Well, come to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, session 133. Welcome back, everybody. Today, I decided to give you an ocean news update. So I'm going to be covering three or four stories, three stories and one sort of resource that you can get more science information from. Yay! All this on this episode of Speak Up For Blue Podcasts. Stay tuned! Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. I almost messed that up a little bit. I think I kind of mumbled it a little bit. But anyway, you know who I am if you've been listening to the Speak Up For Blue podcast for a while now. We are in episode 133 and it's awesome. It is Wednesday. It's kind of interesting this week because this has been a week, it's March Break here in Ontario and so our kids, my wife and I, our kids are over at the grandparents in Toronto. And so we're kind of on our own. So I'm actually doing this podcast at a relatively early time. I'm doing it at 4.30 because to be honest, when I come home from work, I really don't know what to do with myself between four o'clock and eight o'clock. That's usually when we have kid time after work. So I really don't know what to do with myself when the kids are gone. So I decided, hey, let's try and get this done instead of doing it at 10.30 at night and scrambling to make sure everything gets done properly. So I had a little time. I did a little check around. I didn't have an interview for this week. I couldn't get somebody on the show. I apologize for that. So I thought I'd give you sort of a news update on what's happening in ocean conservation. There's some good things. There's some bad things. And there's some interesting things going around. And we're going to get started. We're going to start with the good. We're going to go the good, the bad, probably the ugly. And then we're going to get into something kind of cool, a little bit of a resource. So what's an interesting thing that came across my news feed on Facebook. I look at Facebook quite a bit. And I shared it on the speaker for Blue page, the speaker for Blue Facebook page. So if you go to facebook.com/speakerforblue, you can get on that page. There's an interesting story, I guess it's a US news channel, Channel 7 News or News Adelaide. So maybe Australia. Sorry, it's Australian News. They were talking about this retired bricklayer from Brazil and a penguin that have bonded together. Now the story goes that every year this penguin comes back just to this coastal area just outside of Rio de Janeiro. And it comes back to sea and hang out with this dude, with his retired bricklayer. You're probably wondering why is this happening, why this guy? Well apparently, a few years ago, the penguin was found covered in oil and it was starving, it couldn't feed itself, it was probably very unhealthy. This bricklayer decided to take it in, he cleaned it off, he nursed it back to health, and then the penguin went on its way. Well every year, so what happens every year, the penguin will swim thousands of miles to Antarctica to go to its breeding ground. And then every year it swims thousands of miles and it comes back and it hangs out, literally hangs out with this retired bricklayer. He's this older man who just kind of, he's like, he treats it, apparently he treats it like it's his kid. I don't know if the penguins male are female to be honest, I'm not too sure. But they're very close, like a father or like a kid and his father. They cuddle, they, he said the penguins sit on his lap. You can see the penguin, I don't know if it's giving him kisses or just kind of cleaning him maybe his face, but it's obviously being sort of intimate with the thing, not in a bad way, don't get all crazy on me and I'll pervert it on me, but no, you can see it looks like little kisses on his face. And it just hangs out, they swim together, they go, they hang out together. Like I said, this penguin just sits on its lap and it just goes to show that humans and animals can really bond. And this, this, this bricklayer just basically did what he thought was right and cleaned off this penguin. He wanted to save this animal. Probably didn't expect such a bond to occur and such a friendship to build, but it has. And it seems as though, you know, the penguin really is taken to this, to this person and so much so that it won't let anybody close to him. It's a little possessive, I guess, a little jealous. You know, maybe there is a little bit more to this relationship, but I'm not going to make any kind of speculation. I'm getting perverted now. But no, apparently that the, according to the, the video, this penguin doesn't really like to allow other people close to this, this bricklayer, but it's really kind of cool. And I mean, you know, you save an animal, don't expect to have a bond like that with every animal, but this animal swims thousands of miles away and back just to see this guy. That is amazing. He could stay in Antarctica or he could go to Chile or other places, but he decided to come back every year since this, since he's been rescued to stay, to just kind of hang out with this guy. And you wonder, like, you know, you look at this, like, this is a bird, right? This is a seabird and it, it, does it, did you think that it would have this capacity before? I didn't think the bird had this capacity to remember a person that much and not only to remember that person, but to remember, you know, it, it, it's way home. And don't remember, it's way back to that person. I didn't know they had the capability to do that. I think it's kind of an interesting aspect and something that you really discover of, hey, these guys have a really good memory, not only of finding the place and, and traveling that far, but actually finding a specific person and hanging out with that specific person. I think it's just, that's just phenomenal. I mean, I know you've heard it with maybe Marine mammals and captivity, but you don't, and where they kind of impress on, on a human, but you don't really see this happening with, with birds and, and penguins to be, to be specific. So I think it's, it's kind of cool the, the bird, the penguin's name is dim, dim, dim, dim, d-i-n, d-i-n, d-i-m. It swims more than 8,000 kilometers every year to visit the man who saved him from certain death. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I, I swear the ocean surprises me every single time. And this is one of those good, hardest stories I want to start off with, because the next two stories are kind of bad and ugly, like I said, the good, the bad, and ugly. So let's move on to the next story. Uh, February, I'm not sure if you noticed about February, but it was pretty hot. We were up here in Canada, and usually it's cold, last two years, uh, in this year, the previous two years have been, have been like average temperatures of minus 20, minus 25, minus 30, minus 40 sometimes, uh, and it's been pretty damn cold, uh, lots of snow, which has been fantastic. Like the way I see it is winter's winter, it's going to be cold. If it's going to be cold, bring the snow. So at least we can do some outdoor activities. We can spend some time outside in the cold, but we can have some fun with it. But that didn't happen this year. We barely got snowfall. I think we got maybe two big storms where we had 20 centimeters, which isn't that much, uh, for, for this area. Uh, and other places, you know, got the same. It was a very warm summer. And in fact, uh, NASA scientists are saying that it was the warmest month on earth on, on, on, in history of us actually recording it. It was 1.35 degrees Celsius warmer than the average temperature for that month. And that is taking a range from 1951 to 1980. That's a huge jump. I know it doesn't sound like a huge jump, but that's a massive jump to give you a little bit more context. They said, uh, the, the scientists say that one or two degrees more than pre-industrial times were in emergency situations here. If it gets to two degrees above pre-industrial times, we're going to see some massive changes in not only the regular weather patterns or climate, but we're going to see some massive changes in ecology. We're going to see some massive changes in ice distribution. Um, there's going to be less of it. There already is less of it and it's just going to get worse and worse and changes are going to happen that we don't expect we're not ready for it. And I'll tell you it's going to be expensive to adapt to it. It's going to be very, very expensive. Now, January was 1.15 degrees Celsius higher than the average for that month, the long-term average for the month. So it's not as if it's just one month. This has been the last two months. So of course, if, as you can imagine, the entire year, this past year, it has been the hottest year on earth that we, well, since we've been recording, it's, it's, it's even the worst. We thought it was 2014 was, was bad, 2015 was worse. 2015, 2016 was worse. And you know, you get scientists now who are tweeting. So there's, there's a scientist, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, who works for NASA and he's, he's, uh, he's one of the, it's one of the three, he's in charge of one of the three key temperature records that's kept. One of them is kept at NASA's Goodard Institute for Space Studies. And the director of Professor Gavin Schmidt reacted to the, to the February, uh, uh, guest temperature. I guess the, the Goodard Institute of Space Science or space studies, uh, temperature measurements, simply as wow. And he tweeted, normally I don't comment on individual months too much, whether or not enough climate in brackets. But last month was special. And he basically, uh, he basically links to, um, an article on the temperature of what it was. I mean, and it's just the, you see the map and you just like, this is, this is ridiculous. So you got, you know, scientists, climate scientists are saying, wow, like they've been looking at the data forever and they're like, this has been one of the biggest problems in the world. Now, of course you have El Nino event, um, so this, this event now has been the biggest since the 1998, the last big 1998, uh, El Nino event. Uh, so now this is boosting global temperatures, uh, but science are agreed that global warming driven by humanities, greenhouse gas emission is far is by far the largest factor in the astonishing run of temperature records. So this is NASA scientists. You have a post-amp scientists, which