Snowy Apple Blossoms? Evidence at the Climate Justice Tribunal

Today snow gathers in the apple blossoms. This means no apples in the fall. The apples bloomed two weeks early, and the bees didn’t get to chance to pollinate them. Now the snow ends the blossom’s fertility. This is Climate Change spoiling Vermont’s apple harvest.

Abnormally warm weather made the plants wake up too soon. The season is two weeks ahead. A month of abnormally warm weather tricked almost every plant into blooming early. Now it has snowed for a day, in typical late-April fashion. The fruit tree blossoms didn’t get pollinated because the honeybees weren’t out yet. So this fall there will be less fruit.

The apple harvest is always variable. If we get a wet patch when the trees bloom, much less fruit in the fall. If the weather is sunny and the bees can work, a big crop. Bees navigate by the sun.

But this spring has been weird. It started with a banging weekend of 80 degree weather and then it was warm for a month. Most plants begin spring growth based on temperature, though some a daylight/day-length sensitive. So most of the ecosystem is going for it. And today, snow. Many of the flowers will decay quickly after today’s rough weather.

I watched the early blossoms without seeing any honeybee pollinators and so I asked a beekeeper about it. Author of The Natural Beekeeper Ross Conrad wrote, “I suspect that you are not seeing the bees you expect because the mild winter and unusually warm weather during the past couple months has fooled the plants into blossoming much sooner than usual (everything seems to be about 2 weeks ahead of schedule). Now that the temperatures have returned to what is considered seasonably "normal" it is often too cold for the bees to fly.”

The snow on the apple blossoms is proof of the Climate Crisis. For too long, action on the Climate Crisis has been stagnated by this idiotic debate “does climate change exist?” In a well-documented plot, the Fossil Fuel industry has conspired to obscure the overwhelming scientific evidence. These dark conspiratorial propagandists should be put on trial at the upcoming International Climate Justice Tribunal.

Today’s ruined apple blossoms are just a mild beginning of a world wobbling off it’s axis. Imagine the major cities of Bolivia not having drinking water because glaciers have melted. Imagine runaway Climate Change turning our planet into Mars. This is really where we are headed, and unfortunately, most people don’t have the imaginative fortitude to bear witness to science-based projections of our shared future.

The Climate Crisis isn’t a mild disruption of our Earth, but rather an Apocalyptic Trail-of-Tears Death March into a Science Fiction-ish unraveled Ecosystem Planet Death. Mild ecosystem disruptions like today’s apple trees are just the tip of the melting iceberg.

We need a revolution against planet death, for a living healthy future. We need a citizen’s movement to push a government movement to solve the Climate Crisis.

Fortunately, there is indeed an emerging world citizen’s movement for Climate Justice. Last week in Cochabamba, Bolivia, there was the People’s World Summit on Climate Crisis and the Rights of Mother Earth. Democracy Now had exciting coverage last week. Naomi Klein writes, “When Morales invited “social movements and Mother Earth’s defenders... scientists, academics, lawyers and governments” to come to Cochabamba for a new kind of climate summit, it was a revolt against this experience of helplessness, an attempt to build a base of power behind the right to survive.”

The wisdom of Indigenous people’s entered the global discussion with passage of a Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth. In 2011, on the next Earth Day, there will be a Global Referendum on the Climate Crisis. Who knows what any of that will mean for saving the planet from fossil fuels, but it’s thrilling language that calls us in the right direction.

We have a right to survive on an Earth where the bees buzz in the apple blossoms at the right time to make fruit. And Mother Earth has the right for Her Spring Song to be in rhythm.

Bee Author Comments On Blossoms without Bees

To beekeeper and author of the book "The Natural Beekeeper", Ross Conrad, I asked “Are bees light sensitive in their emergence behavoir, and thus missing the right time to wake up? I thought they were warmth sensitive, and woke up based on hive temperatures. If so, why are the blossums here but not the bees?

