faulker083

Humans, despite being the brainiest species ever to have lived, have an amazing penchant for getting bored by the very information that would keep them alive. Dismissing Climate Change warnings by climate scientists is like deer getting sick and tired of hearing wolves howling in the night and deciding to ignore the disturbing sounds altogether. Yet the numbers—the number of carbon dioxide molecules in our atmosphere in parts per million (as of today it’s 409 ) and the number of inches our oceans are rising—keep climbing and most people still continue business as usual. Climate Change presents some of the most intractable problems we face and some of these problems will be made insoluble if we don’t prioritize them. For example, if we keep responding to extreme weather in the same way we’ve done historically, we are never going to rebuild our homes in the aftermath of a deluge, and we’ll probably go broke trying. As we go further into the Climate Change Bottleneck, where our past envir...

Presently, in the USA there are many occasions “… where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates”( 1 ) because an appalling amount of US Climate Change news stems from a federal government dominated by contrarians and sceptics. So, if your American media has a crib sheet for its reporters on their editorial policy towards Climate Change, it’s going to read differently than, say, the UK’s. Exclusive: BBC issues internal guidance on how to report climate change  The BBC, one of the world’s largest and most respected news organisations, has issued formal guidance to its journalists on how to report climate change. Carbon Brief has obtained the internal four-page “crib sheet” sent yesterday to BBC journalists via an email from Fran Unsworth, the BBC’s director of news and current affairs. The crib sheet includes the BBC’s “editorial policy” and “position” on climate change. All of the BBC’s editorial staff have also been invited to si...

The Global Climate Action Summit starts on September 12 th and runs through the 14 th in San Francisco, California. It is a “is a gathering of mayors & local governments, business and civil society … ” “… to showcase climate action taking place around the world, and inspire deeper commitments from each other and from national governments.”( Global Climate Action Summit ) To raise awareness and enthusiasm for this summit, communities around the country and the world participated in many # RiseForClimate events. In Rochester, we just completed an amazing event, Rise For a Resilient Rochester , where ten area residents explained to an audience of over 100 how Climate Change was affecting their lives—now. Area leaders, including business, faith, and political leaders, also listened as the speakers told amazing personal stories. Evidence of living in a quickly warming world.   At Saturday's session, held at Asbury First United Methodist Church, the true target audience sat righ...

Mainstream media is doing much better on communicating the urgency of Climate Change , but local media coverage is still spotty. At the risk of sounding Trumpian (Fake News!) when criticizing the media, there’s reason to press the press on their role in this crisis. I’ve been pondering the role of mainstream media for some time now in a slew of essays , wondering why our mass media have been so hesitant to inform the public completely about this unprecedented crisis unfolding during our lifetime. You’d think a quickly warming planet, not just any planet, but our planet, would garner more concern and action than it has. Even if we (miraculously) adhere to the Paris Accord, we are still going to reach over 3C by 2100. Our grandchildren will be fighting tooth and nail for their existence on a very hot world.    Whatever one thinks of the media in these crazy political times, in the information age the public gets their sense of reality in the aggregate of information speeding aro...