Sports Breasts, Celebrity Topless Sunbathing And Other Cultural Changes

You Can Only Hope To Contain Them

(By Amanda Hess, ESPN The Magazine, 15 July 2013)

Minutes after Ronda Rousey bounded into the octagon this past February for the first women's fight in UFC history, she found herself grappling with two formidable opponents. The first was former Marine Liz Carmouche, who was suddenly suctioned to Rousey's back, strangling her and twisting her head. The second was her low-cut black crop top, whose elastic spaghetti straps were no match for Carmouche's moves.  In a last-minute mishap, handlers had failed to order Rousey a formidable fight-night bra and instead handed her one of the light-as-air chest coverings she usually wears for weigh-in.

Now that teensy swath of fabric was the only thing standing between Rousey's goods and 13,000 onlookers at the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif. -- and it was inching closer and closer to the mat.  "When someone's on your back trying to rip your head off, things tend to slip around a bit," Rousey says. After one failed attempt at a wardrobe adjustment, she switched her focus to freeing herself from the choke hold "so she wouldn't snap my neck in half." As soon as she flipped Carmouche to the floor, Rousey went straight for her own neckline. Bad move: "I got kicked straight in the chest right as I was trying to adjust my bra."  Rousey eventually finished Carmouche with her signature armbar. But the rumble over the bra had only just begun. Online commentators asked whether the UFC's new female fighters required a dress code to fight modestly. Others immortalized the near nip slip as an ever-refreshing animated GIF.

The episode was the latest skirmish in a long-standing war over the place of the mammary in the pectoral-dominated world of sports. Breasts are an impressive network of milk glands, ducts and sacs, all suspended from the clavicle in twin masses held together by fibrous connective tissue. But a mounting body of evidence suggests that they pose a serious challenge in nearly all corners of competition. Gymnasts push themselves to the brink of starvation to avoid developing them. All sorts of pro athletes have ponied up thousands of dollars to surgically reduce them. For the modern athlete, the question isn't whether breasts get in the way -- it's a question of how to compete around them.  "Gina Carano was an amazing fighter, and she had a fantastic rack," Rousey says of the MMA fighter-turned-actor. But then again: "You don't see big titties in the Olympics, and I think that's for a reason."

Breasts have taken a metaphorical beating from the sports world ever since women first entered the arena. Greek folktales spun the myth that a race of all-female Amazons lopped off the right breast in order to hurl spears and shoot arrows more efficiently. (In Greek, a-mazos means "without breast.") Centuries later, in 1995, CBS golf analyst Ben Wright controversially told a newspaper that "women are handicapped by having boobs. It's not easy for them to keep their left arm straight. Their boobs get in the way."  Wright's commentary wasn't exactly the result of careful scientific review. ("Let's face facts here," he opined in the same interview: "Lesbians in the sport hurt women's golf.") But what if he had a point? Research shows a typical A-cup boob weighs in at 0.43 of a pound. Every additional cup size adds another 0.44 of a pound. That means a hurdler with a double-D chest carries more than 4 pounds of additional weight with her on every leap. And when they get moving, the nipples on a C- or D-cup breast can accelerate up to 45 mph in one second -- faster than a Ferrari. In an hour of moderate jogging, a pair of breasts will bounce several thousand times.

None of this feels good. Large breasts are associated with back and neck pain, skin rashes, carpal tunnel syndrome, degenerative spine disorders, painful bra strap indentations and even anxiety and low self-esteem. In one study of women racing in the 2012 London Marathon -- cup sizes AA to HH -- about a third reported breast pain from exercise. Eight percent of those described the pain as "distressing, horrible or excruciating." Reports of pain grew with every cup size.It's no wonder that athletes rack up strategies -- and bills -- for battling the bulge. Well-endowed golfers flock to former player-turned-coach Kellie Stenzel, who teaches them to shift their posture forward so their swing clears the top of their breasts; the bigger the chest, the deeper the lean. "These women have a real feeling of relief, like, 'Nobody ever told me that before,'" Stenzel says, adding that despite Wright's claims, she's never seen a chest she couldn't coach into compliance.

American archer Kristin Braun says her chest causes clearance issues as she draws her bow; in order to get around it, she anchors the string farther away from her body, which can diminish power and consistency. Australian hurdler Jana Rawlinson received breast implants in 2008, then promptly removed them in hopes of speeding up her times. "Every time I raced, I panicked about whether I was letting my country down, all for my own vanity," she told reporters. And inside the Octagon, Rousey's boob issues go deeper than the cotton-Lycra blend. "The bigger my chest is, the more it gets in the way," says Rousey. When she's fighting at her most curvaceous weight, "it just creates space. It makes me much more efficient if I don't have so much in the way between me and my opponent."

But nowhere do breasts pose more of a liability than in the world of elite women's gymnastics, where any hint of a curve can mean early retirement. "Look at missiles that shoot into the air, batons that twirl -- they're straight up and down," says Joan Ryan, author of the 1995 expose of gymnastics and figure skating, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. In order to stay stick straight, elite gymnasts undereat and overtrain, which delays menstruation. "You can't afford to have a woman's body and compete at the highest level," Ryan says.  To keep competitors from reaching puberty, coaches would push away bread baskets at the table and riffle through their belongings to sniff out hidden treats, says Dominique Moceanu, who was, at 14, the youngest, teensiest competitor on the 1996 gold medal USA Olympic team. "The sport pushes us to be breastless little girls as long as possible," she says. But though breasts were forbidden, privately "we longed for them."

Laying off the carbs may do the trick for preteens, but most adult athletes can't starve their boobs out of existence. So every year, some competitors head to the Marina del Rey, Calif., office of Dr. Grant Stevens in pursuit of a streamlined frame.  Stevens, a plastic surgeon with backswept blond hair and a boyish face he maintains through injections of Botox and Restylane, is known as the inventor of a scalpel-free procedure that leaves women multiple cup sizes (and up to $15K) lighter with minimal recovery time. The doctor says he's treated volleyball players, golfers, ballet dancers and assorted Olympians, though he won't name names. (He trains his lasers on men as well, because nothing calls their abilities into question like a pair of man boobs.) But many of his patients have already lost out on the years of weightless chests needed to reach the highest levels of competition. At the size they walk in with, Stevens says, "They would never get to be a pro athlete."

Not all athletes agree that large breasts constitute a competitive disadvantage. In 2009 then-18-year-old Romanian tennis player Simona Halep announced she was having her breasts surgically reduced from a 34DD to a 34C, saying they were slowing her reaction time and causing back pain. Upon hearing about Halep's plan, retired South African beach volleyball player Alena Schurkova took the opportunity to launch a big-boob-pride campaign. "If she does this, it sends out the message that girls with big boobs can't play sports, and that is just wrong," Schurkova said. "I am 32E, and I have never found them to be a problem. I could be double what I have" -- 6 pounds per boob! -- "and I would still be okay to perform."  Maybe so, but Halep's downsizing appears to have paid off: Before she went under the knife, she was ranked around 250; by 2012, she'd cracked the top 50.

