Daily Quick Read - August 15, 2019

PETA Please Shut Up

                                                                                                PHOTO CREDIT: SAN DIEGO ZOO SAFARI PARK

I have no respect for PETA as an organization, so I’m not surprised that PETA would object to attempts to save a species by comparing artificial insemination to rape.  But, really this is a step to far toward stupid.  Massive efforts are going on in the field to protect and preserve southern white rhinos in the wild, but maintaining a diverse population in key zoos is also vital.  And, of course, PETA entirely missed a critical point regarding this process – its impact on saving  the northern white rhino from total extinction. 

ANIMAL rights group PETA has condemned the San Diego Zoo Safari Park for creating the first artificially inseminated southern white rhino calf.

The activists claimed zoos should instead be protecting the species in their natural environments, before labelling the process as unpleasant and comparing it to rape. The baby male rhino is the first of the species to be artificially born in the United States and only the third of its kind in the world.

But PETA director Elisa Allen hit back against the historic birth.

She told Express.co.uk: “Conservation of southern white rhinos and other endangered species should mean protecting them in their rapidly disappearing natural homelands.”

She added the focus should be tackling the causes of endangerment, before highlighting habitat destruction and poaching as the key causes.

Elisa Allen is the PETA director for the United Kingdom.

Speaking of Stupid

Researchers at Penn State University recently completed a behavioral study that concluded that men are reluctant to engage is environmentally friendly behaviors such as recycling or taking a reusable shopping bag to the store.  Wow…Just wow.  Who are these men whose sexual identity is so precarious that they are afraid to recycle or be seen with a reusable shopping bag?

Researchers found that certain attempts to be more environmentally conscious are often perceived as either masculine or feminine.

Using a reusable shopping bag was labelled a “feminine” act by participants in the study, with both men and women found more likely to question a man’s sexuality if he shopped with a bag for life.

Subjects were also more likely to question a woman’s sexual orientation if she displayed supposedly “masculine” green tendencies, such as caulking windows.

Janet K. Swim, the Pennsylvania State University psychologist who led the study, said that some people might be put off behaving in a more eco-friendly manner because of these stereotypes. 

“People may avoid certain behaviours because they are managing the gendered impression they anticipate others will have of them. Or they may be avoided if the behaviours they choose do not match their gender,” Swim said.

Is the Future Already Decided?

The first two stories today have me considering this article that basically says, kiss the old world goodbye and give in to our dystopian future. After all, why bother when the die is cast? We can't save ourselves from ourselves.

We don’t have to wait long for the worst to arrive. Come 2050, civilization as we know it will start to tap out thanks to climate change, if a report from earlier this year is to be believed. Drawing on existing research and modeling, authors David Spratt and Ian Dunlop make a case that more than a billion people will be displaced as melting ice caps and glaciers raises the sea levels and the increased heat becomes lethal for huge swathes of the population for multiple days out of the year. It’s not conclusive — but it’s convincing.

Of course, unlike proponents of the Mayan calendar’s supposed prophecies or Nostradamus’s writings, the augurs of the climate movement come armed with science — repeatable and verifiable and very sure we’re on the edge of disaster. "This scenario provides a glimpse into a world of 'outright chaos' on a path to the end of human civilization and modern society as we have known it," Spratt and Dunlop wrote in exceedingly clear terms, "in which the challenges to global security are simply overwhelming and political panic becomes the norm."

Who Will Remember Us?

Assuming that mankind is truly an endangered species facing a rapidly accelerating extinction deadline, what action would most perfectly encapsulate this moment in history?  Well, we can arbitrarily give the current time a grand geological title.  We can call it the Anthropocene - the human epoch.   How typical of humans.  We name the period when we devastated the planet after ourselves, the main architect of the destruction.  Talk about ego. 

The idea of the Anthropocene is an interesting thought experiment. For those invested in the stratigraphic arcana of this infinitesimal moment in time, it serves as a useful catalog of our junk. But it can also serve to inflate humanity’s legacy on an ever-churning planet that will quickly destroy—or conceal forever—even our most awesome creations.

What paltry smudge of artifacts we do leave behind, in those rare corners of the continents where sediment accumulates and is quickly buried—safe from erosion’s continuous defacing—will be extremely unlikely to be exposed at the surface, at any given time, at any given place, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years in the geological future. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Perhaps, someday, our signal in the rocks will be found, but only if eagle-eyed stratigraphers, from God knows where on the tree of life, crisscross their own rearranged Earth, assiduously trying to find us. But they would be unlikely to be rewarded for their effort. At the end of all their travels—after cataloging all the bedrock of the entire planet—they might finally be led to an odd, razor-thin stratum hiding halfway up some eroding, far-flung desert canyon. If they then somehow found an accompanying plaque left behind by humanity that purports to assign this unusual layer its own epoch—sandwiched in these cliffs, and embarrassed above and below by gigantic edifices of limestone, siltstone, and shale—this claim would amount to evidence of little more than our own species’ astounding anthropocentrism.  Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.

The primary geological evidence of our short span on the planet might just be a razor thin layer of plastic preserved over the millennia.

How to Be First to the Lifeboats

Of course, even as we slide down the slope to oblivion, some people will try to make a profit.

How do we avoid a future in which the best data for saving lives and property from climate destruction are only available to those who can afford it?

That’s the question some observers and critics of “climate services” are asking. The fast growth of this field in recent years marks a profound shift in how our society creates and uses science. Rather than focus broadly on the regional, national or global impacts of rising temperatures, providers of climate services create data tailored to specific decision-makers: the mayor of a coastal city, say, or the CEO of an energy utility.

Earlier this year, the journal Climatic Change devoted a special issue to climate services, which included tough questions from critics. University of Melbourne researcher Svenja Keele argued in one paper that the field’s growth “shifts the incentives for climate science away from the public interest towards the ongoing pursuit of profit.”

University of Guelph assistant professor Eric Nost meanwhile asked, “when do climate services actually exacerbate existing vulnerabilities?”

“[Commercially developed climate services] are often exclusive and only accessible by those involved and/or paying for that service,” Marta Bruno Soares, a Met Office university academic fellow in the U.K., wrote in an email. “What is critical at this point is to understand how the climate services produced … are being licensed and what accessibility is allowed to whom.”

Even industry leaders acknowledge the risk of a not-so-distant future where the wealthy and powerful have better information and tools for protecting themselves from the devastation of climate change than the poor and vulnerable.