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Acorns Disappear Across the Country
Hugh Pickens writes "Botanist Rod Simmons thought he was going crazy when couldn't find any acorns near his home in Arlington County, Virginia. 'I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe,' said Simmons. Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill. Simmons and Naturalist Greg Zell began to do some research and found Internet discussion groups, including one on Topix called 'No acorns this year,' reporting the same thing from as far away as the Midwest up through New England and Nova Scotia. 'We live in Glenwood Landing, N.Y., and don't have any acorns this year. Really weird,' wrote one. 'None in Kansas either! Curiouser and curiouser.' The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather and Simmons has a theory about the wet and dry cycles. But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns, and the acorn bust is nothing more than the extreme of a natural boom-and-bust cycle. But the bottom line is that no one really knows. 'It's sort of a mystery,' Zell said."
...the comments on this article can actually include speculation on what may be occurring beyond climate change alarmism?
That's the thing that kind of bugs me is that Global Climate change gets all of the attention at the expense, it seems, over other issues. For example, coal fired power plants. The argument usually boils down to green house gases and maybe air quality. But the issue of coal burning releasing mercury into the environment (why do you think predator fish are contaminated with the stuff?) is hardly ever brought up and if it is, it's just ignored.
Unfortunately, global climate change has become a very politically polarizing issue and it drowns out any sort of rational discourse. Which means, regardless of what needs to be done, it won't get done because folks will spend all their time digging their heals in to be "right".
If the earth's temperature is being increased by the sun, then it's more important we do something about global warming, and quick.
All the bad stuff that's going to happen thanks to global warming doesn't magically vanish because it's being done by the sun.
If it's caused by humans, we just need to back off. As long as we don't hit the point where the ocean currents flip or the antarctic ice melts, we're okay.
If it's caused by the sun, we need to back way the hell off, back to the stone age, and even farther, perhaps with some sort of technology to shade the earth, and attempt to weather it out without hitting the tipping point in several of the systems that would push us past no recovery.
I.e., the car we're in just got a flat tire. Most people are arguing that it's because we're driving over a rocky road with bad tires, whereas you're arguing there's a sniper shooting at us. That doesn't make the situation better and somehow mean we can ignore it, that makes it a good deal worse and means we need to start panicking now.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I emailed my mom who lives in Pennsylvania (which was mentioned in the article), and who owns 5 acres of oak trees (terrible for raking in the fall - these leaves decay very slowly and lay very flat - each missed leaf is a dead bit of grass come the spring). She also lives on the edge of ~100 acres of forest composed largely of oak.
She's a zoologist and not a botanist, though botany is a bit of a hobby of hers. This explanation sounds as plausible as any other, and more plausible than most.
So I think that alarmism about this is overboard until there's more information. That said though, environmental concern under the guise of global warming is overall a good thing - it's causing people to pay attention to the impact of their actions on the world.
Just like most main stream causes, the only way to maintain the public attention the cause requires is to either federally mandate the attention, or to engage in a lot of alarmism. The only way to get the federal mandate is to convince politicians that doing so is in their political career's best interest, so you need to engage the public with... alarmism.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!