By Umberto Bacchi
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The largest all-female expedition to Antarctica, comprising 76 scientists, is due to set sail from Argentina on Friday in a quest to promote women in science and highlight the impact of climate change on the planet.
The international team will brave sub-zero temperatures to undergo a 20-day bootcamp on the frozen continent aimed at developing their leadership skills and challenging male dominance of senior scientific roles.
Women make up only 28 percent of the world’s researchers and are particularly under-represented at senior levels, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) says.
Yet greater female leadership is needed to fight climate change, which disproportionately affects women, according to Fabian Dattner, co-founder of the Antarctica initiative, Homeward Bound.
“Mother Nature needs her daughters,” said Dattner, an Australian entrepreneur and leadership coach.
Many of sub-Saharan Africa’s smallholder farmers – one of the groups hardest hit by more frequent and worsening drought linked to climate change – are women.
In other parts of the developing world, women and girls face the prospect of walking further to gather water as a result of climate change drying up riverbeds and groundwater supplies.
Natural disasters, which are expected to worsen with climate change, are also likely to kill more women and girls than men, a 2007 study from the London School of Economics showed.
Dattner said she decided to set up the initiative after hearing a group of polar scientists joking that candidates had to have a beard to land a leadership role in Antarctic science.
#
Related Links:
Antarctic Sea Ice Has Not Shrunk In 100 Years
Global Warming Expedition Stopped In Its Tracks By Arctic Sea Ice
Update: AP’s Seth Borenstein at it again hyping Antarctic melt fears – Recycles same claims from 2014, 1990, 1979, 1922 & 1901! – Climate Depot’s Point-By-Point Rebuttal
…
It’s time to set the doomsday clock to Thanksgiving 2026 or sooner, according to a university professor who “can’t imagine there will be a human on the planet in 10 years.”
University of Arizona biology professor Guy McPherson thinks human-caused global warming is pushing the world closer to the sixth mass extinction. Based on his calculations, we have less than a decade before civilization comes to an abrupt end.
“It’s locked down, it’s been locked in for a long time – we’re in the midst of our sixth mass extinction,” McPherson told New Zealand’s Newshub.
McPherson believes current efforts to fight global warming are a waste of time since humanity will be gone within a decade. Instead, the biologist wants us to focus on living life to its fullest.
“The problem is when I give a number like that, people think it’s going to be business as usual until nine years [and] 364 days,” McPherson told Newshub.
Western civilization is used to being bombarded by apocalyptic predictions. Remember, 2012? Or Y2K?
Probably the most memorable climate apocalypse prediction came from former French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius who famously said in 2014 the world only had “500 days to avoid climate chaos.”
Well, 500 days came and went with no major global warming treaty being signed and the world hasn’t tipped into a state of unmitigated disaster.
Maybe Fabius should have taken MCPherson’s advice, stopped caring and just lived out the rest of his life.
“I encourage people to pursue excellence, to pursue love, to pursue what they love to do,” McPherson said. “I don’t think these are crazy ideas, actually – and I also encourage people to remain calm because nothing is under control, certainly not under our control anyway.”…
A top biologist says the Earth will end soon and false hope is foolish. Photo-Pixabay
A retired University of Arizona professor said the
human race is heading toward a sixth mass
extinction event and it’s right around the corner.
Guy McPherson, a biologist and professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology, believes humanity is basically a suicidal bunch and that we are destroying our planet through increased greenhouse gas emissions, a key factor in the theory of man-made
#Climate Change.
Most human-caused greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), are created when fossil fuels combust. Despite CO2 constituting only 0.04 percent of all atmospheric gases, it has been demonized as an evil trace gas that causes droughts, floods, more storms, fewer storms, illnesses, and death. In reality, CO2 is a harmless, odorless, colorless gas essential to all life on Earth.
…
et few things on Trump’s confrontational agenda put him more quickly on a collision course with the rest of the world, much of his own country and even some in his own party than his stated desire to abandon the fight against global warming. The looming assault on environmental regulation will test the resilience of California’s leadership role in the world, which is defined in large part by aggressive action on climate change that became a blueprint for the Obamaadministration.
