Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
An unfortunate consequence of our divisive political climate is the portrayal of an immovable chasm between people on opposite sides of issues. While that’s certainly true in some cases, there is middle ground to be worked. Those keen to help move the needle of public opinion and engagement on climate change should look first toward peers and those who are open to change but not yet involved in the issue.
f you’ve heard of Frank Luntz, you may know him as the evil-genius messaging expert who advised Republicans how to twist words to support their policy priorities. But Luntz seems to have gotten religion on climate. He has stopped minimizing the problem of global heating and has instead decided to do the opposite — to try to help activists raise the alarm.
It’s a power that has come into play a lot lately: Pushed by dire circumstances to explore tactics beyond the eye roll, middle and high school students are leading the charge on just about everything, from climate justice, to gun control, to criminal justice reform.
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.
So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half a degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a “planetary boundary” at 1.5°C beyond which lie climate dragons.
This week’s episode is co-hosted by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one of the lead policy writers of the Green New Deal. She joins Mary & Maeve in the studio to discuss public opinion on climate change in the United States, where it’s crucial that citizens and politicians take a role in environmental action.
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.
In this post I’m going to share my top ten most annoying things people say about climate change. Some are outright denialist climate myths, some are misguided opinions or false dichotomies. So here we are, in no particular order!
The results are starkly clear: there is NO evidence of an increased public interest in global warming as a result of the fires. One thing that can be said is that no major environmental problem was ever solved by means of a bottom-up meme diffusion mechanism.
Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.
How do we anchor ourselves in a world in which neither the narratives we are told nor the images we are shown can be trusted?
