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Strategy

Climate Opinions From Yale — Down to the County Level, Nationwide

By Climate Culture, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate solutions, politics, Psycho, Solutions, Strategy

  The Yale Climate Opinion Maps are nothing but astonishing in their depth of coverage. The folks at Yale have accumulated climate opinions nationwide down to the county level in an easy to use interactive format. Their work is truly a fundamentally important way to understand what Americans really think about climate change. Pick your…

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Very Large Negative Emissions: Beyond Paris Emissions Reductions to a Safe and Healthy Climate

By Abrupt changes, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate solutions, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions Scenarios, Extreme Weather, Impacts, modeling, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (1981-2013, now retired), has had a new fundamental piece of climate work published. His team looks at the negative emissions required–in addition to various scenarios for emissions reductions–that are needed to achieve “non-dangerous” warming. Under Hansen’s…

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Fake News Reduces Climate Science Outreach

By Climate Policy, Deniers and Delayers, Messaging, Myths, politics, Psycho, Strategy

Fake News Reduces Climate Science Outreach Reported this month in EOS, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, Climate scientists are slowing their publicity of new discoveries.  Inaccurate reporting, and reporting taken out of context are a scientists worst nightmare. In this day of fake news and radically divisive partisan reporting on climate science, the…

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New Climate Culture

By Abrupt changes, alternatives, Climate Culture, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate solutions, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, global warming psychology, Legacy Policy, Messaging, Negative emissions, politics, Psycho, Scenarios, Solutions, Strategy, What we can do

  New Climate Culture Our climate culture of the last two or three decades, very bluntly, not working out . Yes, carbon emissions are decreasing, or at least they are not increasing as fast a they were or as fast as projected. Possibly, they are even decreasing. But the bottom line is that current warming…

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Falling Emissions: With Offshored Goods and Fugitive Emissions — Not So Much

By Climate Policy, climate pollutants short-lived, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Legacy Policy, Negative emissions, politics, Scenarios, Solutions, Strategy, What we can do

Observations on Declining U.S. Emissions: It’s a widely held belief that the U.S. has been reducing emissions since the peak  2005-2007 before the recession. This is just barely valid today, but several years back it was not. The last time we reported on this, U.S. emission had not fallen as the EPA had insisted, but…

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Large Negative Emissions of 80 Gt Annually Allow Dangerous Warming

By Abrupt changes, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Legacy Policy, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy, Temperature

The greatest climate dude of all time has done it again. James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard institute for Space Studies, published a new fundamental piece of climate work last month. He looks at the additional negative emission on top of Paris reductions that are needed…

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What We Can Do as Individuals to Advance Climate Change Awareness

By Deniers and Delayers, global warming psychology, Messaging, Myths, Psycho, Solutions, Strategy

  What is the most efficient thing we can do to progress climate change awareness and defeat the Climate Change Counter Movement’s stranglehold on a healthy climate? What can we do when politics has been destroying our ability to act to regulate climate pollution for a generation? What to do when 75 or even 85…

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What Is the Most Meaningful Way to Increase Climate Action

By Climate Reform, Messaging, Psycho, Solutions, Strategy, The Unexpected, What we can do

What can we do as individual citizens that is the most meaningful of all climate change actions? How can we best use our time to create the biggest difference? This question has a very surprising answer. The 2016 Yale Program on Climate Communications poll Spiral of Silence is a short, simple “must read” for anyone…

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Sea Level Rise Scenarios Starting to Catch Up With Prehistory

By Abrupt changes, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, ice sheets, modeling, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

McClatchy reported on a new NOAA sea level rise impact report and made some very good points. But a lot of the true meaning is left out. I like to use well publicized journalism like this to be able to quickly get to the most important pieces of the science being reported on, that are…

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Global Warming Psychology and How To Use It

By Deniers and Delayers, Messaging, Myths, politics, Psycho, Strategy, What we can do

