> "Whether this behavior is due to competition for food or to the decline of the rainforest's productivity caused by climate change will now be investigated in more detail."
Declaring the cause must be food competition or climate change seems a bit hasty?
These are complex social animals. Given this is the only attack ever observed, it seems possible to me that there are a myriad of plausible one-off explanations. Perhaps a particular chimp or gorilla was having a really bad day and just went out looking for a fight.
From the videos, it looks like the human observers were about ten meters away.
That made me wonder how risky filming this is.
Google didn’t give me cases of attacks on observers, but it did give me https://observers.france24.com/en/20120926-midst-armed-confl..., so I think those observers are at some risk.
It also taught me chimpanzee wars exist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229682-600-only-kno...)
Never have I been more disappointed that an article didn’t include video.
There are videos
"At 13:15, Chenge followed by an adult female, Roxy, climbed up the tree. Roxy moved toward Greta and took the body. She then began to consume the hands and internal organs of the gorilla infant. Between 13:16 and 14:00, Roxy allowed Chenge, Littlegrey, Onome, Orian, and Queliba to access small amounts of meat, no begging behaviour was observed between individuals. A final gorilla chest beat was heard at 13:46 in a North-East direction of the observers."
That's pretty gruesome.
They are nasty but not as much as Dolphins...
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160204-cute-and-cuddly-dolp...
That looks like a scene from a Stanley Kubrick movie :)
For those wondering, click the "supplementary information" on the navigation pane for videos.
Direct link?
You can download these with youtube-dl:
https://videocdnvod1-vh.akamaihd.net/i/EDUvKatdP5Y4y5HF1ihek...
https://videocdnvod1-vh.akamaihd.net/i/5PRZ1ghRygZ5tTNMcbrrT...
For videos scroll to the bottom of this page https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93829-x
It took me much longer than it really should've to find these videos [0]. Guess I need my morning coffee...
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93829-x#Sec10
Gorilla infants were killed while the adults escaped
Although noteworthy that the chimpanzees scattered and broke down the defenses of Silverbacks, it would be more noteworthy if they took down an adult male
I remember once watching a documentary on a roving band of chimpanzees, and thinking how human they looked. I was shocked when they attacked another band of chimpanzees and killed them all. However, I quickly overcame my shock. They were quite human indeed...
Even monkeys (those that are not apes) exhibit behavior that so powerfully human. One campus where I studied had many (curb the joke). This allowed enough opportunities to observe them.
What moved me most, apart from their usual monkey business, is their display of quiet private tenderness towards their partner. That took me by surprise.
Everyone has some personal experiences that they would remember because it changed their perspective or added one when non existed. This would be one of them for me.
A family friend of ours was researcher in medical biology. His daily work included draining blood from rhesus monkeys for testing. I remember as a kid that he gave up his line of work. At that time it had struck me as an odd thing to do because he was doing so well. When I saw the behavior of these monkeys from up close, I got a better appreciation of why.
What were your personal experiences?
Did they touch a black monolith right after?
Funny how all the people criticizing the science behind that article didn't do proper research themselves.
The Max Planck Society is a research organization with a steady, long-term funding through the German government that is organized in a bottom-up manner, meaning the directors of the various institutes can do pretty much whatever the fuck they want and decide about everything important in that organization. There are dozens of institutes doing research in virtually every research field. And yeah, lots of Nobel prizes. They really don't have to follow some political lead or short-term trends.
Just, you know, fyi (the other fyi, yes).
As a child, I would hear news reports talking about guerrilla attacks. It wasn't until I saw a Mad Magazine feature with a title along the lines of "if only the news meant what it sounded like" with a picture of gorillas attacking a city that I realized that they not gorilla attacks (I think it was a while longer still before I knew the word was guerrilla—I was a kid, OK?). This is the first sign that maybe the world could be as interesting as I imagined.
cool
I am surprised silverback gorillas were not capable of protecting their clan.. A full grown gorilla has a 1,300 PSI bite force.
There were 18 chimpanzees vs. 1 silverback. While the silverback was getting harassed by 10 chimpanzees, the gorilla infant could be targetted by the other chimpanzees.
Moreover, the silverback was troubled by the presence of human observers and fled 3 minutes later, whereas the chimpanzees were habituated to the human presence.
