04/09/2019

'Can't Rely On Governments Alone': Atlassian Leads Push For Staff To Attend Global Climate Strike

Sydney Morning Herald - Michael Koziol

Tech giant Atlassian will encourage its 3500 employees to take part in this month's global strike for climate action in a move it hopes will reverberate through corporate Australia.
The firm's billionaire co-founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, said companies had to take their share of responsibility for the "climate crisis" and warned Australians in particular could not rely on governments "at all" to address the problem.
Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes says Australians can't rely on government "at all" on climate  change. Credit: Steven Siewert
In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, he said prominent politicians such as Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who has been critical of corporate activism in the past, should "stick to [their] knitting", something Mr Dutton has previously told chief executives to do.
Millions are expected to walk out of work or school on September 20 as part of "Strike 4 Climate Action" – inspired by 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl and activist Greta Thunberg – to demand global action on climate change ahead of a major United Nations summit in New York the following week.
A dozen other firms will support staff who wish to take part in the strike, including fossil-free superannuation fund Future Super, which will shut its doors on the day, and reusable coffee cup company KeepCup. Atlassian employees can use part of the week's leave they receive each year to do charity work.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said Australia had "no credible climate policy whatsoever", noting carbon emissions continued to rise despite the Morrison government's insistence it will meet its 2030 targets under the global Paris Agreement.


Prime Minister Scott Morrison will forge ahead with his government's climate change policy. Hear what he has said on the topic, after his election win.

"Politicians can try to put whatever spin on it they want," he said, referring to Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor's recent explanation that emissions increases were due to growth in liquefied natural gas exports. Mr Taylor in June said the figures did not acknowledge Australia's contribution to lowering emissions in other countries through exports of LNG, which creates fewer emissions than coal.
"I was very amused by the spin that absent that - the increase in LNG exports - [emissions] would have gone down," Mr Cannon-Brookes said.
Coalition ministers have previously criticised student climate strikes and corporate activism. Resources Minister Matt Canavan warned striking students would only learn "how to join the dole queue", while Mr Dutton said it was "unacceptable that people would use companies and the money of publicly listed companies to throw their weight around".
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But Mr Cannon-Brookes said as corporations were directly affected by climate change, it was in their own capitalistic interests to encourage stronger political action.
"Corporations have to deal with it; they have to deal with their own impact and their own footprint as companies," he said.
"It's a crisis that demands leadership and action. But we can't rely on governments alone - sadly, in Australia, we can't rely on them at all."
Mr Dutton has previously suggested chief executives wishing to debate "moral issues" such as same-sex marriage should "become a politician, resign your job at $5 million a year, come on to $250,000, if they can tolerate that".
But Mr Cannon-Brookes rejected the idea of entering politics. "I'm a little too honest for that. I'd be a rubbish politician," he said.
In addition to supporting the strike, Atlassian will screen Damon Gameau's climate change documentary 2040 at its offices in Sydney, San Francisco and Austin.

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Climate Change: Hungry Nations Add The Least To Global CO2

