Category: Climate

Here’s How to Get People to Care About Climate Apocalypse

Even by the standards of dire climate news, a milestone hit last week is a shocker: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels just hit their highest level in 800,000 years.

But, according to experts, most people won’t care.

In fact, according to a series of studies by Yale University and George Mason University, if you want to persuade someone that climate change is an urgent problem–the newest study in the series, released on Thursday, says voters rank it just 17th among issues of concern–atmospheric science is the last place to start.

“It’s meaningless for most people,” said one of the series’ authors, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Here’s How to Get People to Care About Climate Apocalypse

You Don’t Have to Be a Vegan to Be a Climate-Friendly Eater

Last October, scientists convened by the United Nations issued a dire warning: Unless carbon emissions fall by about 45 percent by 2030, we will face a world of climate chaos—more frequent droughts and floods, decimated coral reefs, and cities swamped by rising seas. Soon after, the Trump administration quietly released a similarly terrifying report from US government scientists, who estimated climate chaos will cost the country more than $500 billion annually by the century’s end. The president’s response? “I don’t believe it.”

Frankly, all this news made me want to stress-eat a giant steak and succumb to a food coma. But a spate of new studies have argued that cutting back on meat—way back—can help our climate enormously. Americans now eat a staggering 216 pounds of meat annually per person, nearly triple the global average. Even our appetite for beef, which fell during the Great Recession, has crept back up, and we eat more of it per capita than almost any other country.

You Don’t Have to Be a Vegan to Be a Climate-Friendly Eater

Global warming blamed for record-breaking weather worldwide, scientists say

Record-breaking weather events, especially heat waves but also downpours and droughts, can be linked to man-made global warming, a new study says.

“Our results suggest that the world isn’t quite at the point where every record hot event has a detectable human fingerprint, but we are getting close,” said study lead author Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University.

It’s the first research to look specifically at the link between record weather events of the past several decades and climate change. Diffenbaugh and his team found that in over 80% of the heat records — which included both record hot days and months — there was a clear-cut signal of global warming.

Global warming blamed for record-breaking weather worldwide, scientists say

How You (Yes You, By Yourself) Can Start Mitigating Climate Change – Digg

Perhaps you’ve heard about this climate change? A buildup of greenhouse gases — largely produced by us — in our atmosphere over the past century is warming the atmosphere. This warming will result in all kinds of fun consequences such as increased precipitation, regular heat waves and drought, stronger hurricanes and sea level rise on the order of at least a foot.

It is, by no exaggeration, a problem of global proportions. Just months ago 136 nations ratified the Paris Climate Agreement — the international diplomatic equivalent of your group project members finally agreeing to meet the night before your group presentation is due. It’s also a problem that is slightly out of the control of the average person. Between 1970 and 2011, 78 percent of all greenhouse gasses emitted were the work of industrial processes and transportation.

The more cynical among us might see that stat and throw their hands up. No one person can halt the complex systems that keep the engines of our planet going. But maybe you aren’t a cynical person. Perhaps you watched Leonardo DiCaprio’s Before The Flood, and now feel like you should try and do something. Maybe you’d like to, at least, no longer contribute to the problem.

Fantastic. The good news is that just about everything you do emits some kind of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere — if you really want to understand the exact extent of which, go ahead and use a carbon calculator — so there’s plenty you can do to reduce that.

How You (Yes You, By Yourself) Can Start Mitigating Climate Change – Digg

How climate change will threaten mental health – CNN.com

“One of the major health effects of flooding seems to be the mental health aspects,” said James Rubin, a psychologist at Kings College London whose recent research looked into the psychological impact of people both directly and indirectly effected by floods. “There are a whole host of stressors around it,” he said.
These types of natural disasters are expected to rise in frequency due to climate change, and Rubin feels that the mental health aspect deserves more attention.
“Preventing (climate change) from happening, from worsening and intervening is really important,” he said.
Climate change is predicted to bring more than just floods: There could be heat waves, sea level rises causing loss of land, and forced migration and droughts affecting agriculture and the farmers producing it. And with these concerns comes a plethora of issues plaguing the human mind, such as depression, worry, anxiety, substance abuse, aggression and even suicide among those who cannot cope.
“If you don’t resolve them, these conditions don’t necessarily go away,” Rubin said.
To find out the extent of this psychological burden, he focused in on flooding and sent surveys to more than 8,000 people living in areas affected by floods in 2013-14, looking for signs of conditions such as depression and anxiety.
How climate change will threaten mental health – CNN.com