Quotes below:
> In both events, the chimpanzees considerably outnumbered the gorillas. [...] At 17:13, the silverback charged an adolescent female chimpanzee, Gia, knocking her into the air. At 17:15, a group of approximately nine male chimpanzees (adults and adolescents), and at least one adult female chimpanzee surrounded the silverback, and repeatedly jumped down on and hit him whilst screaming and barking. [Meanwhile, the gorilla infant could be kidnapped by the other chimpanzees.] At 17:22, one adult male chimpanzee, Littlegrey, was observed sitting on the ground holding a gorilla infant in front of him.
> During the first encounter the silverback was present for 14 min [out of a total of 52 min], whilst in the second encounter the silverback was present for 10 min [out of a total of 74 min]. [...] At 12:33, the silverback discovered the human observers on the ground in a distance of approximately 30 m to the base of the tree and started barking. [...] At 12:36, the silverback rapidly climbed down the tree and fled. The chimpanzees continued barking but did not follow him. [...] We cannot rule out that the presence of human observers, in both events, may have had an effect on the unhabituated silverback’s departure and may have tilted the imbalance of power in favour of the habituated chimpanzees.
If I was one of the researchers, I would be very worried about having been associated with this encounter, the next time I see some gorilla.
On the face of it that does seem surprising. With (vastly) superior numbers and a focus on confusion and harassment though, I can easily imagine a gorilla being unable to fend them off completely.
How us Chimps captured King Kong is beginning to make more sense.
It begins.
Apes apart weak.
I for one welcome our new chimpanzee overlords.
I think the gorillas are now angry and down voting.
This is how it happened.
At each step of the evolutionary ladder, there is a confrontation from one species to the next; A battle of hairy to slightly less hairy homonids. Two meet on a grassy plain, their stares communicating that this is the final straw. You came into our banana plantation the last time. A thought reverberating through the millenia. Once again, two creatures play out their parts, employing different gifts bestowed upon them by nature, now to challenge eachother in mortal combat. One with a slightly more developed brain, and the other with slightly more developed muscles.
Partially written with GPT-3.
Joe Rogan needs to know about this as soon as possible. The guy loves talking about chimps on his show.
I’d like to keep Rogan at peace and not indulge him with this. The man has a family and a career, and the last thing he needs is to open up the Chimpanzee addiction.
Besides, the Covid lab leak theory is plenty to keep that weirdo going for awhile.
A hundred percent
Time for Manning's to release a Natural Selection in Action series.
A modern day analog of the conquest of Neanderthalia by the strange, physically weaker cousins from down under.
About time. As a civilization, we desperately need a monolith or two to show up right about now.
Just split the monolith into several smaller repos.
IDK, someone is just going to argue it should be packed back into a monolith over and over. Despite there clearly being no right answer.
The right answer is whoever has more people on their side. Weird. I guess this is exactly how those chimps went after a lone gorilla.
May the victors write our history.
Historians will be completely befuddled trying to understand how THIS was the instigating factor for the series of events that lead to WW3.
> The increased food competition may also be caused by the more recent phenomenon of climate change
Way to go, jumping right into speculation, as scientists they shouldn't be so trigger happy, specially given that they go on to say
> We are only at the beginning to understand the effects of competition on interactions between the two great ape species
Meta: Any HN threads where 90% of the comments are "jokes" should just be deleted.
Depends if the jokes are good.
no... thanks for trying to censor everything though... you sound like Mods on a bad day.
Deleting a thread on a tech forum with no substantive discussion about great ape behavior is not "censorship" or "censoring everything"
HN is not strictly a tech form. The goal is what’s interesting, the audience is tech focused but the third ranked link is currently:
Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches (sciencemag.org) 226 points by chippy 8 hours ago 81 comments
Yesterday’s top 10 had: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-07-20
Restaurant workers quit at record rate (npr.org) 434 points by boulos 1 day ago 907 comments
Baltimore Museum of Art will host an exhibition curated by the museum's guards (artbma.org) 415 points by hampelm 1 day ago 139 comments
MAPS Celebrates California Senate Passage of Psychedelic Reform Bill (maps.org) 303 points by pmoriarty 1 day ago | 87 comments
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (danlawton.substack.com) 480 points by mudita 1 day ago | 539 comments
The comment you responded to responded to the comment it responded to.