BBC - Matt McGrath

Burundi has contributed little to rising temperatures, but will be hit hard by some of the effects. Getty Images
The impoverished African nation of Burundi comes top of a list of the world's most food-insecure countries says Christian Aid.
The charity argues that Burundi and others are now keenly feeling the impacts of climate change on their food production systems.
But Burundi's contribution to rising temperatures is marginal, say experts.
In fact, the annual carbon emissions of one Briton is equal to the CO2 produced by over 200 Burundians.
Scientists and government officials from all over the world are meeting in Geneva this week to consider how climate change impacts the land and how the lands and forests impact the climate.
Their detailed report will be released on Thursday.
However, researchers at development charity Christian Aid have put together a study showing how that climate change is now having a disproportionate impact on the food systems of the countries that have done least to produce the carbon emissions that are driving up temperatures.
Burundians produce 0.027 tonnes of CO2 per person per year. Someone living in Saudi Arabia produces the same as 718 people in Burundi. The equivalent number for the US would be 581 and for Russia 454.
Their study says that the top 10 most food insecure countries all generate less than half a tonne of CO2 per person, and in total just 0.08% of global emissions.
Interactive tool: How much warmer is your city? Select from 1,000 major cities around the world
As well as Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Yemen and Sierra Leone make up the top five countries.
The rest of the top 10 includes Chad, Malawi, Haiti, Niger and Zambia.
Burundians produce 0.027 tonnes of CO2 per person per year. Someone living in Saudi Arabia produces the same as 718 people in Burundi. The equivalent number for the US would be 581 and for Russia 454.
The report's authors draw a clear link between rising global temperatures and increasing food security issues.
"Our research shows that rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are reducing the nutritional quality of the food we eat and that the most vulnerable people to these impacts are those least responsible for rising global CO2 concentrations," said Dr Samuel Myers, principal research scientist at Harvard University's department of environmental health.
"From this, and other research, what is quite clear is that climate change is not only a global health crisis, it is a moral crisis."
Other researchers say that the report on food insecurity is a warning for rich and poor alike, that climate change is having profound effects on our ability to feed the planet.
"These are warning signals that all of us ignore at our peril, for agriculture ultimately is one of the most threatened of our economic sectors and most fundamental for the healthy functioning of our societies and our communities," said Dr Doreen Stabinsky, professor of global environmental politics at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, US, who was not involved with the study.
"Both the Christian Aid report and the upcoming IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land begin to make clear how serious a threat this is, and how urgently we need to act."

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Australian Medical Association Declares Climate Change A Health Emergency

The Guardian - 

Exclusive: AMA points to ‘clear scientific evidence indicating severe impacts for our patients and communities’
AMA president Tony Bartone says climate change will affect health by increasing the spread of infectious diseases and through more extreme weather. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
The Australian Medical Association has formally declared climate change a health emergency, pointing to “clear scientific evidence indicating severe impacts for our patients and communities now and into the future”.
The AMA’s landmark shift, delivered by a motion of the body’s federal council, brings the organisation into line with forward-leaning positions taken by the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association and Doctors for the Environment Australia.
The American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians recognised climate change as a health emergency in June 2019, and the British Medical Association the following month declared a climate emergency and committed to campaign for carbon neutrality by 2030.
The World Health Organisation has recognised since 2015 that climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century, and argued the scientific evidence for that assessment is “overwhelming”.
The AMA has recognised the health risks of climate change since 2004. Having now formally recognised that climate change is a health emergency, the peak organisation representing doctors in Australia is calling on the Morrison government to promote an active transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; adopt mitigation targets within an Australian carbon budget; promote the health benefits of addressing climate change; and develop a national strategy for health and climate change.
The AMA president, Tony Bartone, argues the scientific evidence is clear. “There is no doubt that climate change is a health emergency. The AMA accepts the scientific evidence on climate change and its impact on human health and human wellbeing,” he says.
Bartone says the climate science suggests warming will affect human health and wellbeing “by increasing the environment and situations in which infectious diseases can be transmitted, and through more extreme weather events, particularly heatwaves”.
“Climate change will cause higher mortality and morbidity from heat stress,” the AMA president says. “Climate change will cause injury and mortality from increasingly severe weather events. Climate change will cause increases in the transmission of vector-borne diseases. Climate change will cause food insecurity resulting from declines in agricultural outputs. Climate change will cause a higher incidence of mental ill-health.
“These effects are already being observed internationally and in Australia.”
Bartone told Guardian Australia the motion adopted by the federal council had followed an ongoing discussion among stakeholders, and medical practitioners within the AMA membership.
Health and medical groups, including Doctors for the Environment, the Climate and Health Alliance, the Royal Australian College of Physicians, and the Australian Medical Students’ Association wrote an open letter to all political parties in April pointing out the “significant and profound impacts climate change has on the health of people and our health system”.
The AMA president said the decision to pass the motion followed on from those events both domestically and internationally, and was “pretty much unanimous” internally. “I don’t recall anyone speaking against it,” he said.
Asked whether the current government was pursuing ambitious enough policy action to combat the risks of climate change, which the Morrison government argues it is, Bartone said “it’s really difficult to say because this issue is clouded in conjecture and conflicting reports”.
He said all of the political groups in the Australian parliament had a responsibility to move past the toxic partisan politics that had characterised the debate and find durable solutions to a difficult public policy challenge.
Bartone said the AMA would continue to assess the evidence about climate change as it emerged and update its stance to reflect the science.
The latest official data released last week confirms that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise in Australia. National emissions increased by 3.1m tonnes in the year to March to reach 538.9m tonnes, a 0.6% jump on the previous year.
Emissions in Australia have increased every year since the Abbott government repealed a national carbon price after taking office in 2013.

