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Climate change is a serious security risk to the United States — the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House have affirmed as much in various reports and proclamations. It’s become a popular talking pointamong climate hawks. Nonetheless, there hasn’t been enough thinking, at least outside nerd circles, about what it would it mean to approach climate change as a security problem. What exactly would that look like?

Typically, economists and policymakers have viewed climate change through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, where the goal is efficiency, the right balance between pollution reduction and economic growth. The idea is to determine the cost that a ton of carbon imposes on society and price that cost into markets. Voilà: the optimal solution.

Unfortunately, climate change is subject to a degree of uncertainty that renders any such attempt at optimization arbitrary and brittle. Decisionmaking under deep uncertainty calls for an emphasis on robustness and resilience — plans that can hold up reasonably well under a wide variety of possible outcomes.

It’s important to realize, however, that climate change is not unique in this regard. We make decisions in the face of deep uncertainty all the time: in finance, in resource management, in infrastructure planning. In particular, national security decisions are often made on the basis of incomplete, unreliable, or shifting information. If you think planning for climate change is bad, try making decisions today based on China’s military posture in 2050. Now that’s uncertain! Nuclear proliferation, terrorism, disease epidemics … they all require taking action in a fog.

Obviously, many national security decisions have turned out to be awful. Nonetheless, over time, there has been a great deal of learning about how to operate under uncertainty. The approach used in national security circles falls under the rubric of risk management. How would it look applied to climate change? That, as it happens, is the subject of a fantastic report from green think tank E3G: “Degrees of Risk: Defining a Risk Management Framework for Climate Security.” It came out in early 2011, but somehow I missed it at the time (thanks to ace energy blogger Adam Siegel for bringing it to my attention). I shall attempt to convey the gist of it, but I highly recommend reading at least the short executive summary [PDF].

First, what is risk? In this framework, it means probability times severity. In other words, the risk of X is the probability of X happening multiplied by the severity of X should it occur. It follows that risk can be meliorated in two ways: reducing probability and reducing severity.

Humans have an unfortunate tendency to dismiss risks when they are uncertain — to confuse uncertain risk with low risk — which turns out to be an exceedingly poor strategy, especially in relation to long-term risks. In fact, greater uncertainty can mean greater risk. One of the authors of the report, Jay Gulledge, illustrates this point with a graph in a separate presentation [PDF]:

Click to embiggen.

So this is a basic risk matrix: on the vertical axis you have probability, on the horizontal axis, severity. The two lines are risk assessments. As you can see, the black line is narrowly centered around a particular severity, while the red line sprawls across a wide range of severities — in other words, there’s more uncertainty about the red scenario. Nonetheless, even though the red scenario is not as probable as the black scenario, it has long risk “tails,” including the one on the right that contains extremely severe outcomes. It contains more risk.

When it comes to risk management, uncertainty is not reason to delay planning, it is information that informs planning.

So, why should we prefer the risk management approach? Pardon me a long excerpt from the report:

Risk management is a practical process that provides a basis for decision makers to compare different policy choices. It considers the likely human and financial costs and benefits of investing in prevention, adaptation and contingency planning responses. Some risks it is not cost effective to try and reduce, just as there are some potential impacts to which we cannot feasibly adapt to while retaining current levels of development and security.

Risk management approaches do not claim to provide absolute answers but depend on the values, interests and perceptions of specific decision makers. Risk management is as much about who manages a risk as it is about the scientific measurement of a risk itself. The Maldives will have a different risk management strategy to Russia; Indian farmers will see the balance of climate risks differently from the Indian steel industry.

This is crucial: the point is not to find the “right” or optimal policy, but to provide a framework that allows comparisons between policies, a framework that incorporates both science and the “values, interests and perceptions” of local decisionmakers. The framework won’t settle the disputes, it will simply clarify them:

Legitimate differences in risk management strategies will form much of the ongoing substance of climate change politics. All societies continually run public debates on similar existential issues: the balance of nuclear deterrence vs. disarmament, civil liberties vs. anti-terrorism legislation, international intervention vs. isolationism. Decisions are constantly made even when significant differences remain over the right balance of action. Political leadership has always been a pre-requisite in the pursuit of national security. We should expect the politics of climate change to follow similar patterns.

Implementing an explicit risk management approach is not a panacea that can eliminate the politics of climate change, either within or between countries. However, it does provide a way to frame these debates around a careful consideration of all the available information, and in a way that helps create greater understanding between different actors.