To be fair, substantive discussion has emerged and all the tomfoolery has been downvoted. Steady as she goes
It most certainly is censorship done arbitrarily-- the voting system is there to reflect the attitudes and desires of the users.
But let's go further and just delete articles on gorillas and the dangers of mindfulness meditation as well? They have nothing to do with tech, anyways...
> is not "censorship" or "censoring everything"
Actually, that would in fact be a very straightforward example of censorship. Which isn't to say that it would necessarily be a bad thing - moderation involves limited and targeted censorship.
Let's not go redefining words in order to defend a particular course of action. We should argue the actual merits instead.
Agreed. Fun should not be tolerated. This is a serious place for serious discussions and dour faces. I'm frowning as I pound this out on my keyboard.
> In the encounters, which lasted 52 and 79 minutes, the chimpanzees formed coalitions and attacked the gorillas.
Gorillas needs to watch their aggressive expansion. Especially since Chimpanzee tribes are overpowered since Leviathan.
Indeed. Chimps will eat gorilla infants. So if the attack was over a scarcity of food resources you'd expect the killed infant to be eaten. This was only observed in 1/2 the encounters...
> Between 2014 and 2018, we observed nine direct interactions between individuals of the Rekambo community and unhabituated gorillas (N=9; see Fig. 1). These events were always peaceful, and occasionally involved co-feeding in fruiting trees (N=2). In 2019 however, we observed two encounters resulting, in both cases, in coalitionary lethal attacks. The first encounter involved a party of 27 chimpanzees and a group of five gorillas. The second involved a party of 27 chimpanzees and a group of seven gorillas (see Table 1, and video clips 1 and 2 in the SA). The first event occurred after a territorial patrol during which the males made a deep incur- sion into a neighbouring chimpanzee territory. The second event happened at the start of a suspected territorial boundary patrol. Both events took place on the outer boundaries of the Rekambo territory (see Fig. 1). The main aggressors in both events were adult male chimpanzees (for details of involvement see Table 1). The two encounters lasted 52 and 79 min, respectively, involved both contact and non-contact aggressions and coalitionary displays from chimpanzees towards gorillas. The gorillas counter attacked and defended themselves using contact aggressions, displays and threat gestures. During the first encounter the silverback was present for 14 min, whilst in the second encounter the silverback was present for 10 min. The first encounter resulted in one dead gorilla infant and three injured chimpanzees; the second resulted in one dead gorilla infant. While there was no indication of consumption of the dead gorilla infant in the first encounter, the infant in the second encounter was almost entirely consumed by one adult chimpanzee female.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93829-x.pdf
The non-eating attack resulted in chimpanzee injuries. They very well could have been chased away and/or too busy nursing injuries.
I'm anthropomorphizing but it doesnt seem very primate-like not to enjoy the spoils of a hard won victory.
>> Declaring the cause must be food competition or climate change seems a bit hasty?
It's not a declaration, but a hypothesis that attempts to explain the observations according to prior knowledge. It "will now be investigated in more detail" to try and disprove it. That's bog standard scientific work.
What's hasty is the easy dismissal of the opinion of experts on a subject most commenters here are probably unfamliar with (interspecies interactions between non-human primates) and the attemps to find an ulterior motive of some kind of political nature, in comments in this thread.
When did HN become so anti-science?
Science is a process. HN isn't anti-science.
The scientific establishment is a group of people in various organizational structures and alliances. I'm part of that establishment, and I can say that it lies, exaggerates, and has become increasingly untrustworthy in the past decade or two:
- The easiest way to get ahead in the scientific establishment is to fabricate politically-motivated results.
- Competition is intense, and the "hard" way is becoming impossible.
My general advice is to read source data -- even there with a large grain of salt -- but to definitely not trust "expert" conclusions. One of the easiest ways to have "impact" is to write newsworthy conclusions weakly supported by evidence. It's not technically academic fraud, and gives you the visibility you need for academic job offers.
Science isn't about authority or expertise. It's about evidence, critical thinking, and the scientific process. If you believe science is "opinion of experts," you're doing it wrong.
Can you please show me where in my comment above I say that "science is "opinion of experts"?
If I haven't said that in my comment, would you say I'm obliged to reply to your comment and explain why I'm not, in fact, "doing it wrong"?
