It's not surprising that many people are uncertain about the dangers of climate change. Much confusion has been created by groups with vested interests, who have successfully utilised sophisticated PR (public relations) techniques to influence public perceptions and opinion. In this article, I consider the link between tobacco industry PR and that of the fossil fuel sector. The story...
Suppose you weren’t worried that we humans are destroying our water supply and eroding our ability to feed ourselves by burning coal and gas and oil and hence changing climate. Suppose you thought that was all liberal hooey. What might worry you about fossil fuels instead? How about a six trillion dollar bet, including a big slug of your own money, on people not doing what they have said...
There was a time in the distant past — call it the late 2000s — when infographics seemed like a good idea. You can pack all kinds of info into a visually appealing file that’s easy to share! What could go wrong? What could go wrong is that infographics became the No. 1 answer of every middle-aged person in a meeting discussing how to get their organization exposure and...
It got so hot in Australia in January that the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts . A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80 percent of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis...
Editor's Note: Fossil fuel companies have spent millions of dollars to get you to believe that a tax on *them* would really be a tax on *you.* Their money has bought mouthpieces to propagate their myths in both mainstream and alternative, anti-establishment outlets. But don't be fooled. We're already paying a tax on carbon , while they continue to profit in the billions. ...
We've been covering the debate on climate change for a while now, and we've noticed there's about a dozen or so common responses that we get on Facebook and here on the site. From "it's the sun" to "other planets are warming too" to "volcanoes emit more co2 than humans" to "in the 70's they said there'd be an ice age" to...
Clearly, we have a catastrophic problem on our hands. But climate change isn’t it. In fact, climate change isn’t a problem at all – to be precise, climate change is merely a very acute symptom of a much, much larger matrix of problems that, if left undiagnosed, will rapidly lead to limitless, albeit unnecessary, suffering for every living creature on the planet...
Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $ 120m ( £77m ) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind
In a brewing scandal that should shock and trouble all of us, Exxon silenced us this week. We put together a nationally crowdfunded PSA , promoted by thousands online who threw in a dollar or a click or both in favor of two simple ideas: we should be able to get the word out about the most pressing issue of our time, climate change, on television primetime; and we should be able to demand...
“There it is,” I said, camera in hand. “I’ve been looking for that poster for my ecological city slide show.” Before me was a sign I’d seen several times flashing by through the window of my moving train. It turned out to be part of a campaign by the Vancouver Aquarium. Featuring an image of a polar bear floating on a slab of ice in an almost open ocean, the...
Global warming is a threat to all of us regardless of our politics, religion, or culture. People from all walks of life are realizing this and converging to address this common threat and 350.org , Bill McKibben, along with The Sierra Club are leading the charge. "At 12 Noon on Sunday, February 17, thousands of Americans will head to Washington, D.C. to make Forward on Climate the...
Discussions on energy in general are relevant for two reasons: first, most of us not only just use energy but we also recognise its absolutely indispensable role to allow us to function in our routines, assure the continuation of the economic systems we rely upon, and to put simply to allow for the survival of mankind; second, we finally have come to accept that energy sources and supply...
Human greenhouse gas emissions have continued to warm the planet over the past 16 years . However, a persistent myth has emerged in the mainstream media challenging this. Denial of this fact may have been the favorite climate contrarian myth of 2012 , first invented by David Rose at The Mail on Sunday with an assist from Georgia Tech's Judith Curry , both of whom later
I first met nature writer and philosophy professor Kathleen Dean Moore in 2004. I had already dog-eared my copy of her first collection of essays, Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water , when she came through town to read from her next book, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World . After the reading I stayed so long asking questions that she invited me to join her philosophy...
I’m fascinated by climate deniers. How could anyone deny the climate change is happening? What evidence is there? Surely it’s unambiguous? Curious, I investigated the key statements made by climate denialists and sought out the counter-views, as presented by climate research scientists. The result is this image . Click for a larger view.
Device Uses Solar Energy to Convert Carbon Dioxide into Fuel April 17, 2007 By Sherry Seethaler CO2 splitting semiconductor/catalyst device under construction (gallium phosphide wafer with metal contacts) Credit: Aaron Sathrum, UCSD Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have demonstrated the feasibility of exploiting sunlight to transform a greenhouse gas into a useful product.
Reducing your carbon footprint by eating less red meat rarely gets attention. This strategy has been recommended by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, epidemiologists writing in The Lancet and a host of other highly-regarded researchers and organisations. But it appears we don’t want to be put off our food by acknowledging the implications of our Western diet. Our...
' One woe doth tread upon another's heel, So fast they follow ". That radical green pressure group PriceWaterhouseCoopers warns that even if the present rate of global decarbonisation were to double, we would still be on course for 6C of warming by the end of the century. Confining the rise to 2C requires a sixfold reduction in carbon intensity: far beyond the scope of current policies. A...
At his official post-election press conference, President Obama told reporters that he's serious about fighting climate change while creating jobs. "We can shape an agenda that says we can create jobs, advance growth and make a serious dent in climate change and be an international leader," he said, "I think that's something that the American people would support." We have just the answer...
The International Energy Agency released its annual flagship publication yesterday, the World Energy Outlook . The IEA made an historic statement in the executive summary. It said, “ No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 °C goal ”, the internationally recognized limit to average global...
Throughout this long, crazy campaign, there’s been a tension simmering between empiricists like Nate Silver and Sam Wang , who cited poll data showing Obama with a small but durable lead, and pundits who trusted their “guts” and the “narrative,” both of which indicated that Romney had all the momentum after the first debate. In the face of model projections...
Sandy has blown climate change back on the agenda – and many believe the White House was wrong when it decided in 2009 that climate change was not a winning political message [as opposed to the opportunity of the clean energy economy]. Barack Obama: a 2009 off-the-record event marked a strategic decision by the White House to downplay climate change. (Photograph...
A round up of the 10 best films about climate change or the issues related to it. Click the title of each film to watch all of these documentaries online. 10. Who Killed The Electric Car? (2006) In 1996, electric cars began to appear on roads all over California. They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline... Ten years later, these cars
The city has been shut down. Bridges and subways and airports are closed. There is no school, no shopping, no work. The stock exchange is shuttered. The circuits of capital are disrupted indefinitely. A state of emergency--but not the sort we had hoped for on May Day. This is not a General Strike but a Climate Strike. The banks are lined with barricades. But they are not there to...
Five million people die every year as a result of the carbon economy and the impacts of climate change, according to the latest edition of DARA’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor. Published today, the report warns this could rise to six million by 2030, with 700,000 of those deaths from climate change related impacts. It estimates 100 million people could die as a result of climate-carbon...
Nine activists have committed themselves to blockading construction by TransCanada of the Keystone XL pipeline project through Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. The activists have established a position in trees that TransCanada must cut down in order to build the pipeline. They have decided to engage in nonviolent direct action to stop TransCanada from destroying land for the tar sands pipeline...
HistoryCommons.org has compiled an incredible historic resource that documents the rise and escalation of the climate denial industry over the last 15 years. Without editorializing the content, these articles summarize 178 headlines (often with multiple news article sources for each headline), which covers a range of climate change topics. History Commons lets the stories speak for themselves...
Over the first half of 2012, the African Development Bank (AfDB) has been demonstrating its commitment to support the scaling up of renewable energy in Africa with the approval of US $800 million in loans to spur private investment in Morocco’s growing wind and solar markets. The Bank’s technical and financial support of Morocco’s plan to develop a concentrated solar power...
Yesterday was August 28th 2012. Remember that date. It marks the day when the world went raving mad. Three things of note happened. The first is that a record Arctic ice melt had just been announced by the scientists studying the region. The 2012 figure has not only beaten the previous record, established in 2007. It has beaten it three weeks before the sea ice is likely to reach its...
As the climate has warmed during the past several decades, there has been a growing imbalance between record daily high temperatures in the contiguous U.S. and record daily lows. A study published in 2009 found that rather than a 1-to-1 ratio, as would be expected if the climate were not warming, the ratio has been closer to 2-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records during the past decade...
Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the...
