Feedback on Kalmus readings

You read part of chapter 3, "Global warming, the science".

Would there ever be a time where we are too late to fix climate change?

As Daniel quoted in his In the news presentation:

We shouldn’t give up! 1.5 [C degrees] is bad but 1.6 is worse, etc.
.

Every incremental increase in global average temperatures brings new hazards, so it's always worth working to reduce the change from getting even worse.

Negative Emissions Technologies (NET) might eventually play a bigger role in reversing warming with various engineered (e.g. direct air capture) or natural (e.g. rewilding or seaweed farming) ways of removing $CO_2$ from our atmosphere.

But there are changes that may happen as the world heats up that may be very difficult or impossible to reverse once they happen such as:

  • when a particular species of plant or animal goes extinct.
  • "tipping points"

What can we do?

One of you suggested the individual actions of "composting and voting wisely" are not enough.

I encourage you to think in terms of thinking about things you can do in each of these spheres. None of these on their own will solve things, but a combination of...

  • individual actions
  • advocacy at the local level of government
  • advocacy within any organization you're a part of. Project Drawdown's At Work initiative claims that "every job is a climate job", and that employees are the best positioned people to hold their companies to account for combatting climate change.
  • Into the Woods reference..."You are not alone". Involve other people in figuring out what to do: Climate Scientist Katharine Hayhoe has a TED talk about "The most important thing you can do about climate change". Follow the link to see what she thinks that is!

    Peter Kalmus himself illustrates some of these:

  • In the later chapters of his book, he describes the satisfaction of having modified an old Mercedes to run on cooking oil (and the difficulties he made within his own family by insisting that they use it for long trips!)
  • He has been a loud voice urging his scientific community to hold more conferences on zoom to cut back on air travel,
  • He has protested in several very public ways, for example with Scientist Rebellion, chaining himself to a JP Morgan bank in LA, in protest of their ongoing financing of oil/gas exploration.
  • And of course he wrote this book that we're using.

When will we experience climate departure

The climate departure paper came out in 2013. Many news outlet's covered it, including