climate change – the heart thrills

CORAL REEFS AROUND SURIN ISLAND

Kuraburi, 18 April 2016

It was a few minutes before we turned back to the boat that my wife and I spotted them, a school of pale lemon yellow fish, browsing on the bottom of the reef. Much internet surfing suggests that we saw yellow runner fish.

As we watched, another school of fish, light blue this time, floated by, pulled by some unseen current. They were fusilier fish, I think

During our two-day snorkeling trip to the Surin Islands National Park, just north of Phuket, we saw much more besides on the four or five reefs we visited.

The last time I’d snorkeled was half a century ago, in the shallow waters of a bay near Buea, Cameroon. My father had some work to do there, and he had brought me along. An English family living in Buea had taken me with them on an afternoon outing, and so it was that after a merry hour spent sinking up to my thighs in the micro-quicksands which dotted the bay, I spent another hour floating on my stomach, watching with fascination the tiny, brilliantly coloured fish darting back and forth across the black sand, fruit of the nearby volcano, Mt. Cameroon. A badly burned back was the result of this excessive curiosity. Still remembering the pain of that red and peeling back, I snorkeled this time with a shirt on. Alas! In the intervening five decades, my hair has thinned so I found afterwards that my scalp was burned from floating face down in the water (my wife instead got burned just below her swimsuit, on what our personal trainer calls the glutes).

All of which has not taken away one jot from the pleasure we derived from the wonderful sights we took in as we paddled slowly hand-in-hand along the reefs, with no sound but our breathing, witnessing a riot of colour as fish swam into our line of sight and then disappeared, intent on their business. Below is an incomplete catalogue of our sightings:

Powder blue surgeonfish
Rainbow parrotfish

The wonderfully named Moorish idol

Lined surgeonfish

Black surgeonfish

Emperor angelfish

Triggerfish

Melon butterfly fish

Blue lined grouper

We saw other denizens of the reefs too:

A powder-blue starfish

The aptly named crown-of-thorns starfish

Squamose giant clams, which would snap shut as we floated over them

Magnificent sea anemone, whose green tentacles would wave this way and that, revealing a wonderful blue-mauve body beneath

And of course there were the corals, around which all these other species revolved:
Staghorn coral, whose tips seemed to glow phosphorescently

Table coral

Mushroom coral

But really, although it was fun to point out to each other new species that we spotted, it was the reef communities as a whole that were most fascinating

those tens of species all working in and around a coral mount which surged up from the bottom towards the light.

I suppose we’re lucky to have seen this. As we were floating over the reefs around Surin Island, an article appeared in the Guardian about massive coral bleaching going on at the Australian Great Barrier Reef. The immediate cause is El Niño, which is leading to much warmer waters than usual; coral dies if the water is too warm, and all you are left with are the bleached bones of coral, devoid of that blizzard of life with which it would normally be surrounded.

But behind this latest episode is climate change, which is making El Niño events ever longer and more intense. Two days before this article appeared, the Guardian had another announcing that the month of March had been the hottest on record.

But so had February. And so had January. And so had 2015 as a whole.

One of the many, many – many – impacts of climate change will be the die-off of coral reefs the world over. Coral reefs everywhere are showing signs of increasing strain. And with that die-off will come a steep decline in fish species: coral reefs are home to an astonishing 25 percent of the world’s fish species. That favourite cartoon character, Nemo, will lose his real-life counterpart.

Can we really let this happen? Surely we humans can collectively take on our responsibilities for controlling climate change. Let’s not destroy this beautiful planet we inhabit.

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Yellow runner fish: http://www.123rf.com/photo_24661711_yellow-runner-school-fish-in-similan-thailand.html
Fusilier fish: http://www.123rf.com/photo_16881582_blue-and-gold-fusilier-fish-at-surin-national-park.html
Powder blue surgeonfish: http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/acanthurus.html
Rainbow parrotfish: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/303922674822811295/
Moorish idol: http://diveadvisor.com/sub2o/the-moorish-idol
Lined surgeonfish: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthurus_lineatus
Black surgeonfish: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/wallpaper/surgeonfish-laman_pod_image.html
Emperor angelfish: https://cococares.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/maldives-emperor-angelfish-at-3-different-stages-of-life/
Triggerfish: http://www.seafocus.com/species_triggerfish.html
Melon butterfly fish: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thailandbeach/3568555120
Blue lined grouper: http://www.aquariumdomain.com/viewSpeciesMarine.php?id=49
Blue starfish: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-3387803/stock-photo-blue-starfish-close-up-similan-islands.html
Crown of thorns starfish: http://www.bubblevision.com/underwater-pictures/racha-noi/pages/crown-of-thorns.htm
Squamose giant clam: http://forum.scubatoys.com/showthread.php?t=9755
Magnificent sea anemone: http://www.shutterstock.com/video/search/heteractis
Magnificent sea anemone: http://forum.scubatoys.com/showthread.php?t=9755
Staghorn coral: https://www.fau.edu/facilities/ehs/info/elkhorn_staghorn_corals.php
Table coral: http://adamjadhav.com/2010/
Mushroom coral: http://www.messersmith.name/wordpress/tag/mushroom-coral/
Reef life: https://www.govoyagin.com/activities/thailand-phuket-snorkel-and-see-sea-turtles-and-sharks-in-phi-phi/2039
Bleached coral reef: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/17/great-barrier-reef-worst-destruction
March global temperatures: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/15/march-temperature-smashes-100-year-global-record
Clownfish: https://prezi.com/m/m7zrpx-gkdqs/life-cycle-of-a-clown-fish/

