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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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In USA Today, Dr. Alex Berezow and I ask what a Trump presidency might mean for science. The reason to ask is obvious; he might win.

And science is one of America’s most important strategic resources. We lead in Nobel prizes and with just five percent of earth’s population we produce over 30 percent of the world’s science.
Environmental groups, who ordinarily love centralized government and social authoritarian mechanisms to block science and progress, have suddenly embraced the free market - well, when the free market is using social authoritarian mechanisms to block science and progress, anyway.

Last year, after review and stalling well beyond believability, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the AquAdvantage salmon, an Atlantic salmon that expresses a gene from a Chinook salmon and grows faster.
Friends of the Earth, an activism group generally devoted to impeding science and progress, is excited that the Texas Clean Energy Project, a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Texas, has support from the Department of Energy that is set to expire.
The Obama administration released new limits on methane emissions from oil and gas wells that are even tougher than the industry expected - $530 million more per year than the already high costs. 25 percent more. The government, meanwhile, claims their new regulations will make money because this will stop storms, floods and other consequences of climate change. Yes, a government regulation on methane will change the weather.
The political attack site PRWatch, one arm of the dark-money funded group self-named as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), is run by a former attorney for the Clinton administration which slashed funding for real science in the 1990s (1) while promoting junk environmental claims about ethanol, so it's no surprise CMD hate pro-science groups who don't cater to the environmental scaremongering CMD gets paid to do.
The Bee Informed Partnership conducts an annual survey of commercial and backyard beekeepers so that they can try and track health and survival rates of honey bee colonies.  Though honey bees are just one bee species out of about 27,000, estimates of their implied economic value are around $10 billion annually. A  The latest results show that honey bee colonies declined 44 percent during the year spanning April 2015 to April 2016.

That sounds alarming, and it is in contrast to studies showing that bee numbers are not in decline, but were instead at a 20-year high last year. (1)

How can the claims be so different? Should we be alarmed or not?