Rape culture and systemic racism

There are a number of reasons why I care about climate change, but the biggest one is that I care about humanity. I like us, as a species, and I want us to continue to exist for as long as we can, and I’d like for there to be as much human happiness as possible during that existence. Climate change is one of the biggest large-scale threats to that, but it’s far from the only threat. I realize that as small as my platform currently is, it still feels irresponsible to block exclusively about climate change, and to ignore the other problems in human society.

Bigotry – both individual and institutional – also represents a massive threat, and one that has done a huge amount of damage throughout recorded human history. With every form of bigotry, there seems to be a group of people who insist that it doesn’t exist, and right now in the U.S. that denial seems to be strongest for rape culture and racism.

I’m sure you’ll all be just shocked to discover that this post centers on the absurdly light sentence of convicted rapist Brock Turner. This is less of an essay than it is the result of the thoughts that have been going through my head on this over the last few days.

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Conversations with strangers: Accelerating sea level rise

This is from a Huffington Post article about the watery fate of a number of NYC neighborhoods. There are a lot of people there making various arguments about why we don’t need to worry about climate change or sea level rise, but this one was repeated often enough I figured I’d take some time to answer it. This is the “but the historical records show a slow, constant rate of sea level rise! The acceleration is only in the projections!” argument:

Stranger says:

Interesting that the past, measured sea level rise appears constant, rising at the same rate for the last 130 years. It is the projected sea level rise which is accelerating.

There are plenty of reasons for that.

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Small comfort

One of the scariest parts of climate science is that various amplifying feedback effects that have come into play, and will do so more as the planet continues to warm. These feedbacks are almost certain to both accelerate the warming of the planet, and to make it continue long after humans have reduced or eliminated our societal carbon emissions. These amplifying feedbacks are why we know that barring nigh-miraculous new technology to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, the planet will continue warming for generations to come.

Fortunately, amplifying feedbacks are not the only responses to a warming climate. One suppressing feedback I heard about a while back is from the increasing number of icebergs breaking off the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets as they melt into the ocean. The icebergs have a fertilizing effect on the water around them, increasing algal growth, and pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. It’s not much, but as long as we’ve got ice sheets falling into the ocean, it’s going to keep capturing just a little more CO2 than would be captured without them.

New materials from NASA indicate that, as expected, the warming of the Arctic has had a “greening effect” on northern land masses. This means more photosynthesis, which means more CO2 being captured and stored as plant matter. It’s not clear how big of an effect this will end up being, or how it will compare to loss of primary productivity in other areas due to drought, but it will be some help in slowing the increase in greenhouse gas levels from a thawing, rotting permafrost, and so it will buy us just a little bit more time to get our act together.

Image shows a satellite representation of Canada and Alaska, with some areas shaded in green, particularly in northern Canada. Some areas are also shaded brown. The green indicates an increase in plant growth, and the brown indicates a decrease.

Using 29 years of data from Landsat satellites, researchers at NASA have found extensive greening in the vegetation across Alaska and Canada. Rapidly increasing temperatures in the Arctic have led to longer growing seasons and changing soils for the plants. Scientists have observed grassy tundras changing to scrublands, and shrub growing bigger and denser. From 1984-2012, extensive greening has occurred in the tundra of Western Alaska, the northern coast of Canada, and the tundra of Quebec and Labrador.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Cindy Starr

Sins of the father…

In many ways, we seem to be entering the era of cleaning up after our predecessors. I think there’s a degree to which every generation has to cope with the mistakes of their forebearers, but I believe the youth of today, and of generations to come, will face unique challenges in that arena. There’s climate change, of course. Our climate is headed to a hotter planetary temperature than our species has ever encountered. This could have been avoided, but it wasn’t, and now those of us alive today, and those still to come, will have to figure out how to deal with it. But that’s not all we’ll have to deal with

Climate Progress recently published an article about the start of a pollution cleanup effort in Nigeria. In the U.S., we tend to hear about things like oil spills when they’re big, sensational events, and usually only when they happen on our shores. In some ways, Nigeria has had one long oil spill around the Niger Delta that has never really been cleaned up, and it hasn’t gotten much attention in the media. [Read more…]

Renewables on the rise

One of the realities of a warming world is that for the rest of our lifetimes (barring big, big changes in our priorities as a species), we will see records broken for the hottest month, year, and decade on record, both at a local and at a global level. A related, but more pleasant reality, is that we are now on an inevitable road to the end of fossil fuel use. That means that pretty much every year, at least for a while, we’re going to see records broken in renewable energy capacity as we shift away from coal, oil, and natural gas. This is a good thing, and the steady release of articles about some town or country breaking a record for renewable energy has helped me keep my spirits up over the last few years.

While I’ll probably share more articles about this sort of thing, one in particular caught my attention this week. [Read more…]

Seriously…

Image shows two stick figures, one with the Shell oil company logo instead of a head. The normal figure on the left has a caption that reads,

It’s a serious problem that our government is actively supporting a business model that has created a real threat to the continued existence of our civilization.

What does caring about climate change look like?

I recently came across an article titled “What will it take for people to care about climate change?“. There are a lot of articles like this, all of them focused on some disaster linked to climate change. This one touches on the current heat wave in India, which has seen the highest temperature ever recorded in that country. This is the second year in a row in which the country had a heat wave that caused roads to melt.

“What will it take?” is a fair question to ask, but I think it may be the wrong question, at least if asked by itself. I think if you polled the planet, most people would say they care about climate change. Even if you polled the United States – a country famous for its science denial, it seems a majority of people care about the issue, at least to some degree. The problem is what that actually means. [Read more…]

Ending a period of silence

Over the last couple weeks I’ve had a combination of events that have kept me from being able to blog. Primarily, a health problem and a re-assessment of funding at work that means I’m now working half-time instead of full time.

The downside of all this is that I don’t currently have the funds to hire other writers for a series I had planned, so that’ll have to go on hold for a while. The upside is that I now have a lot more time for blogging and fiction writing. Starting Friday, I’ll be doing about one in-depth blog post about some aspect of climate change per week, plus a higher volume of less time-consuming posts, so this will become a more interesting place for all of us.

I’m also going to re-vamp my patreon page and put a link to that where it’ll be easier to find, so if you decide you like what I’m doing, and want me to do more of it, you will have the ability to make that happen! More on that later.

Anyway, I just wanted to drop a post to say I’m back in action, and stay tuned!