Please don’t sweat the 2,132 new high temperature marks in June—remember, climate change is a hoax. The first to figure this out was Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who in fact called it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” apparently topping even the staged moon landing. But others have been catching on. Speaker of the House John Boehner pointed...
The leaked Heartland Institute documents proved what most people know to be true anyway – that mainstream climate deniers are secretly funded by industry and will stoop to any level to fight science with spin – even brainwashing children through the k-12 curriculum. As one of the world’s leading climate denial thinktanks, the expose is a serious blow to the objective...
In case you haven't heard the thunderous celebration by the North American climate movement, today the State Dept is set to outright reject the Keystone XL pipeline . #booyah This is a reminder that people power works. Direct Action works. Social movements work. Grassroots organizing works. Lets take some time today to celebrate another huge victory. Every time we win, it...
I wrote this originally in 2010, and, it is based on decades of work by some of our best. Our scientists do not get credence from media. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/publications/annrpt25/Manning.pdf This document is pages 121 to 126 of a longer set of data about our monitoring of our Homeworld, and specifically, the composition of our air, or, atmosphere. Unlike the countless tens and...
Frack! tells the story of the unconventional gas-drilling ("fracking") frenzy sweeping the Marcellus region, including the Catskills and Upper Delaware River watershed, threatening pristine areas which provide clean drinking water for over 15 million people. Without a massive public outcry, once idyllic rural landscapes could become toxic industrial wastelands, and New York State a gas...
Very, very few people can ever say that they are in the single most important place they could possibly be, doing the single most important thing they could possibly be doing -- that's you, here, now. You are the movement that we need if we are going to win in the few years that we have. You have the skills now, you are making the connections, and there is no one else. It is you. That is a...
Reaching out to young people is especially critical at this time. With mounting psycho-social stress attributed to an increasingly uncertain future, young people are going to need support grappling with the social effects of so many convergent crises. The world is rife with uncertainty about our fate on the planet. Declining ecosystems and biodiversity, a quickly destabilizing climate and an...
Unless we come up with some better solutions Klein says, "this crisis will be exploited to militarize our societies, to create fortress continents." AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein, journalist and author. Her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . She’s writing a new book on climate change and the climate change deniers. Naomi, take it...
When we try to engage people politically we never know who will respond, or when someone will shift from reveling in their apathy to taking powerful public stands. Here's a striking example of one such transformation. Virginia Tech freshman Angie De Soto didn't vote in the 2004 election. The president, she thought, had nothing to do with her life. She didn't care who won. Instead, she and...
For the past few weeks, I have been learning how to sing. Once a week, members of the Unitarian Church , social activists, and climate activists have been gathering together to learn the some of the old protest songs that buoyed up the abolition movement, the civil rights movement, and the peace movement. I won’t lie. It’s a little awkward to find my voice and raise it up in...
Last week, in a move that pits American labor against China's green-technology industry, the Obama administration filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization over China's wind-power subsidies. The U.S. move challenges China's rapid growth in the renewable-energy market, and also throws the weight of the administration behind the unions, elevating concern about Chinese competition to...
Reducing your home energy use is the best of win-win deals — not only does it reduce your carbon footprint, it also saves you big bucks on your energy bills. That’s especially exciting when you consider that many home energy improvements are fast, easy and inexpensive . Often, the savings from an individual project are small, but when you start putting them together they add up...
CANCUN, Mexico—Critical negotiations are under way here in Cancun, under the auspices of the United Nations, to reverse human-induced global warming. This is the first major meeting since the failed Copenhagen summit last year, and it is happening at the end of the hottest decade on record. While the stakes are high, expectations are low, and, as we have just learned with the release of...
It’s the year 2010. Icebergs are melting, forest fires are raging out of control, sea levels are rising, drinking water is becoming scarcer, droughts, famine, conflict — climate related pressures — are growing exponentially. Are you experiencing climate anxiety? Perhaps you prefer climate denial? Or are you feeling through the heartbreak, to the possibility that lies beyond?...
Climate change got you down? Don't despair. Here's a visual exploration of what you can do to make a difference, featuring art, video, and dinosaurs.