气候变化谁受害？ 诸平 气候变化是一个不可否认的客观事实，面对其变化谁又会是未来的受害者呢？Catherine Offord2018年7月1日发表于 T he Scientist 的文章给出了答案，特摘引如下，仅供参考。 Identifying Future Victims of Climate Change Assessments of species vulnerability provide crucial information for conservation efforts. But the science behind them is still evolving. Jul 1, 2018 Catherine Offord I n late 2014, conservationist Ian Gynther lost hope. After days spent crawling into rock crevices, scouring through camera-trap footage, and carefully laying bait around Bramble Cay—a tiny island at the northern end of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—there was little room for doubt. The Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), a furry little rodent endemic to the island, had gone extinct. “My colleagues and I were devastated,” Gynther, a senior conservation officer at Queensland’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, later told The Guardian . “As each day of our comprehensive survey passed without revealing any trace of the animal, we became more and more depressed.” The disappearance of the Bramble Cay melomys became a grim milestone in the history of conservation biology. Its extinction report, published in 2016, determined the cause of death to be anthropogenic climate change, the first such attribution for a mammalian species. 1 The rodents’ home had been battered by increasingly extreme weather, storm surges, and rising sea levels, Gynther and his colleagues wrote in the report, pointing “to human-induced climate change being the root cause.” The melomys will not be the last species to meet this fate. As global temperatures rise, more and more of the Earth’s millions of species are experiencing environmental change at a rate that may well be unprecedented in our planet’s history. A recent meta-analysis of research on more than 2,000 species suggested that nearly 50 percent of threatened, nonflying terrestrial mammals and 23 percent of threatened birds had already been negatively affected by climate change in at least part of their ranges. 2 And with climate change accelerating many deleterious global dynamics, such as ice melt and ocean acidification, the damage is likely to continue. Faced with this sobering reality, conservation biologists are increasingly shifting their focus from documenting the effects of climate change on the world’s wildlife to trying to forecast the risk that individual taxa or ecosystems will be lost—and do so early enough to intervene. Due to varying exposure and differences in biology, not all organisms are equally likely to suffer. So, to best allocate limited resources, “what we really want to be able to do is pinpoint those species that are most at risk,” says the University of Connecticut’s Mark Urban , an ecologist who works in Arctic Alaska. “We need to identify the winners and the losers. And then try to help the losers.” Over the last decade, more and more researchers have been working to measure this risk for taxa across the tree of life. The tools that provide the foundations for these so-called climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) range from models of future habitat availability to analyses based on the physiological effects of projected temperature increases, and can be conducted for one or multiple species at a time. The results, which can be expressed as the estimated extinction risk of a species or its categorization into broad classes such as “highly vulnerable,” are cited by conservation planning organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But conservation biologists are still working to improve the methodology behind these assessments. Bruce Stein , chief scientist at the National Wildlife Federation, notes that researchers are increasingly addressing questions such as, “What does climate vulnerability mean?” and, “What are some of the different techniques for assessing it?” Yet, as in any discipline that deals with prediction, researchers working on CCVAs are grappling with a suite of challenges. Data on many species are limited, and the need to juggle multiple sources of uncertainty—including those inherent to the climate forecasts these models employ and the biological assumptions they rely on—have raised questions about how best to approach vulnerability assessments, and how researchers should make use of their results. 3 “We’re making some headway in thinking more about becoming forecasters rather than just descriptors,” says Urban. “But I think we still, as a discipline, have a long way to go.” Predicting the harmful effects of climate change In the Namib Desert of southwestern Africa, quiver trees ( Aloidendron dichotomum ) stand out against the vast, rocky backdrop. These towering succulents grow more than 8 meters tall and live for around 200 years on average. In addition to being culturally significant—they’ve been used for centuries by local San people to make bow quivers, and their image appears on Namibia’s 50-cent coin—the trees provide critical habitat and food for many insects and birds. But by the turn of the millennium, the quiver tree populations of Namibia and South Africa were in serious trouble: large swaths were dead or dying. Wendy Foden , then a master’s student at the University of Cape Town, was one of the researchers who stepped in to investigate. “We went to every population across its entire range, which is about 2,000 kilometers long,” says Foden, now a researcher at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University and a climate change specialist for the IUCN. “We looked at how many were alive, how many were dead, how many babies.” Source: Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services , 2018 More than 50 sites and some 6,000 quiver trees later, the team concluded that the species was being battered in populations at the northern edge of its range as temperatures crept upwards and the desert became drier. 