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Cascadian Farm, an organic brand owned by General Mills, is encouraging consumers to plant wildflowers to provide a healthful environment for bees. Read this article: Advertising: Cascadian Farm ‘Bee Friendlier’ Effort Enlists Public to Help Protect Insects
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Advertising: Cascadian Farm ‘Bee Friendlier’ Effort Enlists Public to Help Protect Insects
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6 Oct 2014 4:54 PM
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Climate change’s relationship with the sea just got more mysterious
I have abysmal news: The deep oceans are not getting warmer.
OK, that sounds like a good thing. But hold your applause! Surface waters — everything above 1.24 miles — are still hot and getting hotter. It’s the deep ocean abyss that has not warmed measurably since we started keeping track in 2005, according to a new paper out in Nature Climate Change.
“The sea level is still rising,” said Josh Willis, NASA scientist and coauthor, presumably anticipating the ‘I-told-you-so’s of deniers. Sorry guys, we don’t get out of global warming that easily.
What is surprising about this study is that scientists often theorized that deep oceans took the heat from our atmosphere, causing a lull in the pace of global warming observed over the last decade or so. The case of the missing heat, it seems, is still wide open.
Since sea-level rise is the joint project of 1) water that expands as it heats up, and 2) meltwater that has been locked up in landbound ice, we will continue to see the tidelines inching up our coasts as those partners in crime continue to do what they do best. But scientists wanted to know how much sea-level rise could be attributed to warming in the deep oceans. So they used satellite images and direct temperature measurements to extrapolate the amount of sea-level rise happening in the upper ocean, plus the estimated volume of de-iced ice water. Whatever rise was left over must be due to increased temperatures in the deep ocean — but that turned out to be next to nothing.
So the question remains: If the deep oceans aren’t warming, where is all that extra heat going?
We … don’t really know, at least not yet. But it’s definitely going somewhere. Another paper published in the same issue of Nature Climate Change suggests that we’ve been massively underestimating (by 24 to 58 percent) the amount of heat absorbed by the upper layer of the ocean since the 1970s. If the deep, deep oceans aren’t getting any warmer, it could be that we’ve been overlooking some sneaky heat somewhere else. In any case, the bottom line is that we still have a lot to learn about how global warming and sea-level rise act on a system as complicated as a planet. What we DO know is that this isn’t some Olive Garden-size portion of troll food to keep climate deniers going for the next couple months.
Not that it’ll stop them from trying. Trolls will eat anything.
Source:
NASA Study Finds Earth’s Ocean Abyss Has Not Warmed
, NASA.
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Climate change’s relationship with the sea just got more mysterious
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THIRST FOR JUSTICE
3 Oct 2014 6:00 AM
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Apparently, water is a luxury in Detroit, not a right
As if the Motor City needed more grim news: On Monday, U.S. judge Steven Rhodes declared that the city of Detroit can continue to cut off water to residents who can’t pay their water bills. According to an AP story:
“Detroit cannot afford any revenue slippage,” the judge said. “It cannot be doubted that water is a necessary ingredient to sustaining life,” said Rhodes, but that doesn’t mean “there is an enforceable right to free and affordable water.”
Since January 2013, Detroit has shut off the water for more than 50,000 households, and continues to terminate service to about 400 more households every day. Victims filed a lawsuit against the water department in July, contending that the city’s policy inflicts irreversible harm on public health and fails to treat everyone equally. Matt Helms of the Detroit Free Press sums up the plaintiffs’ contention nicely:
They asked Rhodes to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the shutoffs until the city can come up with a better way to address the unaffordability of water service in a city where more than half of households live at or below 150% of the federal poverty level.
We can only hope the decision is not a sign of things to come in other U.S. cities. Grist’s own Heather Smith reminds us that water costs are climbing and aging infrastructure is crumbling everywhere. Meanwhile, income inequality is steadily rising in the United States and cities face tightening budgets. Will cities’ obligation to pay back banks and bondholders trump the right to water elsewhere?
Besides, instead of relying on Canadians to bail us out with fresh water, wouldn’t we rather receive donations of Labatt Blue?
Source:
Judge Won’t Stop Detroit Water Shutoffs
, ABC News.
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Mother Jones
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Is this the year that voters will finally insist on knowing which supermarket foods contain genetically modified organisms? Activists in Oregon say the momentum is on their side for a GMO labeling initiative on the November ballot. “The electorate in Oregon has a greater awareness of this issue than in other states,” says Sandeep Kaushik, a spokesman for Yes On 92, as the initiative is known. “We are approaching a tipping point.”
