We’ve known about the greenhouse effect for nearly 200 years and about global warming for more than a century, but we’ve had a hard time acting because our brains aren’t a good match for a problem this big.
Splitting the atom once promised to be the carbon-free energy source of the future. But today, nuclear power plants are aging and retiring worldwide. What happened?
What do you think of when you hear the words “climate change?” Chances are, you might think of sad nature, somewhere far away. But climate change also affects humans, in every corner of the world, including the corner where you live, and where I live. It impacts the people and places we see everyday, and it will impact some of us more than others.
Weather and climate are very different. But our experience of weather can have a big effect on how we view climate change. Why is that?
The average carbon footprint of a person in the US is 16.5 tons –TONS. So, what can you actually do decrease this number and make a meaningful difference?
Climate change is affecting lots of living things, including the fluffy, cute ones. What can the adorable pika teach humans about adapting to global warming?
Climate change is amplifying extreme weather events like hurricanes, heatwaves and other disasters. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of how best to prepare for this stuff? Moving inland? Buying flood insurance? Stockpiling water? Building stronger relationships might not be high on that list, but maybe it should be.
We don’t hear much about the hole in the ozone layer anymore. That’s because we’ve all but fixed it, thanks to consumer choices and a massive international agreement called the Montreal Protocol. Can we learn anything from this environmental success story that will help us fix climate change?
We have enough fossil fuels to make Earth intolerably hot & wet, so we’ll have to choose to not burn them all.
Beef production emits more greenhouse gases than basically anything else we eat, so let’s look at the scale and impact of our bovine pals - and importantly, what we can actually do to make beef less bad.
Over the past few centuries, a handful of countries reaped the benefits of fossil fuels and developed their economies, emitting a lot of greenhouse gases along the way. We now know these gases have changed the climate. But since the mid-2000s, an interesting shift has occurred. The majority of greenhouse gas emissions are now coming from large developing countries, who are looking for cheap energy sources to drive their own economic growth, just like rich countries before them.
Humans are running a dangerous experiment on our planet. We're putting more and more carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, which are trapping the sun's energy, and lo and behold, our planet is heating up in response. To fix this, we could cut carbon dioxide emissions, but that’s been hard. What if there were a shortcut? What if we could reflect some of the sun’s energy away before it had a chance to get trapped? Like… maybe with space mirrors?!
It’s impossible to say that climate change is responsible for any individual storm or hurricane, but climate change is making these storms stronger. How much stronger? It turns out, Hurricane Harvey is the ideal test case to measure how a warming planet and warming oceans, amplify our worst storms.
In 2017, storms, floods, and droughts displaced 18 million people from their homes worldwide. And by some estimates, over the next three decades, 200 million people may need to leave their homes to escape the same kind of disasters, made worse by climate change. Where in the world will all these people go?
Earth’s atmosphere naturally contains greenhouse gases. Without them, the world would be way too cold for humans. But we are adding extra greenhouse gases, which are causing Earth to heat up and disrupting weather patterns worldwide. So which of these many gases is heating Earth the most?
Thanks to climate change, disease carrying critters are expanding their ranges, and their seasons are getting longer -- meaning they have more space and more time to take a bite out of you or me.
Imagine that aliens landed and gifted us a clean, limitless energy source. And instead of killing each other over this technology, we decided to immediately transform the world into a carbon-free society. This wonderous source would power our homes, industries, cars and planes, and humanity’s annual rate of carbon pollution would almost instantly fall to zero. So if we kicked our carbon addiction tomorrow, what would that mean for global warming?
As the world figures out how to live with a rapidly changing climate, traditional knowledge from indigenous cultures could help us understand just how things are transforming.
About half the world has internet access. That’s 3.6 billion people surfing the web. How much energy is that using? And what is our online world doing to our planet’s climate?
Deforestation is a big problem for the climate. This kind of land use releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any single country, besides the United States or China. And most of the deforestation in the world today happens because people want to put farms where forests are. So, figuring out how to farm with trees instead of just chopping them down could help us fight climate change.
Energy efficiency standards have quietly been saving people mountains of money and helping avoid planet-warming emissions at the same time.
Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the seafloor, and yet they’re home to a quarter of all marine life, making them some of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But their future looks bleak. Decades of environmental threats like warming waters and ocean acidification have pushed reefs to the brink. Can we use science to bring them back?
By the end of 2016, the US was home to over 1 million household and commercial solar energy operations, with 4 times as many solar panels installed that year compared to just four years earlier. But if you don’t own the roof over your head, or can’t afford this kind of upgrade, are you left out of the solar energy revolution?
Georgetown, TX is a conservative city in the middle of oil and gas country that’s committed to 100% renewable energy, and we could learn a lot from them.
Today, lawsuits are positioning climate change as this generation's smoking: it pollutes the air, it’s caused by burning chemicals we buy from a handful of huge companies, and it’s dangerous to human health. Fossil fuel companies are being taken to court just like tobacco companies were, because of what they knew and when. Should they be forced to pay for damages from climate change? And can you even sue specific companies when we’ve all benefited from the industrialization that oil and coal made possible?
Carbon dioxide gets a lot of grief these days. It’s the main cause of the global warming that’s already damaging coral reefs, ice caps, and coastlines. But for eons, life survived on Earth because natural processes kept CO2 levels within limits, preventing the planet from getting either too cold or too hot. So, if we want to keep earth from warming more than a few degrees, we probably need to supercharge those natural processes, in a hurry. Or maybe even invent some new methods to suck carbon out of the sky at an even bigger scale. The question is, can we capture all that carbon before earth becomes too hot for us?
