Environment

We’ve been saying for years that the anti-GMO folks haven’t a scientific leg to stand on—that their stance is based on an irrational misunderstanding of what "organic" and "natural" is.“unnatural.”  Mainstream media has increasingly embraced the position of the American Council on Science and Health, and our legacy of Nobel laureate Dr. Norm Borlaug. An article in the Washington Post points that out once again, discussing haphazard and irrational that stance is. Those who have been following the anti-GMO movement have surely heard of Bt, short for Bacillus thuringiensis. This is a…

If you suffer from seasonal allergies, you are probably sick of it. So are allergy sufferers around the world. We can make a phone that could land a man on the Moon and create potatoes that don't brown but allergy solutions eluse us.  Paloma Carinanos, a professor of Botany at the University of Granada in Spain, studies how the trees in urban green spaces contribute to and even cause allergies. Carinanos' interest in studying allergies started early. She and her seven brothers and sisters all suffer from seasonal allergies, a trait they inherited from their father. "Since I was young, I…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announces a determination of non-regulated status for a genetically engineered (GE) potato variety developed by J.R. Simplot Company (Simplot) called Innate, which has been engineered for late blight resistance, low-acrylamide potential, reduced black spot bruising, and lowered reducing sugars.  The determination will be effective upon publication of the Federal Register notice announcing the decision on September 2, 2015, they wrote. The Final Environmental Assessment, the Final Plant Pest…

The explosion in coffee consumption in the past two decades has generally not benefited farmers of coffee beans in poorer nations along the equator, it has mostly just helped corporations, including those marketing "fair trade" as some sort of ethical improvement.. The analysis of trade and globalization found that the shift to "technified" coffee production in the 1970s and 1980s created harsher economic and ecological consequences for heavy coffee-producing nations, such as Honduras, Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil, Vietnam and Ethiopia. Technified coffee production changed the process to…

Much of the European continent has been affected by a severe drought so far this summer, one of the worst since the drought and heat wave of summer of 2003, according to the latest report by the European Drought Observatory (EDO). The drought, which particularly affects France, Benelux, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, northern Italy and northern Spain, is caused by a combination of prolonged rain shortages and exceptionally high temperatures.  The current seasonal weather forecast envisages more abundant rains for the Mediterranean region in September, but no effective improvement…

You are gazing over the clear stream, thinking of fishing the crystal waters in the Rockies. The next morning, you are stunned to see an orange-yellow sludge covering the stream as far as you can see. Is this the Colorado Gold King Mine spill into Cement Creek of August 5, 2015? No, this describes the Clear Creek, CO spill of April, 2009 from a private mine or it could be the 1975 or 1978 Cement Creek spills from abandoned mines. Spills of acid mine drainage (AMD) from abandoned mines have been a problem in the US for over 100 years. How many other mines are leaking or holding millions of…

It used to be that clean energy was something that environmental lobbyists pretended to care about, at least when it came to raising money.  Greenpeace, NRDC, you name it, they all put clean energy in their tool chest of ways to get their hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. Of course, they never actually built anything to help us get clean energy, just like they don't do any science and instead prefer to criticize those who know what they're talking about. They just embrace whatever isn't shown to be viable and abandon efforts that succeed, as they did with ethanol…

If you care about the environment, you should eat the steak and throw out the salad, according to University of Missouri researchers who say that the type of food wasted has a significant impact on the environment.  Approximately 31 percent of food produced in the U.S., or 133 billion pounds of food worth $162 billion, was wasted in 2011 according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Although less meat is wasted (on average) compared to fruits and vegetables, the researchers found that significantly more energy is used in the production of meat compared to the…

Today, many wealthy countries are able to mitigate, to some degree, their risk of delta flooding through vulnerability-reducing investments, but a new model suggests that this mitigation may not be sustainable in the long-term. Ultimately, wealthy countries could be feeling the strain of floods to a similar degree as developing countries. To calculate a given delta population's risk of flooding, Zachary Tessler and colleagues accounted for the population's probability of a damage-producing event, how the population's exposure to these hazards may change over time due to changing climate…

Among all the hype about bee deaths, there is an overwhelming amount of discussion about pesticides and blinders on about parasites and disease and even climate change, but one thing gets no mention at all: Flowers. But they are a grave danger to bees, according to an article in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The study is the first to show that not only can bees disperse parasites around the environment but also that flowers are platforms for a host of pollinator parasites subsequently dispersed onto visiting bees.  The researchers found four common honey bee and bumblebee…