Do you agree that when having a conversation one should reply to what one's interlocutor has actually said, and not what one thinks has been said?
>> Science isn't about authority or expertise. It's about evidence, critical thinking, and the scientific process.
I disagree. "Science" means knowledge. What we call science is a process, like you say, but it is the process of accumulating and organising the collective knowledge of our civilisation. "Evidence, critical thinking and the scientific process" are not the essence of science, but tools to acquire knowledge, and this knowledge is the essence of science.
The people who have deep knowledge of a subject of scientific inquiry, we call "experts". At least I do and that's what I mean by "expert" in my comment above. To become an expert -to acquire deep knowledge in a subject- takes long years of study and familiarity with the work of other experts. "Evidence, critical thinking, and the scientific process" don't make anyone an expert. Hard work and applying oneself to the task of learning is what does.
Yet, what I see on HN, time and again, is that it is the opinions of non-experts that are supported by the majority of users. I say that because every time I see a post like the one above, where some researchers announce the results of their work, someone will always, always, jump in and dismiss the work of the researchers, and that someone usually has no idea what they're talking about, has spent a minimal amount of time thinking about or learning about what they're talking about, and their comment will rise to the top of the conversation, like a flag waving in the wind proclaiming "we do not care what you know, we can do better with a quick google and some bungled logic". That such comments rise to the top of conversations means that they are the ones most other users agree with.
This, the preponderance of inexpert opinion found as the first comment in posts about researchers' work, dismissing the researchers' work and supported by a majority of HN readers, is what I think of as "anti-science".
>> Right here: "What's hasty is the easy dismissal of the opinion of experts on a subject ... When did HN become so anti-science?"
So you choose to misrepresent what I said? Disappointing.
People lie. People who care more about getting their PhD and less about the actual research. Cause they don't have the integrity to not cheat. If you care about the actual research, why cheat.
And still if researchers would only care about getting funding, they'd all "prove" that them fucking democrats eat children cause man, would they get donations by them QAnon people.
And of course if you have a distinguished researcher in a field voicing a clear and educated guess/opinion, its worth much more then any random person commenting here ...
For which part of that commend did I get the downvotes? Seriously interested to know so I can write more of that.
>HN isn't anti-science.
Oh yes it is. We're not just talking about criticisms of individual papers here; this site often has comments disparaging science as a whole, calling it a "new religion", etc. If that isn't anti-science, then there isn't such a thing.
Moreover, typical commenters here do not apply evidence, critical thinking, and scientific process appropriately. They usually find something easy to nitpick that gives them the appearance of thinking critically, then they conclude that the research is trash. See: the recent article on caffeine.
It's one giant fallacy fallacy masquerading as deep conversation.
I've noticed a tendency towards pseudo-intellectual snark amidst the comments these days. It relies a lot on misused logic and eloquence to present itself as a knowledgeable opinion, but often never goes deeper than a semantic nitpick. This whole comment thread wouldn't exist if the author of the article had simply said "or something else."
You confuse the "opinion of experts" with the scientific process.
A hypothesis is just a statement to be tested against reality. We don't automatically have to assume it is true. It is literally someones untested opinion.
All that matters in science is the truth about the underlying reality, i.e. the experiments that verify the hypothesis.
You are angry that people aren't somehow placing this hypothesis on a pedestal by mere appeal to authority. But science doesn't work like that, that's academia.
People who participate in HN are not a monolithic bloc, not everyone reads the words the same way or thinks about them the same way.
I think “climate change” is a bit indirect as a topic myself, would love to hear something about how these encounters would be directly caused by a change in temperatures, humidity, rainfall and the like. Non-human primates don’t share our politics. Food pressure or loss of habitat might cause more of these encounters, and those could attribute to climate change, that’s indirect.
Gangs of adult male chimpanzees can be right assholes. Pinning down another chimp and tearing its rectum, among other violent indignities, suggests that they’re capable of lots of other violence.
You don’t need any expertise at all to notice that there might be more than two possible explanations for this thing that has now been observed a total of one times.
You need expertise to know whether an explanation is likely or not with respect to prior knowledge.
Specifically, expertise depends on having the necessary prior knowledge to know whether a hypothesis is likely or not.
