Michael Mann Takes on Climate ‘Doomists’ in His Latest Book ‘The New Climate War’

Ten years ago, climate scientists were accused of exaggerating the risks, and now they’re accused of underplaying the dangers. There are times when it seems a no-win situation, but as renowned climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann argues in his engaging — and eye-opening — new book The New Climate War, this is no time to give up.

If anything, he says — thanks in no small part to Greta Thunberg and the climate kids — the public mood has changed. This time feels different. It looks different; it smells different. Dr. Mann is newly optimistic about a favourable shift in the political winds. The youth climate movement has had an almost incalculable effect on the public conversation, and has reshaped the debate to focus on inter-generational ethics. 

It’s one thing to say you love your kids, but quite another to ensure they have a better future.

Dr. Mann holds advanced degrees in climatology and geophysics. His day job is Distinguished Prof. of Atmospheric Science and director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, but he’s more widely known as the co-creator of the “Hockey-stick Graph” in 1999. 

The self-explanatory graph showed the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial age in terms even a Trumpist climate denier or hockey fan might understand. That made him a lightning rod for controversy, for both climate deniers in general and the fossil-fuel industry in particular. His email has been hacked; his social media accounts have drawn unfriendly fire from online trolls; and his public profile has made him a ready target for conservative politicians and media outlets beholden to the fossil fuel industry.

He doesn’t care!

They come at him, but he’s more than willing to take them on. HIs Twitter account is lively and engaging, and he’s quick to reply to tweets that engage him on a personal or scientific level (I have personal experience of this). He has 168,000 Twitter followers and counting at @MichaelEMann, not bad for a career academic, glorified lab rat and policy wonk. Dr. Mann has been on Twitter since 2011, and is a long way from walking away from the social-media platform, as others in the public eye have done.

The New Climate War shows how the fossil fuel industry has waged a 30-year campaign of disinformation to deflect blame and responsibility from a crisis that even the most entrenched climate deniers are now forced to admit is real, and not a figment of Al Gore’s imagination.

That said, Mann insists it’s unhelpful to keep carping about the negatives. The New Climate War points the way to potential solutions. Mann finds hope where it’s often all too easy to dwell on the negatives. He has an almost unshakeable faith in humanity’s ability to solve big-picture problems. That may seem naive, but there it is. It will take our collective focus, dedication and application, but we can get there in the end.

“Sorry, Bill Gates, but we don’t ‘need a miracle,’” he has said. As one Twitter follower pointed out, Dr. Mann is an actual climate scientist; Bill Gates is a rich man with opinions.

“Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic,” Mann told the UK’s Sunday Observer this past weekend in a wide-ranging conversation with the 2019 SEAL Award winning environmental journalist Jonathan Watts. “Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.”

Good people fall victim to doomism, he added.“I do too, sometimes.”

I’m much the same, as anyone who read my last post about polar bears on International Polar Bear Day knows. I still think polar bears are doomed, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to give up on climate models just yet. The New Climate War points the way to possible ways out, provided we pay attention. And persevere.

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Joel Sartore on Saving the World’s Remaining Wild Species, One Photograph at a Time

“Most humans will sit for their pictures to be taken, so that’s not a problem. If you understand what drives people, what they’re motivated by, that’s fine. But with animals, it’s different. It’s hard to speak their language a lot of the time.”

— Joel Sartore

Joel Sartore, National Geographic Fellow and long-time contributing photographer for National Geographic’s family of magazines and websites, opened his TEDx DeExtinction talk by explaining that, for more than 20 years, he had travelled the world, taking pictures of various conservation issues.

And then, one day, he realized he needed to do more.

“I realized that what I’m doing here in the wild,” he said, pointing to a giant screen image of a sea turtle finding its way back to sea on a lonely tropical beach, “is just not enough. Through my career I have seen more and more species head towards extinction. So now I’m in the second act of my career. I’m 50-years-old. Maybe I have 20 years left. Maybe. If I’m lucky. What am I going to do to save species?

“I went from doing this—” he said, pointing at the image of the turtle on the beach, “to taking black and white backgrounds with me and doing this—“ he said, pointing at a new image of a turtle swimming, just the turtle, in silhouette, with a clear white backdrop in the background.

The difference to the naked eye is simple: One is an action photo, taken in the wild; the other is a more traditional portrait photo, a close-up of a single animal, with nothing else to distract the eye.

So what, you might ask.

