I included a photo of Socks and wished him the very best of luck in finding a home.
Beautiful Socks!
Well, miracles of miracles, when I came to my emails last Saturday morning awaiting me was this email from John Zande.
Paul and Jean, Socks has a wonderful new home!
I really don’t want to jinx it by writing this email (I am the superstitious naked ape, after all), but the morning started out with not much hope as we drove and drove out into the countryside, wondering where on earth this petshop was that was hosting the adoption fair.
When we eventually found it, it was a tiny storefront, little more than a dog-bath business. We thought, “nothing is going to come from this.” They were just opening as we arrived and met the young girl who runs it. Lovely person. Literally two minutes later a family walk up the road dropping off their two dogs for a bath. We got to talking. They fell in love with Socks.
After a phone call to the woman’s husband (a serious, serious dog lover, we’re told, as she is too) we heard the words we did not think we’d hear: “If it’s OK, we’d love to give him a home.”
Ten minutes later we were in their house, which was about 50 meters down the road. Nice place, lots of room, and Socks has full run of the outside, and a huge enclosed laundry-come-Socks-home for the night. He won the lotto! Three young boys full of energy. He took to them like a champion. I still can’t believe it. It’s like this every time we find a home. It just doesn’t seem real.
Anyway, I’ve attached two short videos of Socks and his new home, and a photo. And yes, the family is keeping Jean’s name, Socks. They loved it. I’m sure G will write you later tonight, but you both played a huge role in this. Your help paid for his neutering, and for that we’re eternally grateful.
Here is that photo and those videos.
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A little later on ‘G’, John’s nickname for his wife, sent me these further details:
Hello Paul and Jean – I guess you’ve been cheering since John’s e-mail, right? So have we, since this morning.
Well, I have to say I still can’t believe how lucky we (and Socks) have been. Virginia and Fabiano and their three boys: Lago (11 or 12 y.o, not sure); Marcos (turning 8 tomorrow, Sunday) and Raphael, 6. Lovely family, she invited us to go to their place (he was working), showed us around.
As I said at the outset: It doesn’t get more beautiful than this!
It is very hard to avoid hyperbole when one speaks of global warming.
I am indebted to The Nation magazine, May 8/15 Issue, in which is included a feature article authored by Bill McKibben. My sub-heading is much of what Bill wrote in his first line.
It is hard to avoid hyperbole when you talk about global warming. It is, after all, the biggest thing humans have ever done, and by a very large margin.
A few sentences later, Bill offers this:
In the drought-stricken territories around the Sahara, we’ve helped kick off what The New York Times called “one of the biggest humanitarian disasters since World War II.” We’ve melted ice at the poles at a record pace, because our emissions trap extra heat from the sun that’s equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima-size explosions a day.
Yet what scares me, scares me beyond comprehension, is the almost universal disregard being shown by Governments and those with power and influence right across the world to what in anyone’s language is the most pressing catastrophe heading down the tracks. Not next year; not tomorrow, but now!
Or in Mr. McKibben’s words, once more from that Nation article:
But as scientists have finally begun to realize, there’s nothing rational about the world we currently inhabit. We’re not having an argument about climate change, to be swayed by more studies and journal articles and symposia. That argument is long since won, but the fight is mostly lost—the fight about the money and power that’s kept us from taking action and that is now being used to shut down large parts of the scientific enterprise. As Trump budget chief Mick Mulvaney said in March, “We’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.” In a case this extreme, scientists have little choice but to be citizens as well. And given their credibility, it will matter: 76 percent of Americans trust scientists to act in the public interest, compared with 27 percent who think the same thing about elected officials.
Whatever your response is to what I have already presented, the one thing that I do know is that you have been aware of humanity’s effect on our atmosphere for many, many years. Indeed, Bill McKibben wrote his first book twenty-eight years ago!
His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books.
But I would be the first to acknowledge that back in 1989 while I did become aware of Bill McKibben and did purchase and read that book of his, I didn’t see the effects he prophesied. In addition, I didn’t understand the mechanisms that would bring those effects into place.
Now, today, it’s very difficult to deny that global weather systems are behaving in ways that most do not understand albeit we do understand how those weather changes are affecting our lives.
