Survey sees biggest US honeybee winter die-off yet

WASHINGTON (AP) — Winter hit U.S. honeybees hard with the highest loss rate yet, an annual survey of beekeepers showed.
The annual nationwide survey by the Bee Informed Partnership found 37.7% of honeybee colonies died this past winter, nearly 9 percentage points higher than the average winter loss.
The survey of nearly 4,700 beekeepers managing more than 300,000 colonies goes back 13 years and is conducted by bee experts at the University of Maryland, Auburn University and several other colleges.
Beekeepers had been seeing fewer winter colony losses in recent years until now, said Maryland’s Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the bee partnership and co-author of Wednesday’s survey.
“The fact that we suddenly had the worst winter we’ve had ... is troubling,” vanEngelsdorp said.

In this Oct. 12, 2018 file photo, a man holds a frame removed from a hive box covered with honey bees in Lansing, Mich. According to the results of an annual survey of beekeepers released on Wednesday, June 19, 2019, winter hit America’s honeybees hard with the highest loss rate yet. (Dale G. Young/Detroit News via AP)
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‘Climate apartheid’: UN expert says human rights may not survive

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.
Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law.

International climate treaties have been ineffective, the report said. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images
Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”. His report to the UN human rights council (HRC) concludes: “Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval.”
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Opinion | The Greens Are Germany’s Leading Political Party. Wait, What? - The New York Times

As the country took climate change to heart, it was only a matter of time before its politics did too.
HAMBURG, Germany — The emergence of the Green Party as a leading force in German politics is not unlike the flowering of the Serengeti after a rainstorm: What had been mere seeds one minute, hidden but full of potential, sprout overnight, so fast and so fully that it’s hard to remember how things looked before.
After winning a modest 8.9 percent of the votes in the general elections in 2017, the Greens jumped to 20.5 percent in the recent European elections, scoring their best result ever on the national level. Then, in a poll last week, the Greens received 26 percent, topping Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, which came in at 25 percent, and making the Greens the leading political party. Long considered a left-wing fringe group, the Greens are now in control of Germany’s progressive agenda — a fact that could reshape German politics for decades to come.
The party began as a motley crew of Marxists, ecologists and pacifists. Over time, it made its way step by step into the mainstream; Joschka Fischer, who served as foreign minister and vice chancellor, came from the Greens, and helped cement the party within the establishment.

Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck, the leaders of the German Green Party.CreditCreditBernd Von Jutrczenka/Associated Press
But the Greens didn’t sell out; rather, their version of the political avant-garde helped form a new mainstream. German politics were once, and to some extent still are, dominated by old gray men and women. But it is the Greens, almost alone among the country’s political parties, who can speak with authenticity to and for the younger generations; among all but the oldest Germans, they come in first in the polls. The Greens have sprouted because they fit perfectly into a society in which unconventionality has become the norm.
Opinion | The Greens Are Germany’s Leading Political Party. Wait, What? - The New York Times

Europe Awaits Record-Smashing June Heat Wave | The Weather Channel

A heat wave this week could produce all-time record highs at multiple European cities. This heat wave – which will be unusually strong for so early in the summer – will gin up some of the hottest June temperatures ever recorded in western and northern Europe.

At a Glance:

• The upper-level pattern will allow heat to build across Europe in the week ahead.
• A heat wave is expected in western and northern Europe.
• All-time June high-temperature records will likely be smashed in some countries.

A vicious heat wave this week could produce all-time record highs at multiple European cities. This heat wave – which will be unusually strong for so early in the summer – will gin up some of the hottest June temperatures ever recorded in western and northern Europe.
The European and GFS (American) forecast models are in strong agreement on the development of a blocking ridge of high pressure from near Greenland into western Europe. The setup is related to a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) that has prevailed since late April and that could intensify this week.

Often a blocking high over Greenland leads to cooler, cloudier conditions in western Europe, but in this case an upper-level trough is positioned over the eastern Atlantic, west of France. The Greenland high will arc around and to the north of the trough and into western Europe. This topsy-turvy pattern, known as a rex block, can last for a number of days.
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Couple Spends 20 Years Planting an Entire Forest and Animals Have Returned

Nearly 30 years ago, Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado returned from East Africa, where he was on location documenting the horrors of the Rwanda genocide. Following this traumatizing project, Salgado was to take over his family’s sprawling cattle ranch in Minas Gerais—a region he remembered as a lush and lively rainforest. Unfortunately, the area had undergone a drastic transformation; only about 0.5% was covered in trees, and all of the wildlife had disappeared. “The land,” he tells The Guardian, “was as sick as I was.”

Then, his wife Lélia had an idea: they should replant the forest. In order to support this seemingly impossible cause, the couple set up the Instituto Terra, an “environmental organization dedicated to the sustainable development of the Valley of the River Doce,” in 1998. Over the next several years, the Salgados and the Instituto Terra team slowly but surely rebuilt the 1,754-acre forest, transforming it from a barren plot of land to a tropical paradise.

Now a Private Natural Heritage Reserve, hundreds of species of flora and fauna call the former cattle ranch home. In addition to 293 species of trees, the land now teems with 172 species of birds, 33 species of mammals, and 15 species of amphibians and reptiles—many of which are endangered. As expected, this rejuvenation has also had a huge impact on the ecosystem and climate. On top of reintroducing plants and animals to the area, the project has rejuvenated several once dried-up springs in the drought-prone area, and has even positively affected local temperatures.

Continue Reading: Instituto Terra: A Replanted Forest That's Home to 500 Endangered Species

A nasty swine virus in China means big trouble for US farmers

A relentlessly rainy spring and President Donald Trump’s trade war with China aren’t the only forces haunting the Midwest’s corn and soybean farmers. A deadly, highly contagious disease called African swine fever—thankfully, harmless to humans—is sweeping through China’s hog farms, literally killing demand for feed. 

A nearly-empty barn at a pig farm in Jiangjiaqiao village in northern China's Hebei province, where swine fever is taking its toll.Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo
African swine fever has already wiped out at least 20 percent of the nation’s hog herd this year, according to the Dutch agricultural lender Rabobank. That amounts to about 90 million pigs—more than the entire US hog population, the globe’s second-largest behind China. That’s bad news for American farmers, because China imports large quantities of our soybeans. China houses nearly 60 percent of the entire globe’s pig herd—and fattening nearly half a billion pigs for slaughter every year requires it to import two-thirds of all globally traded soybeans.
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General Electric to scrap California power plant 20 years early

NEW YORK (Reuters) - General Electric Co said on Friday it plans to demolish a large power plant it owns in California this year after only one-third of its useful life because the plant is no longer economically viable in a state where wind and solar supply a growing share of inexpensive electricity.
The 750-megawatt natural-gas-fired plant, known as the Inland Empire Energy Center, uses two of GE’s H-Class turbines, developed only in the last decade, before the company’s successor gas turbine, the flagship HA model, which uses different technology.
The closure illustrates stiff competition in the deregulated energy market as cheap wind and solar supply more electricity, squeezing out fossil fuels. Some utilities say they have no plans to build more fossil plants.

It also highlights the stumbles of Boston-based GE with its first H-Class turbine. The complex, steam-cooled H design takes hours to start, suffered technical problems and sold poorly, experts said.
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