Welcome to the Vine Mealybug Sniffer Dog Project. Faced with the use of hard core pesticides* to get rid of this nasty new pest, the Vine Mealybug Workgroup started looking into other options, as you can read here. The idea is quicker detection, quicker eradication and less use of chemicals. I love being on the cutting edge.

*Pesticides such as organophosphates and carbamates — such icky stuff, most growers don’t use it anymore. They are both cholinesterase inhibitors. If you don’t know what that is, you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that it’s bad. Unless you have Alzheimer’s apparently.

An “important read”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/02/opinion/edroxana.php from the International Herald Tribune

bq. Fanaticism is a driving force here, as it often is behind great crimes. This is a crime against nature, and this fanaticism is economic – the belief that money and profit should outweigh all other considerations, including survival of the species.

I’m probably late to the party on this one, but I just heard about this one today. A recent Senate vote “weakened the USDA Organic standard”:http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/11/7/11418/9530 by allowing the definition of “organic” to include all sorts of artificial substances:

bq. Ominously, the Senate’s act would strip power to decide which synthetic substances can and cannot be used from the National Organic Standards Board, a 15-member panel made up of a mix of farmers, processors, retailers, scientists, consumer advocates, environmentalists, and certifying agents. Although the board is appointed by the USDA chief, it has acted independently — and by most accounts, responsibly — in its ten-year history, approving only 38 synthetic ingredients.

The Grist article (linked above) has some good comments at the end, from both sides of the fence. My favorite quote from one of them:

bq. If the USDA and the dominant companies in the OTA continue to ignore consumer and organic community expectations…, we will set up our own label, certification, and accreditation system and point out to consumers that “USDA Organic” means “grade B organic,” and that consumers looking for “grade A” will have to look for our new label.

Unfortunately, it’s just this kind of label confusion that the USDA Organic program was supposed to resolve in the first place. Sigh.

Now _that’s_ what I’m talkin’ about. The UK government, which recently started supporting wind power in a big way, just completed a study that shows that “wind is a stable, continuous source of energy”:http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article326907.ece in the UK, and has been for as long as they have records. In fact, it seems to provide more energy during winter, when it’s needed most. Imagine that: a fact-based approach to evaluating energy resources. What a novel idea.

The question of hurricanes and their relationship to climate change (“global warming”) has come up a few times recently, so I’m making a few notes here:

“Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years”:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature03906.html,
(abstract) from Nature.

“The links between hurricanes and climate change”:http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_warming/page.cfm?pageID=1529,
from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

It certainly looks like the models of cyclone strength as related to sea surface temperature are well developed and useful in predicting future trends. I personally think they provide enough support for a causal link meme, namely “these storms are getting worse because of global warming”, even if that meme gets oversimplified in transmission.