With that broad-brush introduction, let’s take a quick look at how it would apply to climate change.

Getting back to our definition of risk: the risk of dangerous climate change equals the probability that it will occur multiplied by the severity of its social and economic impacts. Attempts to reduce the probability are known as mitigation. Attempts to make social and economic systems more resilient and thus reduce the severity of climate impacts are known as adaptation. Mitigation and adaptation are both tools to reduce risk.

One important feature of climate projections tends to be invisible from the cost-benefit point of view: the presence of “long-tail risks,” the low-probability, high-impact stuff out on the end of the probability curve. Think “temperature rises by 6 degrees, ice sheets collapse, seas rise by 20 meters, drought covers the globe, remaining humans run feral through a post-apocalyptic hellscape.”

We would really, really like to avoid that kind of thing. But if we’re just optimizing toward the average projection, we’ll take no account of those tails. Risk management calls for them to be incorporated.

I’m going to put another of Gulledge’s graphs below to illustrate a point. It may make your eyes bleed, but take a deep breath.

Click to embiggen.

The solid blue line is the range of projections for climate change without mitigation (don’t worry about the specific numbers; it’s meant to be illustrative). As you can see, over on the right, that blue line has a long tail of risks that are fairly low probability (5 percent or less) but extremely dangerous, with average temperatures of over 6 degrees, which would be apocalyptic. The dotted blue line is the same range of projections incorporating steady mitigation of around 1 percent a year (again, the specific numbers don’t matter).

The key thing to notice: Mitigation reduces the expected change — the top point of the probability curve — 0.8 degrees, but it reduces the long-tail scenarios by 1.3 degrees. In other words, the minute you start mitigating, you start disproportionately taking the worst, scariest risks off the table.

This is a crucial benefit of mitigation that rarely shows up in our policy debates, because it doesn’t show up in risk-benefit optimizing. But eliminating or reducing those long-tail risks ought to matter. It ought to count as “added value” in our mitigation plans.

(Side note: If we have overestimated “climate sensitivity” and temperature doesn’t rise as much in response to CO2 as we expect it to, it has precisely the same effect as mitigation — moves the curve left and chops off some long-tail risks.)

Another crucial aspect of uncertainty that gets overlooked: Even the most ambitious climate plans currently on the table offer only offer a chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees (the widely agreed threshold of safety). But if a mitigation plan offers a 50 percent chance of hitting the 2 degree target, that means there’s a 50 percent chance of going higher. So even if you’re wildly aggressive on mitigation, you can’t put all your adaptation eggs in the 2 degree basket. You have to plan for the possibility of higher temperatures.

With all that said: Here is what the authors propose as a climate change risk management framework, in handy graphic form:

Click to embiggen.

The details in the right-hand column are mostly self-explanatory, though they are explored at greater length in the report. The main takeaways are on the left side: prudent risk management suggests that we should try to hit 2 degrees, build and ruggedize as though we will hit 3-4 degrees, and develop contingency plans for the catastrophic 5-7 degree scenarios.

The important thing is not the specific numbers. It may be that science will develop (or our risk tolerance will increase or decrease) and we’ll tweak them up or down. It may be that different communities will estimate the risks differently. The important thing is the framework itself, which creates a common space for divergent worldviews and perspectives. This isn’t another clash of “believers vs. skeptics.” It’s about how much risk you’re willing to take on and what risks are worth hedging against. The framework won’t end political debates — there’s no “science says to do XYZ” here — but it will allow us to clarify where, and over what, we genuinely differ.

Filed under: Article, Climate & Energy

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By Joseph Romm

Photo by Sebastian Anthony.

A version of this post originally appeared on Climate Progress.

Journalist Bill Blakemore has a great piece on ABC’s website called “‘Hug the Monster’ for Realistic Hope in Global Warming (or How to Transform Your Fearful Inner Climate).”

He offers advice to journalists in covering climate change — and advice to the rest of us in a world captured by denial.

The piece helps dispel the myth that climate scientists have long been overhyping climate impacts — when everyone who actually follows climate science and talks to any significant number of climate scientists knows that the reverse is true. As Blakemore writes:

Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe,” and “risk to the collective civilization.”

… A few years ago, this reporter heard a prominent climate and environment scientist speaking at a large but off-the-record conference of experts and policy makers from around the world who had gathered at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

… He told us that he and most other climate scientists often simply didn’t want to speak openly about what they were learning about how disruptive and frightening the changes of manmade global warming were clearly going to be for “fear of paralyzing the public.”