Conrad said “Bees require both adequate light and warmth in order to forage. It is widely held that they utilize the sun for navigational purposes, and they require warmth in order to maintain a high enough body temperature so that their flight muscles will work and not become immobilized. When temperatures fall to around 57 degrees F, the bees will tend to cluster around the brood and queen in order to keep them warm, and this will restrict the colonies flight activity (the exact temperature varies among bee hives depending on race, genetics, etc.) I suspect that you are not seeing the bees you expect because the mild winter and unusually warm weather during the past couple months has fooled the plants into blossoming muchsooner than usual (everything seems to be about 2 weeks ahead of schedule). Now that the temperatures have returned to what is considered seasonably "normal" it is often too cold for the bees to fly. This especially true for hives that are kept in shaded areas and do not get a lot of direct sunlight inhibiting their ability to warm up enough to send out a lot of foragers during the day. Other factors come into play as well...as the plants have to have the right soil, light, and moisture conditions (among others) to be able to produce the nectar they need to bribe the pollinators into visiting their blossoms. It does not matter how big and beautiful a flower is, if there is no reward for a visiting bee, the bee will go elsewhere.

Of course in your particular area, it may be that the bees have simply died off during the winter and that is why you are not seeing them. Given the critical role that pollinators have come to play in maintaining the biosphere which supports all life on Earth, and the fact that pollinators across the board are in serious decline world-wide, your concern is certainly understandable and warranted.

One note: We would not usually refer to the bees as "waking up" in spring since they don't actually sleep through the winter, but cluster and become dormant or inactive for a brief period during the winter season when the queen stops laying eggs. This is different from hibernation in which the organism's metabolism drops significantly and they go into what is described as a deep sleep. Healthy bees maintain their metabolism throughout the year and keep the temperature within the hive's cluster well above freezing during the entire winter.

Vermont's Spring Three Weeks Early, Blossums without Bees, I'm Freaking Out!

Spring has come 2-3 weeks early this year to southern Vermont. We are witnessing Climate Change. The seasons are out of rhythm because humans are heating our thin, limited skies.

Today I talked some experienced landscapers and gardeners. Everyone agreed it was 2-3 weeks early. Spring's parade of flowers is also compressed, because all the plants and trees have suddenly blossomed all at once.

It's only April 25th. Traditional “last frost date” is June 1st, five weeks away. What if we get a normal frost? Plants, interrupted.

And the Honeybees aren’t out, so I guess they didn’t get the memo about Global Warming Early Spring. Bees generally stay in the hive until warmer days come. I've seen a few wild Bumblebees dumbledorfing around, but the hardworking Honeybees aren't out in full force yet. This is so incredibly not good. The bees pollinate everybody, and without their flower-visiting tours, no fruit. The Climate Crisis is disturbing mind-bogglingly integrated and complex biological systems.

As Bill McKibben’s new book Eaarth says, we don’t need to argue anymore whether Climate Change is real. We are already living on a changed planet where the atmosphere holds 5% more water than it used to and so the storms are so much bigger.

This spring in Vermont is a tragedy like the Titanic, though quiet and easy to gloss over and return to the socially acceptable cultural trance. I am allowing myself to get upset over it because I think it may catalyze fierce commitment to work and fight for a carbon-neutral planet for the rest of my days. (Starting here with fierce blog posts! Tomorrow, the Revolution.)

Our world, our delicate, impossibly beautiful Pandora is unraveling, coming apart at the seams, sprouting at the wrong time, blooming in the middle of nowhere.

So I say to you and myself, snap out of cultural trance! It's OK to be upset by this.

I'm reminded of a poem that asked....

"What did you do when the seasons started to fail? What did you do, once you knew?”

Go to Copenhagen-in-Cochabamba with these web-links!!!

Today, in Bolivia, there was another day of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. I think this conference is tremendously exciting. I love to hear people talking about Mother Earth and defending here rights! Yes! Mother Earth has rights!

The following post is a list of web-links to see what's going on.

Check out the past two days of Democracy Now and catch up on their amazing coverage of this event.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/21/evo_morales_opens_climate_change_conference


Home page for the conference:

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/?lang=en


to sign in to the virtual conference:

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/spip.php?page=inscribirse&lang=en


Letter from the great author of Memory of Fire, Eduardo Galeano

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/Message-to-CMPCC-from-Author


DN actress Q' orianka Kilcher extremely articulate rap:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/20/three


Hey! Mother Earth has Rights!

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/D%C2%B4ESCOTTO-Y-BOFF-PIDEN-DEJAR-EL


webcasting link:

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/-Difusion-en-vivo-?lang=en


Bolivian President Evo Morales says "Coca-Cola is "poison and sewage water." (YES!)

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/Evo-Morales-message-to-grassroots


Maybe helpful tech note: On the top toolbar of the webpage, you can click to get the pages translated always into English so you wouldn't have to click the "translate' button each time you moved thru the Conference website.