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03/09/2019

Pope Urges Politicians To Take 'Drastic Measures' On Climate Change

Reuters - Philip Pullella

Francis issued his appeal ahead of the United Nations Climate Action Summit this month in New York
Climate activist Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg meets Pope Francis during the weekly audience at Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican, April 17, 2019. Vatican Media/Handout via REUTERS
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis challenged governments on Sunday to take "drastic measures" to combat global warming and reduce the use of fossil fuels, saying the world was experiencing a climate emergency.
Francis issued his appeal, a written message for Sunday's World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, ahead of the United Nations Climate Action Summit this month in New York, a follow up to the 2016 Paris Agreement to curb global warming.
Calling the U.N. summit "of particular importance," he added:
"There, governments will have the responsibility of showing the political will to take drastic measures to achieve as quickly as possible zero net greenhouse gas emissions and to limit the average increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius with respect to pre-industrial levels, in accordance with the Paris Agreement goals."
Francis has made many calls for environmental protection and has clashed over climate change with sceptics leaders such as U.S. President Donald Trump, who has taken the United States out of the Paris accord.
"We have caused a climate emergency that gravely threatens nature and life itself, including our own," the leader of the world's 1.3 billon Roman Catholics said in the message for the prayer day, which is marked by various Christian Churches.
"Our prayers and appeals are directed first at raising the awareness of political and civil leaders," he said, adding that governments should "renew commitments decisive for directing the planet towards life, not death".
He listed constant pollution, continued use of fossil fuels, intensive agricultural exploitation and deforestation as being among the man-made causes of global warming and said the Amazon, where fires are raging, is "gravely threatened".
"Now is the time to abandon our dependence on fossil fuels and move, quickly and decisively, towards forms of clean energy and a sustainable and circular economy," he said.
Other phenomena, such as the melting of glaciers and the presence of plastic and microplastics in the oceans "testify to the urgent need for interventions that can no longer be postponed," he said.
"Egoism and self-interest have turned creation, a place of encounter and sharing, into an arena of competition and conflict," he said.
Francis, who wrote an encyclical in 2015 on environmental protection, said now was the time for people to reflect on their lifestyles, urging them not to make "thoughtless and harmful" decisions" on food, consumption and transportation.
"Too many of us act like tyrants with regard to creation," he said.
Protection of the environment is expected to be a main these of the pope's trip to Africa, which starts on Wednesday.

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The Misogyny Of Climate Deniers