When Katherine Switzer became the first woman to don a bib at the Boston Marathon in 1967, science was unprepared to grapple with the female frame in motion. Critics warned her that the repetitive movement could cause her breasts to atrophy and her uterus to drop out of her vagina. (She ran the race in a flimsy fashion bra under a T-shirt and sweatshirt.) The sports bra wasn't even invented until 10 years later, when a group of women sewed two jock straps together and slung them over their shoulders. (An early version of the original Jogbra is now preserved behind glass at the Smithsonian.)  The advent of the sports bra "was like the birth control of the women's sports revolution," Switzer says. Still, for the next 10-plus years, scientists stayed out of athletes' efforts to make their breasts stay put. Finally, in 1990, Oregon State University researcher LaJean Lawson invited female subjects onto a treadmill and filmed the results in the first-ever study of breast movement. Today, labs have sprung up in the U.K., Australia and Hong Kong to study breast biomechanics -- and deliver the results to bra manufacturers seeking to develop cutting-edge solutions.

At Britain's University of Portsmouth sits a laboratory outfitted with black floors, black curtains and a treadmill surrounded by infrared cameras aimed directly below a subject's neck. Here, Jenny White, a lecturer in the school's sport and exercise science department, invites women to take off their shirts, outfit their breasts and torso with reflective markers, step onto the treadmill and break into a jog. On a set of monitors, White and her group of female researchers track 3-D images of the migrating dots in an attempt to better understand how breasts move through space. Her research has confirmed that size does matter: As breasts get bigger, they accelerate quicker, move faster and bounce higher. What she doesn't know -- yet -- is whether these speedy breasts really slow athletes down.

Part of the problem is that, 23 years after Lawson's seminal study, data collection is limited to relatively sluggish treadmill jaunts. "We can't take them to the park to do a decathlon," White says. It's easy to get a group of women to run at the same low speed. It's almost impossible to get them all to jump to the same height, swing a racket at the same trajectory, punch with the same power or run at a world-record pace. And while breasts are all built from the same basic elements, the proportions and densities of the tissues vary among individuals; they fluctuate throughout the month; they transform in puberty, pregnancy, motherhood and menopause. "It makes our job quite difficult," she says.

The research does reveal the self-selection process by which some women end up on the court while others -- disproportionally, those with bigger breasts -- are relegated to the stands. Hormones could play a part: "Studies suggest that curvier women may have higher estrogen levels, while higher testosterone levels are associated with more competitiveness and aggression," says Florence Williams, author of Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History. "So it's possible that if you have more estrogen, you might be somewhat less inclined to compete." Other factors include the pain and embarrassment associated with larger breasts in motion. Deirdre McGhee, a senior lecturer at Breast Research Australia, has been studying breast support and bra fit for the past decade -- and watching young athletes drop out as their breasts pop up. "They're embarrassed. They don't want to talk about it. And so they stop," McGhee says. "They just don't move."  McGhee counsels women to engage in physical activity that puts less of a strain on their breasts. But as the breasts get bigger, the field narrows. Busty ballet dancers are transferred to hip-hop. Postpubescent gymnasts get put on the rings. Runners are instructed to play in the water instead. If all else fails: yoga.

The physical and social barriers that come with a larger cup size mean that the Schurkovas and Haleps of the world stand out. Nothing appears to be weighing Serena Williams down on the court, but her measurements represent such an outlier that when Caroline Wozniacki stuffed her tank top and skirt with towels at a Brazilian exhibition match last year, everyone knew which great she was ridiculing. Serena took the impression in jest, dismissing charges that it was racist. (Apparently, Wozniacki's temporary augmentation didn't weigh her down either; she won the point.)

But even when an athlete's breasts aren't notably large -- and no matter how expertly she works to contain them -- she still must contend with oglers who fixate on her peaks instead of her performance. When Halep announced her plans for surgery, more than 1,400 men signed a petition begging her to stay busty. Water polo matches are so notorious for nipple slips that bloggers hover over the pause button in hopes of glimpsing an areola. And in the rare case that a breast is on full display, all hell can break loose. Even as Carmouche was threatening to break her neck, Rousey felt as if her falling bra was a life-or-death situation too. If she failed to get a grip, "I'd be morbidly embarrassed," she says.

Nebiat Habtemariam can relate. At the 1997 world championships, the 18-year-old Eritrean runner suffered the longest wardrobe malfunction of all time during a qualifying heat for the women's 5,000-meter run. Lacking her own gear, Habtemariam asked to borrow another runner's red singlet for the race. What she failed to borrow was a sports bra. She spent her 18 minutes on the track with one breast perpetually in view. She didn't leave her hotel room for the rest of the week.  But the run of shame wasn't the end of Habtemariam's story. She kept running -- in two more world championships, three Olympic Games and countless other competitions. Last year she was the third woman to finish the Milano City Marathon, her lime-green and blue sports bra securely in place. It was further confirmation that the world's best athletes are those who have managed to transcend the limits -- and the addendums -- to the human body. Or as Rousey put it about her one-two punch of neutralizing Carmouche and her little black bra at the same time: "Multitasking!"

http://espn.go.com/espnw/news-commentary/article/9451835/female-athletes-biggest-opponents-their-own-breasts-espn-magazine?wpisrc=nl_lunchln

Why Do The Rich And Famous Always Sunbathe Topless?

(By Daniel Engber, Slate.com, 09 January 2013)

In the week before Christmas, we opened up the Explainer mailbag and dumped the dregs into a bucket of the sordid, silly questions sent in by our readers—all the ones the Explainer was unwilling or unable to answer in 2012. These included puzzlers such as Has anyone ever actually used a falling chandelier to take someone out? Or How long could a lactating woman survive drinking her own breast milk? In accordance with tradition, we invited you to pick the one that's most deserving of an answer. More than 66,000 readers registered their choice, and the winner is addressed below. But first, the runners-up:

In third place, with 7.5 percent of the total vote, a spin on the birds and the bees: When and how did humankind figure out that sex is what causes babies? It’s not exactly the most obvious correlation: Sex doesn’t always lead to babies, and there’s a long lead time between the act and the consequences—weeks before there are even symptoms, usually. So roughly where do we think we were as a species when it clicked?

In second place, with 7.7 percent of the vote, a question that has certainly been asked before: Why do people hate the sound of their own voice when they hear it on a recording?

And in first place, the question that was plastered on Slate's homepage beside a photo of a bikini babe, and with 24 percent of reader votes, our Explainer Question of the Year for 2012: Why do the rich and famous always sunbathe topless?

The answer: Because they can.  It would be easy to explain away this question as a case of availability bias: Lots of people sunbathe topless, but it's only the rich and famous ones who capture our attention. Photos of a half-nude and apricating royal—Kate Middleton, perhaps, or Princess Di—are more likely to make the papers than a picture of the Explainer's nudist cousin Linda. If a model like Heidi Klum or Kate Moss gets caught on camera topless, it's not because stars like these are more inclined to flash but because they're under perpetual surveillance, and because people would like to see them without their clothes.

It could also be that rich and famous women have the means to visit places where going topless is expected. If they're stripping down on the French Riviera, that's because they happen to be on the French Riviera—not because they like to strip. But this response brings up the question of why the French Riviera (where rich people tend to go) is so forgiving of breast exposure to begin with. Nor can the availability bias elucidate the link between topless fashion and social class. In fact, there's a long history behind the wealthy, public bosom: The rich have been taking off their tops for centuries.

Starting in the 1300s, European ladies showed their breasts in courtly fashion, and the trend had made its way to England by the late 1500s. Noblemen and -women of the Renaissance collected Greco-Roman statuary, explains historian Angela McShane, and venerated their naked, marble breasts. Queen Anne of Denmark, and maybe also Queen Elizabeth, proudly showed their nipples in public.  Extreme décolletage was well-received in the English court throughout the 1620s and then returned to haute couture in the 1680s, too. Woodcuts of Queen Mary II, who took the throne in 1689, show the monarch with her breasts exposed. While high-class girls could use the super-low-cut gowns to demonstrate their "apple-like" virtue, a naked, bawdy arm would never be exposed in full.

