Y’all gave me quite an earful on global warming issues. In this post, I’m collecting them into larger categories. I won’t try to identify every contributor, and some suggestions came from more than one. If I missed your suggestion, let me know in the comments. I am not an expert on all these topics, although …
Global Warming Topics Suggested By ReadersPost + Comments (52)
Climate Models
- Where is the tipping point?
- We have enough data now that we can move past the models into doing time series analysis and estimation. The economist time series guy who helped the climate scientists on that is Peter Phillips of Yale. (Disentangling greenhouse warming and aerosol cooling to reveal Earth’s climate sensitivity)
Electrical Generation
- Modernization of the grid – Smart grid
- Solar
- Wind
- Nuclear
- Regulation
Transportation
- Air travel
- Mass transit
- Eliminate the internal combustion engine
- Shipping
Agriculture
- High metabolism plants to soak up all the CO2?
- BBC – Would you give up beef to save the planet?
- Forestry for carbon sequestration
- Ocean fertilization
- Soil for carbon sequestration
- Indoor farming
- Livestock production
Mining
- Fracking
- Cement manufacture, substitution
Economy
- Jobs created and saved
- Economic opportunity for women
- Fossil fuel divestment
- Balancing economic development for poor countries against energy usage
- Transition – natural gas as a transitional fuel
- Occupational transitions
Governmental Actions
- VOTE DEMOCRATIC
- Carbon tax
- Carbon trading
- Importance of collective action rather than consumer choices
- Funding for research
- California as model (links here and here and here)
- Establishing virtuous outcomes through regulation, positive feedback loops
- Updates on currently proposed legislation, at the federal or state level, and why it’s important for the climate. Push to call congresspeople.
- What we can call on our individual cities to do. What policies should we be talking to our city councilors about? What has worked well in other places? How do we help people realize that these changes can be cost effective?
- Changing code requirements for more efficient buildings
- Could there be an environmental equivalent of ActBlue?
Mitigation
- Coastal infrastructure
- Displaced persons
- Population growth
- Denser cities
- Wood as construction material
- Have one less child if you’re planning to have more.
- Switch to a plant based diet (or mostly plant based)
- Banning all 2-stroke engines
- Suggestions for good climate change fighting organizations to donate to or volunteer for.
- How to make individual changes easier, or how to get more people involved in doing them.
Communicating the Issues
- Effective viral methods like the Parkland students, the Beto campaign, and how the annoying Avenatti gets headlines.
- Effective storytelling
- Fox News as a problem
- Coastline maps projecting sea-level rise
- Some sort of recognition and memorialization of each island as it disappears. They should not be consigned to the dustbin of history.
- A graphic that breaks down how Americans consume energy
- Downsides of global warming – local and regional impacts, crop yields and food, ocean acidification
Resources
- William Nordhaus, who just won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics
- Weitzman and Stern
- “Chasing Ice”
- Reddit has a subsection titled “ELI5”. Explain Like I’m 5. (Example and example)
- Marvel Avengers
- Drawdown
- Michael Coney’s novel “Rax”