When Scientists Hate Science

With Donald Trump’s recent picks to head the Environmental Protection Agency (Scott Pruitt) and the Energy Department (Rick Perry), it appears that science denialism has now been institutionalized. Pruitt, Perry, and Trump deny the fact that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the environment have trapped heat, causing an increase in the Earth’s surface temperature (“the greenhouse effect”), and consequent climate disruption. Although climate change is undeniable, the current administration has managed to deny it. 

Climate change denialists couldn’t take their anti-science stance without the support of certain scientists. Although the overwhelming consensus among environmental scientists is that global warming is a real and present threat, a few disagree. Sadly, throughout history, science-denying scientists haven’t been hard to find.

Daily Beast

Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories

Did NASA fake the moon landing? Is the government hiding Martians in Area 51? Is global warming a hoax? And what about the Boston Marathon bombing…an “inside job” perhaps?

In the book “The Empire of Conspiracy,” Timothy Melley explains that conspiracy theories have traditionally been regarded by many social scientists as “the implausible visions of a lunatic fringe,” often inspired by what the late historian Richard Hofstadter described as “the paranoid style of American politics.” Influenced by this view, many scholars have come to think of conspiracy theories as paranoid and delusional, and for a long time psychologists have had little to contribute other than to affirm the psychopathological nature of conspiracy thinking, given that conspiricist delusions are commonly associated with (schizotype) paranoia.

Yet, such pathological explanations have proven to be widely insufficient because conspiracy theories are not just the implausible visions of a paranoid minority.

Scientific American

375 top scientists warn of ‘real, serious, immediate’ climate threat

Yesterday, 375 of the world’s top scientists, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, published an open letter regarding climate change. In the letter, the scientists report that the evidence is clear: humans are causing climate change. We are now observing climate change and its affect across the globe. The seas are rising, the oceans are warming, the lower atmosphere is warming, the land is warming, ice is melting, rainfall patterns are changing and the ocean is becoming more acidic.

These facts are incontrovertible. No reputable scientist disputes them. It is the truth.

Despite these facts, the letter reports that the US presidential campaign has seen claims that the earth isn’t warming, or it is only a natural warming, or that climate change is a hoax. These claims are false. The claims are made by politicians or real estate developers with no scientific experience. These people who deny the reality of climate change are not scientists.

The Guardian

Six Snowballs Thrown in the Gun-Control Debate

People will recall that, not so long ago, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in order to conclusively demonstrate that claims of man-made climate change were false, made a snowball after a February storm and threw it on the Senate floor. I demonstrate it thus! If I see frozen water, how can the planet be warming? What was so beautiful about this demonstration was that it did not even depend on a snowball made out of season, one packed and tossed, say, in September or April—this was a mid-winter snowball, and it still refuted global warming, for once and all.

Anyone who follows the debate on any public issue discovers that the snowball-in-the-Senate style of argumentation persists, with the same note of smugness—that’ll show them! It most often comes from the same political direction, or party, and with the same disconnection from all familiar standards of evidence and argument. In the debate about the necessity of bringing America into agreement with the rest of the civilized world on the issue of guns and gun killings, there are some persistent snowballs-in-the-Senate that keep getting thrown, which need to be mopped up as they melt.

The New Yorker

No, Lettuce Is Not Worse For The Environment Than Bacon

If you follow the intersection of food and climate change, you know that you can barely swing a reusable grocery bag these days without running into a new study or article bemoaning the environmental damages of a meat-heavy diet.

So imagine the joy that must have leapt into meat-eaters’ hearts when Tuesday, media outlets from around the world ran a story claiming that the environmental villain lurking in your refrigerator is not that salty slab of bacon, but that crisp head of lettuce hiding innocently in the salad drawer.

“Bacon lovers of the world, rejoice!” cried one article in Climatewire.

That celebration, however, should be short-lived. Sorry to break it to you, meat enthusiasts, but bacon isn’t necessarily better for the environment than lettuce.

The issue is that the original Carnegie Mellon study on which the claim was based looked at energy, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions on a per calorie basis.

ThinkProgress