One person who did, and still does even more, understand the physics involved in our changing weather, is Patrice Ayme. For some nineteen years after Bill McKibben’s first book, Patrice published a post on his blog. I have been following Patrice’s blog for some years and while I would be the first to stick my hand in the air and declare that some of his posts are a little beyond me, there’s no question of the integrity of his writings and his bravery in spelling out the truth of these present times. (OK, the truth a la Monsieur Aymes but I would place a decent bet of PA being closer to the core truth of many issues than Joe Public.)
I am indebted to Patrice for granting me permission to republish that post. Please read it. Don’t be put off by terms that may not be familiar to you. Read it to the end – the message is very clear.
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Applying Equipartition Of Energy To Climate Change PREDICTS WILD WEATHER.
By Patrice Ayme, March 8th, 2008.
Lately, the world weather has been especially perplexing, influenced by the cold ocean temperatures of a La Niña current in the equatorial Pacific. For Earth’s land areas, 2007 was the warmest year on record.
This year, record cold is more the norm. Global land-surface temperatures so far are below the 20th-century mean for the first time since 1982, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Last month in China, snowstorms stranded millions of people, while in Mumbai, officials reported the coldest day in 46 years.
Yet, England basked in its fourth-warmest January since 1914, the British Met Office reported. The crocus and narcissus at the U.K.’s Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew flowered a week earlier than last year — 11 days ahead of their average for the decade and weeks ahead of their pattern in the 1980s. In Prague, New Year’s Day was the warmest since 1775.
“It is difficult to judge the significance of what we are seeing this year,” said Kew researcher Sandra Bell. “Is it a glitch or is it the beginning of something more sinister and alarming?”” (Robert Lee Hotz, Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2008).
Many scientists have pondered this question, as if they did not know the answer, but it is a straightforward application of thermodynamics.
A basic theorem of equilibrium thermodynamics, the EQUIPARTITION OF ENERGY theorem, says that the same amount of energy should be present in all degrees of freedom into which energy can spill.
(How does one demonstrate this theorem? Basically, heat is agitation, kinetic energy at the scale of atoms and molecules. This agitation can spill in a more organized manner, in great ensembles, such as vast low and high pressure systems, or large scale dynamics. See the note on entropy and negative temperatures.)
In the case of meteorology, this implies, oversimplifying a bit, that only one-third of the energy should go into heat (and everybody focuses on the augmentation of temperature). Now, of course, since the energy enters the system as heat, non equilibrium thermodynamics imposes more than one-third of the energy will be heat.
As time goes by, though, the other two degrees of freedom, potential energy (represented as the geometry of gradients of pressures, high and low pressure systems, hurricanes) and dynamics (wind speed and vast movements of air masses of varying temperatures and/or pressure; and the same for sea currents) will also store energy.
Thus the new heat created in the lower atmosphere by the increased CO2 greenhouse will be transformed in all sorts of weather weirdness: heat, cold, high and low pressures, wind, and big moves of big things. Big things such as vast re-arrangements of low and high pressure systems, as observed in the Northern Hemisphere, or the re-arrangement of sea currents as apparently also observed, and certainly as it is expected. Since it happened in the past (flash ice age of the Younger Dryas over Europe, 18,000 years ago).
As cold and warm air masses get thrown about, the variability of temperatures will augment all over.
In other words, record snow and cold in the Alps and record warmth simultaneously in England is a manifestation of the equipartition of energy theorem applied to the greenhouse warming we are experiencing. It is not mysterious at all, and brutal variations such as these, including sudden cold episodes, are to be expected, as more and more energy gets stuffed in the planetary climate, and yanks it away from its previous equilibrium.
Wind speed augmentations have already had a spectacular effect: by shaking the waters of the Austral ocean with increasingly violent waves, carbon dioxyde is being removed as if out of a shaken carbonated drink. Thus the Austral ocean is now a net emitter of CO2 (other oceans absorb CO2, and transform it into carbonic acid).
Hence the observed variations are the beginning of something more sinister and alarming. Climate change is changing speed. Up, up, and away.
Note on entropy: Some may object that transforming heat into collective behavior of vast masses of air or sea violates the Second Law Of Thermodynamics, namely that entropy augments always, in any natural process. Well, first of all, the genius of the genus Homo, not to say of all of life itself, rests on local violations of the Second Law. Secondly, the most recent physics recognizes that fundamental considerations allow systems where increased energy lead to increased order (such a system is said to be in a negative temperature state).
Even more revealingly, a massive greenhouse on planet Earth would lead, as happened in the past, to a much more uniform heat, all around the planet, that is, a more ordered state. Meanwhile, the transition to the present order of a temperate climate to the completely different order of an over-heated Earth will bring complete disorder, as observed.