The partisan divide over climate change is growing and the scholarly literature blames it on conservative political bias in the media. (Charmichael 2017, Dunlap 2016) Though this is not what we hear in the media, the reason we don’t “hear” this, is in itself the conservative bias in the media. (National Academies of Sciences 2017)…

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Fundamental Climate Science:  Time Frames, Net Warming and Implications for Strategy

By Abrupt changes, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Legacy Policy, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Solutions, Strategy

The IPCC changed their fundamental philosophy on how they evaluate scenarios of our future climate in their 2013 reporting, but they have yet to acknowledge the most common and meaningful way our climate usually changes, implying negative consequences for traditional climate reform strategies. Popular science however, continues on the path of traditional climate reform strategies…

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Climate Intervention: NAS DAC Review — Atmospheric CO2 Removal and Sequestration Costs

By Abrupt changes, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Negative emissions, Solutions, Strategy

A quick note on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s review of climate pollution reform technologies: Climate Intervention — Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration, June 2017. Theoretical academic publishing on the current state of direct air capture technologies, continues to color academic literature with very dated and inaccurate statements.  Part of the challenge…

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Paris Warms, Not Cools, for Thousands of Years

By Climate Policy, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Legacy Policy, Myths, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Strategy, Temperature

It’s a widely held misconception that implementation of Paris Climate commitments would tame the climate beast. This has no more been the case in the past than it is today. Our culture of climate policy has always relied on overshoot, or additional increase in temperature as we implement greenhouse gas regulations and reduce the amount…

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Sea Level Rise: IPCC Averages, Extremes From Latest Publishing, and Ice Sheet Collapse

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Extreme Weather, global warming psychology, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, ice sheets, Impacts, Legacy Policy, Messaging, Negative emissions, Psycho, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

It’s not the averages that are troublesome. The understating reporting of scientists, journalists and climate science consensus organizations is one of the most confounding parts of climate change today. It’s the extremes that matter, yet extremes are viewed as “uncertainty” in a way almost entirely related to written grammar, rather than the statistical uncertainty of when,…

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Climate Change T-shirts Launches: Why Global Warming Psychology Will Save the World

By Climate Policy, Climate Reform, global warming psychology, Legacy Policy, Messaging, Psycho, Strategy

Global warming psychology, this burgeoning new discipline of science that seeks to understand why we don’t trust climate scientists when we trust virtually all other scientists almost implicitly, is very clear in its findings: old science communications strategies have failed and we must use new techniques to communicate the climate change challenge. None of the…

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West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Collapse: The Latest Case for Zero Warming

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, ice sheet, Oceans, Sea Level Rise, Strategy, underice

New research has for the first time defined the tipping point between a stable WAIS and an Antarctica that collapses uncontrollably. Potsdam Institute researchers (Levermann and Feldmann) tell us is that if we do not return our oceans to their preindustrial temperature by 2050, we will see out of control collapse of the WAIS and…

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Climate Control Moon Shot: Do We Have the Technology Already?

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, economics, Negative emissions, Psycho, Solutions, Strategy

We have entered the non-linearly increasing phase of climate change impacts. This is pretty much standard climate science that climate scientists said we would endure if we delayed action. Could they have imagined that we would delay for 20 years? What would they have said 20 years ago about what we should expect if the had…

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2 Degrees C., 1 Degree C. or 0 Degrees C.?

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, economics, Forest Mortality, Legacy Policy, Strategy, Temperature

Two degrees C was first suggested as an upper limit to where we should allow our climate to warm by Nordhaus (Yale) in the American Economic Review in 1977 with the justification that this amount of change would exceed the temperature envelope where our mature civilization has developed. Nordhaus cites Sellers 1974 and NCAR 1974…

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Critical Climate Time Frames: New Strategy is Needed

By Abrupt changes, alternatives, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy

Scientists have been planning for how to implement a transformation to an alternative energy infrastructure for more than several years now. Jacobson 2013, represents years of effort and others have been doing the same. We know how to evolve our energy infrastructure, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how efficient…

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