A tweet of a graph comparing the expectations vs. actual commitments we have made in light of the past three climate accords. Really eye opening. Thought you’d like to see and share. 🙂
it’s really fucking interesting that accusations of inaccessibility never seem to be levied against The Hard Sciences
if someone asks me what i’m doing in lab and i explain a little bit of maxwell’s vortex hypothesis, nobody expects to understand the whole thing. you have to have some foundational knowledge of calculus and electromagnetism, and you need to study faraday’s experimental data; without those, i can give you a summary of maxwell but i can’t possibly make you understand the whole thing. that’s not a failing on my part, your part, or maxwell’s. it’s just how it goes when someone produces a paper in a specialized field, and people generally accept that.
if someone asks me what i’m writing my annual essay on and i say it’s about spinoza’s conception of god as explicated through nature, suddenly i’ll get people who expect that either the entire thing needs to be stated in fifth-grade vocab terms, in which case they’ll shit on the entire field of philosophy for being easy, or i’m being inaccessible and elitist, in which case they’ll shit on the entire field of philosophy for being pretentious and esoteric. it’s striking, actually, the extent to which people have different expectations of subjects i’m in fact studying simultaneously in an interdisciplinary program.
there are plenty of academics who overuse jargon, whose writing is genuinely unintelligible and needlessly convoluted, and who i would like to punch in the face. but the solution to that problem is not to make blanket statements about how knowledge must always be accessible to people outside the field. and even when people do make those statements they never mean them. what they mean is that they think humanities are essentially lower and dumber than hard sciences and that the way students discuss them should reflect that.
I’d argue that the hard sciences should be made more accessible though. Maybe not all of them, but sciences that have policy applications absolutely.
That’s not to say that the double standard isn’t unfair to people
studying the humanities either because I agree that being told to dumb
down your work by everyone is disrespectful, just that the world loses
out on the flip side of that as well.
Most people don’t understand climate change because scientific discussion of it is confined to inaccessible academic journals. Meanwhile media companies don’t have environmental reporters anymore so, if it gets talked about in mainstream media at all, it’s going to be by people who don’t usually report on it. Scientists aren’t taught how to communicate with the public (and many see it as beneath them anyway) so they have trouble being as effective at it as PR charlatans for fossil fuel interests, and if a badly written article about climate change comes out, they’re the ones who can spin it to their advantage easier.
Rinse and repeat for pretty much any other complicated topic that attracts anti-science conspiracy theories to it like vaccines or chemtrails. The public doesn’t get the whole truth because most of the academic discussion is inaccessible and what gets disseminated out to the public is “both sides” type reporting by journalists who don’t normally cover science.
This would be made better if scientific writing was required for science majors but it usually isn’t.
The thing is climate change is going to happen. We are already in to deep. A central part of organization now has to be preparing for its effects. Climate refugees will be rampant. Gentrification from coastal cities will be everywhere. Famines and droughts will be common. Hurricanes will be worse. We have to prepare disaster relief asap. Fascists and racists thrive in times of crisis. Our communities have to be strong and ready
Will a vegetarian diet make all that much of a difference on the environment? How about recycling? According to a recent study
published by a pair of scientists, there is a way to rank which actions
reduce greenhouse gas emissions the most. And in lieu of the Paris
Agreement, the everyday citizen may want to get acquainted. Read more (7/12/17)
reducing your carbon footprint =/= fighting climate change. some of the biggest things you can do are campaigning, taking part in environmental activism, talking to your local politicians, voting with environmental policy in mind and spreading awareness about all these actions. (i’m not suggesting these as an alternative to the methods in the article, but as a complement. we can’t think about environmental action in individual terms only).
On its deadly run through the Caribbean last September, Hurricane Irma lashed northern Cuba, inundating coastal settlements and scouring away vegetation. The powerful storm dealt Havana only a glancing blow; even so, 10-meter waves pummeled El Malecón, the city’s seaside promenade, and ravaged stately but decrepit buildings in the capital’s historic district. “There was great destruction,” says Dalia Salabarría Fernández, a marine biologist here at the National Center for Protected Areas (CNAP).
As the flood waters receded, she says, “Cuba learned a very important lesson.” With thousands of kilometers of low-lying coast and a location right in the path of Caribbean hurricanes, which many believe are intensifying because of climate change, the island nation must act fast to gird against future disasters.Irma lent new urgency to a plan, called Tarea Vida, or Project Life, adopted last spring by Cuba’s Council of Ministers. A decade in the making, the program bans construction of new homes in threatened coastal areas, mandates relocating people from communities doomed by rising sea levels, calls for an overhaul of the country’s agricultural system to shift crop production away from saltwater-contaminated areas, and spells out the need to shore up coastal defenses, including by restoring degraded habitat. “The overarching idea,” says Salabarría Fernández, “is to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities.”
But the cash-strapped government had made little headway. Now, “Irma [has] indicated to everybody that we need to implement Tarea Vida in a much more rapid way,” says Orlando Rey Santos, head of the environment division at Cuba’s Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment (CITMA) here, which is spearheading the project. The government aims to spend at least $40 million on Project Life this year, and it has approached overseas donors for help. Italy was the first to respond, pledging $3.4 million to the initiative in November 2017.
A team of Cuban experts has just finished drafting a $100 million proposal that the government plans to submit early this year to the Global Climate Fund, an international financing mechanism set up under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.Many countries with vulnerable coastlines are contemplating similar measures, and another island nation—the Seychelles— has offered to collaborate on boosting coastal protection in Cuba. But Project Life stands out for taking a long view: It intends to prepare Cuba for climatological impacts over the next century.
“It’s impressive,” says marine scientist David Guggenheim, president of Ocean Doctor, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that has projects in Cuba. “Cuba is an unusual country in that they actually respect their scientists, and their climate change policy is science driven.”‘
Rush's tumblr archive 