Hard hitting global and local news
Tweet My two activities this weekend were to listen to the podcast of Grover Norquist speaking to the Commonwealth Club  and attending the annual California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento. Norquist played up the libertarian angle, probably a smart move when a conservative addresses a liberal crowd.
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This week’s Science Friday had a segment with Lincoln Brower , an entymologist who studies the monarch butterfly. The monarch population is collapsing faster than the Arctic ice cap, with the area of their wintering grounds in Mexico going from 52 acres to less than 3 in twenty years. In Brower’s words “In previous years we had seventeen sites with colonies, this year eight of those sites had zero butterflies, and the rest of them had very few butterflies. Only one of the colonies had significant numbers. My worry is that they are winking out one by one and they may not be able to recover” There are several reasons for this, among them that the Oyamel forest is being thinned which exposes the area under the canopy and makes it harder for the butterflies to shelter from winter frost in the high forest. Monarchs have an absolutely crazy life cycle . Simplified, overwintering butterflies in Mexico (there are also populations in California) leave Mexico in late March and head for Texas, where they feed on milkweed and create a new generation. The new generation is short lived, and starts the migration north to the Great Lakes region and the east coast. They, in turn, lead to two other short lived generation, with the fourth and final one being the one that migrates back to Oyamel and overwinters. You can follow this on Journey North , a science activity for young and old. Monarch larvae are fussy eaters, depending on milkweed the way that pandas depend on bamboo. It is the only thing that they feed on in all stages of their lives. This has made them indirectly vulnerable to GMCs. The introduction of Roundup Ready crops has lead to broadcast spreading of Roundup, which kills everything EXCEPT the Roundup Ready crops, including the milkweed (and also nectar yielding plants which does nasty things for pollinators). This breaks the Monarch’s lifecycle
Tweet Many Americans are bewildered by the mixed reception that Baroness Thatcher’s death has received in the United Kingdom. Having lived in England for a year or so during her time as Prime Minister, Eli will refrain from commenting on her political career, but there was something he wrote over at the Curry Shack that is worth repeating .  Curry posted remarks from Michael Kelly of the Oxburgh panel During Mrs Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister, UK science was squeezed hard, and I would argue came out of it better, leaner and fitter. Like dieting, it is not a healthy permanent state, but its absence is definitely unhealthy. In times of plenty, one ‘lets a thousand flowers bloom’ and in tough times, one redoubles the effort to exploit the stock of recently acquired new knowledge, rather than generate more new knowledge and leave it unexploited.
UPDATES GALORE BELOW 🙂 Eli has lost his jump, and pretty much ain’t got much these days (wait until tomorrow) but there are a couple of things the bunnies might be amused by First, a number of FAQ like objects about Marcott et al., nothing really new but short summaries to send to your uncle rabetts who always send you stuff from Chris Monckton or Rush Limbaugh (btw, Chris seems to be waking up to the fact that his grift is not paying well anymore ).
Tweet My general view both in general and as a policymaker in my small local-office pond is that a widely held (few expert dissenters) and strongly held (high confidence) consensus position might as well be a fact as far as the policymaking is concerned . A contradictory study is just that, a study. If it turns out to be accurate, then the consensus will eventually fracture soon enough and create problems for policymakers, but there’s no need or even a rational way for policymaking to jump the gun
