Thursday, September 26, 2019

Deliver a secret message with a pin

Making a subliminal statement ....

From The Guardian -

Say it with a brooch: what message was Lady Hale's spider sending?

The judge is the latest powerful woman to use a brooch to make a coded statement

Lady Hale’s image was beamed across the world with all the signifiers of the supreme court – papers, judge’s bench, austere clothing. It was the court’s stunning verdict that would dominate the headlines, of course, but the judge’s spider brooch – pinned to her black dress – had the optics that made it a story of its own.

Wearing a spider to deliver news that trapped the prime minister felt pointed – a message backed on a safety pin. Twitter certainly read it that way. “What could Brenda Hale be telling us with her AMAZING giant spider brooch?” wrote @Anna_Girling. By Tuesday afternoon, there was a call for the brooch to have its own Twitter account.

The brooch soon made its way, via social media attention, on to a T-shirt sold by Balcony Shirts. Based, ironically, in Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge constituency, the company has donated 30% of proceeds to the homelessness charity Shelter. It has raised more than £5,000 in the couple of hours after Hale delivered the court’s verdict.

A spokesperson for the company said: “We often print topical t-shirts, and as everyone on Twitter was talking about the brooch we thought it was a great angle for a new design. We can’t believe it’s taken off quite the way it has. We picked Shelter as homelessness appears to be a growing problem in Uxbridge, and it’s nice to do our part.”

The eBay listing for the Lady Hale brooch T-shirt. Photograph: eBay

Brooches are enjoying something of a moment in fashion this autumn – seen on the catwalk at Versace and Erdem – but Hale is a brooch trailblazer. She has a particular fondness for creepy crawlies – frogs, beetles and the like. On her profile on the supreme court website, she wears a brooch of a caterpillar – like the spider, it’s an animal that hardly has the cute factor on its side.

Lady Hale’s caterpillar brooch. — Lady Hale’s brooches include a caterpillar … Photograph: Kevin Leighton

Lady Hale's frog brooch — … a frog … Photograph: Lauren Hurley/PA

Lady Hale's dragonflies brooch. — … dragonflies … Photograph: Supreme court/EPA

Lady Hale's second spider brooch. — … and another giant spider. Photograph: Kevin Leighton

With the spider, Hale joins a list of high-profile women who have used the seemingly unassuming brooch to send a message – at least, some observers think so.

The Queen’s brooches for Donald Trump’s visit in 2018 – one of which was given to her by Barack Obama – were interpreted as statements of her displeasure with the current US president.

Madeleine Albright, as secretary of state under Bill Clinton, was open about her use of brooches – or “pins” to Americans. After being called an “unparalleled serpent” by Iraqi state media, she wore a snake brooch to her next meeting with the country’s officials and her brooch-as-statement career began.

Albright published a book called Read My Pins in 2009 and has continued to allow her pins to say it all.

The smashed glass ceiling design, worn to watch Hillary Clinton make her nominee speech in 2016, broke the internet. Hale’s spider could do the same. It certainly suggests Hale doesn’t squirm when faced with any kind of insect.

Are the oceans doomed?

The latest UN report says it is horribly likely.

Traversing the Pacific during a world cruise this year, it was apparent that wildlife has largely left the ocean. Where flocks of flying fish used to accompany the ship, there were only one or two to be seen. I know that ships don't throw tempting garbage overboard these days, but there must be another reason why the ship was never followed by an albatross, or was flocked with seabirds close to the shore. In the Baltic we saw many birds, and in the Atlantic dolphins often frolicked, and whales made an occasional appearance, but in the open Pacific? Nothing to be seen.

The difference from previous voyages was alarming, and the UN report tells us why.

From the NYT - Story by Brad Plumer

WASHINGTON — Earth’s oceans are under severe strain from climate change, a major new United Nations report warns, which threatens everything from the ability to harvest seafood to the well-being of hundreds of millions of people living along the coasts.

Rising temperatures are contributing to a drop in fish populations in many regions, and oxygen levels in the ocean are declining while acidity levels are on the rise, posing risks to important marine ecosystems, according to the report issued Wednesday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders in policymaking.

In addition, warmer ocean waters, when combined with rising sea levels, threaten to fuel ever more powerful tropical cyclones and floods, the report said, further imperiling coastal regions and worsening a phenomenon that is already contributing to storms like Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston two years ago.

“The oceans are sending us so many warning signals that we need to get emissions under control,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and a lead author of the report. “Ecosystems are changing, food webs are changing, fish stocks are changing, and this turmoil is affecting humans.”

For decades, the oceans have served as a crucial buffer against global warming, soaking up roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans emit from power plants, factories and cars, and absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped on Earth by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Without that protection, the land would be heating much more rapidly.

