Bees had a devastating year
Some 44 percent of bee colonies died off or were killed in 2016 as millions of nature's most prolific pollinators became the collateral damage of insecticide spraying for Zika.
You may remember news stories from September out of Summerville, S.C.
In the aftermath of county spraying there, Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply owner Juanita Stanley watched in shock as millions of her bees died instantly after mists of an insecticide called Naled was dropped from airplanes.
She told The Associated Press that her farm "looks like it's been nuked. They passed right over the trees three times," Stanley told reporters. After the plane left, the familiar buzzing stopped. The silence in its wake was like being in a morgue, she said.
The stressed bees in her 46 hive boxes tried to flee, only to surrender in clumps at the hive entrances, according to a Washington Post story. About three million bees - gone. Just like that.
Scientists and environmental groups are worried. Very worried.
In addition to the pesticide's decimation to Stanley's livelihood from selling honey and hives (as well as other beekeepers' farms), dying bees put an estimated $15 billion worth of pollinated food crops in jeopardy. Without pollinators like bees and moths and knats, crops that flower - basically all of them, apples, squash, pumpkins, you name it - don't produce the fruit or vegetables that we eat.
Of course, disease-carrying mosquitoes are serious threats, too. Malaria, West Nile virus, elephantiasis, dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya and now Zika virus - are frightening concerns.
Zika causes a neurological birth defect known as microcephaly that causes babies to be born with smaller than normal heads, profound brain destruction and sometimes less obvious brain damage. The virus is now believed to also be able to harm adult brains, possibly causing epilepsy, personality changes, depression and dementia - as well as Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing disorder. By Dec. 21, CDC reported 215 cases of Zika had been locally acquired in the United States, along with 4,541 travel-associated cases. Every travel case poses the threat starting a home-grown outbreak.
With close to 4,000 native bee species known in North America (and more we have not yet catalogued), one would think we should not be at risk of losing some of the best farmers we have. Yet we are at risk because of systemic insecticides known generally as neonics.
Though awareness of the dilemma has been growing, the Sierra Club fears the incoming Trump administration poses a road block to any moves to find a better way to stop mosquito-spread diseases and save the bees.
Myron Ebell - Donald Trump's pick to lead the EPA transition team - denies the science that links neonics and bee death. And if Scott Pruitt is confirmed by the Senate as the new EPA head, it is clear he will severely weaken the EPA's power.
The fate of bees - and all the crops and ecosystems that depend on them - may come down to a standoff between the Trump administration and science itself, according to the Sierra Club.
There is no winner here, if we don't demand and find the right answer. We can't endanger lives, but we can't have famines either.
Please let your senators and congressmen know you are concerned and counting on them to ensure science deniers don't hamstring our science, environmental and health organizations.
And there are climate science concerns
In less than a month, the science-friendly Obama administration will be replaced with what seems to be an increasingly science-unfriendly Trump regime.
President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a "hoax." (In reality, scientists are quite certain climate change is real and largely the result of human activity.) And Trump is amassing an alarming number of advisers and Cabinet members who reject the consensus on climate change, have deep ties to the fossil fuel industry and who make it clear they want to undo or weaken Obama's current climate policy. The Trump transition team has even asked the Department of Energy to name staff who worked on Obama's climate policy and pressed the State Department about its international environmental spending.
Given such a witch hunt-like tenor of inquiries, the scientific community is bracing for a dismissive or antagonistic administration. Some scientists already are copying government climate science data on independent servers to ensure its preservation, according to The Washington Post.
Dr. John Holdren, Obama's science adviser, recently told ThinkProgress that although he can't speculate about the next administration, he does have some advice for climate scientists and for Americans.
Climate scientists should keep doing their science and publishing the results, and keep talking about the implications of the results, he said. As for the rest of us, he stressed that our question shouldn't be "do you believe in climate change?"
"The notion that this is a matter of belief rather than respect for the conclusions of an expert community - this is not a matter of belief. Climate change doesn't care whether you believe in it or not. It's going to keep going."
And we must, too.