New Republic - 

Why do right-wing men hate Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so much? Researchers have some troubling answers to that question.
Teenage activist Greta Thunberg
(Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty Images)
Climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have difficulty sticking to the blasé tone when it comes to a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden.
Lomborg has repeatedly mocked and criticized Greta Thunberg, the prominent young activist who has been sailing across the Atlantic to attend the UN’s Youth Climate Summit and other meetings in the U.S. In June, he tweeted out a cartoon that implied Greta was only useful to climate activists because being young made her unassailable—in four years, it joked, she’d be replaced with someone younger still. Earlier in the year, he’d asked why the World Economic Forum was listening to her at all, and approvingly shared a Quillette article which called Thunberg a fanatic and “absolutist” and which argued adults had a duty to correct her childlike naiveté.
And Lomborg’s on the more civil end of Thunberg’s critics. In April, while tweeting that her policies were “unrealistic” and “costly,” he added that, “of course, she should be treated respectfully, just like all participants in the climate debate.” Several of his followers didn’t seem to care for the caveat, attacking Thunberg with comments about her age and mental health in replies.
As Thunberg approached America, she was followed by a tsunami of male rage. On her first day of sailing, a multi-millionaire Brexit activist tweeted that he wished a freak accident would destroy her boat. A conservative Australian columnist called her a “deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement,” while the British far-right activist David Vance attacked the “sheer petulance of this arrogant child.”
In the U.S., former Trump staffer Steve Milloy recently called Thunberg a “teenage puppet,” and claimed that “the world laughs at this Greta charade,” while a widely shared far-right meme showed Trump tipping The Statue of Liberty to crush her boat. We can expect a surge of similar attacks in the U.S. as she arrives in New York this week.
While these examples might feel like mere coincidence to some, the idea that white men would lead the attacks on Greta Thunberg is consistent with a growing body of research linking gender reactionaries to climate-denialism—some of the research coming from Thunberg’s own country. Researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, which recently launched the world’s first academic research center to study climate denialism, have for years been examining a link between climate deniers and the anti-feminist far-right.
In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”
The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.
Climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy.”
“There is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity that I call ‘industrial breadwinner masculinity.’ They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It’s a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment” Hultman told Deutsche Welle last year.
The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé wrote in another paper.
These findings align with similar ones in the United States, where there is a massive gender gap in views on climate change, and many men perceive climate activism as inherently feminine, according to research published in 2017. “In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female,” marketing professors Aaron R. Brough and James E.B. Wilkie explained at Scientific American. “In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment,” they write.
In the past year, young women such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. and Thunberg in Europe have become the global faces of climate activism, often with tremendous political impact. In the United States, Ocasio-Cortez has helped transform what was once considered a bit of fringe rhetoric—the Green New Deal—into a topic of regular conversation. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a recent poll, one out of three Germans said that Thunberg has changed their views on climate change.
The rise of Thunberg and Ocasio-Cortez has generated a predictable backlash among conservative men. In the U.S., Ocasio-Cortez has become an obsession on right-wing media. Fox News mentioned her an average of 76 times a day during her first month in Congress. Now, Greta Thunberg is becoming a similar target for European nationalists. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party seems to have coordinated their attacks on Thunberg with the right-wing European Institute for Climate and Energy think tank.
Climate change used to be a bipartisan concern, the first Bush senior presidency famously promising to tackle global warming. But as conservative male mockery of Thunberg and others shows, climate politics has quickly become the next big battle in the culture war—on a global scale.
As conservative parties become increasingly tied to nationalism, and misogynist rhetoric dominates the far-right, Hultman and his fellow researchers at Chalmers University worry that the ties between climate skeptics and misogyny will strengthen. What was once a practical problem, with general agreement on the facts, has become a matter of identity. And fear of change is powerful motivation.