They are not declaring that. The proposed cause is a thesis that will be investigated further and could very well be disproven. I don't see what's wrong with that.
I'm not sure how the thesis could possibly be disproven. Interviews with the apes?
So because you don't know, it is impossible?
You have to tie your research to the popular causes of the day. It would a bit far-fetched to tie it to gender and underrepresented minorities or online misinformation or covid, so the nearest possible "serious issue of our time" is climate change.
What on earth has happened to HN comments over the last couple of months? Every post I've opened today has had this same kind of "half-joking-but-not-really SJWs are bad" comment on something completely unrelated.
I touched in this subject the other day in a deep thread full of flaggings, since HN is [primarily] user moderated, these kind of comments seem like they must be here because enough users either want them here, or don’t care either way. Otherwise they’d be flagged as they do violate guildines.
As to why they’ve been like this recently, I can’t tell for sure. I feel like it’s been a bit kore than just a few months though, obviously 2020 was a US election cycle and things tend to get dicey around those times. I recall in both 2016 and 2020 people getting upset by the low quality threads, and other attempted to placate them by swearing it’d be over in a few months. Now it’s been more than a few months at this point, but there was also so much more than an election cycle in 2020 to cause political division.
Which leads to another point. HN is explicitly not a venue for politics, but politics infects everything so it gets complicated. For example, are political threads related to tech and startups off topic? I wouldn’t say no offhand, but there certainly have been an increase in the number of inheritor political threads that I’d personally consider this not the place for. Often this is justified by a lax interpretation of “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity” (note though that the sort of threads I’m thinking of almost never contain inquisitive or intellectual discussion) from the submission guidelines. So if political threads are more common and more accepted, that’s going to invite all the sort of antics you get with internet politics including the sort of comment you mention in your comment. Some of the most egregious stuff will get flagged, but some surprisingly bad comments can stay upvoted if the opinion expressed resonates with enough of the community.
There is a lot of incentive to flood well-meaning discussions with vitriol in order to bring the political temperature up. Most people that do this aren't even trying to be trolls, they are caught up in the fury of those around them.
I don't know what others do, I've been commenting on various technical things too. I wouldn't categorize this as "SJW bad". It's a related but not the same phenomenon.
And it's also quite usual that these kinds of press releases have to include some political punchline, to confirm being on the right side of history and so on. It's predictable.
Maybe it's totally benign in this case. But I've been duped so many times that I discount any such claim which ties into these "serious respectable talking points". I'm planning to take a look at Lawrence Krauss' now book on climate change, that dude still seems to have his head screwed on the right way.
it's simply a hypothesis formed by experts. you're doing a disservice to yourself and the general purpose of acience by denigrating the concept this way.
When the experts are all white liberal progressives competing for citations and news coverage, you're doing science a disservice by not having a critical read....
Yeah and when its commenters throwing around arguments that just don't apply here they're doing everyone a disservice.
Are you sure? "the infant in the second encounter was almost entirely consumed by one adult chimpanzee female." I see a gender assumption here.. we have to check her Twitter to see if it's she/her or they/them..
That phrasing struck me as well. It's a classic false-dichotomy. It's funny to me to see it so prominent in what appears to be a fairly professional site.
They've turned climate change into the new boogeyman, which is a shame since it's an important issue.
and why is it an important issue? In part because of the ecological stresses it causes, which results in less supply of resources in a given ecological niche.
Seems entirely reasonable to hypothesise the cause of aggression being related to this. That's not something they tested, merely a proposed hypothesis.
It's a convenient hypothesis, given the ubiquity of climate change impacts, but also a lazy one, like blaming the aggression on something equally as prevalent and relevant to the situation, like chimp genetics. The hypothesis is untestable absent some other specific assertions, and therefore unscientific.
And you have enough knowledge on the subject matter so this can be seen as an educated guess, or are you just throwing some good-knowing words around to see what sticks?
Testability and a better understanding of how resource limitations impact intraspecific competition is one of the big questions of community ecology.
Sorry, sometimes the convenient hypothesis is a good one. It's just hard to test, since we cannot spin up Earth 2. That's one of the hard parts of ecology.
climate change is having wide and radically accelerating impacts. I'm certain the scientists have good insights into why it might be a factor in this event. much more concerning is the knee-jerk ignorance about climate change among lay audiences who are repeatedly putting their hands over their eyes and ears.