ROLLED-UP T-SHIRTS

Beijing, 20 August 2013

As we go around gasping for air in the currently hot and humid weather, like fish flopping around on a river bank, my wife and I cannot but notice the common Chinese fashion statement at this time of year of men (never women) rolling up their T-shirts

and – if they are wearing them – their trousers.

In the past, when I’ve seen Chinese men stroll past me so attired, I’ve always wondered if I couldn’t make a T-shirt which is specifically designed to be rolled up – in a somewhat more elegant way than the way Chinese men currently do it. Alas, some searching on the internet has shown me that a Japanese designer, Kaoru Inoue, has already come up with a Venetian blind design for a T-shirt!

Story of my life, someone always beats me to the good ideas … But I do think that I could perhaps improve on this design – a circle of some stiff material around the bottom perhaps, to ensure that the whole T-shirt gets pulled up?

But actually, rather than think about how to roll up T-shirts in a more elegant way, we should think about why we are wearing T-shirts, or shirts, or even worse shirts, ties and jackets, in this kind of weather in the first damned place. The modern way of dealing with hot weather is to turn every building into a refrigerator – already standard fare in North America for at least 50 years (one of my enduring memories of my first visit to Canada, 40+ years ago, was my going into a supermarket on my second day there and being astonished at the frigid temperature); and fast becoming standard fare in China.

So we scurry from refrigerated building to refrigerated building, and then we sit in our offices and freeze

while outside the world is turning to toast.

What stupidity. What folly.

Why don’t we do it the way of the few remaining Amazonian Indians do, just wear few clothes?

although I think we could avoid the rather small loin cloths these gentlemen are sporting …

A great advantage of this approach is that it would allow those of us who like painting (not tattooing) the skin to do so, with the certainty that our neighbours would see our designs and admire them.

______________________________________

Rolled-up T-shirt-1: http://www.royalmood.com/img/funny/bell/bell01.jpg
Rolled-up T-shirt-2: http://liuzhou.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/P1050163.jpg
venetian-blind T-shirt: http://tab-files.s3.amazonaws.com/images/crop_LL/f6877b6b752d79d4bbdb3e56533f95e433343c73.jpg?1339079993
Air conditioning: http://media.nowpublic.net/images//d6/5/d659eca89a214dd28daac0bc0ca6d4ba.jpg
Burning world: http://ninja.typepad.com/.a/6a00e554fa70848834014e5fbb3ea4970c-800wi
Amazonian Indians-1: http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=65733&stc=1
Amazonian Indians-2: http://www.wehaitians.com/amazon_2_b.jpg
Amazonian Indians-3: http://madamepickwickartblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/amazon34.jpg
Amazonian Indians-4: http://birdonthemoon.com/Indian_game1104-thumb.jpg

THE (STEEP) STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco, 6 October 2012

Readers of my generation will no doubt remember the 1968 film Bullit with the Great Immortal Steve McQueen.

I don’t suppose anyone remembers the story, it was a cops and robbers story of some kind. They only remember the car chase. What a sequence that was! It started on the steeper streets of San Francisco, with the cars suddenly racing up and down the hills and bouncing across the intersections as the baddies realized that Steve was on their tail (the sequence somehow ended on the highways but that is irrelevant to our story).

I was reminded of this car chase when on the first morning of our stay in the city my wife and I walked from our hotel to our son’s apartment. We had discovered that the two were on the same street – Taylor Street to be precise – and thought naively that it would be a nice walk. Bad mistake! There were sections of the street that were astonishingly – preposterously – steep.

At some points, I felt like we were scaling Everest or Annapurna.

And later, when we took a taxi along the same street, there was a moment, as we were going down a particularly steep section, when the taxi driver had to bend down to be able see out of the windscreen!

Town planning in San Francisco is a beautiful example of 19^th and 20^th Centuries human arrogance. Someone just draped a grid of straight lines over a very hilly landscape and traced the resulting streets, in complete disregard of gradient. The planners of the hill towns in Italy, Greece or Spain never did that; their streets respected the land’s morphology. They lived with their land, not against it.

Be warned. We ignore the physical limitations of our Earth at our peril.

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pix from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullitt
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/antman67/7768689852/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveglass /527678270/
http://www.travelandtournepal.com/climbing-mount-everest/
http://www.sangimignano.com/sghomei.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/18/trust-climate-models