But fashions come and go, and as time went on, the unclothed top became anathema. By the end of the 19^th century, ladies of the upper class were taught to cover up, especially in summer. Instead of stripping down and heading to the beach, fancy women popped up parasols and hid themselves in the shade.  It would take a shift in medical belief to set the stage for the re-emergence of the naked breast. At the turn of the 20^th century, doctors began to advocate for exposure to the sun, which they said was vital for the body. At the same time, the bulky bathing suits of old were cropped down to smaller, one-piece maillots.

In the 1920s, the rich and avant-garde were spending summers on the beach, hoping for a healthy suntan. In France, where Josephine Baker dazzled as a topless dancer, the young and faddish tried to affect a darkened complexion. Bronzed skin was both fashionable and transgressive. Meanwhile, celebrities like Cole Porter and Rudolf Valentino crossed that Atlantic to spend their summers sunning on the Riviera.  This enthusiasm for bumming on the beach produced a social conflict, as the old-guard ruling class in France—the ones who came of age in the age of parasols—bemoaned the decadence of the nouveau riche. In the 1930s, says historian Christophe Granger, author of Les Corps D'été [Summer Bodies], protesters threw stones at immodest sunbathers and accused them of having public orgies. Restrictive beach laws were passed, limiting what could be done in swimwear. (No walking around or playing ball.)

Bathing suits went on shrinking, though, with starlets and celebrities showing off the new and scanty fashions. Two-piece suits were common by the early 1940s, and in 1946 a pair of Frenchmen invented the bikini. Finally the trend tipped over into toplessness in the 1960s with advent of the "monokini." Now the fashion-conscious could assert themselves by stripping to their waists. Another round of protests hit the beachhead in France, but the matter was decided in favor of the looser morals. On Aug. 19, 1975, the French magazine L'Express ran an issue with a half-naked woman on the cover, under the headline, "Going topless: The French are for it!"

The link between social class and plunging necklines was not exclusive to Europeans, though. Through the 13^th century, for example, upper-class women in Sri Lanka wore outfits that left their breasts exposed. In other places, the meaning of the fashion was reversed. In Southern India, both men and women were expected to bare their breasts to anyone of higher caste. Riots broke out in 1858 after Christian missionaries started putting shirts on low-class women so they could hide their nipples like proper, Western women.  When and where the fashions could not be enforced by rule of law, trends in décolletage would trickle down the social ladder, then get disavowed or criticized by those in power. Back in 17^th-century England, the courtly tendency to expose the breast was in certain decades vulgarized by prostitutes, who could not afford the undergarments used to push the naked breast above the breastbone.Even now, the topless habits of the rich and famous have their analog among the middle class. Young women who can't afford a stay in Cannes might still indulge in topless fashion on Spring Break or at Mardi Gras. And like Kate Middleton or Heidi Klum, they sometimes end up on camera.

 

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2013/01/famous_people_sunbathe_topless_the_history_of_topless_celebrities_and_royals.html

Global Warming

Global Warming Is Very Real

(By Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, September 12, 2013)

On September 27th, a group of international scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will gather in an old brick brewery in Stockholm and proclaim with near certainty that human activity is altering the planet in profound ways. The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report offers slam-dunk evidence that burning fossil fuels is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warn that sea levels could rise by almost three feet by the end of the century if we don't change our ways. The report will underscore that the basic facts about climate change are more established than ever, and that the consequences of escalating carbon pollution are likely to mean that, as The New York Times recently argued, "babies being born now could live to see the early stages of a global calamity."

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A leaked draft of the report points out that the link between fossil-fuel burning and climate change is already observable: "It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010. There is high confidence that this has warmed the ocean, melted snow and ice, raised global mean sea level and changed some climate extremes in the second half of the 20th century." If you look beyond the tables and charts and graphs that fill the reports, you can see the Arctic vanishing, great cities like Miami and Shanghai drowning, droughts causing famine in Africa, and millions of refugees fleeing climate-related catastrophes. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, recently told a group of climate scientists that if we want to avoid this fate, governments must act now to cut carbon pollution: "We have five minutes before midnight."

But, of course, this is nothing new. In 2007, when the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment Report, it was also nearly certain that human activity was heating up the planet, with grave consequences for our future well-being. And six years before that, when the IPCC released its Third Assessment, scientists were pretty certain about it too. But phrases like "high confidence" in warming do not, to the unscientific ear, inspire high confidence in the report's finding, since they imply the existence of doubt, no matter how slight. And in the climate wars, "Doubt is what deniers thrive on and exploit," says Bob Watson, who was head of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002. The final report has not even been released yet, and already prominent bloggers in the denial-sphere, like Anthony Watts, are calling it "stillborn."  But perhaps the most significant thing about the new IPCC report is not the scientific findings. It's that the release of the report may actually mark the beginning of a new phase of the climate wars – one in which scientists and activists learn to fight back.

The IPCC, which was founded in 1988 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization, is the world's leading authority on climate science. Deniers like to characterize it as a big, faceless bureaucracy – but in fact it's a tiny agency. The entire organization is housed on the eighth floor of the WMO offices in Geneva and has only 12 full-time employees, with an annual budget of a measly $9 million. The agency doesn't do any research on its own – its role is simply to assess and interpret scientific, technical and economic data. All of the actual work – the assessments themselves – is written by scientists around the world, who volunteer their time to distill information from thousands of studies and academic papers. As climate science has gotten more complex, the reports have ballooned. The Fourth Assessment was more than 3,000 pages long and was toiled over by more than 800 scientists and 2,500 expert reviewers – the Fifth Assessment is likely to be even bigger. These reports, which are issued every five or six years, are broken into three sections: Working Group I, which covers the physical science of climate change, will be released this month; Working Group II, which explores the impacts of rising carbon pollution on nature and human life, will be released next March; Working Group III, which analyzes various scenarios to cut carbon pollution, is due in April. Finally, a synthesis report that tries to pull it all together in a brief summary will be published next fall.

When scientists undertook the first IPCC assessment in the late 1980s, the assumption was that if they got the facts right, politicians would take action. "In the beginning, the purpose of the reports was to provide the fundamentals for a global climate agreement," says Watson. The first report, issued in 1990, led to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that was the foundation for a global agreement. The second report, which came out in 1995, was supposed to be the basis for the Kyoto Protocol. But Kyoto, of course, was DOA, in part because it was never ratified by the U.S.

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Deniers have always been cranked up about the IPCC, in part because of the black-helicopter paranoia of many conservatives who see climate change as a U.N. plot to take away freedom. And from the beginning, they have fought dirty, attacking not just the science but the scientists themselves. After the IPCC released its Second Assessment in 1995, the deniers were not happy that the report directly linked global warming with the burning of fossil fuels ("The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate"). So they attacked one of the lead authors of the report, Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A fossil-fuel-industry-funded group called the Global Climate Coalition accused Santer of removing mention of uncertainties in the chapter to make global warming appear more certain than it was. Later investigations found that Santer's so-called scientific cleansing involved little more than clarifying language suggested by fellow scientists. "Nothing in my scientific training prepared me for what I faced in the aftermath of that report," Santer says now. One night years later, he opened his front door and found a dead rat on his porch. In the street, he watched a yellow Hummer drive off, the driver yelling obscenities at him.