are, are in, uh, Germany who are saying, both who are saying, uh, that, that global, the global warming or climate change, they're the same thing. People, we didn't change the word global warming because it meant something different. It was just, it was just better descriptive, um, but it's the humanities greenhouse gas emissions just to put into context fossil fuel burning and the strong El Nino pushed CO2 levels up by three, by 3.05 parts per million to 402.6 parts per million compared to 2014. So pushed it up 3.05 parts per million. That's a lot. Right? CEO, CEO two levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years, said Peter Tan's lead scientist at nose global greenhouse gas reference network. It's explosive compared to the natural processes. So just goes to show that we're making these things happen. The El Nino event, I don't know how it's created and I don't know if it's because of increased greenhouse gas emissions, but the fact that we're increasing our gas greenhouse gas emissions or we're maintaining that those levels is disastrous for our earth, for this planet, for our oceans. It is disastrous. And you know, you wonder that the climate change talks back in November, December of 2015, whether those are going to do it, they're saying basically we cannot go above 1.5 degrees Celsius on it as a global average. You know, this is 1.5 degrees above pre industrial times and temperatures. We can't go above that. If we go above that, we're in big trouble. So you're going to see changes. You have we're going to have to see changes because countries are not going to be able to adapt to the difference, the differences that we're going to see in the future. You're going to see increased sea level rise. You're going to see increased frequency of storm events, large storm events like hurricanes and typhoons and cyclones and all those things that are devastating, not only the United States, but other places around the world, the Philippines, Australia, all over the place. Um, so we have to be careful with this. We have to have to reduce our emissions. This is where we have to put pressure on our politicians because if we don't put pressure on our politicians, if we don't support politicians who support less, uh, damaging fossil fuel burning, um, uh, or less damaging, uh, emissions or, or I guess processes that, that put up reduce emissions, then we're not going to survive. I don't know if you guys understand that. Like this is, this is going to change our planet and we're going to have a problem. And you may think I'm an extremist by saying this, but we really have to be careful about how we treat our planet and the fact that we're letting politicians who give in to greed and let, you know, oil and gas and fossil beer and fossil fuel burning companies, uh, support them financially to get into office. What do you think they're doing that for? Why do you think they're doing it? It's so that they give back. Those politicians have to give back to them because they supported them. It's really why I support taking money out of the situation, taking money out of the part of, um, you know, of politics and letting them, let politicians run on their own dime and or on support from people from individuals. Because if you don't have that, if you don't have the people supporting you, then what's the point of running? Why would you let companies who really represent not even 1% of the population let you get in, let you get the money so that you can get in front of people, right? That's how I feel. That might be a bit of an extreme view and it might change the way politics are happening, but here in Canada, it's the same thing, right? We under, we don't understand why, you know, when, when governments get into politics or governments get, or politicians get into government and they become in charge. All of a sudden they're giving back to their friends that supported them because they supported them. Right? It makes sense. Um, and you see that and that kind of goes into this, the, the, my next story is you see that in the elections going on in the United States right now. It is utter chaos from what I can see here from up north. I'm seeing, you know, the democratic election, the nominee election, the Republican nominee election, which is just utterly insane, insane. The fact that Donald Trump is leading the nomination race is just, it's stupid. It's just ridiculous. And I, God, I hope he doesn't get the nomination. I mean, the other two, the other two was it, uh, Cruz and I forget the other, I forget the other person, they're insane as well. And I thought, I find it funny that Mitt Romney, who is a little out there as well, uh, is out there and he looks like the sane one. He looks like the guy who's normal and is actually the rational person of the Republican party. But if you remember correctly, when he was running for president against, uh, Obama, a story came out where he rode with his dog on the roof of his car for like, like a family road trip because he thought that was okay. Right? This is a guy who's running for president that would control the free world. Right? So you have a guy who's kind of, kind of weird, little insane out there, uh, who's the, the