Month: June 2018

It is only in recent times that scientists have looked carefully at the elephants that live in the rainforest of Africa and found that actually they are a different species to the savanna elephant.

While there are areas of forest such as the Udzungwa mountains in Tanzania, which are surrounded by Savanna, that are inhabited by Savannah elephants, this is rare.

The African forest elephant is a distinct animal that is spread out throughout the Congo Basin. It is smaller with straighter tusks (as it lives in forest the wide spread tusks of Savannah elephants would get in the way) and smaller ears. The poaching of Savannah elephants increased after southern African countries were allowed a one off sale of their ivory stocks, and while some poaching of forest elephants was going on, this “one off sale” (southern African countries started talking about a repeat almost instantly) increased demand.

The generally recognised idea is that every few years, if lots of ivory is released in one go, the price falls so low that it is not worth the risk that congress with it. Elephants are highly intelligent animals very capable of doing serious injury to people who get to close, particularly if they feel threatened. Due to their ability to communicate over large distances once one is killed all others will be highly aggressive (an added problem as it reduces the money from photographic safari).

Unfortunately, on this occasion countries who had no history of ivory carving or ownership started reading legal ivory and wanted more than was provided. Furthermore China with its large and newly created wealthy middle class, proved a fertile market particularly as it came to be seen as a status symbol.

As such when the legal ivory supply ran out, the markets looked for other places to get it. The Selous in Tanzania lost 80,000 elephants in 4 years.

However, it quickly became apparent that forest elephants were harder to protect, and so came the massacre of the Congo basin elephants. Unfortunately, being straighter forest elephant tusks are easier to work with so enhancing the poaching.

There are small areas where elephant have largely escaped,  such as Gabon, but in general there had been as rapid destruction of these animals, and in areas local extinction.

It should be noted that as ecosystem engineers forest elephants are highly important and forests without them are more at risk from many threats.

Over the last few years there has been a distinct move within leading political parties against experts. This was particularly clear in the run up to the Brexit vote, where the ‘vote leave campaign became increasingly cross with ‘experts sticking their nose in’. Having won the referendum by a narrow margin, any one who points out that the remain campaign had made valid points are attacked (not being patriotic enough etc). Bizarrely this has not been challenged effectively

However,  in the USA Donald Trump has pushed this to extreme proportions. The one place that had continued to look at Trumps absurd claims in a realistic way are the comedians on the evening chat shows. The problem is that with Trump leading America, science and reason have been forced to take a back seat.

The situation had got so bad, in April 2018 600 scientists jointly called out Trump’s attacks on all sides of science. The problem is that due to Trump’s positron as president, he doesn’t have to have a coherent argument – he can simply decree a new governmental line.

Scott Pruitt as he ad of the EPA has declared that we need a red team blue team debate (a debate with two teams from opposing viewpoints) on climate change.  In areas where debate has not reached a conclusion, red team blue team is useful. Climate science is not one of those – indeed science in general works asking these lines- new theories are presented in published papers, and then all scientists can read them and when they disagree submit dissenting papers. Over time a consensus is reached. Scott Pruitt’s idea is particularly stupid as after this process had gone on for the last 50 years a consensus had been reached. As I wrote in my article looking at the  regularly quoted 97% consensus on climate change, looking at papers published in the last few years by serious scientists (as opposed to oil companies’ scientists who know at the start what their research must say) well above 99.9% of articles from the last couple of years agree, the climate is warming and humans are causing it.

In another article in the Guardian, the author argues that the republicans have so damaged the EPA, the only way to reverse this is by a change in government. Some of the changes brought in actually make it harder for the EPA to use science as a reason for anything. Thankfully, Trump has so irritated a large part of the voting population that it is possible he will lose House or Senate or both, however until then there are people trying to defend these attacks. Under Pruitt, the EPA has become a body to promote business rather than looking after the natural environment of the USA.

A Republican senator attacked the idea that climate change and melting ice sheets were causing sea level rises. Instead he pointed at the cliffs of Dover and similar –  he claimed that the world wide sea level rises are caused by rock falls, along with silt and mud washed down rivers. This demonstrates such a lack of scientific understanding as to be highly concerning he got into the Senate.

Quite apart from anything,  given the vast area covered by oceans (361 million square km), one cubic km of rock would raise one million square miles of oceans by 1mm, so to raise world oceans by 1mm you would need 361 cubic km going into the oceans – an astounding amount,  especially as this is for 1mm sea level rise – 1 metre rise requires 1000 more rock. He also insisted the Antarctic ice sheet has grown recently despite all scientists agreeing the data show it has shrunk by over 1000 square km.

The UK is also currently engaged in a quiet push to get the EU to weaken climate laws. It is not surprising that this attempt is surreptitious, as it goes against all scientific evidence. The UK tried and failed to add similar legislation to the 2012 climate agreement. I have to say that I find this behaviour from Westminster embarrassing, and it worries me, that it is about to lose its brake on stupid moves that currently exists in the form of the EU.