As the prominence of climate change grew and the evidence became stronger, attacks escalated. In 2009, just weeks before the Copenhagen climate summit, hackers broke into the servers of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in the U.K. and publicly posted hundreds of private e-mails from climate scientists involved with the IPCC's Fourth Assessment report. Deniers seized on these messages, taking a few barbed comments out of context (in one, for instance, Santer wrote that if he ran into Pat Michaels – a well-known shill for the fossil­fuel industry – he would "be tempted to beat the crap out of him") and claimed they now had their smoking gun, proof of a global conspiracy among scientists to keep out information that didn't fit their thesis that the Earth was warming. The substance of the e-mails was subsequently investigated by five agencies, all of whom cleared scientists of any professional or personal misconduct. And not surprisingly, the hackers who broke into the East Anglia servers and stole the e-mails were never found.

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"For a lot of scientists, ClimateGate was a real awakening," says Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard and co-author of Merchants of Doubt, which chronicles the fossil-fuel industry's long battle to undermine climate science. "It was clear that if you were going to work on climate change, you were a public figure. And it was no longer enough to just do the science. You also had to go out and explain it to people – and defend it." By then, Santer reports, he was receiving countless death threats.  "Most of the world does not have a problem with denial of climate change," says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. "It's only an issue in Australia, Canada and, most significantly, the United States." Although the U.S. population as a whole is moving toward accepting the reality of climate change, Congress remains a scientific backwater. One recent analysis by the Center for American Progress found that almost a third of the 535 members of the House and Senate are climate deniers. Not coincidentally, those 161 reps have taken more than $54 million in political contributions from the fossil-fuel industry.

But lately, climate activists are less shy about calling out deniers. Organizing for Action, the successor of President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, recently created the Congressional Climate Change Awards, honoring 135 members of Congress, including Dana Rohrabacher, Steve King and House Speaker John Boehner, for "exceptional extremism and ignoring the overwhelming judgment of science." And of course it doesn't hurt that President Obama has broken his silence about climate change and seems determined to make it part of his agenda in the second term.

But the biggest change is in the public profile of scientists themselves. Leading the charge is Michael Mann, an IPCC veteran and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, who has become a presence on TV talk shows and is author of a must-read book about the politics of climate science, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. Mann is taking the unprecedented step of suing the conservative National Review for defamation after the magazine's blog quoted a story that called Mann "the Jerry Sandusky of climate science" because he "molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science."  Mann can't talk about the pending lawsuit, but he points out that "concerted industry-funded attacks on our science" by deniers have mobilized many scientists to fight back. In Mann's view, ClimateGate and other denier campaigns are deliberately designed to erode the credibility of scientists: "Public polling shows that scientists are among the most trusted messengers around when it comes to issues such as climate change," Mann says. "So clearly this was an effort by fossil-fuel-industry front groups and advocates to go right at that. It was a deeply cynical effort to undermine the public faith in scientists and science."

The war over the IPCC's fifth assessment officially got under way in August, after a draft report of the "Summary for Policymakers" of the Working Group I report was leaked to the media. Deniers immediately seized on two issues to create controversy and undercut the findings of the report.  The first has to do with "equilibrium climate sensitivity," which is the amount the climate is likely to warm in response to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. In a leaked draft of the Fifth Assessment, scientists slightly lowered the range of possible warming from the previous assessment. Some media outlets – including The Economist, which should have known better – seized on this data to suggest that this is "one sign [that] suggests [the new assessment] might be less terrifying than it could have been." In fact, as prominent climate blogger Joe Romm pointed out, these arcane, highly technical numbers are "far less interesting and consequential subject than the fact that we are headed way, way past [emissions targets] or that the real-world slow feedbacks are expected to make a very big contribution to warming this century." To put it another way: In the real world, climate sensitivity means zip.

But that's how the denier game works: They seize on small errors and inconsequential factual inconsistencies in a piece of climate research and use it to discredit the science and reassure people that climate change is no big deal. In the 2007 Assessment, for instance, the authors and reviewers overlooked a sentence that asserted Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035 – an obvious misstatement, which deniers seized and used to suggest that the entire assessment was bunk. "You didn't have to be a scientist to know that's not true," says Watson. "It was simply an error that slipped through, and deniers tried to use it to invalidate the findings of the entire report." It's like finding a misspelling in the Manhattan phone book and then declaring the whole book useless.

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The second issue that has come up is the question of a "hiatus," or pause in surface-temperature warming. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, winner of a climate-denier award from Texas green groups, recently proclaimed that "there has been no recorded warming since 1998." Not exactly, Ted. According to the IPCC draft report, the rate of warming at the planet's surface is lower over the past 15 years, but warming has not stopped. In fact, since the 1950s, each successive decade has been hotter than the last, and the 2000s were the hottest decade since modern record-keeping began in 1880. Scientists have a variety of explanations for this, including the fact that more heat is being transferred deeper into the ocean and that volcanic eruptions have blocked sunlight. "We never expected warming to be linear," says Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

To former IPCC chair Watson, it is crucial that these criticisms not go unanswered. "The IPCC needs to have an answer for this," he says. "They need to be prepared." But in Santer's view, climate science is rapidly approaching the point where it is immune to these kinds of critiques: "Up until now, the criticism has been that climate science is like a house of cards, and if you pull out one or two sets of data, it all collapses. That narrative has been refuted. The Fifth Assessment shows that warming has a physical and internal consistency – it's warming in the deep ocean, in the intermediate ocean and in the lower atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic sea ice is retreating. The observational evidence for human-caused warming is overwhelming, compelling and irrefutable."

Why We Can't Count on Evolution to Counterbalance Climate Change

That may be true, says Oreskes, "but if there is one thing we have learned in recent years, it's that climate change is not just a scientific problem. It is also a political, social and cultural problem." According to Yale's Leiserowitz, it's also a problem that four in 10 people in the world have never heard of. "If you can reach them, you can convince them," says Leiserowitz. But it is going to take more than a few well-written press releases and a spiffy website: "Think about what a company like Coke does when they are launching a new product in the world," says Leiserowitz. "They spend a billion dollars doing market research, crafting ads, targeting their audience. They know that is what it takes to cut through the media clutter today. So far, the climate movement hasn't come close to thinking about how to communicate on that scale."

For better or worse, this Fifth Assessment may be the last grand climate-science report from the IPCC. "I think these reports have outgrown their usefulness," says David Keith, a Harvard professor who recently resigned as an author of the Fifth Assessment, echoing the view of other top scientists. "If it were gone, scientists might reorganize themselves in a more effective way."  In a more rational world, of course, we wouldn't need any more IPCC assessments. We would have listened to the scientists, built a global consensus and forged international agreements to reduce carbon pollution and head off the risk of climate catastrophe. But in the 25 years since the IPCC was formed, global carbon pollution is rising faster than ever. Future readers may view IPCC reports not as landmarks of scientific inquiry, but as suicide notes from a lost civilization.
 

Fact-Checking The Global Warming Deniers

(By Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, September 12, 2013)

Beware of these oft-repeated talking points. None of them are true

1. There's more ice in Antarctica than ever.
The past few years have seen an expansion of Antarctica's coastal ice sheets – a byproduct, ironically, of climate change, which has brought increased snow and rainfall to the continent. Meanwhile, Antarctica's inland ice sheets are melting at an alarming rate – 1,350 billion tons of ice disappeared into the ocean between 1992 and 2011. And that rate is increasing, fueling global rises in sea level.