sane one, the sane voice in the race of crazy people. Right? Of crazy. Donald Trump is not a smart man. He's in, he's inciting violence, uh, like, which is, which is crazy as a, as a, as a someone who's trying to run for president, um, and you see the difference between president Obama and Donald Trump, you see some videos where, you know, Trump is just inciting violence saying that, oh, you know, protesters at his rallies, you know, back in the day, we would just rough them up and that was, and they would never do it again. And then you have other, and then you have the other side where there's a protest out of Obama's speech and Obama keeps them in there, keeps the protester in there and allows them to speak and then speaks to them with respect, both going both ways. And that is the difference. People between intelligent, sane people and unintelligent, insane people. It's the biggest difference in the world and I'm sorry, I'm biased and I know it's kind of a tangent, but this plays a role in how the US will govern its environment, right? You have on one side, the Republicans who none of the candidates really believe that climate change is caused by humans. They don't quote unquote believe. They don't think that it's a fact. They're wrong and every scientist in the world will say they're wrong, but they don't believe it. They take, they take these little facts and they misconstrue it, misconstrue it, right? They'll take a, you know, they're saying, oh, well, you know, 1998, you know, the temperature has hasn't gone up since 1998 because that was the warmest event because that was, you know, on record, that was the warmest year and it's gone downhill ever since. But the whole trend, if you look at the graph, the whole trend has actually gone up. And it's just, it's just going up and up and up and up. So, you know, you get these politicians who take these, these little tippets of information and they misuse it, but they bring in front of the, they bring in front of the public and say it in a way that they can, that the public can understand and then they say, no, there's no problem. We're okay. We're fine. Yet we're not because you look at the world and the world is having to adapt to all this stuff, but they don't care. They just utterly don't care. All they care about are the people who are supporting them financially to get into politics. All right. So you have that side, the Republican side. Then you have the Democratic side where you have Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders who are kind of the front runners, both senators and they're kind of the front runners. Now Bernie Sanders is kind of a, you know, an interesting fellow because everybody says, oh, he's a socialist. You know, he wants everybody to be equal and all this stuff like in the States, that's a bad thing. I don't know why. I don't understand it. Maybe that's why I live in Canada, but he basically came out. There was a recent debate in Michigan where he came out and said, I am completely against fracking completely against fracking. We don't need it. It is destroying our environment. Climate change is destroying our earth and we are causing it. He came right out and said it and he says he's not supported by oil and gas companies. That's why he can say this kind of stuff, where he says his counterpart, Hillary Clinton has some backers, a super pack that is, that is consists of oil and gas and fossil fuel, fossil fuel burning industries. So her stance on it is we need to regulate it, but we don't need to get rid of it because we need it sometimes. And you hear that argument. I've said that argument. I'm like, we probably need gas. We probably need oil because our whole life is based on it. Everything we do is based on it. We're here. You have Bernie Sanders who's taking more of a stance saying, no, we don't need it. So my, my intrigue is like my, my curiosity kind of hits a high point there and be like, why don't we need it? Can we really live without it? How do we do that? What's the process? You know, it makes Bernie Sanders a very interesting candidate. And yeah, the current president right now is saying it's, you know, climate change is our biggest is the biggest threat of the world, not just the States, but the world. And it's backed up by the US Navy. It's backed up by the Pope. It's backed up by NASA. It's backed up by leagues of scientists all around the world. You know, and they take it. They take that rational information. But I guess my point of this part of the story is saying choose wisely. Choose the people wisely of who is going to be in charge of your country. If you have the ability to vote, go and vote, but inform yourself of the vote. Don't just believe what politicians are going to tell you. Make sure you do your fact checking, okay? Climate change is happening. It's not a hoax. It's not something that scientists have made up. It's not an extreme point of view. Climate change is happening. We have to deal with it. We have to reduce our emissions. We have to change the way we live. It's as simple as that. Don't let politicians who say opposite steer you otherwise, because they're not right. They're not right at all. If you look at who they're backed by, it's