Climate Change’s Twin Towers: Eiffel and Babel

By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion

Climate change is not the biggest problem facing the nation; talking about it is. Until we learn to do the one, the other may never be sufficiently solved to stave off the worst of its potential impact. The greatest of these may be a functioning federal government. Actually, talking about anything in today’s partisan charged atmosphere appears to be the problem of paramount prominence. I will focus here only on climate change.

Climate Change Opinion Polls: A Glass Half Empty or a Glass Half Full? Part 1

By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion

In the midst of the maelstrom named Trump, environmental advocates are finding solace in numerous opinion polls released over the past year or two. From these surveys, it appears one of the few things Americans agree on—more or less-- is the reality of climate change and the need to combat it. As a card-carrying curmudgeon, I tend to look at the numbers and see a glass half empty.

I Was an Exxon-Funded Climate Scientist

By Katharine Hayhoe, The Conversation

ExxonMobil’s deliberate attempts to sow doubt on the reality and urgency of climate change and their donations to front groups to disseminate false information about climate change have been public knowledge for a long time. Reports in 2015 revealed that Exxon had its own scientists doing its own climate modeling as far back as the 1970s: science and modeling that was not only accurate, but that was being used to plan for the company’s future.

Climate Science: Business As Usual

By Chris Nelder, Energy Transition Show

When we hear about the emissions scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, do we really understand what they’re assuming about future fossil fuel combustion? And what do these emissions scenarios imply about the steps needed to achieve climate policy goals and decarbonize our energy system?

Teaching the Carbon Cycle

By Chris Nelder, Energy Transition Show

In this fourth episode of our climate science mini-series, we dive into the carbon cycle to understand how the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels accumulate in the atmosphere. We also discuss how climate science is taught, the concepts that students struggle to understand, and what the science of human reasoning and teaching can tell us about how best to communicate this enormously complex subject to a lay audience.

Dangerous Years: A Conversation with David Orr

By Gene Marshall, Resilience.org

I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write. Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century.

How Can We Talk About Global Warming?

By Renee Lertzman, Sierra Club

Humans are motivated by love, belonging, meaning, and mattering. People love good stories—even ones (or especially one) that have shame, fear, guilt, and anxiety. To understand such stories, one has to have a conscience and care about the world. There’s no need to sugarcoat the situation we’re in; let’s put a rest to that argument. What we need is heaps of fierce compassion and bravery.

Cognitive Dissonance on Climate

By Ashik Siddique, Medium

Suffice it to say that, at a time when our president openly denies that climate change is real, let alone the most consequential challenge we face, the NYT screwed up by hiring yet another columnist to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that immediate action is necessary to avoid the collapse of human civilization.

Being Right, and Being Persuasive: A Primer on Talking Climate

By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance

Given that most people in industrialized countries accept that climate change is a scientific reality, why do so few rank climate change as one of their high priorities? Why do so few people discuss climate change with their families, friends, and neighbours?

Climate Politics: Environmentalists Need to Think Globally, But Act Locally

By Nives Dolsak, Aseem Prakrash, DeSmog Blog

We study environmental politics, and believe the health care debate holds an important lesson for green advocates: Policies that create concrete benefits for specific constituencies are hard to discontinue.

How We Know What We Know: Public Health to Climate Disruption and Back Again

By Hank Weiss, Resilience.org

With so much utter disconnect between the science and the unprecedented risk that further delay or lack of effective policy countermeasures will likely have on public health and societal well-being, it’s probably a good time to look (yet again) at why most climate scientists believe what they do and why theri warnings need to be urgently heeded.

Fake News as Official Policy

By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance

In the first part of this review, we looked at the climate and energy disruptions that have already begun in the Middle East, as well as the disruptions which we can expect in the next 20 years under a “business as usual” scenario. In this installment we’ll take a closer look at “the perpetual transmission of false and inaccurate knowledge on the origins and dynamics of global crises”.