Daily Quick Read - August 1, 2019

Climate Change and Corruption - Sound Familiar?

Why do so many people from Honduras and El Salvador risk the dangerous journey across Mexico to try and get into the United States? Gangs, violence and corrupt governments are certainly part of the problem, but climate change is also a major factor. Climate change and exploitation by corporations looking to take advantage of those corrupt governments.

Golden beaches once helped transform this fishing community on the Gulf of Fonseca into a thriving tourist destination. Nowadays, however, there are barely a few metres of sand left, and rising water levels and tidal surges have wiped out roads, homes and businesses.Locals estimate that around a metre of ground is lost every year – which means this entire community will soon be under water. The same predicament is faced by settlements along the Pacific coast of Honduras, where land and its people are disappearing fast.

In recent years, millions of people have fled Central America to escape grinding poverty, institutional collapse and untrammeled violence. But another factor behind the exodus has received less attention: conflicts over natural resources which have been intensified by corporate expansion and climate change.

Sea levels are rising around the world, but in this region another local factor is helping speed up coastal degradation: swathes of mangrove forests have been destroyed to make way for industrial shrimp farms which have proliferated even inside protected reserves.

In El Salvador, government corruption and climate change have created a water crisis.

El Salvador is the most densely populated country in Central America. It also has the region’s lowest water reserves, which are depleting fast thanks to the climate crisis, pollution and unchecked commercial exploitation.

According to one study, El Salvador will run out of water within 80 years unless radical action is taken to improve the way the country manages its dwindling water supplies.

As in just about every aspect of life in El Salvador, the water problem is only exacerbated by corporate interests, corruption and the country’s vicious street gangs.

Swimming In Garbage

Micro-plastic trash from daily water samples                @osleston

In an effort to focus attention on plastic trash in the North Pacific, this guy is swimming in garbage. 

Ben Lecomte is spending his summer swimming in trash – literally. So far, he’s found toothbrushes, laundry baskets, sandbox shovels and beer crates floating out in the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Since starting the trip on 14 June in Hawaii, Lecomte and his crew – consisting of sailors, storytellers, and scientists – have found everything from empty containers to children’s toys and abandoned fishing nets. Crew member and scientist Drew McWhirter even discovered microplastics in their dinner: upon slitting open a freshly-caught mahi-mahi, he saw a piece of plastic lodged in the fish’s stomach.

“It was a very sobering experience,” Lecomte says. “Plastic trash coming back to our plates.”

Rhino Born in San Diego

                                                                                  Ken Bohn/AP

The birth of a southern white rhino calf at the San Diego Zoo is a positive step for rhino conservation in general, but it’s also an important development in the project to save the northern white rhino from extinction. Conception through artificial insemination is a first step in a complex project involving several zoos. 

The bumbling, sleepy rhino calf at San Diego Zoo is sure to delight animal lovers around the world. But for conservation scientists, his birth has additional meaning – it marks a significant step toward saving wild rhino populations from the edge of extinction.

His mother Victoria, who carried the calf for 493 days, stayed calm during her 30-minute labor on Sunday, the zoo announced.

“Victoria is doing a great job as a mother,” said Barbara Durrant, director of reproductive sciences at San Diego Zoo Global, the not-for-profit organization that runs the zoo.

The newborn southern white rhino is the first in North America, and the third in the world, born as the result of artificial insemination.

Whereas populations of southern white rhinos have recovered and stabilized, thanks to a century of protection and management, northern white rhinos have been decimated by hunting during the colonial era and poaching in recent years. The last male northern white rhino died in March, and only two females of the species remain.

Durrant and her colleagues at the San Diego Zoo hope that eventually the six female southern white rhinos under their care, including Victoria, will serve as surrogates for northern white rhino embryos, helping revive the population.

Transportation Efficiency vs Ego

Ford has a new commercial in which it brags about the power of its new all electric prototype F-150 pickup truck. In the commercial the truck is shown pulling a train loaded with F-150 pickups. Impressive? Not really.

Ford says in its press release:Watch as Linda Zhang, chief engineer of the Ford F-150, shows the capability of a prototype all-electric F-150 by towing 10 double-decker rail cars and 42 2019-model year F-150s, weighing more than 1 million pounds.

This bothered me. My dad was in transportation, and I grew up around trains. Ten cars isn't very many and F-150s aren't very heavy, compared to a hopper car full of coal. Trains carry many millions of pounds and on a level track can be pulled by very small engines.

That's why trains are so incredibly fuel efficient; all you have to worry about is the friction force. According to Sciencing, "The coefficient of rolling friction for a wheel-rail interface is approximately 0.001." You multiply that by the weight of the train and you get the amount of weight being pulled. So 1,000,000 pounds x .0001 = a grand total of 1,000 pounds. I could probably hitch up my family and pull that train.

The other lesson for everyone is that rail infrastructure, whether light rail in cities or high speed between them, whether for passengers or for freight, is incredibly energy efficient. A single train can take 280 transport trucks off the road. It is at least four times as fuel efficient as a truck and emits 75 percent less greenhouse gas emissions.

Survived for Millions of Years Now This

                                                                                     James & Carol Lee Upsplash

During the government shutdown earlier this year, Joshua Tree National Park was vandalized while park personnel were furloughed.  The damage to the parts of the parks fragile ecosystem may take centuries to repair.   Today, the parks namesake Joshua trees face an even more dangerous enemy than MAGA hat wearing off-roaders – climate change.

Botanist Lynn Sweet regularly treks through California's Joshua Tree National Park, nearly 800,000 acres that lie at the intersection of the Mojave and Colorado deserts. She likes to photograph the gnarly, spikey-limbed trees, which look — as some have observed — like a picture from a Dr. Seuss children's book.

The trees have been around since the Pleistocene, which began more than 2 million years ago and concluded at the end of the last ice age. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, giant cave bears and saber-toothed tigers roamed among them. The animals are long gone, but these iconic trees still exist.

Sweet, a plant ecologist at the University of California Riverside's Center for Conservation Biology, partnering with the Earthwatch Institute, enlisted volunteers to help collect data on about 4,000 trees in the park to determine whether climate change already has had an impact. She mapped out where Joshua trees live in the park to determine which conditions they do best in, and then compared that with projections of what Joshua Tree National Park will like look later this century.

"I chose climate change projections for end-of-century," she explained. She looked at how much the climate will change if humans tackle the problem, and how much it will change if humans do nothing. "In the upper end, where we do nothing to address climate change, we may see almost no more habitat for the Joshua tree in the Park," she said.