Climate, environment, evolution, biology … suffering and success

Climate emergency: OSD; BS; G.

The environment: power and benevolence? Floods, fire, COVID, invasive species. 

Humans: power and benevolence? Insects have declined 75% in last 50 years. A trillion trees. Humans have razed half of all global forests. Book. Review. Campaign. Report.

 

Policy and Action

Does the environment have rights? ELC, NR. Are animals sentient? Lords.

NYT Climate Hub

energy and storage; food and agriculture; transport and mobility; construction and design; water and oceans

 

Evolution

The evidence gap in Darwinian evolution: the 890 million years old sponge. Nature. Neanderthals v Homo Sapiens. pLoSOne.

 

Suffering and success

Is suffering good? Evolutionary psychology, Schopenhauer, etc. Is Olympic suffering good? Simone Biles.

 

Gender

Why do the Olympics separate genders? Binary and continuous attributes. Most distributions overlap – but not testosterone. So testosterone does not predict overlapping distributions? Review. There is a need for sound arguments.

See Gender web page.

 

From Franz Baumann, 29 July 2021:

“Earth’s Vital Signs Worsen

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Writing again so soon was not planned.  However, tomorrow is Earth Overshoot Day, which means that humanity has used up the ecological resources and services that Earth can regenerate in 2021.  Between today and until the end of the year, our collective consumption  borrows – no: steals – from the future.  Of course, some countries’ overshoot days were earlier this year, and others’ will be later (https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days/), which only shows the differentiated obligations to move the date back towards the end of December.

Humanity’s ever more excessive use of the planet’s resources has begun to interfere with the Earth’s fundamental life-support systems, from the atmosphere (climate) to the hydrosphere (oceans), to the lithosphere (land) and to the cryosphere (ice).  A detailed mapping is provided by a most important study that was published today:

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021; BioScience, 28 July 2021; https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab079

A very good summary is:

Katherine Gammon, “Critical measures of global heating reaching tipping point, study finds: Carbon emissions, ocean acidification, Amazon clearing all hurtling toward new records,” The Guardian, 28 July 2021; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/27/global-heating-critical-measures-tipping-point-study

Grateful if you distribute further in your networks.

Many thanks and regards,

Franz Baumann”

 

YB17 7 Value Trajectories: Wellbeing, Wealth, Health, Peace and the Environment

See overview on pages 14 to 15 in overviews of chapters on values: