too.
What seems to be happening is these habitats are getting too warm and the bees, instead of migrating towards cooler temperatures, are dying instead.
Re:bumblebees have range? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought bumblebees are everywhere except maybe the desert?
Bombus sonorus -- the Sonoran Bumblebee -- is a common North American desert species.
To answer your question every critter has it's range. Even you do. Visited Antarctica recently? Or Mars?
If you were a bumblebee you'd have a range of about a quarter of a kilometer from your nest. In rare instances you might go as far as 800m distant. And therein you can see why climate change poses an adaptation challenge to bumblebees.
Bumblebee colonies die every winter. The old queen perishes and the new queens hibernate until the spring then disperse to a new nest site. So you can see that the species can only relocate northward at a fraction of a kilometer per year -- although it may have better luck moving vertically -- to higher altitudes where a convenient mountain is handy.
Species that adapt well to climate change either have individuals with large ranges, or they hitch a ride on critters that travel long distance. For example mosquito species have lifetime ranges on the order of 2-3 km, but the Asian Tiger Mosquito (Aedes albopictus), which breeds in small containers of water, usually spends its life within 100m or so of where it hatches. The Tiger Mosquito species was introduced to the US at Houston in 1985 and fifteen years later it was found all over the United States. How is this possible if an individual lives its entire life within a 100m radius of its hatching place? I went to a presentation at CDC Fort Collins where their arthropod borne disease doyen plotted out the spread of Ae albopictus and showed it followed the route of the US Interstate Highway system. Eggs and pregnant individuals hitched a ride. That's because cars and trucks provide things that mosquitoes are attracted to: people to bite and tiny pools of water trapped in spare tires or crevices of the machine for egg-laying. Note that Ae albopictus larvae are known to arrive in the US in a shipments of that "lucky bamboo" you can buy in Chinatown; those stalks hold maybe 20-30 ml of water. It takes a "container" with only a tablespoon or two of water to transport viable larvae.
Now back to bumblebees. Because bumblebee colonies are small (typically 50 individuals to 50,000 for honeybees) and temporary, bumblebees don't stockpile honey. So unlike honeybees humans have no reason to transport them deliberately. Likewise cars and trucks aren't attractive to bumblebees so it's rare that a new queen will get an accidental ride north with a human. So bumblebees are poorly adapted to a rapidly changing climate.
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Just like anything else in the natural world, small changes effect the outliers first. Bee colonies living on the edge, just getting by, die off if there is even a slight drop in survivability.
To answer your question; sometimes a reduction in food supply and sometimes the weather gets just a little too warm for bees already living on the edge of survivability. Either one can cause a colony to fail.
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I don't understand. For the sake of argument. How does an average temperature that's half a degree warmer than it was 40 years ago wipe out the bumblebee's habitat?
Think of it in terms of energy. Raising the atmosphere's temperature by half a degree is the energy equivalent of detonating about two million nuclear warheads [wikipedia.org]. The heat capacity of the ocean is a thousand times that of the atmosphere, but I'm not sure if the whole ocean has warmed along with the atmosphere. If it has, that would be two billion nuclear warheads. Earth's atmosphere is a huge, complex, nonlinear system. Adding more energy affects different parts of the world in different ways. (That's the nat
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Remember, that is an average, with almost no change at the equator and maximum change (on average) towards the poles. Then there are the weird outlier years such as this one where I live. Winter ended at least a month early, the drought showed up and it is shaping up to be the hottest year on record (hottest June, driest May and June so far, the bush (wild flowers) is dieing and the watering restriction are getting severe so people don't have as many flowers). The Bees had bad timing with their usual spring
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So unlike honeybees humans have no reason to transport them deliberately.
Not quite true, bumblebees are used in greenhouses for pollination.
E.g.: https://greenmethods.com/product/bombus-impatiens-pollinating-bumblebee-hives/ [greenmethods.com]
But that probably helps only a select few species of bumblebees to migrate.
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Repeat after me: it has nothing to do with all the RF from all the fucking cellphone towers everywhere. Still don't believe that? Repeat it again, as many times as necessary...
Actually, this has more to do with pesticide use in the controlling of mosquitos and such than the climate changing. Honey Bees are big business and renting out hives a profitable venture. These hives travel all over the country (I saw three full semi-trucks of Bees just last week heading north) and all this global warming (if true) does is to make the growing season happen sooner and makes the business of bee keeping just move the hives north sooner.
Nothing to see here.... Move on..
Re:Repeat after me: (Score:4, Informative)
Since the range migration started happening "even before the neonicotinoid pesticides came into play in the 1980s,” both of your theories seem to not be relevant to this particular article. Especially the wacky cellphone tower tinfoil hat guy.
Please at least try to RTFA next time.
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Try to keep up. We're talking about Bumblebees, says right on my browser windows frame, not Honey Bees. Where I live there is no mosquito spraying, no farming and the wild bees, including Bumblebees are having a fuck of a year due to weird weather (everything is 2-4 weeks early except when the wild bees hatch to make new hives). Pollination rates on the wild Huckleberries, which are usually the first crop for the wild bees, is close to zero, which points to the bees not having their usual spring breakfast w
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It must be psychosomatic just like in humans, since it seemed to happen before the antennas were hooked up as well!