Read “How Dr. Bronner’s Turned Activism Into Good Clean Fun”
In 2002, Oregon became first state to try and pass a GMO labeling initiative—Measure 27 lost by a margin of more than 2 to 1. But the more recent initiatives in California and Washington suffered far narrower defeats, despite a barrage of attack ads bankrolled by biotech, grocery, and ag conglomerates. Washington’s I-522, the most expensive ballot measure in state history, lost by barely 1 percent—a mere 19,000 votes.
Oregon may now be poised to finish what it started: A poll released in July by Oregon Public Broadcasting put support for GMO labeling at a whopping 77 percent. Even if it wins, Oregon probably won’t be the first state to require disclosure. A labeling bill approved in April by the Vermont Legislature takes effect in 2016, assuming it doesn’t get overturned by a lawsuit. Maine and Connecticut have also passed GMO labeling laws, though they’re contingent upon further regional support. Such laws are common outside the United States, and this year alone, according to Slate, 25 states have proposed 67 pieces of legislation related to GMO labeling. But the Oregon prop (and possibly a similar one in Colorado) would be the first directly enacted by voters—a major PR victory for the movement against GMO foods.
Despite the unpopularity of GMOs with consumers, the debate over their health and environmental impacts is far from settled. While the commercialization of GMOs has triggered few health complaints, long-term studies on the chronic health effects of GMOs have been sparse. Pest- and herbicide-resistant GMO crops have boosted yields around the world, benefiting farmers and the poor, but they have also spawned chemical resistant “superbugs” and “superweeds.”
The labeling campaigns are designed to bypass the thorny scientific debate by reframing the issue around the consumer’s “right to know.” This idea polls extremely well with voters, but not so well that it can’t be overcome by an avalanche of spending on political ads. For instance, 66 percent of Washington voters supported I-522 in the summer of 2013, yet some $22 million in spending against the measure whittled support down to 49 percent by Election Day. A similar phenomenon is under way in Oregon, where a poll released by a Portland TV station last week showed that voter support for the labeling measure has fallen to 53 percent, with 16 percent undecided.
Advocates for Oregon’s I-92 remain optimistic, however. While rural areas of Washington and California are strongly opposed to labeling, that’s less the case so far in Oregon, where GMO contamination incidents have angered farmers and two rural counties have banned cultivation of GM crops. The Oregon measure is also well timed: Young voters, who tend to support labeling, didn’t turn out to vote last year in Washington, but Oregonians will cast ballots this year on a pot legalization initiative, which is seen as a potential magnet for the non-AARP crowd. Anti-GMO activists, for the first time, are also funding a registration drive to target young voters.
For now, at least, I-92’s backers have raised more money than its opponents, but nobody expects that advantage to last. In Washington, the anti-GMO crowd was outspent 3 to 1, and the chasm would have been even wider were it not for the heavy involvement of a few organics companies, notably Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, which is shoveling money at the Oregon effort.
Unlike its opponents in Big Food and Ag, Dr. Bronner’s hasn’t entered the fight to retain its own bottom line, at least not directly—GMOs don’t play much of a role in the soap business. Yet the company has become a fascinating model for how genuine corporate activism can increase sales and create a fiercely loyal customer base, as I noted last year in a profile of David Bronner, the family business’ idealistic, third-generation CEO. About half of Dr. Bronner’s profits go towards activism. “If we are not maxed out and pushing our organization to the limit,” he asked me at the time, “then what are we doing?”
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You ready for this jelly?
22 Sep 2014 7:06 AM
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What do you catch when there are no more fish? Jellyballs
When you come across a slick of jellyfish packed bell-to-tentacle into an area the length of five or six city blocks, you may sense something is wrong with the picture. Massive jellyfish blooms have been sprouting more and more often in recent years, one even reaching 1,000 miles long, for reasons mysterious but generally agreed to be bad.
But where there’s a fork, there’s a way! If we can focus all the energy we’re using to overfish more conventional ocean edibles on jellies instead, maybe we stand a chance at pruning the bloom to a more manageable size. Apropos, Modern Farmer reported recently on U.S. fishermen in a tiny port in Georgia who are trawling for cannonball jellyfish, otherwise known as — wait for it — “jellyballs.”
