DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 19, 2106

Birds Do It

So, birds communicate with the chicks while still in their eggs.  And, they can apparently inform/prepare the young for the climate they are about to hatch into.  In other words, birds can warn their young of the potential impact of climate change.

A new study shows that the songs zebra finches sing to their eggs late in development may give the young a head start in dealing with warm weather once they hatch.

Researchers have long known that birds like chickens or quails, which hatch fully capable of fending for themselves, can hear through their eggs—allowing them to imprint things like who their mother is. But or around 50 years, nobody believed anything happened inside the egg with birds that hatch dependent on their parents.

A new study published today in Science upends that wisdom, showing that certain zebra finch calls can change their young's growth and behavior in adulthood. 

“This acoustic signal is potentially being used to program the development of offspring," says Kate Buchanan, an associate professor of animal ecology at Deakin University in Australia and the senior author of the new paper. “Hearing the call affects your rate of growth relative to the temperature that you experience.

Birds Can Figure It Out - People Can't 

Watching their homes burn up in a firestorm whose intensity is a direct result of global warming and yet they are unwilling to believe in the possibility of global warming.  But, a bird is capable of warning a chick in the egg that global warming is real.

“Climate change is real and it is with us,” Robert Bonnie, undersecretary for natural resources and environment at the US Department of Agriculture, told the Guardian in February. “The whole US Forest Service is shifting to becoming an agency dominated by wildfires. We really are at a tipping point. The current situation is not sustainable.”

 This is news to some of those caught up in the Blue Cut fire, many of them political conservatives. “Climate change? A farce. I’ve been here since 1996 and it’s been the same: it gets hot in summer and the place burns,” said Rich Kerr, mayor of Adelanto.

 Ryan Gilmore, 21, and Sonya Haffner, 42, “horse people” from Riverside, drove overnight on their own dime to help residents evacuate animals. “This,” said Haffner, indicating the smoke, “is just a hot period. It’ll go back eventually.”

 Gilmore agreed. “The world goes through cycles. Global warming is a bunch of crap.” He flicked some ash from his shoulder. “It’s just another excuse for people to whine about something.”

Environment Crime

Is it the known criminals or the major corporations that prop up the criminals?

A recent study by UN Environment Programme and Interpol determined that environmental crime is now worth up to $ 258 billion. That is up 26 % on estimates from 2014. “Ecocrime” is the fourth largest criminal enterprise in the world after the drug trade, counterfeiting and human trafficking.

Environmental crime negatively affects nature and has knock-on effects for human health. Every year, miners in the Amazon tip 30 tonnes of mercury into the region’s rivers and lakes. Doctors have diagnosed brain damage from mercury poisoning as far as 400 kilometres downstream. Loggers illegally chop down trees and in doing so degrade water and air quality.

Seeds of Extinction

We will have to change the way we approach our lives if we want to save the planet and ourselves.

Ashley Dawson, author of Extinction: A Radical History, will be featured on Truthout on August 21 in a question and answer about his book. At one point in the interview, he tells Truthout:

Capitalism is predicated on endless expansion. It is a socio-economic system that must grow indefinitely or cease to exist. And it has to grow at a compound rate, leading it to commodify and consume ever-greater portions of the planet at an accelerating velocity. Since we only have one planet, there is clearly a fundamental contradiction between our economic system and the environment upon which it, and all of humanity, ultimately depends. But since capitalism grows in a spatially uneven manner, some people can live obscenely affluent, insulated lives while other people face stark ecological catastrophe. But at some point capitalism will take the entire planet past a point of ecological destruction from which there will be no return, at least on any time scale that is meaningful for human beings.