But the oceans themselves are becoming hotter and less oxygen-rich as a result, according to the report. If humans keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an increasing rate, the risks to human food security and coastal communities will increase sharply, particularly since marine ecosystems are already facing threats from plastic pollution, unsustainable fishing practices and other man-made stresses.

“We are an ocean world, run and regulated by a single ocean, and we are pushing that life support system to its very limits through heating, deoxygenation and acidification,” said Dan Laffoley of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading environmental group that tracks the status of plant and animal species, in response to the report.

The report, which was written by more than 100 international experts and is based on more than 7,000 studies, represents the most extensive look to date at the effects of climate change on oceans, ice sheets, mountain snowpack and permafrost.

Sunday, September 22, 2019

Are cruise ships doomed?

Arriving at a European port on a cruise ship can be a strangely claustrophobic experience. It is sobering indeed to wake up to find your ship edging into a tight berth within a line of other cruise liners. And it is even more thought-provoking to find that you have been docked miles and miles away from port, or that you are anchored a long tender ride from the nearest quay. Indeed, arriving at a port which has not been "blessed" with big cruise ship arrivals -- as happened with us at St John's, Newfoundland -- is quite a treat.

The popular ports are finding the deluge of visitors uncomfortable -- as witness the graffiti in Barcelona telling tourists in no uncertain terms to "go home." Dubrovnik is another example, as this item from The Guardian describes in an essay by Kate Connolly, titled A rising tide: over-tourism and the curse of the cruise ships.

Last year, as she describes, around three million visitors descended on the old town, most of them having poured out of around 400 cruise ships docked in the harbor. A lot of this popularity is due to the hit TV series, "Game of Thrones," but it also must be remembered that this is a historic site, vulnerable to damage. Critics say the influx is causing long-term damage, but with the livelihoods of 80% of the locals dependent on tourist traffic, some are reluctant to address the problems.

Not only is there great strain on facilities such as sewage systems, and inevitable pollution, but there is an awful tackiness taking over from the sense of history. Where once there were bookshops, bakeries, butchers, hair salons and markets, tacky souvenir shops and stalls now cater to the tourists. The boats themselves also burn huge amounts of fossil fuel, creating water, air and noise pollution, and severely affect the marine ecosystem.

So, what can be done about it? Officials, it seems, are becoming uneasy. A growing sense among city residents that tourism has become overtourism has caused the mayor to introduce tighter controls: during mornings just two ships can dock, with a third after midday. Next year a limit of 4,000 daily visitors will be allowed ashore, and in two years each will face a €2 tax.

It isn't as if the city itself benefits financially from the burden cruise ships impose. As we cruisers all know, the ships keep their engines running in port, generating their own electricity to keep the air conditioning flowing, the fridges running, and the elevators going up and down. So another proposal is that the ships are forced to draw their electricity from the local grid. But how can the local authorities enforce this? Not easily.

Other ports face the same problem. In Montenegro, the tiny city of Kotor often has three huge ships docked in port, each staying for an average of 12 hours. The third most popular cruise ship destination in the Adriatic, Kotor expects a total of 500 cruise ships in 2019, bringing more than half a million people. “Compare this to 2003 when there were just 50 ships and 50,000 people,” says Vesna Mačič from Kotor’s institute of Marine Biology.

Kotor is even more at risk than Dubrovnik because Montenegro is outside the EU, so EU laws don’t apply. The city has no recognised marine reserves, ships can use cheaper oil containing sulphur, and there are no restrictions on noise, which is known to damage organisms such as fish, dolphins and turtles. Kotor’s location – at the end of the Boka Kotorska bay, which is surrounded by large mountains – means gases emitted by cruise ships linger for longer, damaging local air quality. Fishermen and marine biologists also complain that the ships drag along the bottom of the bay, damaging the ecosystem, and that they discharge waste water, thus releasing foreign matter into the bay and further upsetting the natural balance. Flowering sea grass, clams and the rich seabed flora are said to have suffered as a result.

There is also the problem that the cruise ships are getting too BIG. The latest to join the fleets are designed for up to 6,000 passengers, plus large crews, meaning that on any one afternoon over 20,000 people can descend onto a city. No wonder the "hop on, hop off" buses line up on the nearest street -- and no wonder that traffic jams pile up. It is also a strain on the ports, which can often handle only one behemoth at a time, so that the two or more that arrive later have to anchor in the harbor, and tender their passengers on shore.

The cruise line operators are certainly aware of the problem. Every cruise ship I have voyaged on has been careful about following local rules, such as sailing very slowly in seas where whales migrate and dolphins play. But it does seem to me that the future of cruising lies with the smaller ships, which can visit less frequented beauty spots, and sail in shallower waters.

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