Climate Change: A Systemic Risk Petri Dish
With the spread of COVID-19 there is a lot of discussion about how this virus pandemic relates to climate change. Are they causally linked? Even if not, doesn’t climate change contribute to the risk of future pandemics? Is our reaction to COVID-19 a model for how we should be reacting to climate change? Or perhaps […]
Comparing Responses to COVID-19 vs. Climate Change
Lots of people are asking why we haven’t responded to climate change the way we’re responding to the coronavirus. They are also envisioning what a climate response paralleling the coronavirus response might look like. Upon closer examination, however, I would suggest that our response to the coronavirus HAS paralleled our response to climate change. After […]
Should You Buy Carbon Offsets?
We have completed our Should You Buy Carbon Offsets? Ebook, which adds to our collection of free climate change Ebooks (available for download here). After years of decline, carbon offset markets seem on the verge of dramatic growth. Individuals, companies, and even entire sectors (the aviation and maritime sectors in particular) increasingly look to voluntary […]
When 17 Climate Narratives Add Up to No Narrative
How many climate narratives are in use today, even if we limit the list to narratives being used to advocate for a serious societal response to climate change? Quite a few, and the list below could be a lot longer if narrower narratives were separated out, e.g. the Soil Carbon Narrative (which right now is […]
Challenging Sustainability Greenwishing With . . . More Greenwishing?
When it comes to investment manager Duncan Austin’s new paper “Greenwish: The Wishful Thinking Undermining the Ambition of Sustainable Business,” I first want to congratulate him on inventing (as far as I can tell) the term “Greenwish.” It is a great term that offers flexibility in characterizing the wide divergence between corporate good intentions and […]
Living Up to the Potential of Actionable Climate Knowledge
Ten years ago I saw a presentation by the authors of the book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything about the ability of the right information at the right time — actionable knowledge — to influence human decisions. That’s because every human decision is based on the answers to two questions: 1) Is the topic […]
The Five Truths of Climate Change
Climate change is a wicked problem, making it really hard to tackle. The Earth is committed to about as much warming as a million species (and a few billion humans) can handle without dangerous disruption. A low-carbon transition is currently underway, and will dramatically reduce the warming impact of human activities. There are virtually no […]
Playing Climate Chess Against the Ultimate Wicked Problem
Google “climate change” and you’ll get almost 500 million hits in less than a second. Indeed, almost any climate-relevant search term will generate millions of hits. That’s an overwhelming amount of information. Is it any surprise that most people interested in climate change have given up trying to track and understand more than the narrowest […]
The Water Will Come: Tackling Willful Blindness on Climate Change
Jeff Goodell’s book, The Water Will Come, was recently released as another addition to the sea level rise bookshelf. But the question the book really raises is one of willful blindness and whether we can overcome that willful blindness on sea level rise in particular, and on climate change in general. In this post, I’ll […]
Find Climate Web Founder, Dr. Mark Trexler, on The Costa Report
Listen to Rebecca Costa’s interview with The Climate Web’s director and founder, Dr. Mark C. Trexler, on her nationally syndicated radio show, The Costa Report. Costa is the author of the new On the Verge, an exploration of futures, foresight, and predictions, and the 2010 The Watchman’s Rattle, a book that explores the difficulties in solving […]