Simple, Sartore would say. One is an action shot, taken in the wild, a single moment not unlike countless other single moments, all vying for attention. Seen today, forgotten tomorrow. The other, he explains, is immortal. A portrait photo, well taken, is forever.

“I started doing this more and more. Everywhere I can go, everywhere National Geographic sends me, every continent, every state, all the time. 

“I started eight years ago. I called it The Photo Ark. The goal is to get animals on black-and-white backgrounds, and get people to care. That’s it. Look them in the eye. See how amazing amphibians are? Reptiles? Whatever I have to do to get people to care.

“What’s it going to take? I don’t know. So far it hasn’t worked out too well for me. I’m seeing almost 50 percent of all amphibians either at extinction now or at risk of extinction. Down to eight, seven, five or four, a couple. Now you’re looking at the very last one. We’re talking about extinction today. I see species right before they go extinct.

“That’s where I come in. . . . I really need to tell the world about this.”

This coming weekend, National Geographic’s specialty channel NatGeo Wild premieres a two-part, two-week special, Photo Ark, which accompanies Sartore on his 25-year mission to take portrait photos of some 15,000 species.

Now age 57, by his reckoning he is two-thirds of the way there: 10,531 species to be exact. This past May he recorded his 10,000th species: a güiña, the smallest wildcat in the Americas, which he photographed at Fauna Andina, a wildlife reserve in Chile. The photo was a milestone nearly 15 years in the making.

“What do I have to do? I think about this question all the time — what do I do, what do I do, what do I do?

“Every class of animal is now at risk. We’re at risk of  losing half of all species by the turn of the next century. We know it’s bad. What to do. My goal is to get people engaged. Get the public engaged. That’s the thing. How do we do this? We have to make it interesting. We have to get people off the couch.

©Joel Sartore NationalGeographic Photo Ark

“We have to get them to care about more than the price at the pump and what’s on television. We have to engage them and get them to meet these animals face-to-face. Most people live in cities now. They live out in the country. They’re never going to get the chance to see these things, unless they get involved somehow and look these animals right in the eye.

“How do we get there? I don’t know. Tick, tick, tick. Time’s running out, isn’t it?

“Can we do it? Absolutely we can. So far, most of what you’ve seen here tonight did not have to go away. It’s dying off for lack of attention. We just need to get this on the public’s radar screen. Have we done it before? You bet we have. We’ve done it many times. We’ve saved the giant panda so far. . . . We can do this. Absolutely. There’s no time to lose, though, is there. No time.

“I often get discouraged if I’m out in the field and I’m seeing the last of something and I think, ‘Holy cow, what am I going to do? How do I get people to care? Is it worth it?’ Absolutely.

“Margaret Mead once said so famously, ‘Never doubt that a small group of concerned can change the world.’”

There’s more, of course. Sartore’s world view — and it is truly a world view — is that this is a great time to be in conservation; there are a million things people can do. The elephant in the room is all of us. 

“I have three children . . . This is not happening to our grandchildren; it’s happening now.

“I'm just inspired to do all I can with the time I have on Earth, and I don't let it get me down. I just think, ‘Well, this one may go extinct, but we're going to tell its story everywhere we can.

“And try to encourage others to realize that these all have value, and that it's a tragedy to let anything else like this happen. Not to mention, it could really hurt humanity in the long run. We shouldn't be throwing away the other pieces of the puzzle before we know what they do.”

He knows the power of a good quip.

“How did I start out? Well, for me, I went to the University of Nebraska, where the ’n’ stands for . . . knowledge. That’s right.

“And I took pictures of things that I thought were interesting or different. Like a cowboy roping a cat. . . . I looked for the weird stuff.”

There is still time to turn things around or else he wouldn’t be putting so much time and effort into the Photo Ark.

The truth is that is to get a message across in a single photo is hard to do, he admits, but a single portrait photo, when it works, can work wonders.

“When people connect to animals through eye contact, we’ve got a real chance at changing human behaviour. That’s what we’re all about.

“Maybe that’s what an explorer does. We go out and find things that people don’t know about, and we bring it back.”

He knows the power of a good opening line.

“My name is Joel Sartore,” he said in a promotional video for the 2018 National Geographic Explorer of the Year Award — a line he often uses now to open his speaking engagements. “I’m a photographer, and my mission is pretty simple: To save life on Earth as we know it.”

Photo Ark debuts Saturday on NatGeo Wild at 10E/9C.

Personal, Poignant, Profound: David Attenborough Fine Tunes His Life’s Message in Netflix Autobiography

“Saving our planet is no longer a technological problem. It’s a communications challenge.”

