Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus returns to Crazy Town, but this time with a green badge of courage. Earlier this year, he locked himself to the entrance of the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles to protest their ongoing investment in the fossil fuel industry.
Given the unfolding tragedy, a moratorium on climate change research is the only responsible option for revealing and then restoring the broken science-society contract.
In order to write creatively about food cultivation, climate change, and social justice, we need to understand how they operate in the world we live in. Imagining a better future, therefore, requires keen and purposeful observations of the present. It requires science.
Over the past two or more decades I’ve witnessed an emerging preference for spinning an appealing but increasingly misleading yarn about what is needed to meet our various climate commitments.
The COVID-19 contagion shows once again the disdain President Trump and his administration have for science-based policies and actions.
Russian science seems to have rejected the current understanding of climate change as seen in the West. Yet, we must keep trying to bridge the gap: if people don’t speak to each other, the only way they have to communicate is to fight.
Failing to learn from past mistakes is the only truly unforgivable mistake in science. And on climate change, the scientific community (by and large) has been criminally negligent when it comes to observing — and especially learning from — its own track record.
In an obvious attempt to keep it out of the news, the Trump administration released the most recent report — Volume 2 of the Fourth National Climate Assessment — at 2pm on the day after Thanksgiving. The 1656-page report begins with a blunt statement that “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization.
I think scientists can’t do it ourselves. We have to talk to those different communities, we have to learn things and we have to listen. Something that I do feel like gets lost a lot of the time is the sense of wonder. Because climate science is still science.
The consensus-building approach of recent climate science has successfully established anthropogenic climate change as an indisputable fact. But it has failed to translate that knowledge into action.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the gold-standard for mainstream climate science. Problem is, the last IPCC report came out way back in 2013. As it turns out, we’ve learned a lot about our climate since then, and most of that new information paints an increasingly urgent picture of the need to slash fossil-fuel emissions as soon as possible.
In this ninth part of our mini-series on climate science, we turn to one of the key suspects in extreme weather events we have experienced in recent years—the shifting shape of the North Atlantic jet stream.