4 Although populations in cooler southern regions were faring better, projected temperature increases suggested that they would soon experience similar conditions. Short of migrating 25 miles south within 15 years—a tall order for a plant species with a juvenile phase of around half a century—the quiver trees were soon going to be well outside their comfort zone. These sorts of geographical shifts in species’ tolerable environmental ranges, or climate envelopes, have become one of the most often-cited consequences of global warming, and a major starting point for biologists to calculate climate-related extinction risk. “The typical approach is to take global climate change models, downscale, and look at how the magnitude and rate of climate change is going to potentially shrink or constrain a species’ climate envelope,” says Lindsey Thurman , an ecologist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS). An early, influential example, published by the University of Leeds’s Chris Thomas (now at the University of York) and colleagues in 2004, applied a version of this approach to endemic species of plants and animals occupying around 20 percent of the world’s landmass. By 2050, the team calculated, between 15 percent and 37 percent of species could be “committed to extinction,” with especially high losses for species in scrubland and temperate forest. 5 R.I.P., RAT: The Bramble Cay melomys ( Melomys rubicola ; above) was a rodent endemic to the Great Barrier Reef. In 2016, following a survey of the roughly four-hectare island with which it shares its name (below), researchers declared the species extinct as a result of climate change. LUKE LEUNG, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND Natalie Waller But these sorts of correlative, distribution-based models have come under fire from ecologists in recent years. For a start, they often equate a species’ current range to the range in which it experiences its preferred environmental conditions—an assumption that overlooks other distribution-influencing factors such as food availability. What’s more, such models generally fail to capture biological consequences of climate change that are not reflected in distribution, says Urban. Indeed, an analysis he conducted in 2015 found that, compared to other approaches, distribution-based models paint a more optimistic picture of extinction risk. 6 “One of the big issues with these types of models is that they’re probably missing many of the key mechanisms that really determine how species respond to climate change,” he says. To address these issues, some researchers use an organism’s biological traits to predict its responses under different climate scenarios. This approach often takes the form of thinking, “What can go wrong?” says Foden. “That’s the right question to start with.” Such trait-based models incorporate data on characteristics that can make a species particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change, such as dependence on certain temperatures for survival, or slow population growth rates. (See “Estimating Vulnerability” here.) More-mechanistic models attempt to incorporate relationships between environmental conditions and a species’ developmental or reproductive biology. Vulnerability assessments built on such foundations are constantly evolving, as biologists turn up ever more answers to the question, “What can go wrong?” For instance, species don’t live in a vacuum, notes Urban, so “species interactions are a key point.” Thanks to these interactions, species may experience indirect effects of climate change that range from the relatively obvious—if one organism faces climate-driven extinction, its predators may also be at risk—to the more nuanced. Last fall, for example, researchers reported that clownfish living in anemones that were bleached as a consequence of ocean warming showed higher signs of stress and reduced fecundity compared with fish living in unbleached anemones. 7 So-called cascading effects open up a dimension of species’ vulnerability that modelers have yet to fully explore. However, not all of the effort to understand responses to climate change concerns various routes to harm. A growing branch of species vulnerability research takes a more positive view, by investigating how species compensate for their changing environments. Although the phenomenon has long been fundamental to biological theory, researchers are only just beginning to come to grips with it in a climate-change context. Incorporating adaptation into assessments of vulnerability In 2014, a medium-size butterfly inhabiting the west coast of North America received a surge of media attention mainly because it was still alive. By the mid-1990s, the Quino checkerspot ( Euphydryas editha quino ) had been pegged as a climate-change victim in waiting. With its range eroded from the south by rising temperatures and from the north by urbanization, the butterfly—along with local populations of its host plant, the dwarf plantain ( Plantago erecta )—was running out of space. “It seemed to me that it was really heading for extinction,” says Camille Parmesan , a biologist at the University of Plymouth in the U.K. “This species had such a high number of populations completely gone that I thought were irretrievable, I didn’t give it much hope.” But as Parmesan worked on plans to raise captive insects in the lab for future reintroductions, the checkerspot did something unexpected. “It went up the mountain,” Parmesan says. In 2015, she and her colleagues reported that the butterfly had relocated east to elevations unheard of for its subspecies, and had switched to a different host plant in the process. 8 “Those populations at the high elevations are really healthy,” Parmesan says. “It felt so good to see them really dance, bumping into each other, having a great time.” Source: Nat Clim Change , 3:919–25, 2013 The case of the Quino checkerspot and other species like it offer a reminder of a fundamental biological response to environmental stress: adaptation (a term that, in CCVAs, refers both to evolutionary changes in a population’s genetic makeup and to individual plasticity, or acclimatization). “We’re often seemingly surprised by how adaptable species end up being,” says Stein. “It’s this notion that nature can find a way—which is sometimes true and sometimes isn’t.” The potential for organisms to escape doom via adaptation is termed “adaptive capacity” by the National Wildlife Federation and several other organizations. Well-recognized adaptation-favoring traits include superior dispersal ability, phenotypic plasticity, and high genetic diversity. “Even with a lot of uncertainty, you know that high levels of genetic variation are certainly going to make those populations more robust in the future, even if you don’t know what the drivers are going to be,” says Ary Hoffmann , an evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. New factors contributing to adaptive capacity are being reported all the time: a study published earlier this year, for example, suggested that warm-blooded vertebrates hold an advantage over their cold-blooded counterparts by being able to tolerate a wider range of climatic conditions and consequently to adapt more quickly. 9 Some researchers are beginning to pin down species’ adaptive capacity to variation in specific regions of the genome, too. Scientists in California recently reported that in North American populations of the yellow warbler ( Setophaga petechia ), successful adaptation to climatic changes was associated with genes involved in exploratory and migratory behavior. 10 A study published earlier this summer identified more than 200 regions in the epigenome of the spiny chromis damselfish ( Acanthochromis polyacanthus ) that were tied to increased tolerance of rising ocean temperatures. 11 Adaptive capacity remains a relatively rare feature of vulnerability assessments, however; a recent USGS review found that, of 124 assessments carried out by the US Department of the Interior as tools for conservation planning, the concept appeared in just a third. 12 There’s growing momentum to change that. Ignoring adaptation can lead to overly pessimistic predictions that could result in allocating resources where they’re less needed, notes USGS’s Thurman. “We feel very strongly that a better understanding of adaptive capacity can improve the cost-effectiveness of conservation plans.” The IUCN’s current guidelines on vulnerability assessments promote the inclusion of adaptive capacity alongside measures of an organism’s sensitivity and exposure to climate change, and Stein and colleagues have published multiple explainers about how to measure adaptive capacity appropriately. To help get the message across, some researchers are demonstrating the effect of taking adaptive capacity into account for vulnerability assessments of specific taxa. In October, Benjamin Ofori of the University of Ghana, along with Linda Beaumont and collaborators at Australia’s Macquarie University, ranked 17 Australian lizard species on vulnerability and found that, based on sensitivity and exposure, seven would be classified as “highly vulnerable” to a warmer and drier climate. However, when they incorporated terms to describe each species’ adaptive capacity, that number dropped to two. 13 “You have some species that were previously classified as highly vulnerable being reclassified as moderate,” Ofori says. “You even have some species jumping ”—potentially reshaping conservation priorities. To calculate the likelihood that organisms will be harmed by climate change, researchers estimate their exposure, sensitivity, and ability to adapt to new conditions. See full infographic: WEB | PDF A better understanding of adaptive capacity will not only improve CCVAs, but could also inform new approaches to conservation, says Hoffmann. His group has promoted strategies to increase genetic diversity—and thus, theoretically, adaptive capacity—in the mountain pygmy possum, an endangered marsupial inhabiting the rapidly warming alpine zone in southeastern Australia. According to a report from the team, introducing males from one relatively large population to a smaller one appears to have helped double the size of the latter in just three years. 