Here is a piece of pseudo-scientific idiocy that caught my attention.  This Fox News/LiveScience article tries to claim that bumblebees are disappearing because of, you guessed it, global warming!

From the article:

Climate change is causing wild bumblebees to disappear from large swaths of their historical range, which could spell disaster for pollinating crops in Europe and North America, new research suggests.

As global temperatures have risen, bumblebees have disappeared from the warmest regions they occupy, but have not spread northward to take advantage of new habitat, the study finds.

"They just aren't colonizing new areas to track rapid, human-caused climate change," study co-author Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa, said at a news conference."

One minor problem: the planet has not warmed since the latter part of the 1990s.

There is another problem that should be immediately evident:

Kerr and his colleagues looked at historical records of the habitat ranges for 67 bumblebee populations in Europe and North America between 1901 and 1974, when climate warming was negligible, and between 1974 and 2010, when climate change accelerated. On its southern edge, the bees' range has shrunk 186 miles, or about 5.6 miles every year, Kerr said.

Yet despite warming in northern latitudes, bumblebees haven't figured out a way to take advantage of the now less-frigid northern climes. The study, which was published July 9 in the journal Science, did not show any correlation between land-use practices or pesticide use and bumblebee populations.

Bees are dying out in the southern end of their range because of the rise of extreme heat waves.

"If you imagine a car that starts running out of coolant and starts blowing steam out of the front of the hood, that's kind of like an analogy for what bumblebees do when it gets too hot," Kerr said.."

Hmm.  I suppose that Kerr doesn't realize that the 1930s were actually a warmer decade than any subsequent one.  Kerr doesn't bother with this technicality in his study, simply assuming it was cooler in the good old days.  (See the temperature map of July 2012 compared to July 1936, for instance.  Why didn't we witness this same loss of bumblebees as a result of the natural warming at that time?  Frankly, I think Kerr and the other AGW alarmists are the ones blowing steam out of the front of the hood.)

So, despite a decided lack of planetary warming and a failure of bumblebees to die off in the '30s, we are still yet to believe they are not moving into new territory as the Arctic and Antarctic allegedly warm.  Why?

Could it be that those areas aren't actually warming?

The bumblebee – genus Bumbus, also known as Bumbini – is twenty-five to forty million years old, far older than humanity.  In all of that time, was the planet cooler than it is now?  It certainly was not during the Eocene:

At the start of the Eocene, the continents were close to where they are now, but the average annual temperature in arctic Canada and Siberia was a balmy 18° C (65° F). The dominant plants up there were palm trees and cycads. Fossil monitor lizards (sort of like alligators) dating back to this era have been found in Svalbard, an island north of Greenland that's now covered with ice all year. Antarctica was home to cool temperate forests, including beech trees and ferns. In particular, our Earth had no permanent polar ice caps!

The Eocene lasted from 55 to 34 million years ago – certainly within the upper estimate for the age of Bumbini.  And it was still certainly warmer during the Oligocene (34 to 24 my) than it is now, although it was much cooler than the Eocene or the even hotter Paleocene.  Bumblebees developed and thrived during this period.  They have done quite well.  Now that their number is dropping, it is immediately blamed on "global warming," a warming that is not happening.

It should also be pointed out that the bumbles did not die out after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age – a serious warming period.  They did not die out at the end of the Little Ice Age in the 19^th century.

Maybe the bees don't want to move north – or south – because it's getting too cold?

Antarctic sea ice has been growing for years, as indeed so too has land ice. The Alfred Wegener Institute station in Antarctica has concluded that there has been no temperature increase anywhere near where it has been measuring.

And this paper makes it quite clear that Antarctic temperatures have dropped over recent years.

However, "Although previous reports suggest slight recent continental warming,” they declare that "our spatial analysis of Antarctic meteorological data" demonstrated "a net cooling over the entire Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000, particularly during summer and autumn,” when ice melt would be most likely to occur. A study of temperatures and ecosystem response in the McMurdo Dry Valleys indicated a cooling of 0.7°C per decade between 1986 and 2000.

Antarctic ecosystems show clear evidence of cooling, suggesting that the temperature measurements reported by Doran et al are occurring widely."

Furthermore, ten years of Icesat data shows that Antarctic ice has been growing.  Ice core data confirms this.

In fact, outside the Antarctic Peninsula – a region subject to ocean currents and weather patterns – the only Antarctic ice disappearing is in West Antarctica, and it is clear that this disappearance is caused by volcanism under the sheet.

It should be pointed out that Arctic sea ice has come back in recent years, too.

So what does it all mean?  It means that the bumblebees aren't stupid enough to immigrate to an icebox, and that this story is pure garbage, a work of fiction.  That the bumbles are dying is not in dispute, but global warming clearly has little or nothing to do with it.

The point of stories like this is to politicize everything and anything to drive an agenda.  The author knows that the average person won't look past the story itself, and perhaps not past the first paragraph or two.  It is intended to leave an impression, and coupled with the other stories written in the same way, it is intended to inflate the AGW meme to critical mass: "see, all the evidence is overwhelming."  It is not intended to actually stand up to close scrutiny.

Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis-based writer.  Read more from Tim and friends at The Aviary (www.tbirdnow.mee.nu).