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Going to leave you with a picture taken from weather.com
An emaciated polar bear is seen on a small sheet of ice in this image taken in August in Svalbard, north of mainland Norway. (Kerstin Langenberger)
Please, please, please: make a difference! Environmentally, domestically and politically, please make a difference.
And the final photograph for this week’s Picture Parade is of Socks being cuddled by a member of his new family home. Socks has been adopted!! (Full story about this wonderful happening on Tuesday.)
Will optimistic stories get people to care about nature?
By Diogo Veríssimo David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow, Georgia State University
May 7, 2017
Nature doesn’t make the news often these days. When it does, the story usually revolves around wildlife on the brink, record-setting climate extremes or ruined landscapes. However, that is not the whole story. There is also good news, but it often receives little attention.
It is easy to see how bleak accounts of the state of the planet can overwhelm people and make them feel hopeless. What is the point of even trying if the world is going down the drain anyway?
To muster public and political support on a scale that matches our environmental challenges, research shows that negative messaging is not the most effective way forward. As a conservation scientist and social marketer, I believe that to make the environment a mainstream concern, conservation discussions should focus less on difficulties. Instead we should highlight the growing list of examples where conservation efforts have benefited species, ecosystems and people living alongside them.
People’s Climate March, New York, New York, Sept. 21, 2014. CIFOR/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
The power of positive messages
This question is not new. Professionals in many fields have to consider how to frame their messages to maximize their impact. For example, public health agencies can make positive recommendations that emphasize benefits of being disease-free, or use negative messages that focus on the consequences of disease. A 2008 meta-analysis of 60 health communication studies concluded that messages focused on loss were less likely to be effective than positive messages.
Another study examined ads designed to persuade income support recipients to report their incomes. It concluded that messages focused on fear, shame or guilt could generate emotional backlash, in which people rationalized decisions to protect themselves from feeling ashamed of their behavior. This approach also caused emotional saturation that led people to “switch off” from the message because of its negativity.
Environmental advocates also confront this challenge. Much discussion has centered on the issue of climate change, where a number of scholars and advocates assert that doom-and-gloom messaging has not been effective. Yet until recently, we have not asked the same question about how we frame nature conservation.
Lost and found species
Today a growing number of scholars and activists are working to create a positive vision for protecting wildlife and wild places. One key effort started in 2014 with the launch of a marine conservation movement called Ocean Optimism, which works to “create a new narrative of hope for our oceans,” and by doing so, to help move towards “a sustainable future for our seas.”
In April 2017 the Earth Optimism Summit, organized by the Smithsonian Institution, brought together environmentalists, scientists, industry and the media to shift the global conservation movements focus away from problems and toward solutions. What started as a single event in Washington, D.C. soon turned into a truly global movement, with about 30 sister events in countries including Colombia, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Lost & Found – Author provided
This effort has kick-started a range of initiatives that are all about communicating conservation bright spots to as many people as possible. One, which I co-founded, is the Lost & Found project, sponsored by the Society for Conservation Biology and the British Ecological Society. This online storytelling initiative focuses on a particularly inspiring kind of good news: rediscovering species that once were thought to be long extinct. After all, what can be more rousing than recovering something unique that you thought was lost forever?
Every year numerous species thought to have disappeared are rediscovered. Over the past century more than 300 species have been rediscovered, mostly in the tropics. On average, these species were missing for about 60 years before being rediscovered. Most rediscovered species have restricted ranges and small populations, which means they are usually highly threatened.
Lost & Found – Author provided
Our goal is not only to tell good stories, but also to showcase the dedication and determination of adventurers who lead these improbable quests and rewrite the history of species they care deeply about. While not every reader may be interested in a red-crested tree rat or a golden-fronted bower bird, all humans are curious about other people.
Lost & Found is making content available in various formats, including text, comics and soon, video animations. This helps make the stories more accessible to people who are not instinctively inclined to read about nature. Currently we have 13 stories freely available online that feature diverse species, from squirrels and toads to bats and birds. They cover a wide geographic range, from Latin America and Oceania to North America and Southeast Asia.
The response has been tremendously positive. More than 1,000 people from over 50 countries visited the website in its first 10 days. Some of our more popular stories, such as the Bulmer’s Fruit Bat and the Cave Splayfoot Salamander, are animals that would commonly not be considered particularly charismatic.