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02/09/2019

AgForce Backs Calls For Review Of Consensus Science On Great Barrier Reef

The Guardian - 

Exclusive: Top Queensland farmers’ group supports controversial scientist Peter Ridd’s questioning of climate science
AgForce says it agrees with Peter Ridd’s calls for Great Barrier Reef climate science ‘to be more thoroughly examined and tested’. Photograph: Photography by Mangiwau/Getty Images 
Queensland’s most influential farm lobby group, AgForce, has backed calls for a review of consensus science on the Great Barrier Reef, as the state’s agricultural sector intensifies its campaign against proposed water quality regulations.
On Friday the release of two key reports painted an alarming picture of the state of the reef. The Queensland-led water quality report – which rated the water quality at inner reefs as “poor” – highlighted the impact of land management practices that contribute to the degradation of the reef due to sediment and nutrient run-off.
The findings were released at a critical point in debate about the Queensland government’s proposed regulations, which would set variable pollution limits in separate reef catchments.
Agricultural groups say those regulations will have a significant impact on farmers; particularly graziers, sugarcane growers and tropical horticulture.
Some farmers accept the consensus science, but claim the regulations are ill thought out and will have unintended consequences for primary producers. This is also the formal position of the LNP opposition.
But increasingly, sober debate about the impact of the regulations has veered into science scepticism; pushed by the controversial scientist Peter Ridd, some of the larger peak industry bodies, backbench LNP MPs and opaque front groups.
The AgForce chief executive, Michael Guerin, in a statement to Guardian Australia sent before the release of the latest reef reports, said the organisation agreed with Ridd’s calls for the science “to be more thoroughly examined and tested”.
Last week Guardian Australia revealed that an expert panel led by the former chief scientist Ian Chubb had warned ministers that Ridd is misrepresenting robust science about the plight of the reef, and compared his claims to the strategy used by the tobacco industry to raise doubt about the impact of smoking.
Guerin said there “was no absolute consensus” on the reef.
“We are not scientists and have no position on the science. However, when eminent reef scientists call into question the research conducted by their peers, we as a community would be foolish not to listen.
“We are simply asking the government to make sure of the science before it implements such momentous changes with potentially devastating consequences for so many.”
The AgForce general president and ABC board member Georgie Somerset will speak at a protest rally of famers in Townsville on Tuesday to coincide with a sitting of the state parliament. The event is being promoted by the opaque front organisation Farmers United, with flyers quoting Ridd and featuring the AgForce logo.
The industry argues regulation is not necessary, and that “best management practice” measures, led by agricultural groups and funded by government, were the best method to address water quality issues. Earlier this year, in protest against the proposed regulations and citing privacy concerns, AgForce deleted a decade of data from its BMP database.
The Queensland environment minister, Leeanne Enoch, said on Friday that the reef water quality report showed that voluntary BMP programs were not working quickly enough, and that urgent action was needed to address the health of the reef.
“The report … shows land-based run-off still remains a problem and that urgent changes are needed if we are going to meet our targets,” Enoch said.
“The report also shows that many farmers have been doing good work to help improve the quality of run-off, but unfortunately the science is showing that uptake has not been fast enough.
“For example, we want 90% of sugarcane land across the reef catchments managed using best management practice systems by 2025. But, the results show this was happening on only 9.8% of land so far.
“Overall water quality modelling showed only a 0.3% reduction in dissolved inorganic nitrogen and a 0.5% reduction in sediment in 2017-2018 across all regions.
“This simply isn’t enough. There are also a lot of scores that are poor, or very poor.”
As large agricultural groups seek to question the science, largely on the basis of a single opinion rejected by scores of other reef scientists, questions have grown about whether they can continue to manage millions in grants allocated for reef water quality measures.
AgForce jointly manages Queensland-funded BMP programs.
AgForce last year lobbied in support of the controversial $433m federal grant to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, and at the time noted that “agricultural land is one of many factors which can affect water quality and the long term health” of the reef.
The Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson has written to the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, suggesting groups that receive reef foundation grants to improve water quality, but who otherwise seek to question the underlying science, have a conflict of interest.
He cited support for Ridd’s recent lecture tour from regional branches of the peak organisation Canegrowers.
“On the face of it, this is a conflict of interest. The activity of Queensland Canegrowers (as a subcontractor) is impairing the ability of the foundation to improve water quality in the reef.”