2. The climate may be changing, but human activity has nothing to do with it.
Many skeptics claim that ice ages have come and gone over the millennia, and global warming is no different. But those earlier climate shifts were caused by phenomena like changes in the Earth's orbit. The current rise in global temperatures has coincided with a nearly 40 percent rise in CO2 levels over the past 150 years.

3. Whatever happens, we can adapt.
True, perhaps, for rich countries. But the worst impacts of climate change – drought, famine, disease – will disproportionately strike the poorest nations. And even the well-off will be hit hard: Between 2011 and 2012, the U.S. government dished out more than $100 billion in climate-related emergency spending.

4. The pace of warming has slowed significantly in the past 15 years.
This may be true for the Earth's surface, but, according to NASA's Josh Willis, it doesn't tell the whole story, because "over 90 percent of the heat trapped by global warming is going into the oceans."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warming-is-very-real-20130912?print=true

 

The Plight Of The Honeybee

(By Bryan Walsh, Time magazine, Monday, Aug. 19, 2013)

You can thank the Apis Mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee, for 1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food you'll eat today. From the almond orchards of central California--where each spring billions of honeybees from across the U.S. arrive to pollinate a multibillion-dollar crop--to the blueberry bogs of Maine, the bees are the unsung, unpaid laborers of the American agricultural system, adding more than $15 billion in value to farming each year. In June, a Whole Foods store in Rhode Island, as part of a campaign to highlight the importance of honeybees, temporarily removed from its produce section all the food that depended on pollinators. Of 453 items, 237 vanished, including apples, lemons and zucchini and other squashes. Honeybees "are the glue that holds our agricultural system together," wrote journalist Hannah Nordhaus in her 2011 book, The Beekeeper's Lament.

And now that glue is failing. Around 2006, commercial beekeepers began noticing something disturbing: their honeybees were disappearing. Beekeepers would open their hives and find them full of honeycomb, wax, even honey--but devoid of actual bees. As reports from worried beekeepers rolled in, scientists coined an appropriately apocalyptic term for the mystery malady: colony-collapse disorder (CCD). Suddenly beekeepers found themselves in the media spotlight, the public captivated by the horror-movie mystery of CCD. Seven years later, honeybees are still dying on a scale rarely seen before, and the reasons remain mysterious. One-third of U.S. honeybee colonies died or disappeared during the past winter, a 42% increase over the year before and well above the 10% to 15% losses beekeepers used to experience in normal winters.

Though beekeepers can replenish dead hives over time, the high rates of colony loss are putting intense pressure on the industry and on agriculture. There were just barely enough viable honeybees in the U.S. to service this spring's vital almond pollination in California, putting a product worth nearly $4 billion at risk. Almonds are a big deal--they're the Golden State's most valuable agricultural export, worth more than twice as much as its iconic wine grapes. And almonds, totally dependent on honeybees, are a bellwether of the larger problem. For fruits and vegetables as diverse as cantaloupes, cranberries and cucumbers, pollination can be a farmer's only chance to increase maximum yield. Eliminate the honeybee and agriculture would be permanently diminished. "The take-home message is that we are very close to the edge," says Jeff Pettis, the research leader at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory. "It's a roll of the dice now."

MORE: The Origins of Nine Bee-Inspired Sayings

That's why scientists like Pettis are working hard to figure out what's bugging the bees. Agricultural pesticides were an obvious suspect--specifically a popular new class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids, which seem to affect bees and other insects even at what should be safe doses. Other researchers focused on bee-killing pests like the accurately named Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite that has ravaged honeybee colonies since it was accidentally introduced into the U.S. in the 1980s. Others still have looked at bacterial and viral diseases. The lack of a clear culprit only deepened the mystery and the fear, heralding what some greens call a "second silent spring," a reference to Rachel Carson's breakthrough 1962 book, which is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. A quote that's often attributed to Albert Einstein became a slogan: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the globe, man would have no more than four years to live."

(MORE: The Trouble with Beekeeping in the Anthropocene)

One problem: experts doubt that Einstein ever said those words, but the misattribution is characteristic of the confusion that surrounds the disappearance of the bees, the sense that we're inadvertently killing a species that we've tended and depended on for thousands of years. The loss of the honeybees would leave the planet poorer and hungrier, but what's really scary is the fear that bees may be a sign of what's to come, a symbol that something is deeply wrong with the world around us. "If we don't make some changes soon, we're going to see disaster," says Tom Theobald, a beekeeper in Colorado. "The bees are just the beginning."

Sublethal Effects

If the honeybee is a victim of natural menaces like viruses and unnatural ones like pesticides, it's worth remembering that the bee itself is not a natural resident of the continent. It was imported to North America in the 17th century, and it thrived until recently because it found a perfect niche in a food system that demands crops at ever cheaper prices and in ever greater quantities. That's a man-made, mercantile ecosystem that not only has been good for the bees and beekeepers but also has meant steady business and big revenue for supermarkets and grocery stores.

Jim Doan has been keeping bees since the age of 5, but the apiary genes in his family go back even further. Doan's father paid his way to college with the proceeds of his part-time beekeeping, and in 1973 he left the bond business to tend bees full time. Bees are even in the Doan family's English coat of arms. Although Jim went to college with the aim of becoming an agriculture teacher, the pull of the beekeeping business was too great.  For a long time, that business was very good. The family built up its operation in the town of Hamlin, in western New York, making money from honey and from pollination contracts with farmers. At the peak of his business, Doan estimates he was responsible for pollinating 1 out of 10 apples grown in New York, running nearly 6,000 hives, one of the biggest such operations in the state. He didn't mind the inevitable stings--"you have to be willing to be punished"--and he could endure the early hours. "We made a lot of honey, and we made a lot of money," he says.

All that ended in 2006, the year CCD hit the mainstream, and Doan's hives weren't spared. That winter, when he popped the covers to check on his bees--tipped off by a fellow beekeeper who experienced one of the first documented cases of CCD--Doan found nothing. "There were hundreds of hives in the backyard and no bees in them," he says. In the years since, he has experienced repeated losses, his bees growing sick and dying. To replace lost hives, Doan needs to buy new queens and split his remaining colonies, which reduces honey production and puts more pressure on his few remaining healthy bees. Eventually it all became unsustainable. In 2013, after decades in the business, Doan gave up. He sold the 112 acres (45 hectares) he owns--land he had been saving to sell after his retirement--and plans to sell his beekeeping equipment as well, provided he can find someone to buy it. Doan is still keeping some bees in the meantime, maintaining a revenue stream while considering his options. Those options include a job at Walmart.

Doan and I walk through his backyard, which is piled high with bee boxes that would resemble filing cabinets, if filing cabinets hummed and vibrated. Doan lends me a protective jacket and a bee veil that covers my face. He walks slowly among the boxes--partly because he's a big guy and partly because bees don't appreciate fast moves--and he spreads smoke in advance, which masks the bees' alarm pheromones and keeps them calm. He opens each box and removes a few frames--the narrowly spaced scaffolds on which the bees build their honeycombs--checking to see how a new population he imported from Florida is doing. Some frames are choked with crawling bees, flowing honey and healthy brood cells, each of which contains an infant bee. But other frames seem abandoned, even the wax in the honeycomb crumbling. Doan lays these boxes--known as dead-outs--on their side.  He used to love checking on his bees. "Now it's gotten to the point where I look at the bees every few weeks, and it scares me," he says. "Will it be a good day, will they be alive, or will I just find a whole lot of junk? It depresses the hell out of me."