“Donald Trump will be about the only head of state who does not believe in climate science or the responsibility of his government to act,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, which signed up more members in the week after Trump won the election than during the rest of 2016 combined. “This makes the Bush-Cheney administration look like it came from an environmental training camp.”
But Trump may be picking a tougher fight than he knows. The last time the White House made the kind of retreat Trump envisions – when President Bush walked away from the Kyoto protocol in 2001 – the policy landscape of climate change was drastically different.
Much of the action on climate change in this country no longer plays out in federal agencies but at local commissions enforcing laws in 29 states that push public utilities to go green. Their mandates are to encourage investment in cleaner plants and technology development.…
Following the death of Fidel Castro, it’s perhaps a good time to think about the malign impacts of totalitarian government, and the damage that political agendas can do to science.
I was recently discussing Lysenko with a friend (as you do), and naturally we turned to Wikipedia to clarify a point. And I came across a quote that hit me between the eyes (figuratively speaking);
“The term Lysenkoism can also be used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives”.
Dear Reader, you’re way ahead of me. Yes of course, I was struck immediately by the read-across to climate science. The parallels are remarkable.
You’ll be familiar with the story of Lysenko. He was a Russian biologist and agronomist who rejected Darwinian evolution and the rôle of genes, and preferred instead the Lamarckian concept of “inheritance of acquired characteristics”. Of course that concept is difficult to accept – especially when you reflect that a man who has lost a leg is perfectly capable of fathering a child with two legs. With the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to believe that Lamarckism was once regarded as a credible alternative to Darwinian theory – but so it was.
And Lysenko, in the late 1920s, took that view, and built a whole theory of plant breeding on it. More than that, he had the ear of Stalin, and Lysenkoism became official Soviet doctrine. The theory was imposed rigidly. More than 3000 mainstream biologists were fired, imprisoned or executed for challenging it.
Lysenkoism held sway in the USSR until the sixties, with dire consequences for Soviet agriculture. Again with hindsight it is difficult to credit the fact that it survived so long, when plainly it did not work. But worse than that, not only did it fail in the field (literally), it also totally blocked proper academic study and research in Russia in the area of plant breeding and Mendelian genetics for decades.
So how close are the parallels with climate theory? Of course Lysenkoism was restricted to the USSR. And it was imposed by a totalitarian régime that could, and did, shoot dissenters. Climate alarmism, on the other hand is broadly speaking global (even if some countries merely pay lip-service to the orthodoxy). It is imposed not …
It appears to be all crumbling for the elites:
- Brexit against their wishes;
- The Paris agreement;
- Trump wins popular vote in US; and now
- France to drop carbon tax plan.
The French government is set to drop plans to introduce a carbon tax, French financial daily Les Echos said on Thursday.
The newspaper, quoting several sources, said the socialist government will not include the carbon tax in a draft 2016 budget update currently being discussed.
Environment Minister Segolene Royal had said in May that France would unilaterally introduce a carbon price floor of about 30 euros ($33) a tonne with a view to kickstart broader European action to cut emissions and drive forward the December 2015 United Nations-led international climate accord.
…
The World Wildlife Fund tells us that global CO2 is bad for global fish stocks, but ponder that professional fish farms can reach levels of CO2 twenty or even seventy five times higher, and the fish appear to be doing OK. Current guidelines for fish farms even suggest that “safe limits of CO2 range from >5000 to >30 000 µatm*” which are “12.5 to 75 times higher than current atmospheric levels”.
So in another few thousand years we might really get into trouble with fish farms and climate change then? (Or maybe we won’t. James Hansen estimates if we burn every last barrel of fossil fuel on Earth we’ll get to 1,400ppm. The experience of fish farms all over the world is that fish can apparently adapt to levels ten times higher even than this worst case scenario.)
We have a situation where there are scores of reports fish suffering from ocean acidification and high CO2 levels, but they don’t mesh with the reality that fish farms have been dealing with for decades. A new paper tries to figure out why this is so.
…