14 But while adaptation can help rescue species from immediate harm, it can only go so far. “With climate change, you can’t stabilize it—certainly not locally, and even globally,” explains Parmesan. Climate change creates “a moving target,” and an organism that adapts under stress might only have reduced its vulnerability for a while. Unfortunately, that appears to be true for the Quino checkerspot. Despite its recent escape from extinction, Parmesan says, the butterfly has reached a new dead end: the tops of the mountains. While the high-elevation habitat provides a cool home for now, Parmesan and her colleagues predict that even this region will become uninhabitable in coming decades. “That’s when the depression sets in,” she says. Moving the insects to more-favorable habitat—a strategy known as assisted migration—is problematic under current environmental regulations. “It’s wonderful that these wild critters can surprise us and have more adaptability than we think they have,” says Parmesan. “But at the same time, it’s just a little bit of buffering. It gives us a few more years to figure something else out.” Source: US Department of the Interior The value of climate change vulnerability assessments As the methodology behind climate change vulnerability assessments evolves, some conservation biologists are concerned that different efforts are out of sync with one another. Reviews of the literature have shown substantial variation in the way models are applied. The Sapienza University of Rome’s Michela Pacifici , with Foden, Hoffmann, and others, reported that birds and mammals were by far the most often assessed taxa in CCVAs carried out between 1997 and 2014—even though they constitute a fraction of a percent of the world’s biodiversity—and only a handful of studies assessed vulnerability on a global scale. 15 While North American and Australian studies frequently made use of trait-based approaches, Europe overwhelmingly favored those based on distribution. Such differences can often be traced to the information available on particular taxa or regions, says Thurman. “For many species, we pretty much have no data,” she says. “Even understanding basic natural history can be challenging.” There’s often a difficult choice to be made, therefore, about how much complexity to include. On one end of the spectrum are approaches that require little in the way of biological data such as environmental tolerances and life history traits, but potentially miss important pathways. On the other are more-detailed models that require researchers to make assumptions to fill in the gaps, adding considerable uncertainty to already taxing calculations. CHANGING THE WORLD: In 2015, unusually high temperatures in Arctic Alaska triggered the arrival of spring one month earlier than normal at ecologist Mark Urban’s research site (top). Though temperatures followed a more normal schedule the following year (bottom), researchers observed the physical effects of the previous summer’s heat, such as the collapse of land on the far left side of the second year’s image. Both photos were taken in the first week of June. mark urban Opinions vary as to how much the choice of approach matters. Last year, the University of York’s Thomas and colleagues published an “assessment of assessments” for 12 recent methodologies. 16 The aim, he tells The Scientist, was to find out whether different approaches—ranging from distribution-based models to trait-focused assessments—would reach roughly the same conclusions. Using historical data on population distributions and abundances of Great Britain’s birds and butterflies, as well as simulated data, the team pitted the models against each other to predict the present from the past. The results, Thomas says, were disappointing. Just two of the models—both of which relied more heavily on distribution than on biological traits—achieved better-than-random accuracy. And “the methods simply disagreed with one another on how they classified species. By definition, that means at least some of them have got to be wrong.” Source: Science , 344:1246752, 2014 Thomas says he hopes that one effect of comparative studies such as his will be to motivate more data collection. “We can’t just say the data doesn’t exist. We have to think, how are we going to put in place the monitoring of things so that a few decades in the future, people aren’t wringing their hands still saying, ‘We haven’t got the data.’” In the meantime, he adds, while models may lack accuracy in predicting exactly when species will go extinct, they can identify taxa likely to be vulnerable at some point. At the same time, the predictions generated by vulnerability assessments are just one step on a road to the much larger goal of finding practical solutions to conserve at-risk taxa, says Stein. As such, CCVAs shouldn’t be seen as “the end product,” he says. “That’s the beginning. Assessing climate vulnerability allows you then to begin applying that to better conserve these things in light of climatic changes.” He and others have advocated for biology-based management strategies that build on CCVAs by helping species realize their adaptive capacity, for example, through assisted migration or breeding programs. Another crucial consideration is that extinction risk is a product not just of climate change, but of multiple interacting stressors including habitat fragmentation and species invasions. And conservation priorities are based on more than just a species’ risk of dying out. Societally influenced considerations such as a species’ economic value, cultural significance, or perceived charisma affect how conservation dollars are spent; scientists may also consider a species’ importance to the entire ecosystem before making recommendations to decision makers. And some conservationists want to drop the species-focused view altogether in favor of a more holistic, biodiversity-centered approach, Parmesan says. “If we focus on individual species, we’re going to be very upset, because there will be a lot of extinctions.” With the clock ticking for many species around the world, it’s imperative that biologists, policy makers, and the public decide what really matters, says Stein. To make effective use of concepts such as climate change vulnerability, “we have to be clear about what our values are,” he says. “To think we’re going to be able to keep things as they are today, or go back to