That speaker now has an influential job in the Obama administration.

Climate scientists have been consistently downplaying and underestimating the risks for three main reasons. First, their models tended to ignore the myriad amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks that we now know are kicking in (such as the defrosting tundra).

Second, they never imagined that the nations of the world would completely ignore their warnings, that we would knowingly choose catastrophe. So until recently they hardly ever seriously considered or modeled the do-nothing scenario, which is a tripling (820 parts per million [ppm]) or quadrupling (1,100 ppm) of preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide over the next 100 years or so. In the last two or three years, however, the literature in this area has exploded, and the picture it paints is not pretty.

Third, as Blakemore (and others) have noted, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are generally reticent and cautious in stating results — all the more so in this case, out of the mistaken fear that an accurate diagnosis would somehow make action less likely. Yes, it’d be like a doctor telling a two-pack-a-day patient with early-stage emphysema that their cough is really not that big a deal, but would they please quit smoking anyway. We live in a world, however, where anyone who tries to explain what the science suggests is likely to happen if we keep doing nothing is attacked as an alarmist by conservatives, disinformers, and their enablers in the media.

Back in 2005, the physicist Mark Bowen wrote about glaciologist Lonnie Thompson: “Scientists have an annoying habit of backing off when they’re asked to make a plain statement, and climatologists tend to be worse than most.”

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the climate situation has become so dire that even the most reticent climatologists are starting to speak more bluntly. By the end of 2010, Thompson was writing:

Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.

Blakemore points out some other climate scientists who are starting to speak out:

 A few days ago in The New York Times, a thoroughgoing front page article about global warming quoted a range of scientists on the overall effect of the global upheavals that can be expected from manmade global warming. Here are three excerpts — bolded highlights mine:

• “The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. “Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.” (Recent scientific studies report the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is proving to be higher than expected.)
• Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late.
• “Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, ‘We’re sure it’s not a problem,’” said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. “It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.”

‘A risk to the collective (global) civilization’

Global warming’s “risk to the collective civilization” (meaning global civilization) has been continually spoken of in secret or unofficial or private conversations among engaged climate scientists and government and policy leaders around the world.

Such terms — catastrophe, threat to civilization itself — have been commonplace in carefully worded private discussions among peer-reviewed experts that this reporter and other journalists have often experienced and sometimes engaged in.

I heard that from many, many climate scientists in private as far back as 2005 and 2006, which is why I titled my book Hell and High Water. Other journalists heard the same, which is why, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote at the time:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

So what does Blakemore mean by “Hug the Monster,” by his “Metaphor to Change Fear Into Action and Extinguish the Panic and Despair so Deadly in a Great Crisis”? He explains:

“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force trainers to those headed into harm’s way.

The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.

If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost.

But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.

Around the world, a growing number of people are showing signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to be a great crisis facing us all …

Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.

What to do about this fear?

Blakemore quotes from “Hug the Monster: How Fear Can Save Your Life,” the title of a chapter in The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, a book written by ABC’s Ben Sherwood before he became president of ABC News:

Nowhere in the book does Sherwood mention climate change, but here’s a passage from the end of that chapter that struck this reporter for its relevance to the increasingly public questions about how our global civilization will deal with the advance of global warming:

Fear as a Security System — When Properly Used (Air Force Mantra)

“Without a doubt, fear is the most ancient, efficient, and effective security system in the world. Over many thousands of years, our magnificently wired brains have sensed, reacted, and then acted upon every imaginable threat. Practically speaking, when you manage fear, your chances improve in almost every situation. But if your alarms go haywire, your odds plummet.”

He concludes:

“For survival then, here’s the bottom line. If you’re scared out of your mind, try to remember this Air Force mantra: Hug the monster. Wrap your arms around fear, wrestle it under control, and turn it into a driving force in your plan of attack. ‘Survival is not about bravery and heroics,’ award-winning journalist Laurence Gonzales writes in his superb book Deep Survival. ‘Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear: They turn it into anger and focus.’ The good news is that you can learn to subdue the monster and extinguish some of the clanging bells. The more you practice, the easier it becomes. Indeed, with enough hugs, you can even tame the beast and turn him into your best friend and most dependable ally.”

And here is Blakemore’s advice for journalists covering this most important of stories:

As a growing number of professional journalists around the world are finding, the story of manmade global warming (and the other evil twin of excess carbon emissions, the rapid acidification of the oceans) is unprecedented in its scale, almost “too big to cover,” and frightening.