— David Attenborough

Nearly 20 years ago to the day, when the world was less weary and planet Earth still seemed filled with boundless possibilities, the late CBS newsman Ed Bradley asked David Attenborough during a profile on 60 Minutes why his films focus exclusively on nature’s natural beauty, while seemingly skirting uncomfortable questions about human overpopulation, habitat loss, environmental ruin and a looming species extinction.

No one sitting at home, Attenborough replied, wants to be told the world is going to pieces, “and it’s all your fault.”

Now, in his early 90s, he has, if not changed his tune exactly, fine-tuned it. The climate emergency, burning wildfires and catastrophic flooding, coupled with a “storm of the century” seemingly every six months, have altered his thinking and reshaped his life’s message. He admitted once to his close personal friend and fellow environmental crusader Jane Goodall that he was depressed and wanted to step away, disappear from public life.

No, Goodall replied, in the gentle yet firm voice that has become her calling card: You mustn’t do that. Nature is resilient and it can endure — eventually — but for now the world needs your voice as an advocate for nature’s beauty. Your voice alone can reach millions — billions — of people, and cut across generations and cultures.

Re-energized, Attenborough vowed to continue the fight.

This was before climate change became a crisis, and then an emergency. This was before the northern white rhino in East Africa was whittled down to just two remaining animals, both females. This was before Greta Thunberg, and before the greatest loss of sea ice in the polar regions in human memory. Attenborough, 94, looked at Thunberg, 16, and his heart broke.

And so, the poignant, personal, profound Netflix documentary David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet is different. It is part autobiography, part allegory.

His biography is familiar enough to anyone who has followed his landmark programs over the decades: Planet Earth, Life, Blue Planet, Seven Worlds One Planet, Life on Earth — almost too many to count.

It’s the allegory part that drives him now, though. His thinking has changed, We can no longer afford to be complacent. We no longer have the moral luxury of being able to look away. Future generations are at stake. Not just the Siberian tigers, Amur leopards and Javan rhinoceroses he loves and cares so much about, but our children and grandchildren, and their children. This is serious, and the time for idle distractions — no matter how well-intended — has passed.

Enter Netflix.

Two years ago, Netflix backed the docuseries Our Planet against all reason and financial advice. The maker was disaffected nature-program producer Alastair Fothergill, who was instrumental in making Planet Earth, Blue Planet and Frozen Earth for BBC. Disheartened by being told by BBC executives at the time that he couldn’t talk about climate change or humans’ impact on planet Earth, Fothergill took his passion project about climate change and species extinction to Netflix.

Fothergill and other filmmakers had expressed growing unease — irritation, even — at having to make the nature programs they want to make with one hand tied behind their backs. 

Fothergill has said broadcasters need to be brave to tell disquieting stories of environmental loss — these are much harder conservation stories to tell. Stories without context don’t inspire us to change, after all. They encourage us instead to continue living our lives in a comfortable bubble, content to believe that someone else, somewhere else, will do something about it, and that all is well with the world.

Our Planet seemed an unlikely fit for a streaming service that had made its bones on solid, entertaining entertainment programs like House of Cards, Stranger Things and Orange is the New Black. And yet, somehow, it worked.

Our Planet needed a narrator, and Fothergill, with the program already filmed and edited by this point, turned to his old friend and former colleague Attenborough, assuming he would say no. Attenborough said yes.

And a remarkable thing happened. Jane Goodall was right. It’s possible that, with a different narrator, Our Planet would still have been seen by those already converted to the cause.

With Attenborough, though, Our Planet became a cause célèbre, a global talking point, thanks to Netflix’s worldwide reach. Netflix has since made Our Planet available in its entirety on YouTube, where anyone can see it.

Now, Attenborough has turned to the semi-autobiographical A Life on Our Planet, an exquisitely personal view of how our home planet has changed in the seven decades he has made nature programs, viewed through the prism of his own life, and through the cycle of life of all living beings on the planet.

To that end, for A Life on Our Planet Attenborough journeyed to coral reefs, to witness the deleterious effects of coral bleaching caused by global heating; to palm oil plantations in Borneo and the devastating effects those plantations are having on Southeast Asia’s critically endangered orangutang populations; to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in the Ukraine, and the strange, dark forest that has taken root around the long-since abandoned industrial landscape; to the boreal forests in Russia’s remote, northern Pacific Coast, home to the last remnant population of Siberian tigers; to high-tech food production farms in the Netherlands and a solar farm in Morocco, to highlight the energy waves of the future; and to the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, to bear witness to the annual wildebeest migration, one of nature’s remaining, most abiding natural glories.

