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 […]
Creating Climate Knowledge for You on Patreon
I have been working on responses to climate change and climate change decision-making for almost 30 years. I’ve served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but most of my career has been spent working with organizations around the world on everything to do with climate change. Whether calling it climate change or global […]
Actionable Knowledge for Climate Progress
This is Part 3 of this blog series. In Part 1, I asked, “do we really intend to do something about climate change?” Part 2 asked “if so, does information matter?” Part 3 asks, “can I find the information I need?” The idea of actionable climate knowledge reflects the reality that an individual making a […]
From Litter to Climate Change: Pogo +47
Walt Kelly’s famous cartoon of Pogo noting that “we have met the enemy, and he is us!” appeared on April 22, 1970. Pogo wasn’t talking about climate change, but he certainly could have been, as the field of behavioral economics has made so abundantly clear since then. I didn’t enter the climate fray until 1988, […]