Without a doubt, 2018 was a big year with Climate Change. So we’re here to catch you up on a few of the stories you might have missed this year.
Clothing is something we have to think about every day, but we don’t always think about how our clothes impact the planet. Fashion designers like Justine Leconte are transforming the industry by creating sustainable, ethical clothing and showing everyone that fashion can be about more than having the latest trends.
Talking about climate change is hard. Not talking about climate change is easy. But if we want to keep our planet livable then we have to do the hard thing and not the easy thing. But how do we do the hard thing? I asked some of my favorite creator friends to help me figure that out.
Say you’re looking to buy a car. How do you pick the best car for the planet? There’s already a lot to consider when choosing a new ride, and factoring in climate change makes it even trickier. Well we’re here to guide you through it… even if we can’t come to the dealership with you.
What can a bunch of circles and squares from a 19th century novella tell us about Climate Change? Its metaphor time!
Do you have complicated feelings about fossil fuels?
Maybe if you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention…
The way we eat is unsustainable for the climate. Our food system contributes a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions and touches basically every facet of our life. Modern diets also contribute to millions of lost lives every year from all the negative health outcomes. The answer is pretty simple on paper: We need to convert more of our diet to plant-based foods, and away from red meat. But in practice? It’s nowhere near that easy. How can something so necessary be so hard? We talked to food policy expert Sheril Kirshenbaum to learn more.
Climate Fiction comes in all sorts of forms, there’s your Mad Maxes, your Games of Thrones, your Parables of the Sowers, and your WALL-Es. But are all these Cli-Fi books, movies, and TV shows just capitalizing on a hot topic, or do they actually change people’s perceptions of climate change? Lindsay Ellis, of It’s Lit, and Amy Brady, the editor-in-chief of The Chicago Review of Books, help us find out.
This is how we know climate change is making extreme weather even extreme-er
What is “the environment”? Well, it’s everything, and it’s everywhere, including you and me. Just about every part of human civilization depends on a healthy and stable environment. Yet, human activity is causing pollution, climate change, and species loss, all of which disrupt that health and stability. So how do we study our environment in order to understand these changes and how we might fix them? That’s the purpose of environmental science.
The air we breathe is this extremely precious thing. Especially, because there is so little of it - the atmosphere is really thin, it’s like if you wrapped a single layer of plastic wrap around a basketball. That thin sheet is what makes this tiny little planet in the vast solar system, and as far as we know - universe - able to sustain life. In this episode of the Essentials of Environmental Science, we’re going to look at some ways in which human beings have negatively affected the thin layer of earth’s atmosphere by filling it with pollutants, how we study the atmosphere, and how we can protect it.
I imagine you’re familiar with the concept of water. Maybe you’ve gotten caught unprepared in a rainstorm, watched ducks hang out in a pond, had a snowball fight, or swam in the ocean. If so, you were witnessing part of the water cycle. But the water cycle, or the hydrologic cycle, if you want to get multi-syllabic about it, is more than just what we can see. The hydrologic cycle links together the atmosphere, the soil, and all the living and nonliving parts of this planet.
Let me make something super clear. If you take nothing else away, remember this: Soil is NOT dirt. Soil is productive, it’s useful. It’s fundamental to life as we know. It is an essential natural resource, a major component of most ecosystems, and has been celebrated in art and song for millenia. Dirt is just soil in the wrong place. Soil is the thin layer of inorganic and organic material wrapping the earth like a cozy blanket. It is where the abiotic lithosphere (that is, the upper mantle and crust of the Earth, the airless, unmoving underground stuff) meets all the living things in the biosphere.
When I first took an environmental science class, I didn’t quite get why energy got its own section. Because in a lot of ways, energy feels so detached from the environment. In order to produce and move energy, we dig deep into the ground for fuel, we burn that fuel to create electricity, and we clear trees to make room for power lines. It all seemed in opposition to the environment. And in a lot of ways, it is, most energy production is entirely extractive. The extraction, and the resulting pollution from most energy sources has an immense impact on the environment, and that’s why we’ve got to talk about energy in the context of environmental science.
Over the last few years it feels like young people have taken over the climate movement. They’re out striking, suing national governments, occupying congressional offices, and taking to the streets. And according to polls, they care more, with 70% of young adults saying they worry about global warming compared to 56% of people over 55. But of course - climate action isn’t new - people have been marching, protesting, and demanding change since the 60s and 70s. People who were grandparents today were fighting for the climate when they were young people, and many are still at it today. It made us wonder: What’s changed since the early days of the environmental movement? How are the stakes different today? And what’s the best way to speak up about climate change?
More Americans than ever believe climate change is happening. Two in three registered voters say they’re worried about it. Four in ten say it’s a “very important” factor in their vote in the 2020 presidential election. And 49% say that they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who “Strongly Supports Taking Action to Reduce Global Warming” vs 16% who say they’d be less likely. But that popular support for action hasn’t been translated into actual bold steps to reduce America’s reliance on fossil fuels. And the greenhouse gases those fuels cause are a big reason that the planet is on course to exceed the 2 degrees of global warming scientists say would mean permanent, dangerous climate change. So why’s there this big discrepancy? Meet the biggest obstacle to US action on climate change: the Attitude-Behavior gap.
If you’re in the United States and you turn on the TV, accidentally open twitter, or start to read a newspaper app, chances are you’ll see a bunch of people talking about the upcoming federal election.
Hot Mess is a show about how climate change impacts all of us, and about how we can create a better future for our planet and ourselves.