This time he’s there in person, not just a narrator this time but our moral and spiritual guide to the planet as it is, not a romanticized version of what we want it to be. A Life on Our Planet is Attenborough’s personal witness statement for the natural world, and it is not to be missed. At age 94, he doesn’t have too many of these left.

“I’ve had the most extraordinary life,” he says simply, early in the film. “It’s only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.”

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet debuts Sunday globally, on Netflix.

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Dereck and Beverly Joubert’s ‘Jade Eyed Leopard’ a Diamond in the Rough

“We generally don’t wave cameras in front of animals. That is for TV personalities who want fame and reaction and usually get scratched as a result. We believe that when an animal sees and reacts to us, we have failed. Our ambition is to be invisible, wallpaper; to see, document, and be led into a magical world of acceptance. You only get this with respect and trust.”

— Dereck Joubert, The Soul of Africa

Leopards are elusive, famously so, which is why the new documentary film from National Geographic Explorers-at-Large Beverly and Dereck Joubert is such a joy to behold — and a privilege to watch.

Monday marks the first day of NatGeo Wild’s “Big Cat Week” and the Jouberts’ film, Jade Eyed Leopard, kicks off a week of programming dedicated to raising awareness of the crisis that faces big cats worldwide.

The Jouberts followed a leopard cub, Toto, Swahili for “little child,” and her mother Fig over three years in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. At the beginning of the film, Toto is tiny, high-energy, playful and blissfully unaware of the dangers that will face her during the weeks and months ahead. By the end of the program, as Toto defends a fresh kill against marauding hyenas, she is no longer a child but a fully grown female leopard, in the prime of her life.

The film is beautifully photographed, sharply edited and narrated by the English stage and screen actor Jeremy Irons, who has become the go-to narrator for the Jouberts’ growing library of high-end nature films — a Shakespearean voice set against the ever-shifting rhythms and tides of the natural world. There are times when Jade Eyed Leopard literally glows on the screen.

Jade Eyed Leopard is not all pretty pictures though, heartwarming and inspiring thought the story may be. Jade Eyed Leopard is intimate and personal, but it also speaks to a bigger picture. The Jouberts are first and foremost about conservation — that’s why they’re making films for National Geographic and PBS Nature, and not, say, Disney. The world’s last surviving big cats are in trouble, and the Jouberts want the world to know that. Dereck Joubert founded National Geographic’s Big Cat Initiative — the clue is in the name — in 2009 in a bid to stem the decline of big cats in the wild.

The facts are these. World lion populations have declined to 30,000 from 110,000 in just 50 years.

Over that same period, jaguar populations have crashed to 15,000 from 60,000, and tigers are down to a mere 3,200 from 45,000. Leopards, which numbered some 80,000 in 1970, today number some 23,000.

These are estimates only. As Jade Eyed Leopard shows, big cats — while playful, curious and high-energy when young — become shy, moody and reclusive in their later years. Leopards, jaguars and tigers are near impossible to count with any degree of certainty; lions are a little easier because they tend to frequent open grasslands, and are social animals that live in groups.

What is certain, though, and what matters today, regardless of the exact numbers, is that there are fewer big cats in the wild today than there used to be. If big cats vanish altogether, it will be an unsettling harbinger of things to come. One doesn’t need an advanced degree in the biosciences to know that apex predators such as lions, tigers and leopards play a critical role in a healthy ecosystem. They cull the weak, the injured and the sick among prey animals, prevent the spread of disease — including zoonotic viruses and their attendant pandemics — and, as nature’s guardians at the top of the food chain, they maintain the order of life.

Leopards face an uncertain future because of shrinking habitat, exacerbated by ever-growing farms, roads and development. Wildlife corridors — natural “highways” through which animals can safely migrate or disperse — are one possible solution, especially for an animal such as a leopard. Males have been known to roam 320 km (200 miles) at the outward extent of their natal range, but even then inbreeding among ever-dwindling populations is a problem. That’s why the Maasai Mara National Reserve, the northern extension of the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem, is so crucial to their survival. The Mara is still a place where open grasslands can sustain a viable population of predators, without the perils that inbreeding entails.

If you have access to NatGeo Wild, Jade Eyed Leopard is well worth a look. Monday, 8ET/7CT.

