Adventures of Mr. Chris

As I noted recently, there’s some new data out from several sources showing long-term and historical temperature changes, none of which is encouraging, followed closely by the usual climate denial pr machine. I’ve spent a lot of hours over the past week reading various climate denial blogs and surfing their networks, as I’m finalizing a paper I will be presenting on Christian fundamentalism and the Anthropocene for the upcoming WPSA Conference in Hollywood, CA. And as anyone involved in this work knows, it’s becoming increasingly hard to separate the climate denial movement from Christian fundamentalist movement and their Bible-based attacks on all things green, secular or–well, basically even marginally sane. Read More

This week saw two important notes in climate news and events. First, an AP Wire story on new climate data revealing an alarming but unsurprising trend–more CO2 in the atmosphere.

The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air jumped dramatically in 2012, making it very unlikely that global warming can be limited to another 2 degrees as many global leaders have hoped, new federal figures show. Scientists say the rise in CO2 reflects the world’s economy revving up and burning more fossil fuels, especially in China. Carbon dioxide levels jumped by 2.67 parts per million since 2011 to total just under 395 parts per million, says Pieter Tans, who leads the greenhouse gas measurement team for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s the second highest rise in carbon emissions since record-keeping began in 1959…More coal-burning power plants, especially in the developing world, are the main reason emissions keep going up — even as they have declined in the U.S. and other places, in part through conservation and cleaner energy.

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Latest news on the Anthropocene science front: global warming still happening, breaking records yet again. You can read the Dot Earth post by Andrew Revkin here, and the journal Science article here. The short and sweet is that we have a new and seemingly comprehensive data set reconstructing not just part, but the entire, Holocene data temperatures. And guess what, it reinforces and extends the “hockey stick” analogy for climate change.

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So last week I had the chance to sit on stage with a handful of New York students and Bill McKibben and ask him some questions about the newly emerging climate divestment movement that a number of NY schools are beginning to work on, and which was the focus of the fossil free divestment talk that Bill gave at Cooper Union. In a nutshell, the campaign aims to get American universities (and a few other institutions) to divest their endowment money or other financial products from the top 200 fossil fuel companies. The hope is that between the financial hit that these companies might take, combined with additional efforts to weaken their political clout in Washington, we might start to shift the discussion around climate change and energy politics in the US. Read More

Last month I had the chance to write a response piece for the IRCPL, where a friend happens to work, about a public talk given by Wallack Broecker at Columbia. The published piece can be read on the IRCPL website here.

What follows here is an extended version I originally wrote, and decided to publish here, since it has additional multimedia better suited to a post here.

[Updated 12/10]

As a lifelong advocate of environmental education and a student of catastrophic and apocalyptic discourses in popular culture today, I was excited to hear that Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) was bringing Wallace Broecker to talk about climate change and apocalypse as part of their yearlong series Apocalypse Now, which is billed as a “series of conversations with writers that explores our current fascination with apocalyptic visions.” The talk also included NY Times writer John Broder, who covers environmental issues in Washington. Read More

“The danger signs are all around.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon

While we really don’t need UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to tell us how f’d the planet and all of us are, it’s somewhat refreshing hearing a die-hard moderate like Ki-Moon speaking honestly about the coming crisis. Speaking from Doha last week at the annual UN climate talks.

Ki-Moon told members that time is running out, citing a growing number of recent reports that all show rising CO2 levels and other similar worrisome environmental indicators. “The abnormal is the new normal,” Ki-Moon told those at the UN meeting. “This year we have seen Manhattan and Beijing under water, hundreds of thousands of people washed from their homes in Colombia, Peru, the Philippines, Australia.” Read More

{Revised 11/4} *Added more discussion on the energy policy-natural disasters link – thanks to BL-T.

Roger Pielke recently wrote a piece in the WSJ called ‘Hurricanes and Human Choice’ that discussed the relationship between increasing natural disaster impacts and human settlement and lifestyle choices. In that piece he argued against considering Hurricane Sandy as some sort of “new normal” event, a claim which I explored and largely supported in my last post here. Two points made by Pielke are worth meditating on: Read More

Now that we’re almost a week past Hurricane Sandy having made landfall along the East Coast, and slamming us here in New York, we’re finally starting to get a picture of the full extent of the damages, and perhaps more importantly, a sense of just how unprepared we were for a natural event of this magnitude. It’s clear from reviewing the evidence that New York is not, and perhaps will never be, prepared to deal with a storm of this magnitude. That’s bad news for a major metropolitan coastal city, and with all projections around climate change related weather showing trends of bigger, badder and more frequent storms likely in the future, Hurricane Sandy may be an omen of things to come in this new Anthropocene world. Read More

Before I could even say shazam, there he was, the famous monster Frankenstein, giving us the latest weather news on Hurricane Sandy. Ok, that’s not quite true: Frankenstein came later, after the news, but before The Doctor. That is truth. But did you notice Monsterville is now a part of Eastern Virginia? Love it.

And then there was my neighbor, who decided that the oncoming Hurricane Sandy was a perfect time to go out and prune the roses hanging over their fence! New York, you are truly amazing!

Until next time…Here’s some science versus magic Frankenstein fairytale fun for you all.

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This post is a little dated now, but still worth highlighting in my opinion.

In a surprising turn of recent events, the North Carolina legislature voted July 3rd that history is not really history, but we can still use it to make legislation about the future, as long as we don’t really take the future into account, thereby foreclosing any chance of seeing the future, thanks to living in the past which is not really the past. If this sounds like a bunch of confusing nonsense, you’re probably not alone. Read More