But there are now signs that, little by little, voices and personalities are beginning to emerge around the world who are starting to hug this monster, manage the fear, and turning the emotions it causes into action.

For us journalists, the core responsibilities of our profession include knowing how to report unpleasant but important facts — and to do so in ways that nonetheless engage groups small and large, even in a sense “entertain” them, as in entertaining the mind, and to try to win their tacit appreciation for doing so.

Obviously, when the news is horrendous, such as, say, a looming world war or the rapid climb in global temperature and ocean acidification, our job includes the very essence of what it means to hug the monster.

But as this reporter and a growing number of others now working the story can report, once we do so, manmade global warming transforms into “a great story” (in our profession’s term of art) — and even one in which it is possible to glimpse a number of reasons for “realistic hope.”

To be continued …

I look forward to Blakemore’s further writing on climate change, a subject that — considering its likely impact on humanity — has been woefully neglected by most of his fellow journalists.

Filed under: Article, Climate Change

View full post on Grist

by Brad Johnson.

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.

On Jan. 24, President Obama will address Congress and the nation
on the state of the union, with the chance to stir this country to
action on the existential threat of climate change. Obama has the
responsibility to seize the moment and finally explain to the American
people the great mobilization of resources and will that protecting our
homeland from a poisoned climate requires.

In a tweet to ThinkProgress Green, White House Director of Public
Engagement Jon Carson promised that he would personally tell Obama that
people believe he needs to talk about the science of climate change in his State of the Union address:

If Obama does make clear that the nation’s prosperity is already
being damaged by the first glimmers of the coming onslaught of climate
change, it will mark a dramatic departure from the past. Each year of
his presidency, as more Americans suffered and died from the consequences of climate pollution, Obama’s discussion of global warming in his State of the Union addresses has withered.

In his 2009 address, he spoke of the need to “save our planet from the ravages of climate change”
through “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution
and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.” As the
climate bill stalled in the Senate that year, Obama went silent. “Thus
far, he has neglected to use his bully pulpit to hammer a climate science message home, thereby helping to fuel
skepticism about climate science and lend support to the building
backlash against the policies he favors,” climate blogger Andrew
Freedman wrote in Sept. 2009. After Obama made a major speech
calling for health-care reform, climate hawks hoped he would explain to Americans the need for the climate bill held up in the Senate.

In the 2010 State of the Union, he said only he wanted to advance a “comprehensive climate and energy bill,” but then the White House avoided the subject.

“I’m just not sure how you do a response to climate change if you can’t really say the words ‘climate change,’” wrote Ezra Klein in June 2010.

In last year’s State of the Union address, Obama avoided any mention of climate change, spurring dismay from climate hawks. Grist’s David Roberts called the omission a “moral failure, a failure of leadership, but also, I would argue, a political failure.”

A textual analysis of State of the Union addresses found that Obama mentions climate change far less than President Bill Clinton ever did, and less even than President George W. Bush. “From a political viewpoint, it is clear that Obama is not talking about climate change,”
Robert Brulle wrote. “In my opinion, this approach has several major
drawbacks, and effectively locks in massive and potentially catastrophic
global climate change.”  Bill Becker even wrote an entire sample speech on the climate challenge for the president.

There are many other climate hawks Obama could follow—in the past year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka have delivered compelling speeches on the mandate for action to fight
the greatest threat to human civilization of this generation.

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Give Thanks for Regulations

View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by Claire Thompson.

The U.S. military recognizes climate change as a serious
threat to national security. The CIA has established a Center for the Study of
Climate Change. The scientific community is in widespread agreement that
climate change is happening, that it’s caused by human activity, and that its
catastrophic effects—such as a sea-level rise of at least a meter—will be
felt within our lifetimes (hell—look out the window). But compared to other security threats with less
clear-cut causes and solutions, the U.S. government has expended relatively far
fewer resources to address the risks of climate change. An article in the latest issue of the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists lays out a comparison:

WMD
proliferation: The Defense Department requested $19.1 billion in 2010 alone
for combating weapons of mass destruction. Lest anyone forget, false rumors of
WMD in Iraq were used as chief justification for the U.S. invasion in 2002 that
has stretched into an almost 10-year war.

International
terrorism: Terrorism is possibly the most ill-defined and elusive enemy in
U.S. pursuit. The country has spent $1.12 trillion on international
counterterrorism efforts through September 2010. Oh yeah, and started another
war.