The two are connected. Scientists lying about climate change, especially in obvious contexts like this one, makes people see that scientists are not to be trusted.
It's the boy who cried wolf.
Can you please point to where I'm lying?
NY Times has been running a series of articles blaming every fire and extreme weather event on climate change. This does two things:
1. Convinces liberals of the coming apocalypse of climate change, since it aligns with their views.
2. Convinces conservatives that the climate change folks are lying, since there are several logical steps missing, and it doesn't align with their views.
I'm sure some of those events are related to climate change. I'm sure some aren't. I don't think we really know which is which.
The problem with using (transparently) bad logic to get to a correct conclusion is that people no longer trust you.
If you look at conservative media, they point to (now obviously wrong) predictions from the eighties, where citations and reporting would go to the most extreme predictions.
It's really hard to convince someone of something after they've been lied to multiple times.
Give it few more weeks of research and they'll blame it on covid.
Maybe the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro...
Well he IS a wild chimp attacking people, right?
Sorry chimps, that was mean.
Give it five minutes and you'll contradict yourself.
Yes, given the headline I expected a coordinated attack that wiped out an entire group of gorillas, not a couple of skirmishes. Chimpanzees will attack humans, including eating human children. I don't see why small encounters that result in one or two deaths would be totally unexpected.
> Chimpanzees will attack humans, including eating human children.
Do you have a source for this?
This is very well known information. Sources are easily available on the news source of your choice.
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2019/11/i-am-sc... https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/magazine/hunting-a-chimp-...
Did I mention natural behavior? Did the comment I responded to mention natural behavior? How is natural behavior relevant to the discussion between OP and I? What is the point that you are arguing and why are you taking it up with me? Further, how are you defining natural behavior? Can natural behavior change over time, in response to external stimulus?
> I don't see why small encounters that result in one or two deaths would be totally unexpected.
And if you, in your grand wisdom, don't see it, it cannot be the case. Yeah.
> The increased food competition may also be caused by the more recent phenomenon of climate change and a collapse in fruit availability as observed in other tropical forests in Gabon.
It seems like an educated guess.
Is there any evidence of decline of this forest's productivity?
> Perhaps a particular chimp or gorilla was having a really bad day and just went out looking for a fight.
Do chimps and gorillas do such things?
Makes your wonder why Neanderthals only survived as fragments in our DNA.
The article that is linked reads "observations", plural.
> "caused by climate change"
Can be translated to "we know this is a good word to say to get research money, so we say it" in this context.
Yeah and you don't know how the research organization works that produced that research, so ...
I appreciate that you're trying to combat the anti-science shallow/kneejerk critiques, but this is not the way. You're feeding trolls by the handful. Here, you're jumping to conclusions just to dunk on somebody. Please pick your battles more carefully so you can be more deliberate as you wage them.
> Also, I'm really pissed and also I'm kind of convinced that its too late anyways to try to convince someone who says stuff like that that they're not right.
Look, I'm not arguing with you here. You're admittedly pissed. Please take a breather. This approach can only bolster confirmation bias for folks who think that science is just another religion with fanatical adherents.
There's a lot of writing about (including several studies) how to talk to people with extreme / conspiratorial / fact-resistant beliefs. Please read up.
As a third party reading through, I find your comments more alienating than endearing. You are actively harming the cause you support.
> Perhaps a particular chimp or gorilla was having a really bad day and just went out looking for a fight.
This doesn't necessarily contradict the food competition or climate change hypothesis. To the individual ape it might seem that he's just having a bad day, but then you could look at weather/food data and compare it to incidence of violence and see a causal relation. It would actually be surprising if those things didn't affect ape behavior.
I know many humans who get very grumpy on an empty stomach.
How is the behavior of some random humans relevant here?
That hunger drives aggression? In monkey as in humans?
Does writing off climate change as a factor seem a bit hasty?
Even if it’s just a one-off, terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day event, one effect of changes in average local weather might be that many individuals are more stressed.
If you want public funding in Germany, you better make sure that you cover either diversity or climate change with your research. Not sure how they missed the opportunity to give "lack of group diversity" as a possible reason for the attack.
Because they don't want to randomly attack people for no reason, other than you?