Doan's not alone in walking away from such unhappy work. The number of commercial beekeepers has dropped by some three-quarters over the past 15 years, and while all of them may agree that the struggle is just not worth it anymore, they differ on which of the possible causes is most to blame. Doan has settled on the neonicotinoid pesticides--and there's a strong case to be made against them.

The chemicals are used on more than 140 different crops as well as in home gardens, meaning endless chances of exposure for any insect that alights on the treated plants. Doan shows me studies of pollen samples taken from his hives that indicate the presence of dozens of chemicals, including the neonicotinoids. He has testified before Congress about the danger the chemicals pose and is involved in a lawsuit with other beekeepers and with green groups that calls on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suspend a pair of pesticides in the neonicotinoid class. "The impacts [from the pesticides] are not marginal, and they're not academic," says Peter Jenkins, a lawyer for the Center for Food Safety and a lead counsel in the suit. "They pose real threats to the viability of pollinators."

American farmers have been dousing their fields with pesticides for decades, meaning that honeybees--which can fly as far as 5 miles (8 km) in search of forage--have been exposed to toxins since well before the dawn of CCD. But neonicotinoids, which were introduced in the mid-1990s and became widespread in the years that followed, are different. The chemicals are known as systematics, which means that seeds are soaked in them before they're planted. Traces of the chemicals are eventually passed on to every part of the mature plant--including the pollen and nectar a bee might come into contact with--and can remain for much longer than other pesticides do. There's really no way to prevent bees from being exposed to some level of neonicotinoids if the pesticides have been used nearby. "We have growing evidence that neonicotinoids can have dangerous effects, especially in conjunction with other pathogens," says Peter Neumann, head of the Institute of Bee Health at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Ironically, neonicotinoids are actually safer for farmworkers because they can be applied more precisely than older classes of pesticides, which disperse into the air. Bees, however, seem uniquely sensitive to the chemicals. Studies have shown that neonicotinoids attack their nervous system, interfering with their flying and navigation abilities without killing them immediately. "The scientific literature is exploding now with work on sublethal impacts on bees," says James Frazier, an entomologist at Penn State University. The delayed but cumulative effects of repeated exposure might explain why colonies keep dying off year after year despite beekeepers' best efforts. It's as if the bees were being poisoned very slowly.

It's undeniably attractive to blame the honeybee crisis on neonicotinoids. The widespread adoption of these pesticides roughly corresponds to the spike in colony loss, and neonicotinoids are, after all, meant to kill insects. Chemicals are ubiquitous--a recent study found that honeybee pollen was contaminated, on average, with nine different pesticides and fungicides. Best of all, if the problem is neonicotinoids, the solution is simple: ban them. That's what the European Commission decided to do this year, putting a two-year restriction on the use of some neonicotinoids. But while the EPA is planning to review neonicotinoids, a European-style ban is unlikely--in part because the evidence is still unclear. Beekeepers in Australia have been largely spared from CCD even though neonicotinoids are used there, while France has continued to suffer bee losses despite restricting the use of the pesticides since 1999. Pesticide makers argue that actual levels of neonicotinoid exposure in the field are too low to be the main culprit in colony loss. "We've dealt with insecticides for a long time," says Randy Oliver, a beekeeper who has done independent research on CCD. "I'm not thoroughly convinced this is a major issue."

Hostile Terrain

Even if pesticides are a big part of the bee-death mystery, there are other suspects. Beekeepers have always had to protect their charges from dangers such as the American foulbrood--a bacterial disease that kills developing bees--and the small hive beetle, a pest that can infiltrate and contaminate colonies. Bloodiest of all is the multidecade war against the Varroa destructor, a microscopic mite that burrows into the brood cells that host baby bees. The mites are equipped with a sharp, two-pronged tongue that can pierce a bee's exoskeleton and suck its hemolymph--the fluid that serves as blood in bees. And since the Varroa can also spread a number of other diseases--they're the bee equivalent of a dirty hypodermic needle--an uncontrolled mite infestation can quickly lead to a dying hive.  The Varroa first surfaced in the U.S. in 1987--likely from infected bees imported from South America--and it has killed billions of bees since. Countermeasures used by beekeepers, including chemical miticides, have proved only partly effective. "When the Varroa mite made its way in, it changed what we had to do," says Jerry Hayes, who heads Monsanto's commercial bee work. "It's not easy to try to kill a little bug on a big bug."

Other researchers have pointed a finger at fungal infections like the parasite Nosema ceranae, possibly in league with a pathogen like the invertebrate iridescent virus. But again, the evidence isn't conclusive: some CCD-afflicted hives show evidence of fungi or mites or viruses, and others don't. Some beekeepers are skeptical that there's an underlying problem at all, preferring to blame CCD on what they call PPB--piss-poor beekeeping, a failure of beekeepers to stay on top of colony health. But while not every major beekeeper has suffered catastrophic loss, colony failures have been widespread for long enough that it seems perverse to blame the human victims. "I've been keeping bees for decades," says Doan. "It's not like I suddenly forgot how to do it in 2006."

There's also the simple fact that beekeepers live in a country that is becoming inhospitable to honeybees. To survive, bees need forage, which means flowers and wild spaces. Our industrialized agricultural system has conspired against that, transforming the countryside into vast stretches of crop monocultures--factory fields of corn or soybeans that are little more than a desert for honeybees starved of pollen and nectar. Under the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the government rents land from farmers and sets it aside, taking it out of production to conserve soil and preserve wildlife. But as prices of commodity crops like corn and soybeans have skyrocketed, farmers have found that they can make much more money planting on even marginal land than they can from the CRP rentals. This year, just 25.3 million acres (10.2 million hectares) will be held in the CRP, down by one-third from the peak in 2007 and the smallest area in reserve since 1988.

Lonely Spring

For all the enemies that are massing against honeybees, a bee-pocalypse isn't quite upon us yet. Even with the high rates of annual loss, the number of managed honeybee colonies in the U.S. has stayed stable over the past 15 years, at about 2.5 million. That's still significantly down from the 5.8 million colonies that were kept in 1946, but that shift had more to do with competition from cheap imported honey and the general rural depopulation of the U.S. over the past half-century. (The number of farms in the U.S. fell from a peak of 6.8 million in 1935 to just 2.2 million today, even as food production has ballooned.) Honeybees have a remarkable ability to regenerate, and year after year the beekeepers who remain have been able to regrow their stocks after a bad loss. But the burden on beekeepers is becoming unbearable. Since 2006 an estimated 10 million beehives have been lost, at a cost of some $2 billion. "We can replace the bees, but we can't replace beekeepers with 40 years of experience," says Tim Tucker, the vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

As valuable as honeybees are, the food system wouldn't collapse without them. The backbone of the world's diet--grains like corn, wheat and rice--is self-pollinating. But our dinner plates would be far less colorful, not to mention far less nutritious, without blueberries, cherries, watermelons, lettuce and the scores of other plants that would be challenging to raise commercially without honeybee pollination. There could be replacements. In southwest China, where wild bees have all but died out thanks to massive pesticide use, farmers laboriously hand-pollinate pear and apple trees with brushes. Scientists at Harvard are experimenting with tiny robobees that might one day be able to pollinate autonomously. But right now, neither solution is technically or economically feasible. The government could do its part by placing tighter regulations on the use of all pesticides, especially during planting season. There needs to be more support for the CRP too to break up the crop monocultures that are suffocating honeybees. One way we can all help is by planting bee-friendly flowers in backyard gardens and keeping them free of pesticides. The country, says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a research scientist at the University of Maryland who has studied CCD since it first emerged, is suffering from a "nature deficit disorder"--and the bees are paying the price.