Getting these inspirational rediscoveries into the hands of as many people as possible is a first step toward creating a more positive vision for Earth’s future. The timeless principles of storytelling seem like the right place to start. After all, who doesn’t love a happy ending?
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Did you note the name of that website!!
Lost & Found. Go visit it and enjoy these wonderful happy endings!
Yet despite it being so obvious it hadn’t crossed my mind before.
I’m referring to the wonderful idea of using those people, who through circumstance have found themselves homeless, to care for animals via an animal shelter.
Glenn Greenwald Unveils New Project to Build Animal Shelter in Brazil Staffed by Homeless People
Published on May 10, 2017
http://democracynow.org – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald unveils his plans to build an animal shelter in Brazil with his husband David Miranda, a city council member in Rio de Janeiro. The shelter will be staffed by homeless people who live on the streets with abandoned pets.
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If you, like me, needed to be reminded as to Mr. Greenwald’s background there’s plenty online.
Glenn Greenwald is one of three co-founding editors of The Intercept. He is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book, No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Prior to co-founding The Intercept, Glenn’s column was featured at The Guardian and Salon. He was the debut winner, along with Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the George Polk award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation watchdog journalism award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. Along with Laura Poitras, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
That article featured the former president of Iceland, Olafur Grimsson, and how he was encouraging new solutions to climate change. Primarily via a new organisation called RoadMap. (Did you sign up??)
There is change in the air. People are starting to make a better future. Cities across the USA (and elsewhere undoubtedly) are pledging to go 100 percent renewable. Here’s what Grist published on May 4th.
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Cities all over the U.S. are pledging to go 100 percent renewable.
Atlanta is the 27th city to make the pledge, according to the Sierra Club. These kinds of municipal promises have been popping up nationwide over the past few months. Here’s a recap:
Portland, Oregon, pledged in April to go 100 percent renewable by 2050. The surrounding Multnomah County got in on the plan, too.
South Lake Tahoe, California, committed to go renewable by 2032. Its initiative is, at least to begin, entirely volunteer-driven.
It’s not just the coasts: In March, Madison, Wisconsin became the biggest city in the Midwest to pledge to a community-wide switch to 100 percent renewable energy (though it hasn’t set a target date).
The tiny town of Abita Springs, Louisiana committed in March to transition to clean energy by 2030 — and its Republican mayor went to bat for it. That’s a big win in our books.
“We know that moving to clean energy will create good jobs, clean up our air and water, and lower our residents’ utility bills,” said Kwanza Hall, an Atlanta City Council member and mayoral candidate, in a statement. “We have to set an ambitious goal or we’re never going to get there.”
The shape of the world is hanging by a thread – or rather, according to experts, by a 110 mile-long (177km) rift. That’s the extent of a rapidly expanding crack in an enormous ice shelf in Antarctica. When the Larsen C shelf finally splits, the largest iceberg ever recorded (bigger than the US state of Rhode Island and a third the size of Wales) will snap off into the ocean. Widening each day by 3 ft (1 m), the groaning cleft is on the verge of dramatically redrawing the southern-most cartography of our planet and is likely to lead, climatologists predict, to an acceleration in the rise of sea levels globally.
An aerial photo of the frigid fissure, taken late last year when it was discovered that the pace of the icy tear was quickening, was suddenly back in the news this week with the announcement that a second rift in the shelf had been detected. The fracture leads our eye along a zig-zagging path – from the backward gaze of the plane’s right engines to the pristine polar blue of the horizon in the distance. The jaggedness of the cleft, which takes our vision on a journey whose ultimate destination is unfathomable, seems at once monumental and terrifyingly fragile. The photo intensifies our helplessness in the face of cataclysmic change. It freezes the potential destruction in the blink of a camera’s shutter, while at the same time hinting at a catastrophe that we can witness unfolding but are utterly powerless to stop.
A second rift was recently discovered in the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula (Credit: NASA/John Sonntag)
As a visual statement, the aerial photo of the Larsen C crack is, by definition, incomparable; never before has the world marked the glacial advance of such a sublime and fearsome fracture in its very fabric. Yet the reemergence of the image in the news anticipates the ten-year anniversary of one of the most intriguing and innovative large-scale works in contemporary art – a work whose power relies for its thought-provoking effect on the peculiar poetry of ruinous rifts. In October 2007, the Colombian-born artist Doris Salcedo unveiled in London an ambitious installation in the cavernous space of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall – a piece that split reaction down the middle.
