I’m feeling really good these days, mostly because of the big shift in momentum around climate action. As Bill McKibben, a noted climate change author and journalist, wrote last month, “There’s a shock-and-awe feel to the barrage of actions, and that’s the point: taken together, they send a decisive signal about the end of one epoch and the beginning of another.”
On January 6th, we were stunned as we watched an angry mob of citizens invade and desecrate the U.S. Capitol.
It was a startling culmination of years of divisiveness, misinformation, and demonization, stoked by pundits and politicians (on both sides). The fabric of our country is torn, and we will have to work hard to repair it.
At C-Change Conversations, we have worked to reduce the divide and help people understand that climate change is an issue that should bring us together rather than push us apart. Why? Because nature does not discern between a liberal or a conservative, or a farmer or a city dweller.
With the New Year comes exciting news from C-Change Conversations. This month we celebrate the milestone of delivering our Climate Change Primer presentation to more than 10,000 people in 30 states. In 2020 alone, we gave the presentation 32 times! We aim to double this record-setting number in 2021.
What a difference a day makes. As we predicted last month, the final hours of the outgoing administration were spent locking in fossil fuel projects and climate-related regulatory rollbacks.
Then came January 20th. Cue the soundtrack: screeching brakes, spinning tires, and swooshing air around one of the most dramatic U-turns in modern American politics. On his first day as the new president, Joe Biden pivoted toward a clean energy economy and promised to address what he called the climate “crisis.” C-Change Conversations applauds the recognition of the severity of this threat to our health and economic well-being and hopes for meaningful bipartisan action.
A step-by-step guide to helping your community address climate change
“What can I do?” It’s a question that we almost always get after presenting the C-Change Conversations Primer. Most of us aren’t likely to invent a new renewable energy source or broker an international agreement on climate, but we can have a big impact on decisions made by our local government. That’s important because cities and towns have the power to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to help their residents adapt to the challenges presented by climate change.
We live in contentious times. This election highlighted how deeply divided we are, with each side clinging to strongly held and passionately argued views of what America means today and what it should look like tomorrow. There are many issues that separate us. Climate change should not be one of them.
My impression is that this “3%” generally consists of scientists who acknowledge that CO₂ is rising due to human activities, and who also acknowledge that this rising CO₂ will cause some global warming, but who disagree on the amount of warming it will cause.
We believe that the fundamental trigger for the end of the last ice age was increasing insolation (more heating from the sun) over the northern hemisphere, where the main glacial ice cap sat.
Ozone is an atmospheric gas made of three oxygen atoms bound together (chemical formula O₃). It constitutes a very small fraction of the air close to the Earth’s surface which we breathe in and out every day.
Natural fluctuations are indeed a feature of Earth’s climate. But, if we look at the climate of the past 150 years (for which we have direct temperature measurements) and compare to climate models, we find that the observed warming of the past 30 years or so is outside the range of natural fluctuations produced by models.