Economic
crisis: Policymakers acted swiftly to pass a $789 billion stimulus package
after the 2008 financial meltdown, even as economists were still debating the
best solution to the crisis.

Climate
change: The U.S. spent just $1.7 billion in 2010 on “international climate
change financing” (whatever that even means), and most of the international
agreements addressing the threat have resulted in little more than honor system
pledges to act.

So why are we so squeamish about preemptive action against climate change? Not so long ago, preemptive action was seen as the way to go—at least  when it came to
terrorism and the (nonexistent) threat of WMDs in Iraq. We toppled Saddam
Hussein and, in a J.K. Rowling-esque triumph of good over evil, finally killed
Osama bin Laden. But we also lost thousands of our own people and spent up to
trillions of dollars in the process, and Iraq and Afghanistan are still f*cked
up.

But when it comes to acting on climate change, the relative risk of a preemptive
strike against the planet’s destruction seems to like a no-brainer. For
once, we really have nothing to lose. The only drawback politicians can seem to
drag up as a lame excuse for their inaction is the economic cost of climate
policy—but wouldn’t we rather be betting dollars on new companies and
technologies with a clean slate, instead of investing in the same hacks (I’m looking at you, Big Oil) who
screwed us over in the first place?

Even the climate deniers should be able to see the irony.
WMDs in Iraq turned out not to be a real thing. In the extremely unlikely event that, as skeptics want to
believe, climate change also turns out not to be a real thing, at least this
time we won’t have paid for our mistake in sunk costs, human lives, and the
further destabilization of an entire region. We’ll have paid for it by creating
jobs, lowering energy and fuel costs, and stimulating the economy. Last time I checked, that was what the government was supposed to be doing anyway.

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View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by David Roberts.

As you probably know, the Yes Lab (home of the Yes Men) recently put up a site called CoalCares.com, a parody suggesting that coal company Peabody is interested in doing something about the health impacts of coal on children. (How dare they!)

Peabody responded, predictably, by threatening a lawsuit.

Here’s the letter the Yes Lab just sent in return:

Dear Andrew Baum, Foley Lardner LLP, and Peabody Energy,

Thank you for your thoughtful letter demanding that we remove Peabody’s name from www.coalcares.org and cease falsely suggesting that Peabody cares about kids made sick by coal.

Your threat, although entirely baseless (see this response, and the EFF’s blog post later today), did make us realize one thing: that Peabody, despite being our country’s largest coal producer, and one of the largest lobbyists against common-sense policy, accounts for a mere 17% of U.S. coal production. The remaining 83% comes from 28 other companies, who are, every bit as much as Peabody, giving kids asthma attacks and other illnesses.

As even you may agree, the root of the problem is not Peabody, but rather our system of subsidies, regulations, and lobbying that lets your whole industry continue its lethal work. To make this clear, we have changed every instance of the word “Peabody” on www.coalcares.org to a rotating selection of the names of other large U.S. coal producers who, like Peabody, also need to be stopped from killing kids.

Very truly yours,
Coal is Killing Kids and the Yes Lab
coalcares@yeslab.org

P.S. You suggest in your letter that “Peabody has a First Amendment right not to be involved with the dissemination of a message with which it does not agree,” a statement which, while completely untrue, does recall the World Resources Institute’s longstanding demand that you cease falsely attributing to them the nonsense statistic that “for every 10-fold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.” As the WRI notes:

First, WRI has never made such an assertion and has never done analysis to that effect. Second, this conclusion ignores critical factors related to energy production and human health. WRI’s longstanding support for a global transition to cleaner, low-carbon energy is well-documented.

We would be grateful if you would stop misquoting WRI and issue a corrective statement within the next 24 hours.

Classic.

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View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

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by Tom Philpott.

Remember neonicotinoids? They’re the widely used class of pesticides that an increasing body of evidence—including from USDA researchers—implicates in the collapse of honeybee populations. Neonicotinoids are marketed by the agrichemical giant Bayer, which reels
in about $800 million in sales from them each year.

Germany
(Bayer’s home country), France, and Slovenia have either banned their
use outright or limited it severely. Meanwhile, the U.S. EPA has stood
by its approval of them—even though its own scientists have discredited Bayer’s research purporting to declare neonicotinoids safe for bees, and the USDA’s chief bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, has reported doing research showing them to be highly harmful to bees even in extremely low doses.

