On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's chairman and ranking Republican, John Kerry and Richard Lugar, will hold a briefing that will bring scientists and evangelicals together to share their concerns about climate change.

Big names will be there, including Richard Cizik, former vice president for government affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, and Nobel laureate Eric Chivian, a physician who heads Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment.

Kudos to Kerry and Lugar for bringing leaders in the science and faith communities together to highlight their shared concerns about climate change.

Both senators and their 533 congressional colleagues also would benefit by reading a just-published book, A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. It was written by Katharine Hayhoe, a geoscientist at Texas Tech and expert reviewer for the IPCC, and her husband Andrew Farley, lead teaching pastor at the west Texas church Ecclesia and author of the bestseller, The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church.

Excerpts of the book can be downloaded from ...

Autumn brings again reports of honey bee colonies crashing, collapsing, and beekeepers trying to figure out what to do.

Over the last year or so a lot of samples have been taken, papers written, talks presented, discoveries made, interviews given ... but no definitive answers discovered.

From what I’ve learned, here’s at some of what’s going on ...

First off, some colonies die every year, in fact some die every month, every week, every day. They always have and always will. Bees are insects subject to the pressures of nature and the real world and they offer a bell curve of tolerance to those natural pressures ... no different than animals everywhere, domestic or wild, large or small. It happens. But because they are under the media microscope at the moment and live in a manmade box under the care of people, blame falls disproportionately on the glamorous and visible Colony Collapse Disorder and its (probably) man made cause. But for some bees in some places, sometimes, let's rule out Colony Collapse Disorder right off.

For a better picture, let’s back up a moment and see what peripheral activities beekeepers have been up to lately ... it’s been an interesting summer ... and it leads back to honey bee colonies collapsing....

What are the lessons of Tuesday's off-off-year election?

Republican spin doctors are proclaiming that the phoenix has arisen and a newly popular GOP is poised to cast out the spendy liberals in 2010. Democratic spin doctors are saying that all politics are local and a fratricidal GOP is still bent on eating its young.

If the shoes were on the other feet, both the GOP and Dem pundits likely would be saying exactly the opposite. So, if anyone is inclined to listen to partisan spin doctors, take two tablets of salt and call me in the morning.

Nearly a week later, a few patterns seem apparent.

The country is edgy. Despite the recent stock market froth, unemployment remains high, government debt is way outside people's comfort zone, and many voters are not convinced that the know-it-alls in DC know what the hell they're doing. Wary independent voters are displaying a fickle streak. ...

The Obama administration handed out $3.4 billion in grants the other day to begin building the smart grid - smart meters, smart transformers, smart substations, and smart what-not.

The money will buy lots of smart equipment. What it won't do is buy smart behavior. And there lies one of the great unknowns about the big energy transformation facing America.

Will all that great equipment be put to optimal use - squeezing waste out of our energy production and consumption patterns, integrating cleaner technologies into the electric grid, and banishing oil's shadow over our economy and our international relations? Or will cussed, mercurial human behavior drive our energy economy into unexpected directions?

Let's see how these unknowns might play out. One of the ideas behind the smart grid is that if utilities adopt variable electricity pricing for end-use customers and those customers can see current electricity prices on home data screens tied to their smart meters, they will have the information they need to optimize their demand patterns - say, running the dishwasher late at night when demand is down and prices are lower, rather than during morning or early evening hours, when loads are high and electricity prices reflect higher demand. One benefit of shifting demand to off-peak periods would be reduced need for "peaker" power plants, typically gas-fired combustion turbines.

Would consumers respond to clear price signals and shift their demand patterns in optimal ways? There is some evidence that they would, but much will depend on whether consumers incorporate electricity price monitoring into their daily routines. Some may want to actively manage their electricity use, some may not want to be bothered. Today, no one knows precisely how consumers will respond to the technology.

Take another example - plug-in hybrid-electric cars that use both batteries and internal combustion engines for propulsion. General Motors plans to market the Chevrolet Volt sometime next year. Uber-environmentalist Denis Hayes says the Volt is the best idea that Detroit has had in decades.

The thinking behind a car like the Volt is that many people don't need to drive more than 30 or so miles per day for commuting, errands, and socializing.