Inviting gallery-goers into the otherwise empty and austere interior of the former Bankside Power Station, Salcedo subverted expectations. Rather than offering visitors a hall of temporarily installed sculptures, she orchestrated the contemplation instead of a ragged subterranean breach that appeared to rip open the concrete floor of the structure – a crevice that extended from one end of the yawning space to the other.
For the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s 2007 work, Shibboleth, a giant crack was made in the concrete floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (Credit: Alamy)
Salcedo deepened the mystery of her bold and experimental conceptual work by giving to it the curious title Shibboleth – a biblical word which, when mispronounced, was said to have exposed the outsider status of individuals. Complicating matters still further, the artist insisted that her work was a comment not on the folly of material ambitions, but on racism – that deep cultural scar that tears at the foundations of humanity. Placed side-by-side, this week’s photo from Antarctica and the image captured a decade ago of Doris Salcedo’s challenging Shibboleth share both a brutal beauty and a common theme: the brittleness of being.
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“the brittleness of being.”
Please, all of us, let’s make a positive difference so that we can soften the edges of that brittleness.
That post in April also included a picture of a recent stray supported by the Fund. He was named Socks by Jean.
Socks starting a new and better life.
Anyway, a few days ago Dionete sent me an email that I wanted to share with you.
Hello Paul – how’s things with you & Jean & dogs? Fine, I hope.
We’ve got some news: Socks has just been neutered. We picked him up at the clinic an hour ago and took him to a temporary shelter. Unfortunately it is just for a couple of nights but at least he is safe and can recover from the grogginess tonight.
Here are the pics we’ve taken.
Thank you very much (again) for allowing it to happen.
All the very best,
Here are those photographs of Socks.
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Socks has a really gentle look in those eyes. Hopefully, he will find a new loving home before too long.
It takes so little good news to uplift one’s heart!
For reasons I can’t readily put my finger on it’s been feeling like a bit of a struggle recently. But that’s enough of that! For our gorgeous dogs have yet another lesson for me: How little it takes for a dog to wag it’s tail!
I so frequently share stuff that I read over on the Care 2 site and why not because as the home page declares:
40,107,687 members: the world’s largest community for good
Just three days ago there was a wonderful article shared on the Care 2 site about some dogs being rescued from a so-called backyard breeder. Better than that, it highlighted the wonderful consequence of a donation from George and Amal Clooney.
Here’s the story.
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9 Dogs Successfully Rescued From Backyard Breeder Thanks to George and Amal Clooney
Nine lucky dogs have just had their world turned upside down in the best way possible.
Camp Cocker Rescue, based in California, just took in the “Mojave 9″ who were being kept by a backyard breeder. They’ll be getting all the love and veterinary care they desperately need thanks to a generous donation made by George and Amal Clooney.
The nine dogs have had little human contact, and are all in need of extensive veterinary treatment for health issues ranging from mammary tumors and dental disease to skin and ear infections to ingrown toenails. The organization relies on donations, and expenses for this rescue operation were quickly rising.
“We literally didn’t know how we were even going to begin to start paying for all of these new dogs that we took in on the same day,” Camp Cocker’s founder Cathy Stanley told PEOPLE.
Now, the organization is celebrating a generous and unexpected donation of $10,000 made by George and Amal Clooney, who are parents to two adopted cocker spaniels from Camp Cocker — Einstein and Louie.
Their donation is going to help cover the cost of care for these dogs, who have never been to a vet. The Clooney’s will also be matching donations up to $10,000 for the rest of May.
“After we all did happy dances and cried with happiness for this unbelievable matching donation offer – we then asked the donors if (and only if they gave us their permission) . . . if we could reveal their names to our supporters in order to help us reach our big goal this month. They were so very gracious to give us permission to reveal their names,” Camp Cocker wrote in an update.
While this was a huge boost for them, Camp Cocker is quick to point out that no donation is too small to help.
“We have a philosophy where we want to be very inclusive of all of our supporters and it’s important to us that no matter how small of a donation, every person feels like their donation is meaningful and that we appreciate them,” Stanley added.
Hopefully news about the Mojave 9 and the attention it’s getting will help raise awareness about rescue and inspire more people to get involved … and will help find each of these precious dogs their perfect forever home.
For more on how to help, and info on how to adopt one of these dogs, check out Camp Cocker Rescue and follow updates on Facebook.
Learning from Dogs 