The push to save a rare ecosystem in Nova Scotia

(Moira Donovan/CBC)

Just outside Kingston, N.S., biologist Sherman Boates crouches over a yellow flower growing out of the sand. "Watch your feet," he says. "It's an endangered species." 

The flower, known as rock rose or Canada frostweed, isn't all that's facing extinction along this stretch of highway. So is its entire habitat, a globally rare ecosystem known as the Annapolis Valley sand barrens. 

The area is "very rare in terms of North America, but many of us locally don't really know that it exists, or how interesting and how important it is," said Boates. 

Over hundreds of years, human activity has reduced the sand barrens to roughly three per cent of their original size. Now, scientists and a community organization called Clean Annapolis River Project are trying to build awareness about the ecosystem to stem further decline.

The Annapolis Valley sand barrens — "barren" because there are few trees and vegetation is low to the ground — are formed by ancient sand deposits running from roughly Kentville to Middleton. "It's quite a big ecosystem," said Boates, but much of it has been destroyed or degraded by activities such as agriculture. 

He said that for decades, scientists had resigned themselves to the disappearance of the habitat. But that's changed thanks to measures such as federal funding aimed at identifying places important for species at risk.

A project aimed at protecting the sand barrens, run by Clean Annapolis River Project, has set out to identify the threats and develop ways to address them. 

While all levels of government have potential roles in the project, community members have a particularly important part to play, said Katie McLean, CARP's communications and outreach co-ordinator. 

"If people can recognize maybe three of these plants that we see covering the ground around us, they're going to start to recognize if they're recreating or if they're living in sand barrens," said McLean.

With that recognition, they may start to take steps to preserve this ecosystem, MacLean said.

In its initial stages, the project is asking people to get involved by helping to document some of the species found in the sand barrens. In future years, the organization hopes to expand to restoration efforts, by encouraging people to change how they manage their land to include more plants that grow naturally in the ecosystem.

The sand barrens wouldn't support growth of Kentucky bluegrass lawns, "but a lot of people want their lawns to look like that," said McLean. "Unfortunately, [sand barrens] has a bad reputation. I recall one person kind of lamenting … 'How do we get rid of it?' So there's still that work to do to help people understand that this is something we should be excited to see and celebrate."

In the long term, McLean said the work CARP is doing now could help make a case for designating the sand barrens as an entire ecosystem in need of protection. Sherman Boates agrees.

"Just like we don't want to see the piping plover disappear, we don't want to see the Annapolis Valley sand barrens get smaller and smaller, and more and more degraded, and blink out before we even know."

— Moira Donovan

The Big Picture: Wildfire damage in the U.S.

It's been a week of hellacious weather in the U.S. While the country is contending with Hurricane Laura on its southern coast, California is in the middle of another pitched battle with wildfires. It is estimated that 90 per cent of wildfires are caused by humans (either deliberately or through negligence), but scientists say that climate change tends to make them worse. While California has become synonymous with fires, it isn't the only state with this problem. The graphic below shows the states with the highest susceptibility to wildfires — and how many homes are at risk of damage.

(CBC)

How cold was the ice age? Researchers now know

by University of Arizona
  

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A University of Arizona-led team has nailed down the temperature of the last ice age—the Last Glacial Maximum of 20,000 years ago—to about 46 degrees Fahrenheit (7.8 C).


Their findings allow climate scientists to better understand the relationship between today's rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide—a major greenhouse gas—and average global temperature.

The Last Glacial Maximum, or LGM, was a frigid period when huge glaciers covered about half of North America, Europe and South America and many parts of Asia, while flora and fauna that were adapted to the cold thrived.

"We have a lot of data about this time period because it has been studied for so long," said Jessica Tierney, associate professor in the UArizona Department of Geosciences. "But one question science has long wanted answers to is simple: How cold was the ice age?"

Tracking Temperature

Tierney is lead author of a paper published today in Nature that found that the average global temperature of the ice age was 6 degrees Celsius (11 F) cooler than today. For context, the average global temperature of the 20th century was 14 C (57 F).

"In your own personal experience that might not sound like a big difference, but, in fact, it's a huge change," Tierney said.

She and her team also created maps to illustrate how temperature differences varied in specific regions across the globe.

"In North America and Europe, the most northern parts were covered in ice and were extremely cold. Even here in Arizona, there was big cooling," Tierney said. "But the biggest cooling was in high latitudes, such as the Arctic, where it was about 14 C (25 F) colder than today."

Their findings fit with scientific understanding of how Earth's poles react to temperature changes.

"Climate models predict that the high latitudes will get warmer faster than low latitudes," Tierney said. "When you look at future projections, it gets really warm over the Arctic. That's referred to as polar amplification. Similarly, during the LGM, we find the reverse pattern. Higher latitudes are just more sensitive to climate change and will remain so going forward."


Counting Carbon

Knowing the temperature of the ice age matters because it is used to calculate climate sensitivity, meaning how much the global temperature shifts in response to atmospheric carbon.

Tierney and her team determined that for every doubling of atmospheric carbon, global temperature should increase by 3.4 C (6.1 F), which is in the middle of the range predicted by the latest generation of climate models (1.8 to 5.6 C).

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the ice age were about 180 parts per million, which is very low. Before the Industrial Revolution, levels rose to about 280 parts per million, and today they've reached 415 parts per million.

"The Paris Agreement wanted to keep global warming to no larger than 2.7 F (1.5 C) over pre-industrial levels, but with carbon dioxide levels increasing the way they are, it would be extremely difficult to avoid more than 3.6 F (2 C) of warming," Tierney said. "We already have about 2 F (1.1 C) under our belt, but the less warm we get the better, because the Earth system really does respond to changes in carbon dioxide."

Making a Model

Since there were no thermometers in the ice age, Tierney and her team developed models to translate data collected from ocean plankton fossils into sea-surface temperatures. They then combined the fossil data with climate model simulations of the LGM using a technique called data assimilation, which is used in weather forecasting.

"What happens in a weather office is they measure the temperature, pressure, humidity and use these measurements to update a forecasting model and predict the weather," Tierney said. "Here, we use the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research climate model to produce a hindcast of the LGM, and then we update this hindcast with the actual data to predict what the climate was like."

In the future, Tierney and her team plan to use the same technique to recreate warm periods in Earth's past.

"If we can reconstruct past warm climates," she said, "then we can start to answer important questions about how the Earth reacts to really high carbon dioxide levels, and improve our understanding of what future climate change might hold."


Explore further   Ancient plankton help researchers predict near-future climate
More information: Glacial cooling and climate sensitivity revisited, Nature (2020).  

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2617-x , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2617-x
Journal information: Nature


Provided by University of Arizona

Asteroid passing Earth before the election is real, but NASA isn't worried
The Michael Jordan-size asteroid has a 0.41% chance of entering Earth's atmosphere.
Amanda Kooser
Aug. 26, 2020
  

Enlarge Image
Artist's concept of a near-earth asteroid.NASA/JPL-CalTech

It's easy to look at 2020 and assume an asteroid coming in close to Earth this year will be just one more disaster to add to the pile. But it's going to be OK, at least as far as asteroid 2018 VP1 is concerned.

Yes, the asteroid is scheduled to get uncomfortably close to Earth on Nov. 2, the day before the US elections. It may even enter our atmosphere, but it doesn't herald doomsday.

NASA Asteroid Watch, which keeps an eye on these space rocks, tweeted some reassurances on Sunday.

Asteroid 2018 VP1 measures roughly 6.5 feet (2 meters) in diameter. "It currently has a 0.41% chance of entering our planet's atmosphere, but if it did, it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size," NASA said.

Asteroid 2018 VP1 is more of a space speck than a big bad harbinger of destruction. Space is a busy place and asteroids sweep past Earth all the time, including the occasional surprise asteroid that sneaks up on us.

NASA has been tracking 2018 VP1 since, well, 2018. We knew it was coming back for a visit. If it does hit our atmosphere, it will be much worse for the asteroid than it will be for us.

“Consciousness” –Existing Beyond Matter, Or in the Central Nervous System as an Afterthought of Nature?



Does human consciousness exist separate from matter, or is it embodied in the body –a critical player in anything that has to do with mind? “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” answers neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who pioneered the field of embodied consciousness –the bodily origins of our sense of self. “We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence,” he says. “we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind.”

Consciousness is considered by leading scientists as the central unsolved mystery of the 21st Century: “I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness,” says Edward Witten, theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey who has been compared to Isaac Newton and Einstein about the phenomena that has been described as assuming the role spacetime did before Einstein invented his theory of relativity.

Some scientists have asked how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? One popular, if mystical, idea, writes astrophysicist Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine, “is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician’s mind somehow ‘breaking through’ into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether.”

The English astronomer, Fred Hoyle, infamous for his rejection of the Big Bang theory, suggested an even more radical hypothesis: that quantum effects in the human brain leave open the possibility of a “superintelligence in the cosmic future using a subtle but well-known backwards-in-time property of quantum mechanics in order to steer scientific progress.”

Four billion years ago, writes Damasio, in The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind, “the first primitive organisms monitored changes in their bodily state – equivalent to hunger, thirst, pain and so on – and had feedback mechanisms to maintain equilibrium. The relic of those primitive mechanisms is our autonomic nervous system, which controls bodily functions such as heartbeat and digestion, and of which we are largely unconscious.

Then, about half a billion years ago, the central nervous system, featuring a brain, evolved an afterthought of nature,” says Damasio who a proposes three layered theory of consciousness based on a hierarchy of stages, with each stage building upon the last. The most basic representation of the organism is referred to as the Protoself, next is Core Consciousness, and finally, Extended Consciousness.

Damasio, who is an internationally recognized leader in neuroscience, was educated at the University of Lisbon and currently directs the University of Southern California Brain and Creativity Institute. The human brain, he argues, became the “anchor” of what had once been a more distributed mind. Changes in bodily state were projected onto the brain and experienced as emotions or drives – the emotion of fear, say, or the drive to eat. Subjectivity evolved later again, he argues. “It was imposed by the musculoskeletal system, which evolved as a physical framework for the central nervous system and, in so doing, also provided a stable frame of reference: the unified ‘I’ of conscious experience.”

Life was regulated at first without feelings of any sort; here was no mind and no consciousness. 

“There was,” Damasio writes, “a set of homeostatic mechanisms blindly making the choices that would turn out to be more conducive to survival. The arrival of nervous systems, capable of mapping and image making, opened the way for simple minds to enter the scene. During the Cambrian explosion, after numerous mutations, certain creatures with nervous systems would have generated not just images of the world around them but also an imagetic counterpart to the busy process of life regulation that was going on underneath. This would have been the ground for a corresponding mental state, the thematic content of which would have been valenced in tune with the condition of life, at that moment, in that body. The quality of the ongoing life state would have been felt.”

Enter Sarah Garfinkel, at the University of Sussex, UK, who joins Damasio in arguing that our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are shaped in part by the internal signals that arise from our body. But, she reports in New Scientist: “it goes beyond that. It is leading her and others to a surprising conclusion: that the body helps to generate our sense of self and is a key part of consciousness. This idea has practical implications in assessing people who show little sign of consciousness. It may also force us to reconsider where we draw the line between life and death, and provide a new insight into how consciousness evolved.”

Since 2000, concludes Damasio, “I have been defending the idea that the body is a critical player in anything that has to do with mind.”

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via New Scientist and Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes Error and the Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind and Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine –All Kindle editions

Image credit: Shutterstock License

SCIENTISTS: BACTERIA COULD SURVIVE TRIP TO MARS ON OUTSIDE OF SPACECRAFT

GERALT VIA PIXABAY/FUTURISM
A DAY AGO__JON CHRISTIAN__FILED UNDER: OFF WORLD

The Hitcher

Researchers in Japan say that a sample of bacteria managed to survive in the vacuum of space, on the exterior of the International Space Station, for three entire years — raising the possibility that errant organisms could unknowing hitch a ride to Mars on an exploration mission.

“The results suggest that [bacteria] could survive during the travel from Earth to Mars and vice versa, which is several months or years in the shortest orbit,” said Akihiko Yamagishi, a professor of molecular biology at Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences who worked on the research, in a press release about the research.
Mars Tho

According to a new paper about the research published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, the bacteria in question is called Deinococcus, which tends to form small colonies and is resistant to ultraviolet radiation.


Yamagishi has previously investigated the hearty Deinococcus’ ability to survive miles above the Earth’s surface using balloons and aircraft.
Panspermia

Yamagishi’s research was motivated by the theory of panspermia, which posits that life is capable of spreading through space, perhaps by hitching a ride on meteorites.

“The origin of life on Earth is the biggest mystery of human beings,” Yamagashi said. “Scientists can have totally different points of view on the matter. Some think that life is very rare and happened only once in the Universe, while others think that life can happen on every suitable planet. If panspermia is possible, life must exist much more often than we previously thought.”


READ MORE: Bacteria could survive travel between Earth and Mars when forming aggregates [EurekAlert]

More on panspermia: New Evidence That Life on Earth Could Have Come From Outer Space


Could life have started on Mars before coming to Earth? Possibly, new study suggests

Japanese study tackles hypothesis of panspermia, where life could travel between planets

Nicole Mortillaro · CBC News · Posted: Aug 26, 2020

New research suggests that bacteria could survive in space and could have even come from Mars to Earth. (NASA/GSFC)
How life arose on Earth remains a mystery, though many theories have been proposed. Now a new study by Japanese scientists has reinvigorated the discussion around panspermia: The idea that life may have reached Earth from Mars.

The panspermia hypothesis suggests life may have arisen on another planet, with bacteria travelling through space, hitching a ride on a piece of rock or other means, eventually making its long-distance journey to Earth. Mars is a particularly appealing source, as studies suggest it was once potentially habitable with a large hemispheric ocean.

However, the biggest challenge has been determining if bacteria could survive the harsh interplanetary — or even intragalactic — journey.

To answer that question, a group of Japanese scientists, in participation with the Japanese space agency, JAXA, conducted an experiment on the International Space Station.

In the new study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers of Microbiology, researchers found, with some shielding, some bacteria could survive harsh ultraviolet radiation in space for up to 10 years.
Protective shield

For their experiment, the team used Deinococcal bacteria, well-known for tolerating large amounts of radiation. They placed dried aggregates (think of them as a collection of bacteria) varying in thickness (in the sub-millimetre range) in exposure panels outside the space station for one, two and three years beginning in 2015.

Early results in 2017 suggested the top layer of aggregates died but ultimately provided a kind of protective shield for the underlying bacteria that continued to live. Still, it was unclear whether that sub-layer would survive beyond one year.


NASA launches mission to Mars
28 days ago

NASA launched its next-generation Mars rover, Perseverance, which will endeavour to collect samples of Martian soil and rocks during a months-long mission. They will be the first material brought back to earth from another planet and could provide evidence about the possibility of life on Mars. 1:53

The new three-year experiment found they could. Aggregates larger than 0.5 mm all survived below the top layer.

Researchers hypothesized that a colony larger than one millimetre could survive up to eight years in space. If the colony was further shielded by a rock — perhaps ejected after something slammed into a planet such as Mars — its lifespan could extend up to 10 years.

Akihiko Yamagishi, a professor at Tokyo University in the department of pharmacy and life sciences who was principal investigator of the Tanpopo mission designed to test the durability of microorganisms on the ISS, said one of the important findings is that microbes could indeed survive the voyage from Mars to Earth.

"It increases the probability of the process, [making it] much higher," Yamagishi said in an interview.

Once life took hold in Earth's oceans, it thrived. (Great Barrier Reef National Park Authority/Reuters)

"Some think that life is very rare and happened only once in the universe, while others think that life can happen on every suitable planet. If panspermia is possible, life must exist much more often than we previously thought."

There are two important factors, he believes: Mars and Earth come relatively close together in their orbits every two years, which would allow time for transfer of bacteria; and the RNA World theory.

The theory hypothesizes that Earth was once composed of self-replicating ribonucleic acids (RNA) before deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and other proteins took hold. Yamagishi believes that RNA could have once existed on Mars before conditions for life arose on Earth and potentially travelled towards Earth bringing along RNA which began to seed our planet.
Not 'ironclad proof'

This isn't the first experiment to see whether bacteria could survive in space.

In past experiments, where microbes were mixed with clay, sugar or other elements, the bacteria died. However, this is the most promising finding to date supporting the panspermia hypothesis.

While some research suggests bacteria could survive a trip embedded in rock, this is the first of its kind to suggest they could survive without that kind of aid, what the researchers term "massapanspermia."

However, it's not an open and shut case.

"Actually proving that it could happen is another thing, so I wouldn't say that this is ironclad proof," said Mike Reid, a professor at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics who wasn't involved in the Japanese study. "It's certainly leading in that direction."

Surface of Mars shows scars of glaciers just like Canada's High Arctic: study
It's Alive! Algae Survive 16 Months Exposure To Space

Does Reid believe life could have made its way from Mars to Earth?

"If you'd asked me 20 years ago, I would have said no, of course not. But now, it's a little hard to say," he said. "I think we won't be able to answer that question until we've had a really thorough look at the surface of Mars ... did it ever have life ... and was it like us?"

The answer to that question could come in the form of NASA's Perseverance mission to Mars that launched on July 30. One of the main goals of the state-of-the-art rover is to look for past signs of life on the red planet, taking samples to be returned to Earth at a later date.

While promising, the Japanese research team acknowledged that, while their research strengthens the case for panspermia, other factors need to be considered, such as whether bacteria could survive the descent through Earth's atmosphere.

Canadian company creates concrete from carbon dioxide in the air
Isabella O'Malley
Digital Reporter, Environmental Scientist


Thursday, August 27th 2020, 6:00 am - A Canadian cleantech company is fighting climate change by capturing carbon dioxide from a plentiful and perhaps obvious resource - the air we breathe.

Concrete’s omnipresence is undeniable and roughly 70 per cent of the world’s population lives in a structure that contains this material. Most of our built environment, including homes, schools, hospitals and buildings, was created with concrete because of its strength and relatively cheap cost. It is also incredibly versatile, which is why it is the second most widely used substance on Earth after water.

This use has come at a cost.

The concrete industry is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions globally and generates the most carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per dollar of revenue. Approximately 8 per cent of humanity’s carbon footprint comes from concrete and the only sources of greenhouse gases that are higher come from coal, oil and gas.

Most of the greenhouse gas emissions from concrete come from manufacturing cement, which is concrete’s primary ingredient. Limestone and clay are heated to 1,400°C to start the calcination process, which releases 50 per cent of concrete’s carbon emissions. The fossil fuels that heat the limestone account for 40 per cent and the fuel used for mining and transporting the concrete make up 10 per cent of the carbon emissions.

TRAP THE CARBON INSTEAD
Our reliance on concrete won’t disappear anytime soon, so CarbonCure, a Canadian cleantech company, designed a technology that injects captured CO2 from the air to permanently store it in concrete.

The company sources CO2 from industrial gas suppliers, which is then injected into wet concrete during the mixing process. As the materials are mixed, the CO2 undergoes a mineralization process that converts the gas into nano-sized minerals that strengthen the concrete and reduces the amount of cement needed. This procedure comes without compromising performance.


carboncure concrete Concrete made with CarbonCure technology was used to build the East Deicing Apron at Calgary International Airport in 2019. Credit: CarbonCure

“By using CarbonCure and manufacturing CO2 mineralized concrete, producers reduce the carbon footprint of their concrete by an average of 4-6 per cent,” said CarbonCure during an interview with The Weather Network.

“Every cubic metre of CO2 mineralized produced with CarbonCure reduces carbon emissions by 17 kg; so an average building made with CO2 mineralized concrete would reduce CO2 emissions by approximately 120,000 kg. That's equivalent to the carbon absorbed by 160 acres of forest in a year, or the emissions generated from driving 480,000 km.”

CarbonCure was founded in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2012 and has since contributed to several large-scale projects using its technology, including the construction of one of its own buildings. Four years after the company formed, the Ambassatours Headquarters was built with 93,900 kg of CO2 that was captured from the air.

Another notable project that saved an impressive 160,000 kg of CO2 is the East Deicing Apron at the Calgary International Airport, which is equivalent to 85 hectares of forest absorbing CO2 in a one year period. The new centralized deicing pad was built in 2019 and involved the second-largest pour of CarbonCure concrete in a single project and the largest quantity to be used at a Canadian airport.


CONCRETE PRODUCTION EXPECTED TO GROW
Experts predict that growth in concrete production will coincide with global urbanization and economic development, which is why sustainable alternatives are needed to lower its exorbitant impact on the climate.

A study conducted by McKinsey & Company found that scaling innovative technologies can help the concrete industry reduce its 2017-level CO2 emissions by over 75 per cent by 2050. The company says that concrete will likely remain the top construction material globally due to the availability of limestone and cement, but the COVID-19 pandemic is providing opportunities for alternative sustainable materials.

“As players address the challenges of uncertain demand, they have an opportunity to reset strategies: identifying the best path toward decarbonization, assessing digital and technological advancements to invest in, and rethinking their products, portfolios, partnerships, and construction methodologies—areas we explore later,” McKinsey & Company states.

“Forward-thinking players could have an opportunity to leapfrog and become the industry front-runners.”

The study concludes that innovative approaches, including new technologies and alternative building materials, will be “indispensable” to achieve carbon reduction targets by 2050.

LGBT rights

How Trump's chief pink-washer is setting back LGBT+ equality  Mark Gevisser

Only a week after his ad endorsing the president’s pro-gay credentials, Richard Grenell seems to have forgotten his brief

Fri 28 Aug 2020
 

LGBT+ adviser Richard Grenell recording his speech for the Republican convention. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP


Richard Grenell, who spoke at the Republican party’s convention on Wednesday night, is an openly gay former US ambassador to Germany who has just been appointed the Trump campaign’s senior adviser on LGBTQ+ outreach. But just a week after Grenell launched a campaign advertisement in which he describes Trump as “the most pro-gay president in American history”, he remained utterly silent on the matter at the convention podium, choosing instead to focus his speech on the president’s “America first” foreign policy.

This is unsurprising, given not only Trump’s evangelical Christian base, but also how easy it is to disprove the claims made by Grenell in the earlier ad. In it, he distorts timelines and mashes up facts to present Joe Biden as a homophobe and Trump as some kind of rainbow warrior. He even claims that the US president initiated a global campaign to decriminalise homosexuality at the United Nations last year.
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Trump, in fact, uttered a single sentence on the issue at the 2019 UN general assembly, as part of Grenell’s high-profile but empty global decriminalisation campaign. At a UN meeting he convened, Grenell said he wanted the 69 countries in which homosexuality was still illegal to be called out “on a daily basis”, and according to state department insiders, Grenell lobbied furiously for aid to these countries to be suspended if they did not drop their anti-gay laws.

If the global dynamics over LGBTQ+ rights in the past decade have shown one thing, it is that such intervention only strengthens the efforts of homophobic leaders, buttressing their claims that anti-gay policies protect their peoples’ “traditional values” and “cultural sovereignty” from the immoral west. It thus only makes life worse for LGBTQ+ people on the ground. When David Cameron was prime minister in 2011, he mooted that international aid should be conditional on decriminalisation: this caused a marked uptick in hostility to LGBTQ+ people in some African countries, and almost all the continent’s leading activists signed a statement disassociating themselves from the notion. In a similar vein, the Russian activist Igor Yasin wrote in 2013: “Russia needs its own Stonewall, not western sanctions.”

During Barack Obama’s term, the US government generally understood this, and trod carefully. It moved multilaterally and stayed in the background at the UN, working hard to support local activists. Particularly during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Proactive US missions actually made a difference to LGBTQ+ activists around the world – although there were some notable mis-steps, such as the hosting of an LGBT Pride event in Pakistan in 2011, two months after the US assassination of Osama bin Laden on that country’s soil.

Some of this work has continued in the Trump years, but as elsewhere in US foreign policy, any notion of multilateralism has been thrown to the wind. And many of Grenell’s fellow Trump supporters, including conservative gay Republicans, deny that transgender people exist at all; abroad as at home, the US government has stepped away from any association with trans rights.

Meanwhile, the pro-gay stick can be used as another weapon against the US’s enemies. Listen, for instance, to Grenell’s words in his campaign ad: “President Trump fully supported our fight to crush the homophobic and barbaric Islamic terrorist organisation Hezbollah and the Iranian regime that supports them.”

This is an increasingly common tactic: rightwing European politicians, such as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, use the alleged homophobia of Muslims to justify their anti-immigration policies, while Israel uses its pro-LGBTQ+ policies to garner support in the US and western Europe, and to promote itself as a beacon of tolerance in a hostile neighbourhood. By promoting gay rights, activists claim, Israel “pink-washes” its human rights abuse of Palestinians. Now Grenell has become a pink-washer for Donald Trump: he chases the gay vote in the US (albeit not during the RNC) by suggesting that the “American” values Trump seeks to defend – against immigrants, and foreign powers, of course – include the protection of gay people. This is all the more egregious because of the Trump administration’s actual record: its opposition, for instance, to the LGBTQ+ employment discrimination cases ruled on by the supreme court in June, on the basis of a protection of religious freedom.

In contrast, Joe Biden’s extensive LGBTQ+ platform sets out to build on the gains made during the Obama era. It also tries to strike a balance in foreign policy between, on the one hand, the “aggressive” use of “pressure tactics” such as global Magnitsky sanctions, and “culturally appropriate information campaigns” and helping local organisations and activists on the other. And, in Congress, Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris is a co-sponsor of the Greater Leadership Overseas for the Benefit of Equality (Globe) Act, which sets out a comprehensive vision for the role that the US should play in promoting global LGBTQ+ equality.

Biden and the Globe act also emphasise the importance of immigration reform for LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in the US. As I watched Grenell put on a rainbow-coloured “Make America Great Again” cap in his pro-Trump campaign ad, I thought of Camila Díaz Córdova, who was murdered in El Salvador in 2018. A few months previously she had petitioned for asylum in the US, armed with documentation of previous threats on her life, because she was transgender. She was deported before she was given the chance to argue her case.

• Mark Gevisser is the author of The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers

THE GUARDIAN

UPDATED 
Pandemic has brought Canadians together, pushed Americans apart, poll suggests

88% of Canadians said they approved of country's response to COVID-19

The Canadian Press · Posted: Aug 27, 2020


Families in Toronto’s east end Danforth neighbourhood bang pots and pans on April 15 as part of a nightly salute to health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new survey suggests two-thirds of Canadian respondents feel more united than before the outbreaks. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

Canadians believe the COVID-19 crisis has brought their country together, while Americans blame the pandemic for worsening their cultural and political divide, a new international public opinion survey suggests.

Fully two-thirds of Canadian respondents to the Pew Research Center study released Thursday say they believe Canada is more united as a result of the coronavirus, while 77 per cent of U.S. participants feel precisely the opposite is true south of the border.

"In the U.S., where a patchwork of coronavirus-related restrictions reflects broad disagreement over the best path to economic recovery while mitigating the spread of the virus, roughly three-quarters say that the U.S. is more divided than before the coronavirus outbreak," the centre said in a release.

"In contrast, nearly three-quarters in Denmark say there is more unity now than before the coronavirus outbreak. More than half in Canada, Sweden, South Korea and Australia also say their countries have become more united since the coronavirus outbreak."

A similar bilateral gap emerged when those surveyed were asked about how their respective countries responded to the emergency.
In Canada, 88 per cent of respondents said they approved of their country's response to COVID-19, compared with just 47 per cent of Americans who feel the same way about how the U.S. has responded.

The difference of opinion in the U.S. was tied to the political affiliations of those who took part in the survey, said Kat Devlin, one of the Pew research associates who compiled the report. Of those identified as Republican, 76 per cent cheered the government response, compared with 25 per cent of Democrats.

Political splits

"In a way, in the U.S., we do see these political splits among the two main political parties that may affect the overall views of the U.S. compared with in Canada."

A separate online poll conducted over the weekend by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies asked Canadian and Americans alike which of the two countries they believed had better handled the outbreak.

Fully 87 per cent of Canadian respondents said their country's response had been "much" or "somewhat" better than that in the U.S., while only 38 per cent of Americans agreed. Nearly as many — 37 per cent — gave the U.S. higher marks than Canada, while 25 per cent gave no answer.


The Pew survey also found a distinct link between respondents disappointed in the response to the pandemic in their country and the likelihood they felt divisions had worsened.

"In every country surveyed, those who think their country has done a bad job of dealing with the coronavirus outbreak are more likely to say that their country is now more divided."

The disparate versions of reality in the U.S. when it comes to COVID-19 have been on clear display over the last two weeks as America's political parties, their eyes squarely on the Nov. 3 presidential election, have used their national conventions to spin competing narratives.

Joe Biden's Democrats have excoriated Donald Trump's response to the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, accusing the president of "devastating, inexcusable management" and his operatives of lying "through their teeth" about it.

Republicans, meanwhile, insist the crisis is under control, even as the death toll — 183,000 people to date out of a world-leading six million cases — continues to rise.

Regardless of their political affiliation, Americans surveyed agreed that divisions in the U.S. have widened since the pandemic began, Devlin said.

"This is actually one question where Republicans and Democrats are somewhat united in their answers," she said. "About three-quarters at least in both parties do feel this sense of national division here."

Women, who typically do more unpaid work at home such as child care, reported a disproportionate impact from the pandemic in 12 of 14 countries surveyed. (Katerina Georgieva/CBC)

The Canadian portion of the Pew study involved 1,037 respondents across the country who were surveyed by phone between June 15 and July 27, and the American section had 1,003 U.S. participants who took part between June 16 and July 14.

Both components of the survey carry a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

14 countries

The survey, which involved participants from 14 countries including the U.K., France, Italy, Australia, Japan and South Korea, also found a majority of respondents believe the global spread of COVID-19 could have been mitigated with stronger international co-operation. That sentiment was especially strong in Europe, which was hit hard by the virus in the earliest days of the pandemic, particularly in Italy and Spain.

In the U.S., where Trump has largely taken a go-it-alone approach, 58 per cent of respondents said the number of American cases could have been reduced had the country worked more closely with other countries.

Women who took part in the survey reported a disproportionate impact from the pandemic in 12 of the 14 represented countries. In Canada, 69 per cent reported that their lives had changed either a "great deal" or a "fair amount," compared with 57 per cent of men.

"Women around the world typically do more unpaid work at home than their male counterparts, such as child care and housework, and this may be amplified by closure of schools and day care centres to combat the spread of COVID-19," Pew reported.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has also said that more women than men around the world are employed part-time, "which is more likely to have been interrupted by the pandemic."

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/08/27/most-approve-of-national-response-to-covid-19-in-14-advanced-economies/

At RNC, Trump gave ‘what may have been the worst convention speech of my lifetime’
For the first time in memory, Donald Trump was a bore

 John Podhoretz | New York Post

But then, just as he did in the worst weeks of April and May, he found himself stumbling in his self-justification. At one point he garbled his words and said, “Thanks to advances, we have pioneered the fatality rate” — when he wanted to say that pioneering advances have led to an 80 percent drop in the fatality rate since April. A convention speech watched by tens of millions is not the greatest time to slip up in this way. You don’t want your most memorable moment to be a mistake