So, why does farm size matter? As the total number of farms goes down, the number of big* farms is going up -- and this shift hurts rural America. According to an analysis by Food and Water Watch: "Communities with more medium- and smaller-sized farms have more shared prosperity, including higher incomes, lower unemployment, and lower income inequality, than communities with larger farms tied to often-distant agribusinesses."

In strictly economic terms, U.S. agriculture has followed a pretty unsurprising path. Better technology leads to greater crop yields, which in turn mean lower prices and larger farms. Our economic system distorts competition and fosters consolidation -- and then we act surprised when farmers follow the rules of the game in order to survive.

Today, we have a ton of tiny farms -- and yet when it comes to land, "the top 10 percent of farms in terms of size account for more than 70 percent of cropland in the United States; the top 2.2 percent alone takes up more than a third," wrote Roberto A. Ferdman in The Washington Post.

The editors of the fantastic book Food and the Mid-Level Farm show how that has paved the road toward an increasingly polarized farm-scape:

A Cooper's hawk, found in Greater Vancouver, is the most polluted wild bird that has been found anywhere in the world. A team of Canadian researchers made this startling discovery while analyzing liver samples from birds of prey that were discovered either injured or dead in the Vancouver area.

The levels of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in the contaminated Cooper's hawk were 196 parts per million, significantly higher than those recorded in birds found either in cities in California or in an electronic waste site in China. PBDEs are a group of chemicals that act as flame retardants and were once used widely in computers, stereos, televisions, vehicles, carpets and furniture.

Although many of the PBDEs have been banned since the 2000s in Canada, they continue to accumulate in landfill sites where people dispose of PBDE-rich items. In British Columbia's Fraser River delta, for example, the quantity of PBDEs has doubled every four years over the past four decades. This can have a significant effect on the bird populations that live nearby.

I was a bit surprised to read (in German) Siemens' CEO Joe Kaeser comments in Houston yesterday. After saying that his firm was "born in Germany, raised in Europe, and at home across the world" (note: my back translation from the German, not his original), he apparently added this:

"If you want to influence a country's energy policy, you just have to do the opposite of what's being done in Germany. Germany is subsidizing renewable energy to the tune of nearly 500 billion euros guaranteed. I hope that Germany at least manages to export wind turbines. But supporting photovoltaics in Germany makes about as much sense as planting pineapples in Alaska."

(Also note that this is a back translation from indirect speech, so his original wording - which I have not seen - may be somewhat different.)

Have I mentioned that Siemens has quite a small share of the German wind power market? Yes, I believe I did. Siemens did not even enter the wind sector until 2004, when it took over Bonus AS of Denmark. The firm apparently knows a lot about photovoltaics, for it focused on concentrated solar power more than PV, partly within the Desertec project, which did not pan out (note to Joe: the Sahara is probably too dry for pineapple plantations). The global PV market is set to skyrocket from now on, but Siemens has nothing to sell.

And let's not forget Siemens' recent sales brochure, which it tried to pass off as a serious recommendation for the Energiewende. Or the ridiculous claim that the 2011 nuclear phaseout would raise German power prices fivefold.

High elevation environments around the world may be warming much faster than previously thought, according to members of an international research team including Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They call for more aggressive monitoring of temperature changes in mountain regions and more attention to the potential consequences of warming.

"Elevation-dependent warming is a poorly observed phenomenon that requires urgent attention to ensure that potentially important changes in high mountain environments are adequately monitored by the global observational network," say members of the Mountain Research Initiative Working Group in the current issue of Nature Climate Change.

High mountains are the major water source for large numbers of people living at lower elevations, so the social and economic consequences of enhanced warming in mountain regions could be large, the researchers add.

Let's face it - extreme weather, floods and droughts, melting ice and disappearing species as a result of climate change are enough to ruin anyone's day. So here's some good news for a change, brought to you by the wind industry.

1. Wind power had a fantastic year in 2014, led by China which installed more than 23 Gigawatts (GW) of clean renewable wind energy, enough to power about 25 million Chinese homes. The industry set a new global record with a total of more than 51 GW installed in a single year. Our new projections in our hot off the press Global Wind Report show that the trend will continue for the rest of the decade, with annual installations reaching 60 GW/year by 2018, and supplying 6-7% of global electricity supply by 2020, up from about 3% at present. Denmark already got 39% of its electricity from wind last year; Spain 20%, Germany almost 10%, the US 5%. The even better news is that most of the new growth now is in emerging markets, whereemissions growth is slowing because of wind, solar and other renewables, and increasing energy efficiency.

2. Wind power is now the cheapest way to add new power generation to the grid in a long and growing list of countries: Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, New Zealand, Australia and in large portions of the US and China. In fact, most of the growth in 2014 was not driven by climate policy, but rather by wind power's competitiveness, by its contributions to energy security, price stability, and the economic development and jobs that it provides. Add to that the need to rid the large cities of the developing world from the choking smog which threatens to make them unlivable, and wind power is increasingly becoming the power option of choice for large scale, clean electricity to power economic development. In the second quarter of this year wind will surpass nuclear in terms of total installed capacity globally, although it will be a few more years before it surpasses nuclear in terms of production.

New revelations show how Shell lobbyists were able to shift Europe's renewable energy targets http://t.co/gVOmmzTLVG pic.twitter.com/hYrkRbblIb

— 350 dot org (@350) abril 27, 2015