some version it was in the past, just is no longer realistic.” References I. Gynther et al., “Confirmation of the extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys Melomys rubicola on Bramble Cay, Torres Strait: results and conclusions from a comprehensive survey in August-September 2014,” Unpublished report to the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, Queensland Government, Brisbane, 2016. M. Pacifici et al., “Species’ traits influenced their response to recent climate change,” Nat Clim Chang , 7:205–208, 2017. A.A. Wade et al., “Assessments of species vulnerability to climate change: From pseudo to science,” Biodiversity Conserv , 26:223–29, 2017. W. Foden et al., “A changing climate is eroding the geographical range of the Namib Desert tree Aloe through population declines and dispersal lags,” Divers Distributions , 13:645–53, 2007. C.D. Thomas et al., “Extinction risk from climate change,” Nature , 427:145–48, 2004. M.C. Urban, “Accelerating extinction risk from climate change,” Science , 348:571–73, 2015. R. Beldade et al., “Cascading effects of thermally-induced anemone bleaching on associated anemonefish hormonal stress response and production,” Nat Commun , 8:716, 2017. C. Parmesan et al., “Endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly and climate change: Short-term success but long-term vulnerability?” J Insect Conserv , 19:185–204, 2015. J. Rolland et al., “The impact of endothermy on the climatic niche evolution and the distribution of vertebrate diversity,” Nat Ecol Evol , 2:459–64, 2018. R.A. Bay et al., “Genomic signals of selection predict climate-driven population declines in a migratory bird,” Science , 359:83–86, 2018. T. Ryu et al., “The epigenetic landscape of transgenerational acclimation to ocean warming,” Nat Clim Change , 8:504–509, 2018. L.M. Thompson et al., “Summarizing components of U.S. Department of the Interior vulnerability assessments to focus climate adaptation planning,” USGS Open-File Report 2015–1110, doi:10.3133/ofr20151110, 2015. B.Y. Ofori et al., “Influence of adaptive capacity on the outcome of climate change vulnerability assessment,” Sci Rep , 7:12979, 2017. A.R. Weeks et al., “Genetic rescue increases fitness and aids rapid recovery of an endangered marsupial population,” Nat Commun , 8:1071, 2017. M. Pacifici et al., “Assessing species vulnerability to climate change,” Nat Clim Change , 5:215–24, 2015. C.J. Wheatley et al., “Climate change vulnerability for species—Assessing the assessments,” Glob Change Biol , 23:3704–15, 2017.
今天关注了网易公开课上TED的一堂课，莱温斯基讲的《羞辱的代价》。时隔多年之后，她站出来说话，虽说与政治无关，可是谁信呢！暂且不管这些了，她所提到的网络欺凌的问题，确实在当代的社会已经成为了一个大问题了。 生活在现在这个喜欢制造噱头、喜欢爆炸性信息的时代，不管你愿不愿意、不管你做没做好准备，你都有可能成为下一个网络时代的牺牲品，名人也罢，平常人也罢，网络语境中的你我他，都生活的战战兢兢、如履薄冰。 对于网络欺凌的参与者来说，很多时候大家都是抱着好奇的心态，用自己所谓的道德标准、人生格言去指责他人与教导他人，也许他们只是随便的表达了一下自己的瞬间想法，多数人在发言的时候，几乎不会站在对方的角度上考虑问题的，更为甚至是在自己发言之后，很快也就忘记，根本就意识不到自己语言的攻击性，以及对他人造成的危害，这种一吐为快的心态，促成了很多鲁莽的、不负责的行为。 而对于网络欺凌的受害者来说，别太纠结于别人的眼光，活给自己看，总比活给别人看，要容易活的多。有一个词叫“接受”，对于自己无力回天的事情，那就接受好了，然后再在自己能力所及的范围内，进行及时的补救，要是事情完全超出自己的空间，那就随便它好了，还是那句老话，改变不了别人，那就改变自己好了，只要自己原谅了自己，只要自己接受了自己，还有什么看不开的呢！人生也就不断短短的几十年，别再他人介意的眼光里，葬送了自己的人生。 附演讲稿英文版 The priceof shame You'relooking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade. Obviously, that'schanged, but only recently. It was several months ago that I gave my very first major publictalk at the Forbes 30 Under 30 summit:1,500 brilliant people, all under the ageof 30. That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14, andthe youngest, just four. I joked with them that some might only have heard ofme from rap songs. Yes, I'm in rap songs. Almost 40 rap songs. But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened. At theage of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy. I know, right? He was charming and I was flattered , and I declined . You know whathis unsuccessful pickup line was? He could make me feel 22 again. I realizedlater that night, I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be22 again. At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of24, I learned the devastating consequences. Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn't make a mistakeor do something they regretted at 22? Yep. That's what I thought. So like me,at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns and fallen in love with thewrong person, maybe even your boss. Unlike me, though, your boss probablywasn't the president of the United States of America. Of course, life is fullof surprises. Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake, and Iregret that mistake deeply. In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, Iwas then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we hadnever seen before. Remember, just a few years earlier,news was consumed fromjust three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio, orwatching television. That was it. But that wasn't my fate. Instead, thisscandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. That meant we couldaccess all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere, andwhen the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. It was the first timethe traditional news was usurped by the Internet for a major news story, a click that reverberated around the world. What that meant for me personally was that overnight I went frombeing a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was patient zero oflosing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously . This rush to judgment, enabled by technology, led to mobs of virtualstone-throwers. Granted, it was before social media, but people could stillcomment online, email stories, and, of course, email cruel jokes. News sources plastered photosof me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned tothe TV. Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret ? Now, I admit I made mistakes, especially wearing that beret. Butthe attention and judgment that I received, not the story, but that Ipersonally received, was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore,bimbo, and, of course, that woman. I was seen by many but actually known byfew. And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional , had a soul,and was once unbroken. When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it.Now we call it cyberbullying( 网络欺凌 )andonline harassment( 网络骚扰 ).Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how thatexperience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my pastexperience can lead to a change that results in less suffering for others. In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. I lost almosteverything, and I almost lost my life. Let me paint a picture for you. It is September of 1998. I'msitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the IndependentCounsel underneath hummingfluorescent lights . I'm listening to the sound of my voice, my voice onsurreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the yearbefore. I'm here because I've been legally required to personally authenticateall 20 hours of taped conversation. For the past eight months, the mysteriouscontent of these tapes has hung like the Sword of Damocles over my head. I mean, who can rememberwhat they said a year ago? Scaredand mortified , I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of theday; listen as I confess my love for the president, and, of course, myheartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty , sometimes churlish , sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth ; listen, deeply,deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don't even recognize. A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congress, andall of those tapes and transcripts ,those stolen words, form a part of it. That people can read the transcripts ishorrific enough, but a few weeks later, the audio tapes are aired on TV, andsignificant portions made available online. The public humiliation was excruciating . Life was almost unbearable. This was not something that happened with regularity back then in1998, and by this, I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions,conversations or photos, and then making them public -- public without consent,public without context, and public without compassion. Fast forward 12 years to 2010, and now social media has been born.The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine,whether or not someone actually made a mistake, and now it's for both publicand private people. The consequences for some have become dire , very dire. I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we weretalking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers Universitynamed Tyler Clementi. Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammedby his roommate while being intimate with another man. When the online worldlearned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. A few dayslater, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death. He was 18. My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and hisfamily, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn't quiteunderstand, and then eventually I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving atime when she sat by my bed every night, reliving a time when she made meshower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parentsfeared that I would be humiliated to death, literally. Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in andrescue their loved ones. Too many have learned of their child's suffering andhumiliation after it was too late. Tyler's tragic, senseless death was aturning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at theworld of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different. In 1998, we had no way of knowing wherethis brave new technology called the Internet would take us. Since then, it hasconnected people in unimaginable ways, joining lost siblings, saving lives,launching revolutions, but the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that Iexperienced had mushroomed .Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentallyequipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagineliving to the next day, and some, tragically , don't, and there's nothing virtual about that.ChildLine, a U.K. nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on variousissues, released a staggering statistic late last year: From 2012 to 2013,there was an 87 percent increase in calls and emails related to cyberbullying.A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time,cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offlinebullying. And you know what shocked me, although it shouldn't have, was otherresearch last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely feltemotion than either happiness or even anger. Cruelty to others is nothing new, but online, technologically enhanced shaming isamplified, uncontained, and permanently accessible. The echo of embarrassmentused to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community, butnow it's the online community too. Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with theirwords, and that's a lot of pain, and there are no perimeters around how many people can publiclyobserve you and put you in a public stockade . There is a very personal price to public humiliation,and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price. For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seedsof shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline. Gossip websites, paparazzi, r ealityprogramming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame.It's led to desensitization and a permissive environment online which lends itself to trolling, invasion ofprivacy, and cyberbullying. This shift has created what Professor NicolausMills calls a culture of humiliation . Consider a few prominentexamples just from the past six months alone. Snapchat, the service which isused mainly by younger generationsand claims that its messages only have thelifespan of a few seconds. You can imagine the range of content that that gets.A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the lifespan of themessages was hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos, and videoswere leaked online to now have a lifespan of forever. Jennifer Lawrence andseveral other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate,nude photos were plastered across the Internet without their permission. Onegossip website had over five million hits for this one story. And what aboutthe Sony Pictures cyberhacking? The documents which received the most attentionwere private emails that had maximum public embarrassment value. But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of pricetag attached to public shaming. The price does not measure the cost to thevictim, which Tyler and too many others, notably women, minorities, and membersof the LGBTQ community have paid, but the price measures the profit of thosewho prey on them. This invasion of others is a raw material, efficiently andruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit. A marketplace has emergedwhere public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is themoney made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars.We're in a dangerous cycle. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the morenumb we get to the human lives behind it, and the more numb we get, the more weclick. All the while,someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering. With every click, we make a choice. The more we saturate our culture withpublic shaming, the more accepted it is, the more we will see behavior likecyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking, and online harassment. Why?Because they all have humiliation at their cores. This behavior is a symptom ofthe culture we've created. Just think about it. Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs. We've seen that tobe true with racism,homophobia, a nd plenty of other biases, today and in the past. As we'vechanged beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equalfreedoms. When we began valuing sustainability, more people began to recycle.So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a culturalrevolution. Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it's time for anintervention on the Internet and in our culture. The shift begins with something simple, but it's not easy. We needto return to a long-held value of compassion -- compassion and empathy. Online,we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis. Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote, Shame can't survive empathy .Shame cannot survive empathy. I've seen some very dark days in my life, and itwas the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals, andsometimes even strangers that saved me. Even empathy from one person can make adifference. The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologistSerge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there's consistency overtime, change can happen. In the online world, we can foster minority influenceby becoming upstanders. To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy , we canpost a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation. Trust me,compassionate comments help abate the negativity. We can also counteract theculture by supporting organizations that deal with these kinds of issues, likethe Tyler Clementi Foundation in the U.S., In the U.K., there's Anti-BullyingPro, and in Australia, there's Project Rockit. We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression, but weneed to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. We allwant to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up withintention and speaking up for attention. The Internet is the superhighway forthe id, but online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps createa safer and better world. We need to communicate online with compassion,consume news with compassion, and click with compassion. Just imagine walking amile in someone else's headline. I'd like to end on a personal note. In thepast nine months, the question I've been asked the most is why. Why now? Why wasI sticking my head above the parapet? You can read between the lines in thosequestions, and the answer has nothing to do with politics. The top note answer was and is because it's time: time to stop tip-toeing around mypast; time to stop living a life of opprobrium ; and time to take back my narrative . It's also not just about savingmyself. Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You cansurvive it. I know it's hard. It may not be painless, quick or easy, but youcan insist on a different ending to your story. Have compassion for yourself.We all deserve compassion, and to live both online and off in a morecompassionate world. Thankyou for listening.
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