©Skeeze - Pixabay

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Covid Diaries: Sea Turtles in Thailand. A Glimmer of Light in a Time of Darkness

“It is exciting, and we hope that the people in Samui will help us protect the turtles in the future. We have a chance.”

— Dr. Thon Thamrongnawasawot, Faculty of Fisheries, Kasetsart University, Bangkok

A glimmer of light in times of darkness: Beach resorts in Thailand are deserted — but — this past week, according to media reports, more than 800 sea turtle hatchlings scuttled from their nests across a lonely beach in Koh Samui, Thailand toward a new life in the sea.

That might not seem like big news — but — the daughter of a local beach resort owner in the area told a visiting journalist she hadn’t seen critically endangered hawksbill and green sea turtles nesting in the area in nearly 50 years, not since she was a teenager helping her father harvest coconuts on the island. The sudden increase in nests has delighted conservationists who for years have been fighting a losing battle to lessen the threats humans pose to one of the most familiar, recognizable species in the sea. Thailand’s turtle hatchlings finally have the beach to themselves.

This is worth pointing out — especially now, as the worldwide crash in wildlife tourism has effectively gutted funding for conservation programs from Brazil to  Zambia — because the number of sea turtles in Thailand’s waters has fallen dramatically in the past 100 years, their future threatened by poaching, pollution, overfishing and global heating, which in turn causes sea acidification, the erosion of coral reefs and ever-changing ocean currents, coupled with a marked surge in violent, volatile and unpredictable storms.

The bigger picture surrounding conservation efforts worldwide, as with so much to do with the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown and subsequent re-opening, is complicated. Nothing is quite what is seems. As hawksbill sea turtles cling to life off Thailand’s shores, there’s growing evidence that other species — polar bears, for example, that rely on dwindling shelves of sea ice to hunt for seals, their primary source of food and a necessity if they are to store the reserves of fat need to survive the Arctic winter and breed successfully — are in trouble.

If countries that rely on tourism to fund conservation are not supported — virtually every country in sub-Saharan Africa, for example — entire species and habitats will disappear. Wild creatures, and those who guard them, face a financially uncertain future. In the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown, poaching for ivory and rhino horn was down, then up again, then down, and now up again. In April, 12 park rangers were gunned down in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), home to around 1,000 of the tiny — but so far stable — population of critically endangered mountain gorillas. DRC and the volatile mountain areas surrounding Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi are on a political knife’s edge.

It’s hard to know who poses more of a threat to game rangers who place their lives on the line trying to preserve nature: roving bands of heavily armed poachers who are in it strictly for profit, or a rogues’ gallery of murderous militias, bands of bandits and proxy armies still fighting the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, together with a civil war in Congo that started in 1998 and ended in 2003, then started again in 2004 and continues to burn to this day, in flare-ups in and around the northeastern province of Kivu, little more than a day’s march from the mountain gorilla parks. The war, as it is today, is loosely defined as an armed conflict between DRC’s army and the Hutu-based Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, but it’s basically a scrap between various armed groups with constantly shifting allegiances and enough weaponry to supply a midsize army in its own right.

Demand in countries like China, Vietnam and Laos for rhino horn, used in traditional medicine, pangolin scales and ivory — now illegal in China, but still traded on the black market — continues to drive wildlife trafficking, even during a global  pandemic. Supply and demand are inextricably intertwined after all. It was ever thus.

Conservation relies on Western visitors for funding — philanthropy plays a part, but the truth is the super-rich, starting with the tech titans, could do a lot more — and so the Covid pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns threaten both the present and future viability of wildlife tourism.

There are signs of encouragement, the hawksbill hatcheries in Thailand being just one example. This past month has borne witness to one of the biggest, most spectacular wildebeest migrations in Kenya and Tanzania’s Mara-Serengeti ecosystem in recent memory, following unseasonably heavy rains earlier in the year and, ironically enough, fewer tourist vehicles to interfere with the cycle of life on Maasai Mara’s grasslands.

What effect will the Covid pandemic on wildlife conservation from here? It’s complicated.

The truth, as with so much to do with Covid, is that no one knows for certain, and anyone who says they do is lying. One thing is certain, though, You can rest easy tonight knowing that hawksbill and green sea turtles have a new lease on life off the coast of Thailand, and the annual wildebeest migration in East Africa, while still under threat, is having one of its finest hours in recent memory.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/21/thailand-turtle-hatchlings-finally-have-the-beach-to-themselves-aoe

©Skeeze/Pixabay

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