People's Climate Crisis summit

Today something very cool is happening in Bolivia... the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

It is designed to be an open people's summit, rather than a government meeting. It's also being organized as a voice-giver to the other parts of the world that sometimes get left out. Climate Change has a social justice component because it affects the poor more painfully. Developing Countries (ie. the 2/3rds world etc) will feel the affects of climate change more than rich white northern countries that burned all the damn coal. The Conference seems expressly designed to be more "Climate Justice" orientated than Copenhagen.

The news program Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org) is covering the People's Summit from Cochabamaba. Monday's show was powerful and I expect them to throw it down all week. DN's coverage of Copenhagen was so smart and on-point.

Info on the event is on-line here at: http://pwccc.wordpress.com/

Event organizers are trying to create some live-web features so us far-away people can participate in the conference.

Hurray! Gov't Goes After Goldman Sachs paper-hustlers!

On Friday April 16, the gov't went after crookedest crooked thieves at the center of the financial crisis. Indictments and beginning of public legal process involving the dasterdly mathamatical swindle factory of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs.

Apparently, Goldman Sachs was selling clients investments that were design by some big trader betting large that the housing industry was going to collapse. So, selling crap, designed by somebody who was betting it the other way, essentially, fraudulent dealings with the client designed to take their money.

Following the Financial Crisis scandel, reading Matt Taibbi's stuff has been great to keep abreast of the complicated crookednes involving Goldman Sachs and others.

Bearing witness to the financial crisis takes some high-number abstraction math skills and an ability to wade into some truly boring material, but the basic plot isn't so hard to work out. Some rich kids grown big enough (but not morally enough) to figure out how to move a lot of numbers around so that the golden crumbs land on them. And sometimes even better, mega-swindles where millions enter a UBS Swiss Bank with your password on the Euro pile.

To which I say, hurray for good governance. We need the cop on the beat to regulate and police Wall Street. Because when their are billions to make by somehow, oppsy, misreporting something on a piece of paper somewhere, people are going to do it.

Wall Street spent years and millions to dismantle the regulatory function of government in oversight of the banking industry. And now, the unwatched inmates have run amuck,surprise surprise. Here's hoping financial reform happens in a way that protects real wealth (planet, family, food, etc) from the mis-valueing of everything by people who are too cheap to save Mother Earth.

May we someday have a Wall Street sized according to it's function.

The Parade of Flowers marching to the beat of Climate Crisis

It is bittersweet to get gorgeous June days in the first days of April. Yes, we love it. No, we can’t enjoy it guilt-free. Vermont’s spring came too early this year. And 2010 is aiming to be the warmest on record. This is a changing atmospheric climate.

I love to watch the swift return of Life to the landscape. In a few weeks, Vermont goes from frozen-under-snow to summer time’s Green Everywhere. Biologist classify Vermont’s ecology as “Temperate Rainforest.”

Plants decide when to awake because of temperature. Warm spring temperature’s bring a parade of flowers, a sequential revealing of different plants making the beautiful mad dash to reproduction. In early spring, the small plants race ahead before big plants fill the space with big leaves: the Snowdrops, the Crocuses, the Daffodils. In late May, the whole plant kingdom makes a mad dash towards growth and seed-making. The parade of flowers is more purple early on, and more orange and red later in the season.

Unusually warm days in the spring risks “tricking” the plants too early. These delicate ecosystems adapted to centuries of stable temperatures. Climate Change risks upsetting this delicate timing sequence. What if spring comes in February in a few years, and then the snow returns, but all the trees have broken bud?

We live in a tightly wound ecosystem. Spring’s delicate unfolding is seriously in jeopardy because of climate change. Humans need to live in the reality of our biological life-web ecosystem, the ground floor of our existence. We need to stop burning coal and oil, and start moving at full speed to a post-carbon world. Otherwise, someday, spring may spring in January, then backtrack, leaving a confused parade.

Many gardeners are observing a two week drift towards earliness in plants. In England, the arrival of the Lilacs is two weeks ahead. All things being equal, that’s fine. But an ecosystem is complex. What about the birds who are arriving from South America too early or late for the awakening bugs?

The world’s ecosystem’s are being thrown out of rhythm. Nature is supposed to be a joyous, well-organized symphony but burning coal is turning Nature into a arrhythmic Free Jazz cacophony.

So come on, people, let’s get on it.