Climate Change Could be Just the Tonic Humanity Needs

As we keep being told in Britain, mainly by the BBC, climate change is causing extreme weather around the world which threatens to destroy mankind. We also have the brave student-loan and state pension funded activists of JSO and XR to help remind us of our suicidal plunge into oblivion.

But not so fast. According to the BBC, some primates actually respond well to bad weather:

Macaque monkeys got on better with others in their social groups after a devastating hurricane, according to researchers.

Researchers studied the impacts of a hurricane on a population of Rhesus macaques on an island off Puerto Rico.

Temperatures are often around 40C so shade is a precious resource for macaques, since tree cover is still far below pre-hurricane levels.

Macaques, who are known for being aggressive and competitive, have become more tolerant of one another to get access to scarce shade.

“It’s extremely hot, it’s not just uncomfortable, but actually dangerous for one’s health if you don’t manage to lower your body temperature,” said Dr Camille Testard, a neuroscience research fellow at Harvard.

In 2017 Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, killing more than 3,000 people and destroying 63% of the vegetation on Cayo Santiago.

The island is also known as Monkey Island and is home to the macaques studied by the researchers.

The study, which was led by the universities of Pennsylvania and Exeter and published in the journal Science, found that storm damage changed the evolutionary benefits of sharing shade and tolerating others.

“We expected that after the disaster in a more competitive landscape with less shade resources, you would have perhaps more aggression. But actually, that’s really not what we found. We found the opposite pattern,” said Dr Testard.

Using data collected before and after the hurricane, the researchers examined the strength and number of social ties among macaques.

If macaques can find that inner Blitz Spirit as a result of a spot of bad weather, why not Britain too?

We all know how similar human beings are to primates, especially the more social ones. It seems from this remarkable discovery that if climate change can be ramped up several gears in order to have as many hurricanes, typhoons, and other catastrophic events as possible, human beings might also become more cooperative and tolerant of one another. It’s even possible climate activists might rejoin the human race instead of belligerently forcing their opinions on other people and chucking orange paint over national treasures.

Given how fractious, intolerant and divisive Britain has become (and it’s far from alone), the best bet would be for the incoming government to celebrate every extreme weather event as a way to rebuild Broken Britain and recover our Blitz Spirit. We could even Clap For Climate Change on Thursday evenings.

So far the BBC’s climate correspondents haven’t made the connection, but with luck they will.

Worth reading in full.