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I have never been stung by a bumblebee. Yellowjackets, mostly.
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If I'm reading your multitude of comments on this subject correctly, you're saying, "fuck the wild honeybees, private industry will just make more of them and truck them around more and everything will be okay. yay capitalism!"
Is that about right?
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This is a basic tenet of the Church of the Invisible Hand. There's no problem that can't be solved by destroying nature and replacing it dollar-generating industries.
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This is a basic tenet of the Church of the Invisible Hand. There's no problem that can't be solved by destroying nature and replacing it dollar-generating industries.
The basic tenet of the Church of the Totalitarian State is that there is no problem that can't be solved by just raising taxes and adding laws. Generally, "destroying nature" and the like can only be accomplished by a corrupt state supporting the big corporations, i.e., campaign donors. Even a corrupt state isn't too big a problem until it grows large. Even the Grant Administration [wikipedia.org] had a limited short term effect because the size and scope of government was vastly smaller. The true Invisible Hand is rarely
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There's a basic tenet of the Church of the Invisible Hand that states "There are no consequences"
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It's inevitable that business will be more successful by financing a totalitarian state to force people to buy their products. Think about it, one business spends a fortune making a better product and has little money left for advertising etc, another business pays far less to influence the government to force people to use their product and to screw the other company. Which one succeeds?
At least we're no longer in the days when businesses simply hired mercenaries to force people to do what the company want
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If you think so...
I'm saying that this whole article is actually hog wash born of the global warming alarmist religion. I don't think this is a problem, nor do I think that the issue is traceable to global warming. Finally, I don't think global warming is man made (but that's a totally different argument).
This does not seem to be a serious problem to me...Even if their conclusions are true.
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If the "global warming alarmist religion"'s conclusions are true, then we're fucked. If that doesn't seem a serious problem to you, then I'd hate to see what is.
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You know, the alarmists have been playing the gloom and doom card for 20+ years, so far none of their dire prognostications have been proven true. If they've been so so wrong in the past, why would I believe them now? They confidently made claims in the past which turned out to be false.
Don't you see? They have just kept upping the anti with more and more dire predictions, because that's what it takes to get attention now. It's starting to wear thin if you ask me. I look at their past and it seems like t
Quiet please. (Score:3)
If I'm reading your multitude of comments on this subject correctly, you're saying, "fuck the wild honeybees, private industry will just make more of them and truck them around more and everything will be okay. yay capitalism!"
Quiet please.
We are having a moment of silence for the wild cows.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] =/= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bumblebees are larger and usually fuzzier. That is like mistaking hornets for bees, they are different.
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Actually, There was a study a short time ago that said bees become addicted to nicotine based pesticides and prefer it to sugar water or regular food.
Pesticides are likely the issues here.
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Or not: "One clue to the importance of climate: Bumblebee ranges began shrinking 'even before the neonicotinoid pesticides came into play in the 1980s,' says ecologist and coauthor Alana Pindar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph in Canada."
Please RTFA. Thank you.
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That statement is a self nuke since he's talking about 30 years ago. If the trend started 30 years ago then it is probably NOT climate change.
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How do I figure?
Let's imagine for a minute that bees rely more on the sun and its pisition than the available food sources. We do know after all that bees navigate and communicate by the sun and representations of it.
So why would bees migrate if readily available food sources were already nearby? Or perhaps if they do, it is at a lot slower pace than other animals or insects. So let's assume that the location is relatively static which is why there appears to not be any northern movement. Now we need to f
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You forgot to mention the part where production and sale of neonicitonoids is a huge business, and the pesticide industry is attacking entomologists who are studying the effects of this class of pesticides on bees and other pollinating insects with as much fervor as the fossil fuel industry attacks climatologists.
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I note you intentionally left out CO2. Good thing, climatologists are evil fucking commies. We should silence them, so our way of life can be maintained as consequence free as it has always been. Do you agree with me that we should quadruple CO2 emissions every year? After all, CO2 is totally benign, doesn't absorb and re-emit IR like those evil lying communist climatologists claim. Perhaps we should ponder some appropriate punishments for them.
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Yeah, those rotten commie climatologists. We should have them wiped out.
And then we'll go after all the other so called "scientists" with their evil pinko theories that suggest we can damage the environment and wipe them out too. Clearly God and the Invisible Hand have us protected. Let's start really releasing CO2, because we know it cannot do anything at all, and it's all lies by those evil consequence-free socialist fucker traitor climatologists!
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Hey don't look at me. I want to eliminate climatology entirely. CO2 is wonderful, and we should look at massively increasing emissions. So far as I can tell, you're in agreement. You've have, as so many of us who worship at the exalted throne of the Invisible Hand, discovered that CO2 in the atmosphere is at the very worst merely benign, but more likely increased emissions will in fact help in so many ways. Clearly we both are firm believers that the laws of physics simply do not apply to industrial activit