Good
news: A government body is reconsidering the decision to approve those
chemicals, based partly on concerns raised by Pettis. Less-good news: That
government body is not our own; it’s in the United Kingdom. Our own EPA has maintained
its approval for the pesticides—and farmers throughout the nation
will soon plant tens of millions of acres of neonicotinoid-treated corn seeds,
which will soon sprout into trillions of corn plants with
neonicotinoid-infused pollen.

From London-based The Independent:

Growing concern about the new generation of pesticides used on 2.5 million acres of U.K. farmland has led one of the Government’s most senior scientific
advisers to order a review of the evidence used to justify their safety.

That scientist, Robert
Watson, is the chief scientific adviser at the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the U.K. version of the EPA.

Watson’s
concern was triggered by two recent studies, The Independent reports.
The first is Pettis’ as yet unpublished study, whose existence was revealed by The Independent in January. The second, according to the newspaper, is new research from the French
National Institute for Agricultural Research, which also found
bees highly vulnerable to neonicotinoids in small doses.

It appears that the pesticides compromise bees’ immune systems, making them susceptible to a viral pathogen called nosema.

Now,
it’s important to note that both Pettis’ work and that of the French
National Institute for Agricultural Research took place in the
laboratory, not the field. That is, they established that neonicotinoids
theoretically pose a grave threat to honeybees. That’s not the same as
showing that they harm them in real-world, corn-field conditions.

But
given the decline of honeybee health, which roughly tracks with the
explosion of neonicotinoid use in the late ‘90s, these studies show
clear cause for grave concern. The coauthor of the Pettis
study, Penn State University entomologist Dennis Van Engelsdorp, has stated [PDF] that their research found severe harm from neonicotinoids at extremely low
levels, “below the limit of detection.” He added: “The only reason we
knew the [dead] bees had exposure [to neonicotinoid pesticides] is
because we exposed them.”

What about field tests? The study presented by Bayer to show that the pesticides
don’t cause harm in real-world conditions has been thoroughly
discredited. The EPA had accepted the study, after holding it without
comment for two years; but then, last year, its own scientists
downgraded it on the grounds that it was flawed, an internal EPA memo leaked in December showed.

Apparently,
to professional entomologists not on the Bayer payroll, the study was
plainly shoddy. James Frazier, professor of entomology at Penn State,
minced no words when I asked him about it in December. “When I looked
at the study,” he told me in a phone interview, “I immediately thought
it was invalid.”

So
we’ve got the theoretical possibility that neonicotinoids cause serious
harm to bees even at extremely low levels; we’ve got one of the few
actual field studies exonerating the pesticide declared invalid; and
we’ve got a catastrophic decline of a species critical to agriculture
that coincides with the rise of said pesticide. You don’t have to be
Sherlock Holmes to conclude that there’s sufficient evidence to halt its
use and subject it to rigorous, independent field study.  

They’re
at least considering that course of action in the United Kingdom. And
they’re taking USDA scientist Pettis quite seriously. True, his research
remains unpublished two years after it was completed. He has told me in
emails that his study is in the review process for publication, but has
no release date yet. He emphasized that the “delays are on my end; not a
conspiracy to keep my data from seeing the light of day.”

Delayed
or not, Pettis’ research has inspired the U.K.‘s version of EPA to publicly
review its decision to green-light neonicotinoids. Furthermore,
Pettis “sits on a panel of leading experts who will review a £10m
[$16 million] research initiative into the decline of bees funded by Defra, two of
Britain’s research councils, the Wellcome Trust and the Scottish
Government,” the Independent reports. He’ll also address the House of
Commons next month to “present his findings on neonicotinoids to MPs
concerned about the possible link between the pesticides and the demise
of bees and pollinating insects.”  

Hmm.
Surely there are members of our analogue to the House of Commons, the
House of Representatives, who are concerned about the possible link
between the pesticides and the demise of bees and pollinating insects?
Perhaps those formidable defenders of the environment, Reps. Henry Waxman
(D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.)? Or Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y), who has been so heroic in
the fight to prevent the meat industry from abusing antibiotics?

Tragically,
it’s probably too late to stop the planting of neonicotinoid-laced
crops during this spring’s growing season. But the long-term health of
our pollinators—and the health of the vast swaths of agriculture that
rely on them—demands serious attention to the mounting concerns
about this highly profitable and ubiquitous class of pesticides.

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• Now it’s important to note that both Pettis’ work and that of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research took place in the laboratory not the field That is they established that neonicotinoids theoretically pose a grave threat to honeybees
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