Daily Quick Read - July 22, 2019

The Great Green Wall 

Now that we’ve learned that one trillion trees might save the world, this decade old project in Africa looks like a great start.  The benefits are more than CO2 reduction.

The Great Green Wall is an African-led movement with an epic ambition to grow an 8,000km natural wonder of the world across the entire width of Africa.

A decade in and roughly 15% underway, the initiative is already bringing life back to Africa’s degraded landscapes at an unprecedented scale, providing food security, jobs and a reason to stay for the millions who live along its path.

The Wall promises to be a compelling solution to the many urgent threats not only facing the African Continent, but the global community as a whole – notably climate change, drought, famine, conflict and migration.

Once complete, the Great Green Wall will be the largest living structure on the planet, 3 times the size of the Great Barrier Reef.

Shhh…shhh…shark!

The cold Atlantic Ocean waters east of Cape Town, South Africa are a haven for great white sharks.  The  shark population has been in decline in recent years, but they still present a real danger to swimmers in the waters of False Bay.  To protect both swimmers and the beach front tourist attractions, a crew of shark spotter proved early warning of the approach of sharks.  Here’s an interview with one of the spotters.

The first time I saw one, my heart started racing and I was shivering when I spoke on the radio. These days I’m a bit calmer. You’re more likely to die on your way to the beach than be killed by a shark. They aren’t out to hunt us—most of the attacks happen when they confuse us for seals.

It might be a piece of kelp, or maybe it’s a sunfish with its fin up.  One season we had a lot of sunfish in the bay and people thought they were seeing sharks everywhere. But you don’t want to take a chance, and even if I’m not sure I’ll clear the beach. So I radio the other spotters down at the beach and they set off a siren. Then you see everyone start paddling toward the shore.

Yes. It’s Getting Hotter

The frustration is that we can all see the effects of climate change. The evidence is presented to us on a daily basis and yet our political leaders and the media are stuck dealing with Trump’s daily tweets. Go figure – we’re going to tweet away the future.

Climate change is shifting that bell curve toward the hotter part of the temperature scale. Even a tiny shift in the center means that more of the curve touches the extreme part of the temperature scale.

“So you know, a warming of 1 degree Celsius, which is what we’ve seen thus far, can lead to a 10-fold increase in the frequency of 100 degree days in New York City for example,” said Dr. Mann. According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, since the 1960s the average number of heat waves — defined as two or more consecutive days where daily lows exceeded historical July and August temperatures — in 50 major American cities has tripled.

Want to see what has happened with average temperatures in your hometown in your lifetime?  Try this link.

In Case You Get Exiled

Swimming With Whale Sharks - St Helena

I saw a documentary about this place a couple of years ago.  Something about it was so haunting.  Back then it took five days to get from Cape Town to the island by boat, now you can fly there – if you have the nerve.

A small chain of underwater volcanoes lie 1,800 km due west of Angola in the South Atlantic Ocean. One of these volcanoes, St. Helena, broke the surface 12 – 14 million years ago. Regularly hidden in cloud and mist brought by south-easterly trade winds, the island lay uninhabited and undiscovered until the Portuguese stumbled upon it in 1502. Remarkably, they managed to keep this extraordinary place a secret for almost 90 years.

In 1815 Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to St. Helena, after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. The former French emperor, who had once ruled an empire that stretched across Europe, died six years into his exile on the island at the age of 51, most likely from stomach cancer. He was buried on the island and in 1840 his remains were returned to France and entombed in a crypt at Les Invalides in Paris.

Eating Ourselves to Extinction

We can’t all keep eating beef or we are going to run out of resources just keeping the cows fed.

The world's population will hit 10 billion in just 30 years and all of those people need to eat. To feed that many humans with the resources Earth has, we will have to cut down the amount of beef we eat, according to a new report by the World Resources Institute.The report makes several concrete recommendations, including cutting beef consumption.

To feed a growing world, Americans will need to eat about 40 percent less beef and Europeans need to cut their consumption by 22 percent. That averages out to a burger and a half per week, as CNN reported.