Past estimates of the elephant population in Africa ranged from around 400,000 to over 630,000, and there was disagreement about the numbers. The new Great Elephant Census, funded by Paul Allen of Microsoft, estimates that there are just 352,271 elephants in 93 percent of the animals’ range.

Much of the decline in the elephant population is due to illegal poaching by people who sell elephant tusks on the Chinese market. Past estimates of how many elephants are illegally killed were based on models and incomplete carcass counts, as opposed to comparing population numbers. The new survey finds tens of thousands of elephants are being killed each year.

Many governments have tried to prevent illegal elephant hunting by establishing parks and disrupting the market for ivory. Kenya has held public ivory-burning events for years — at the most recent one, in April, the government burned the tusks of nearly 7,000 elephants.

Botswana appears to be most effective at protecting its elephants. The elephants seem to understand this and herds there are now worryingly large. In Namibia, elephant and rhino numbers are treated as a national secret, but appear to be healthy and thriving. It is said that their ivory is not good for carving, which is some small comfort.

The smaller elephants inhabiting tropical forests are another matter. Killed for the ivory, they could be wiped out completely in the next ten years. Their numbers fell by about 65 per cent across the Central African Republic between 2002 and 2013. Unlike the bigger, more abundant savannah elephants, which start breeding from the age of 12, female forest elephants only begin breeding at 23 and give birth once every five to six years. This makes them the planet’s slowest reproducing mammals and means the species may take up to 90 years to recover from losses inflicted over this 11-year period. (various sources, including New Scientist, September, 2016)

The Chinese government should be cracking down on the disgusting trade in ivory from rhinos and elephants. Why won’t they do this? Guess.

Like the cabinet, the public at large also seems uncertain about the implications of Brexit. The BBC today released a poll showing that, while 62% of people are positive about Britain’s future after the EU referendum, 35% are negative. Some of the other poll findings are more awkward for the Brexiteers.

A quarter of Britons have considered leaving the country since the Brexit vote, the poll reveals. Almost twice as many Britons think the UK’s reputation abroad has been damaged by the Brexit vote (46%) as think it has been improved by the vote (27%).

The Minister responsible for developing a strategy for Britain and Brexit, David Davis, a long-time Eurosceptic, appears to have no strategy and is accused of generalised waffling, even though he has had years to work out what to do in the event of departure from the EU.

To The Times
“As former vice-chancellor of a Russell Group university, I strongly disagree with a continued and even increased influx of foreign students. You describe our universities as one of “Britain’s most lucrative exports”, but that is not the purpose of our universities, which is to educate our citizens and to pursue research. An element of cosmopolitanism is, of course, essential, but we are taking it too far, to a point at which it impairs the indigenous character of our universities. A recent walk around the London School of Economics reminded me more of an international airport than a seat of learning. Ironically, we are impairing the character that makes British universities so attractive abroad”.
Professor Sir Laurence Martin, London (The Times, re-printed in The Week).

The average cost of sending a child to private school in London is now £16,500 a year, and has risen by more than 20 per cent during the last 5 years, according to analysis by the Good Schools Guide. This outpaces the 2.7 per cent growth in the capital’s average salary and the 6.1 per cent growth in inflation.

Both in secondary and further education the British are getting it wrong. Private school fees are rocketing up because Chinese parents want to give their children a Western education and will pay a fortune for it. My wife and I encountered a man whose job it is to recruit Chinese kids for British private schools. He said the problem was to keep the ratio of Chinese to British children reasonable (partly for linguistic reasons) – there was absolutely no problem finding rich Chinese parents. The temptation for educational institutions must be huge. This phenomenon exists in the US as well. When we visited the MIT campus we thought we were in Shanghai. What does this say about Chinese education, one might ask? But this isn’t the point. I agree with Professor Martin – this, if pursued, is going to ruin the very things that attract foreign students in the first place.

Meanwhile, for every Chinese student accepted, the private sector becomes even more elitist, exclusive and difficult to enter for British and American children, afforded only by super-rich CEOs and financial sector fat cats.

Research indicates that for a single very hot day — warmer than 86 degrees Fahrenheit — per capita income goes down by $20.56, or 28 percent. The optimum temperature for human productivity seems to be around 13 degrees Celsius or about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, as an annual average in a particular place. When it gets much hotter than this, researchers have found, economic productivity declines strongly.

Serious heat waves have become more prevalent in various parts of the globe. By the mid-1990s, persistently hot, poor countries such as Bangladesh were estimated to have lost 1 to 3 percent of all daylight work hours to extreme heat, which can cause exhaustion, stroke and sometimes death among exposed workers. In West Africa, the number of very hot days per year have doubled since 1960. Countries such as India, Vietnam and Indonesia could see the number of lost work hours more than double by 2055 and more than triple by 2085.

If the world’s nations live up to their promises in an agreement made last year in Paris to cut greenhouse gas emissions in coming decades, it could help slow the warming process. New technologies to cool workplaces — even in poor countries — could help some workers avoid dangerously hot working conditions, although that also could place more strain on infrastructure. (based on an article in the Washington Post, Tuesday, July 19, 2016)

The problem will not subside anytime soon. As a reader wrote on this blog, the irony is that global warming has been principally caused by the more developed countries, but some of the worst effects are being, and will be, felt by the less-developed. The result could be political turmoil and mass movements of people trying to escape unbearable living conditions, including starvation and lack of water. We must be wise and take this possibility very seriously. The un-said attitude of many in the establishment probably is “What can I do personally? Let the next generation sort it out”. Un-Epicurean and irresponsible, if true.

Brady Dennis in the August 24, 2016 edition of the Washington Post reports a study done by Zillow, a real estate company, that estimates that rising sea levels could leave nearly 2 million U.S. homes inundated by 2100, a fate that would displace millions of people and result in property losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars. With six feet of sea level rise, nearly 2 percent of all U.S. housing stock could vanish, accounting for roughly $882 billion worth of homes. “It may turn out that actual water poses almost as much of a problem for the housing market in the future as negative equity has in the past,” said Krishna Rao, Zillow’s director of economic product and research.

The states worst affected would be:

Maryland and Virginia, 100,000 homes
The Carolinas, 140,000 homes submerged.
Florida, facing the gravest threat, one in eight of all properties inder water.

Cities under the worst threat would be Miami (possibly a third of its housing stock), Boston (one in five homes), Honolulu (a quarter of its housing).

The guide who took my wife and I around Namibia is a national figure, a former captain of the national soccer team, who last year came second in the world in a rating of tourist guides. He is smart, well-read and knowledgeable. Yet, in a conversation about the effect of climate change on water-deprived Namibia (drought since 2011) he forcefully stated that man-made climate change was a fiction. He said it in a way that showed he had thought about it. He is a great chap, and I dropped the subject as having nothing to do with our tour.

When someone like that categorically denies the work of nearly all climate scientists it shows what a problem we are faced with. We pour gunk into our fragile, thin strip of liveable atmosphere for two hundred years – and where do the man-made climate change deniers think it goes? Conveniently, to the moon? Meanwhile, local authorities are having to build protective dykes, and other flood prevention projects, to protect houses that, arguably, should never have been built so near to the sea. Whether, in hurricane-prone areas these are effective we we will in due course find out.