But the reality is that barring a major change in the way the U.S. grows food, the pressure on honeybees won't subside. There are more than 1,200 pesticides currently registered for use in the U.S.; nobody pretends that number will be coming down by a lot. Instead, the honeybee and its various pests are more likely to be changed to fit into the existing agricultural system. Monsanto is working on an RNA-interference technology that can kill the Varroa mite by disrupting the way its genes are expressed. The result would be a species-specific self-destruct mechanism--a much better alternative than the toxic and often ineffective miticides beekeepers have been forced to use. Meanwhile, researchers at Washington State University are developing what will probably be the world's smallest sperm bank--a bee-genome repository that will be used to crossbreed a more resilient honeybee from the 28 recognized subspecies of the insect around the world.

Already, commercial beekeepers have adjusted to the threats facing their charges by spending more to provide supplemental feed to their colonies. Supplemental feed raises costs, and some scientists worry that replacing honey with sugar or corn syrup can leave bees less capable of fighting off infections. But beekeepers living adrift in a nutritional wasteland have little choice. The beekeeping business may well begin to resemble the industrial farming industry it works with: fewer beekeepers running larger operations that produce enough revenue to pay for the equipment and technologies needed to stay ahead of an increasingly hostile environment. "Bees may end up managed like cattle, pigs and chicken, where we put them in confinement and bring the food to them," says Oliver, the beekeeper and independent researcher. "You could do feedlot beekeeping."  That's something no one in the beekeeping world wants to see. But it may be the only way to keep honeybees going. And as long as there are almonds, apples, apricots and scores of other fruits and vegetables that need pollinating--and farmers willing to pay for the service--beekeepers will find a way.

So if the honeybee survives, it likely won't resemble what we've known for centuries. But it could be worse. For all the recent attention on the commercial honeybee, wild bees are in far worse shape. In June, after a landscaping company sprayed insecticide on trees, 50,000 wild bumblebees in Oregon were killed--the largest such mass poisoning on record. Unlike the honeybee, the bumblebee has no human caretakers. Globally, up to 100,000 animal species die off each year--nearly every one of them without fanfare or notice. This is what happens when one species--that would be us--becomes so widespread and so dominant that it crowds out almost everything else. It won't be a second silent spring that dawns; we'll still have the buzz of the feedlot honeybee in our ears. But humans and our handful of preferred species may find that all of our seasons have become lonelier ones.

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2149141,00.html

The $15 Billion Bee In President Obama’s Bonnet

(By Isabelle Khurshudyan, Washington Post, 23 June 2014)

Honeybees have a sweet new ally: President Obama.  Plans for a “Pollinator Health Task Force” to help save bees from their mysterious decline were announced Friday in a presidential memorandum.  Why Obama’s worried: The decline of bees could sting the economy.  “Honey bee pollination alone adds more than $15 billion in value to agricultural crops each year in the United States,” the administration said in the release. “Over the past few decades, there has been a significant loss of pollinators, including honey bees, native bees, birds, bats, and butterflies, from the environment. The problem is serious and requires immediate attention to ensure the sustainability of our food production systems, avoid additional economic impact on the agricultural sector, and protect the health of the environment.”

Last winter, 23.2 percent of the country’s managed honey bee colonies died, according to a report by the Bee Informed Partnership, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Deaths are fewer than during the 2012-2013 winter, but still higher than the “acceptable” rate of about 19 percent, the report said.  The task force will have 180 days to create a strategy to prevent future bee loss. Specifically, the task force will investigate how to reduce pollinator exposure to pesticides found to harm bumblebees by interfering with their homing abilities, according to two studies detailed by Reuters.  In a 2011 United Nations report, U.N. Environment Program Executive Director Achim Steiner said “the way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century.”

Steiner said in the report that of 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world’s food, more than 70 are pollinated by bees.  “Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature,” Steiner said in the release. “Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people.”  The bee team will be co-chaired by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/23/the-15-billion-bee-in-president-obamas-bonnet/

 

 

Do Bees Freak You Out? Well, President Obama Wants To Keep Them Around.

(By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, 23 June 2014)

Not many White House fact sheets mention honeybees and Monarch butterflies. But one issued on Friday talked about them in detail, explaining why President Obama had signed a memorandum establishing the first-ever federal pollinator strategy.  The memo creates a new inter-agency task force charged with developing a federal strategy to protect pollinators, which aims to stave off the declines that pollinators such as honeybees, butterflies and bats have suffered in recent years. Obama instructed all federal agencies to use their powers "to broadly advance honey bee and other pollinator health and habitat," and the Agriculture Department announced $8 million in incentives to farmers and ranchers in five states who establish new habitats for honeybees.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday "there is a clear economic incentive for us" to protect pollinators because the crops they pollinate "have an impact of about $24 billion a year on the United States economy.  And we’re going to continue to work in collaborative fashion with industry, with state and local leaders, with private landowners to address this problem," Earnest said.  In fact, one-third of our food supply--the fruits, vegetables and nuts we eat--are pollinated by bees. But the current U.S. honeybee population is now less than half of what it was in 1945.  The president's interest in pollinators is not simply economic, however: he has raised the issue with some of his top aides. White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said in an interview this spring with Politico's Mike Allen that Obama had mentioned an article to him that had to do with "the disappearing bees and the fact this is an issue that there are fewer bees, and this has to do with climate change."

And the White House senior adviser for nutrition policy Sam Kass--who also cooks dinner for the Obama family most weeknights--has also discussed the issue in depth with the president. It's one of the reasons the White House vegetable garden expanded to include a pollinator's garden this year.  And if the Democrats have their way, Washington will have one more high-profile bee advocate after the mid-term elections: Michael Eggman, who is hoping to unseat Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.). Eggman, a third-generation beekeeper and self-described member of the "beekeeper mafia," praised the administration for taking on the issue, "although until this point, not enough has been done.  Colony Collapse Disorder appears to be a crisis with multiple factors including pesticide use and catastrophic climate change," Eggman said in a statement. "I am hopeful that the administration will carefully examine all possible causes and all potential solutions."  In other words, if you're rooting for bees to disappear, you might want to reassess. There are people in high places who are on their side.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/06/23/do-bees-freak-you-out-well-president-obama-wants-to-keep-them-around/
  

23 Signs You're Secretly An Introvert

(By Carolyn Gregoire, The Huffington Post, August 24, 2013)

Think you can spot an introvert in a crowd? Think again. Although the stereotypical introvert may be the one at the party who's hanging out alone by the food table fiddling with an iPhone, the "social butterfly" can just as easily have an introverted personality.  "Spotting the introvert can be harder than finding Waldo," Sophia Dembling, author of "The Introvert's Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World," tells The Huffington Post. "A lot of introverts can pass as extroverts."  People are frequently unaware that they’re introverts -– especially if they’re not shy -- because they may not realize that being an introvert is about more than just cultivating time alone.