probably the greed that's making them say that. It's probably the fact that their campaign is backed by an oil and gas super pack or a fossil fuel burning super pack. So that is my point right now. When you have elections, it doesn't matter what country you're in and you're able to vote for a nominee or for a president or a prime minister, whoever you're allowed to vote for, a local representative, senator, Congressman, and a member of parliament here in Canada, it doesn't matter at what level. Do your homework on the people and make sure that they are right for your country and right for you and right for your community, because that's what they're going to be doing. They're going to make some major decisions. We've seen some interesting things happen in the States between the Bush administration, the last Bush administration, and Obama's administration. We've seen a difference. When Bush left the country was in a crisis, they overspent on military, the unemployment was up, the dollar was down, the US dollar was down. Obama comes in and after eight years, unemployment is down, the dollar is up. I mean, it's amazing. The difference from rational human beings. Make sure you elect a rational human being that can be in charge of a country, that can listen to both sides, not just Republican views, not just Democratic views, but both sides for the good of the country who wants to work with both sides. That's what you need. That's my advice from up here in Canada as a scientist, as a marine ecologist, as someone who loves the ocean and wants to protect and conserve it, because this is an important time, I am very scared of what's going to happen down there and down in the States. The fact that we're losing Obama scares me enough, he won't be in charge anymore after next year or after this year, I guess, but that scares me a lot. Anyway, be smart, do your homework on each candidate and vote with the facts. That's my advice to you guys. I wanted to end the show off with a little bit of a resource that I've discovered in the last bit, and it's a scientist, a fellow scientist, I don't know him well. To be honest, I'm not sure if I even know his name, but it's a YouTube channel called ScienceSciAll, S-C-I-A-L-L dot org. I just really discovered him before I came on and did this podcast. The channel is called Confessions of--or there's a bunch of playlists that are called Confessions of a Marine Biologist, and it's a really cool channel. It's a lot of just first person talking, just kind of like what I'm doing, but he puts in some videos and stuff like that, and he just talks about his time as a Marine Biologist, his projects, he's lived in the tropics before, he's done a lot of coral reef research, talks about Tahiti, he's got some really cool videos out here, and it's gaining a lot of traction and, you know, it's gaining some traction, so check that out, it's called SciAll-S-C-I-A-L-L dot org. We'll put the link in the show notes, so you'll see it in the podcast show notes, and you'll see it in the show notes at SpeakUpForBlue dot com, forward slash session 133, okay? And it's called SciAll dot org, it's Confessions of a Marine Biologist, I'm going to see if I can get the name of the person here, I don't know what his name is, and I don't know why, I don't know what his name is, sorry, I lost it a little bit here, let me just look for here it is, Mike, is it Mike Gill, Mike Gill, yeah, Mike Gill, so, so Mike G.I.L. Gill, and it's great, he's a former PhD candidate at the University of Florida, studying Marine Freshwater Biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, lives in Florida right now from Texas, and it just looks like a great guy who loves science and loves what he does, so check out that YouTube channel, so SciAll dot org, S-C-I-A-L-L dot org, the way I found is I went to YouTube, just put in the search SciAll dot org, and he came, he was the first one to come up and just watch some of his videos, his most recent video is him talking about how he teamed up with a bunch of European researchers to study coral reefs in the tropics, in the South East Pacific, or South West Pacific, sorry, and he talked about the differences between sort of an American field station and a European field station, I think it was French, and he talked about a little bit of the differences and a little bit of the things that he had to adapt to, and I thought it was pretty cool, so, anyway, check that out, so it's Mike Gill at SciAll dot org, you just put together these videos and I think it's fantastic that he's doing it, maybe we'll get him on the show one time and talk about it, maybe on a blab, we'll see, try and get ahold of them, but anyway, that's your resource for today, that is your podcast for today, I hope you enjoyed sort of this ocean news update, I'm actually thinking of doing some videos myself with this kind of stuff, let me know if you like it, you can tweet me @SpeakUpForBlue, or you can just, just, you know, go on the show notes, put a comment, speakupforblue.com/session133, I want to thank you for listening to SpeakUpForBlue podcast, I am your host, Andrew Lewin, happy Wednesday, and happy conservation. 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