First of all, what do you call it when you fish for jellyballs? Is it jelly-balling? Please, please let it be jelly-balling. From Modern Farmer:
“Jellyballs have been very, very good to me,” says [one fishing boat owner, Thornell] King, who has worked as a state trooper for the last 20 years, and might be the only jelly-balling cop in the country. This past season was particularly robust: King and his men caught an estimated 5 million-plus pounds of cannonball jellyfish. At what King says is this year’s price (seven cents a pound), this equates to $350,000. Statistics are absent in this burgeoning new industry, but … the market value of the jellies being fished in the U.S. can be estimated at somewhere in the low millions.
Yessss! Jelly-balling!
And what, pray tell, does one do with 5 million pounds of jellyballs? Typically, the answer is to dry them out and ship them to Japan and China, where they are rehydrated, cut into strips, and tossed into delicious salads. Apparently, prepared correctly, the brined jellies are crunchy “like a carrot.”
Jellyball, the carrot of the sea?
Not enough to whet your appetite? Then try this for sauce:
And as climate change and the global industrial agriculture system continue on what many view as a doomed course, we may have no choice but to eat foods that make sense ecologically — or can at least thrive in a changed environment. Jellyfish, prolific breeders with low metabolic rates and the ability to eat almost anything (some breeds just ingest organic material through their epidermis), have survived in unfriendly environs for centuries.
I’ve been a proponent of eating invasive species before, and as ocean ecosystems are stressing out more delicate denizens, jellyfish are a hardy bet. That being said, if greener protein is your goal, you might be better off with crickets; jellyfish are made up of a little protein and salt floating in more than 95 percent water.
American foodies have been slow to champion the jelly cause, but if we could learn to eat sushi, we can learn to eat anything.
If you’ve made it this far and are still hungry for more jellyball, the Modern Farmer article is mouth-watering.
Source:
Jellyfish: It’s What’s For Dinner
, Modern Farmer.
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Cheeri-NOs
12 Sep 2014 5:40 PM
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Why millennials aren’t going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs
The New York Times crunched the nation’s cereal-eating numbers this week, and it looks like the typical American breakfast is starting to include fewer sugary flakes and moon-shaped marshmallows.
The Times’ Stephanie Stroml reports that in the past decade, Americans have been eating less boxed cereal, preferring healthier options like juiced fruits and veggies and probiotic-rich Greek yogurt. Between 2003 and 2013, sales of the once-beloved flaky cereals (Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, etc.) decreased by 5.5 percent. Children’s cereals (Lucky Charms and good ol’ Cap’n Crunch) have plummeted 10.7 percent. Meanwhile, Muesli, a favorite of health nuts everywhere, is steadily gaining popularity, increasing in sales by 1.8 percent.
The article reads:
For the last decade, the cereal business has been declining, as consumers reach for granola bars, yogurt and drive-through fare in the morning. And the drop-off has accelerated lately, especially among those finicky millennials who tend to graze on healthy options — even if Cheerios and some other brands come in whole-grain varieties fortified with protein now.
As a millennial myself, I’d like to take this opportunity to say a little something to big breakfast cereal companies to give them a heads-up on why young people like me are opting out of their morning Cap’n Crunch:
Dearest Big Breakfast Cereal Companies (BBCCs),
Hello, I am your loyal fan Liz. I am particularly fond of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran Crunch, the perfect blend of whole-wheaty oats and sun-dried raisin chewiness. It’s my favorite thing to snack on while I scroll through my Instagram feed. So, to you I extend the deepest of gratitude.
But, BBCCs, I’m writing to tell you to CUT THE CRAP. We millennials are having a tough time believing the whole “Lucky Charms are a great source of whole-grains” thing when they actually contain 40 percent more sugar by weight than typical adult cereals. C’mon, people, we both know this is bogus. Sugary breakfast cereals are not health food, even if you pump them up with protein. It’s like trying to make “fetch” happen. And it’s not going to happen.
You see, it’s not that we don’t enjoy the taste of sugary deliciousness, it’s that we’re becoming smarter consumers. We’re smarter, BBCCs, because we’ve seen these tricks before. Other companies have been trying to sell us products that cater to millennial interests — by making cars more tech-friendly and fast-food look quaint and local. But those marketing ploys that tell us we should be slaves to the automobile, or that food products are healthy when the nutrition label reads, “sugars: 19 grams” — well, they’re starting to feel a little stale.
I probably won’t give up eating a bowl or two of cereal for dinner once in a while, but if you’re wondering why your sales continue to drop despite your new “heath conscious” advertising campaigns — it’s because when millennials want to get their daily fix of whole grains, we’ll reach for the organic barley, not the box of Fruit Loops.
Source:
Cereals Begin to Lose Their Snap, Crackle and Pop
, New York Times.
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