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Spiders Are Threatened By Climate Change – And Even The Biggest Arachnophobes Should Be Worried

The Conversation - 

As the world warms, male ladybird spiders are hatching too early in the year to meet a mate. MF Photo / shutterstock
Is climate change making spiders more aggressive? A recent scientific study suggests so, as the researchers link aggressiveness to tropical cyclones, events that are expected to become more frequent and powerful with climate change. 
Unsurprisingly, the findings got considerable media coverage. After all, it matches justified fears of catastrophic climate change impacts, with the unjustified fear many people have of harmless spiders.
However, I have studied these arachnids for more than 15 years and I am not too concerned about tropical cyclones making them more aggressive. It is worth worrying about spiders themselves though.
People who dislike spiders will of course be alarmed by any news of them getting more aggressive or even bigger due to climate change. But beyond the headlines, it is important to note that they might be getting bigger for a number of reasons, and that these are localised studies made on target species. Therefore warming temperatures are unlikely to impact the recorded 48,359 species globally in the same way.
In any case, a study found that people who fear spiders are more likely to view them as larger than people who do not. And as I write this article at the end of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, one of the biggest common spiders in Europe (the garden-orb-weaver, or Araneus diadematus)) is now reaching maturity, so you might just come across “large” spiders in the middle of their webs more often at this time of year.
Orb spiders: big in late summer. Sergey / shutterstock
As for aggression, the study that reportedly shows an increase with climate change only actually looked at the impact of tropical cyclones on a single species: the group-living spider (Anelosimus studiosus). Also known as the communal spider, these are often found alone or in groups of up to a few hundred individuals, and each individual is born with either an “aggressive” or “docile” behavioural type (the new study showed that after cyclones the ratio between the two would consistently change towards more aggressive colonies).Communal behaviour is fairly rare in spiders, which is why this species is so interesting to study. But it is also what makes it less representative of other spiders behaviour, and not the best model to understand climate change impact on spiders globally.
But what if you’re still worried about that one harmless species, smaller than a centimetre, potentially becoming more aggressive? In that case, it might be useful to note that aggressiveness in this context was measured as speed and number of spiders that respond to prey (who wouldn’t run to food if they were really hungry), prey-sharing efficiency and reduce wastage (aka, want not waste not), tendency to cannibalise males and eggs (desperate times call for desperate measures) and less susceptibility to infiltration by foreign spiders (aka, when the going gets tough, the tough don’t like sharing). Therefore, if you are not an insect, there is no cause for alarm – their “aggression” is not aimed at humans.

Don’t be afraid of spiders – be afraid for spiders
But, although there is no reason to be concerned about their size or aggressiveness, you should be worried about spider survival under climate change. To take one example, just last year I was researching the beautiful ladybird spider in the western Asian highlands (I’m keeping the location secret as these animals are sought after by the illegal pet trade). Where I observed the males maturing much earlier in the year than they would normally do, thanks to an unusual hot period in winter.
For them, this was a disaster.
These male ladybird spiders usually leave their nests in spring to find suitable females, but this time they would emerge into the wider world only to find no females yet available to mate, as females appear to depend on food intake to reach sexual maturity rather than wait for environmental cues, such as temperature. Like Romeo, these males died without their Juliet.
A jumping spider tucks into a mosquito. vinit thongtue / shutterstock
You should care about all this because spiders eat an astronomical amount of insects, many of which are agricultural pests or the carries of human diseases, their loss will become ours as it impacts future ecosystems.
Furthermore, although unappreciated and understudied, spiders have untapped potential to help us develop new medicine or materials with their venom or silk. You should also care because this type of impact might be particularly dire in desert dwelling animals, which already live at the threshold of what they can tolerate, so even small temperature increases and more frequent heat waves, can wipe entire populations and drastically change those ecosystems.
Which is more likely to happen in regions where losing key biocontrol agents such as spiders, might put even more pressure on crops and on the human populations disproportionately affected by climate change.
If we continue to disregard the value of these animals, not only will our fear likely cause disruption or put us in actual danger, but ignoring them now might drive them to disappear forever.
In the famous aeroplane analogy, species are compared with losing a couple of bolts that still allow the plane to fly, but as you lose more and more parts, you’re getting dangerously close to crashing. Well, spiders are part of the engine in this analogy. Wouldn’t you be worried if the aeroplane you are flying in, the spaceship we are all in, was losing engine parts in front of your eyes?

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative