The Incredible Shrinking Human


In the past few weeks, we’ve heard about how climate change is threatening:

Now it’s apparently also threatening the global height balance—and in turn the power dynamics of the World Cup and professional basketball. Steve LeVine explains in Foreign Policy:

According to a report in Nature Climate Change, two researchers at the National University of Singapore have found that species are shrinking with the march of climate change — including humans. “Reduced food supplies are likely to mean that animals at the top of their food chains — including humans — will grow to smaller sizes, have fewer offspring, and be more vulnerable to disease,” writes the Daily Telegraph, reporting on the study.

Studies have shown that global warming will affect regions of the Earth differently — some countries will see stark affects, and others won’t. Applying that concept, one over time could find soccer or basketball players who grow up in drought-stricken regions — say, the state of Texas (the Dallas Mavericks’s current crop is pictured above) — outclassed by athletes from currently underrated, rain-drenched locales such as the Indian state of Assam. Scouts pay attention.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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