Climate Change Might Give Your Grandfather a Heart Attack: Changing Public Perception to Drive Action

Mikaela Bradbury.

I recently heard Dan Costa, the national program director for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Air, Climate, and Energy Research Program, refer to the word "climate change" as being like the word "stuff": it's an all-encompassing, somewhat opaque term that can potentially leave you feeling overwhelmed and misplaced in how to tackle it. He was speaking at the 2017 Yale Environmental Sustainability Summit as part of a panel about the impacts of climate change on public health, and I had the opportunity to meet with him earlier as part of a private lunch offered to student associates of Yale's Climate Change and Health Initiative.

In this more intimate setting, Costa alluded to some of the linguistic tactics he employs in communicating and deploying his research on the adverse effects of air pollution on human health, some of which includes looking at the shared causes and compounding effects of climate change. In equating "climate change" with the word "stuff," he was suggesting that it would be more effective to break up the issue into its various facets, such as air pollution, and target it more discretely, both as a way to rouse public awareness and engagement and avoid the political charge of the term. In other words, not only is "climate change" like a pile of stuff that we don’t know how to approach, it has become like a pile of toxic waste, politically and in some places socially. Therefore, Costa introduced the term "environmental futures" as another type of designator for man-made weather changes. While "environmental futures" may inoculate against some of the political radioactivity of the word "climate change," it certainly doesn’t solve the problem of obfuscation. Thankfully, he merely used it as an entry point into a more targeted discussion.

Read Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs story by  Mikaela Bradbury -  “Climate Change Might Give Your Grandfather a Heart Attack: Changing Public Perception to Drive Action.”

Now is absolutely the time to politicize Hurricane Irma and other natural disasters

“Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn’t have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America’s poor deserve better than this.” - Michael Eric Dyson

This past weekend, Hurricane Irma made landfall in the United States, battering the entire state of Florida with a colossal reach of more than 400 miles. Making landfall as a category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds in excess of 130 miles per hour (209 km/hr), causing massive flooding and storm surges, resulting in more than five million power outages, and even creating catastrophic tornadoes, the damage it caused may well rise into the hundreds of billions of dollars. This occurred on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in and around Houston, Texas, as a category 4 hurricane as well, marking the first time in recorded history that two hurricanes as powerful as category 4 made landfall in the same year in the United States.

Read the Medium story by Ethan  Siegal - “Now is absolutely the time to politicize Hurricane Irma and other natural disasters.”

Harvey is a 1000-year flood event unprecedented in scale

Washington: As Harvey's rains unfolded, the intensity and scope of the disaster were so enormous that weather forecasters, first responders, the victims, everyone really, couldn't believe their eyes. Now the data are bearing out what everyone suspected: This flood event is on an entirely different scale than what we've seen before in the United States.

Beaumont firefighters rescue two horses
stranded in floodwaters from Hurricane
Harvey in Beaumont, Texas, onThursday.

A new analysis from the University of Wisconsin's Space Science and Engineering Centre has determined that Harvey is a 1-in-1000-year flood event that has overwhelmed an enormous section of Southeast Texas equivalent in size to New Jersey.

There is nothing in the historical record that rivals this, according to Shane Hubbard, the Wisconsin researcher who made and mapped this calculation.

"In looking at many of these events [in the United States], I've never seen anything of this magnitude or size," he said. "This is something that hasn't happened in our modern era of observations.”

Read Jason Samenow’s story in today’s  Melbourne Age - “Harvey is a 1000-year flood event unprecedented in scale.”