Instead, it can be more instructive to pay attention to whether they're losing or gaining energy from being around others, even if the company of friends gives them pleasure.  “Introversion is a basic temperament, so the social aspect -- which is what people focus on -- is really a small part of being an introvert," Dr. Marti Olsen Laney, psychotherapist and author of "The Introvert Advantage," said in a Mensa discussion. "It affects everything in your life.”  Despite the growing conversation around introversion, it remains a frequently misunderstood personality trait. As recently as 2010, the American Psychiatric Association even considered classifying "introverted personality" as a disorder by listing it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), a manual used to diagnose mental illness.  But more and more introverts are speaking out about what it really means to be a "quiet" type. Not sure if you're an innie or an outie? See if any of these 23 telltale signs of introversion apply to you.

1. You find small talk incredibly cumbersome.

Introverts are notoriously small talk-phobic, as they find idle chatter to be a source of anxiety, or at least annoyance. For many quiet types, chitchat can feel disingenuous.  “Let's clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people," Laurie Helgoe writes in "Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength." "We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.”

2. You go to parties -– but not to meet people.

If you're an introvert, you may sometimes enjoy going to parties, but chances are, you're not going because you're excited to meet new people. At a party, most introverts would rather spend time with people they already know and feel comfortable around. If you happen to meet a new person that you connect with, great -- but meeting people is rarely the goal.

3. You often feel alone in a crowd.

Ever feel like an outsider in the middle of social gatherings and group activities, even with people you know?  "If you tend to find yourself feeling alone in a crowd, you might be an introvert," says Dembling. "We might let friends or activities pick us, rather than extending our own invitations."

4. Networking makes you feel like a phony.

Networking (read: small-talk with the end goal of advancing your career) can feel particularly disingenuous for introverts, who crave authenticity in their interactions.  "Networking is stressful if we do it in the ways that are stressful to us," Dembling says, advising introverts to network in small, intimate groups rather than at large mixers.

5. You've been called "too intense."

Do you have a penchant for philosophical conversations and a love of thought-provoking books and movies? If so, you're a textbook introvert.  "Introverts like to jump into the deep end," says Dembling.

6. You're easily distracted.

While extroverts tend to get bored easily when they don't have enough to do, introverts have the opposite problem -- they get easily distracted and overwhelmed in environments with an excess of stimulation.  "Extroverts are commonly found to be more easily bored than introverts on monotonous tasks, probably because they require and thrive on high levels of stimulation," Clark University researchers wrote in a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "In contrast, introverts are more easily distracted than extroverts and, hence, prefer relatively unstimulating environments."

7. Downtime doesn’t feel unproductive to you.

One of the most fundamental characteristics of introverts is that they need time alone to recharge their batteries. Whereas an extrovert might get bored or antsy spending a day at home alone with tea and a stack of magazines, this sort of down time feels necessary and satisfying to an introvert.

8. Giving a talk in front of 500 people is less stressful than having to mingle with those people afterwards.

Introverts can be excellent leaders and public speakers -- and although they're stereotyped as being the shrinking violet, they don't necessarily shy away from the spotlight. Performers like Lady Gaga, Christina Aguilera and Emma Watson all identify as introverts, and an estimated 40 percent of CEOs have introverted personalities. Instead, an introvert might struggle more with meeting and greeting large groups of people on an individual basis.

9. When you get on the subway, you sit at the end of the bench -– not in the middle.

Whenever possible, introverts tend to avoid being surrounded by people on all sides.  "We're likely to sit in places where we can get away when we're ready to -- easily," says Dembling. "When I go to the theater, I want the aisle seat or the back seat."

10. You start to shut down after you’ve been active for too long.

Do you start to get tired and unresponsive after you've been out and about for too long? It's likely because you’re trying to conserve energy. Everything introverts do in the outside world causes them to expend energy, after which they'll need to go back and replenish their stores in a quiet environment, says Dembling. Short of a quiet place to go, many introverts will resort to zoning out.

11. You're in a relationship with an extrovert.

It's true that opposites attract, and introverts frequently gravitate towards outgoing extroverts who encourage them to have fun and not take themselves too seriously.  "Introverts are sometimes drawn to extroverts because they like being able to ride their 'fun bubble,'" Dembling says.

12. You'd rather be an expert at one thing than try to do everything.

The dominant brain pathways introverts use is one that allows you to focus and think about things for a while, so they’re geared toward intense study and developing expertise, according to Olsen Laney.

13. You actively avoid any shows that might involve audience participation.

Because really, is anything more terrifying?

14. You screen all your calls -- even from friends.

You may not pick up your phone even from people you like, but you’ll call them back as soon as you’re mentally prepared and have gathered the energy for the conversation.  "To me, a ringing phone is like having somebody jump out of a closet and go 'BOO!,'" says Dembling. "I do like having a long, nice phone call with a friend -- as long as it's not jumping out of the sky at me."

15. You notice details that others don't.

The upside of being overwhelmed by too much stimuli is that introverts often have a keen eye for detail, noticing things that may escape others around them. Research has found that introverts exhibit increased brain activity when processing visual information, as compared to extroverts.

16. You have a constantly running inner monologue.

“Extroverts don’t have the same internal talking as we do,” says Olsen Laney. “Most introverts need to think first and talk later."

17. You have low blood pressure.

A 2006 Japanese study found that introverts tend to have lower blood pressure than their extroverted counterparts.

18. You’ve been called an “old soul” -– since your 20s.

Introverts observe and take in a lot of information, and they think before they speak, leading them to appear wise to others.  "Introverts tend to think hard and be analytical," says Dembling. "That can make them seem wise."

19. You don't feel "high" from your surroundings

Neurochemically speaking, things like huge parties just aren’t your thing. Extroverts and introverts differ significantly in how their brains process experiences through "reward" centers.  Researchers demonstrated this phenomenon by giving Ritalin -- the ADHD drug that stimulates dopamine production in the brain -- to introverted and extroverted college students. They found that extroverts were more likely to associate the feeling of euphoria achieved by the rush of dopamine with the environment they were in. Introverts, by contrast, did not connect the feeling of reward to their surroundings. The study "suggests that introverts have a fundamental difference in how strongly they process rewards from their environment, with the brains of introverts weighing internal cues more strongly than external motivational and reward cues," explained LiveScience's Tia Ghose.

20. You look at the big picture.

When describing the way that introverts think, Jung explained that they're more interested in ideas and the big picture rather than facts and details. Of course, many introverts excel in detail-oriented tasks -- but they often have a mind for more abstract concepts as well.  "Introverts do really enjoy abstract discussion," says Dembling.

21. You’ve been told to “come out of your shell.”

Many introverted children come to believe that there's something "wrong" with them if they're naturally less outspoken and assertive than their peers. Introverted adults often say that as children, they were told to come out of their shells or participate more in class.

22. You’re a writer.

Introverts are often better at communicating in writing than in person, and many are drawn to the solitary, creative profession of writing. Most introverts -- like "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling -- say that they feel most creatively charged when they have time to be alone with their thoughts.

23. You alternate between phases of work and solitude, and periods of social activity.

Introverts can move around their introverted “set point” which determines how they need to balance solitude with social activity. But when they move too much -- possibly by over-exerting themselves with too much socializing and busyness -- they get stressed and need to come back to themselves, according Olsen Laney. This may manifest as going through periods of heightened social activity, and then balancing it out with a period of inwardness and solitude.  "There's a recovery point that seems to be correlated with how much interaction you've done," says Dembling. "We all have our own private cycles."
 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/introverts-signs-am-i-introverted_n_3721431.html